Pliny the Younger & Pliny the Elder · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
1.0| Pliny to his friend Maximus
1.1| I have often advised you to publish as soon as possible the books you composed either in your own defence or against Planta, or rather both in your own defence and against him (for so the subject required); and now especially, having heard of his death, I urge and advise you to do so.
1.2| For although you have read them to many people and given them to many to read, I still do not want anyone to imagine that you began only after his death what you completed while he was alive. Keep your reputation for steadfastness safe. And it will be safe, if it is known to friends and enemies alike that your confidence to write was not born after your enemy's death, but that a publication already prepared was forestalled by his death.
1.3| At the same time you will avoid that "it is unholy against the dead." For what has been written about a living man and recited about a living man is published against him, even when he is dead, as though he were still living, if it is published at once. So if you have anything else in hand, put it off for the moment; finish this, which to those of us who have read it seemed complete long ago. But let it now seem complete to you as well: the matter itself does not call for your hesitation, and the state of the times cuts it short. Farewell.
2.0| Pliny to his friend Sabinus
2.1| It is pleasant of you to demand from me not only a great many letters but very long ones too. I have been rather sparing with them, partly because I respected your busy life, partly because I myself have been much distracted, mostly by tedious business, which both draws the mind away and wears it down. Besides, I have not had the material to write more.
2.2| For my situation is not the same as that of Marcus Tullius, to whose example you summon me. He had both the richest genius and, to match his genius, a most abundant supply of events, in their variety and in their greatness;
2.3| how narrow are the limits that confine me you see clearly even if I say nothing, unless perhaps I want to send you schoolroom letters and, so to speak, letters written in the shade.
2.4| But I think nothing could be less suitable, when I think of your arms, your camp, and in short your horns and trumpets, your sweat and dust and blazing suns.
2.5| There you have, I think, a fair excuse; and yet I am not sure I want you to accept it. For it is a mark of the greatest love to refuse to pardon the brevity of friends' letters, even when you know there is good reason for it. Farewell.
3.0| Pliny to his friend Paulinus
3.1| Each man has his own view: I think that man most blessed who enjoys in advance the assurance of a good and lasting reputation, and who lives, certain of posterity, in the glory that is to come. For my part, if I did not have the reward of everlasting fame before my eyes, I would be content with that rich and deep leisure.
3.2| For I think all men ought to reflect either on their immortality or on their mortality, and that those who do the first should strive and exert themselves, while those who do the second should rest and relax, and not weary a short life with perishable labours, as I see many doing, who by a pretence of industry, at once miserable and thankless, arrive at holding themselves cheap.
3.3| I say these things to you which I say to myself every day, so that I may stop saying them to myself if you disagree; although you will not disagree, since you are always pondering something glorious and immortal. Farewell.
4.0| Pliny to his friend Macrinus
4.1| I should be afraid that you would think the speech you will get along with this letter excessively long, were it not of a kind that seems to begin often and end often. For each charge contains, as it were, a separate case.
4.2| So wherever you begin and wherever you stop, you will be able to read what follows both as a fresh beginning and as a connected whole, and to judge me very long in the whole but very brief in the parts. Farewell.
5.0| Pliny to his friend Tiro
5.1| You are doing splendidly (for I make inquiries), and you must keep on, in commending your justice to the provincials by great humanity; the chief part of this is to embrace every man of the highest character, and so to be loved by the humbler people that at the same time you are held dear by the leading men.
5.2| Most people, however, while they fear that they may seem to grant too much favour to the powerful, earn a reputation for perversity and even for spite.
5.3| You have kept far away from that fault, I know; but I cannot restrain myself from praising you in the manner of one who advises you, for keeping such a balance that you preserve the distinctions of ranks and dignities; for if these are confused, upset and mixed together, nothing is more unequal than equality itself. Farewell.
6.0| Pliny to his friend Calvisius
6.1| I have spent all this time among my writing tablets and my books in the most delightful quiet. "How," you ask, "did you manage it in the city?" The races were on, a kind of spectacle that does not hold me in the slightest. There is nothing new, nothing varied, nothing that it is not enough to have watched once.
6.2| I am all the more surprised, then, that thousands upon thousands of men should so childishly keep longing to see horses running and men standing in chariots. If, however, they were attracted by the horses' speed or by the men's skill, there would be some sense in it; but as it is, they support a piece of cloth, it is a piece of cloth they love, and if in the middle of the race, in the thick of the contest, this colour were transferred over there and that one over here, their enthusiasm and support would cross over too, and they would suddenly abandon those drivers and those horses whom they recognize from afar and whose names they shout.
6.3| Such favour, such authority in one worthless tunic, I will not say among the common crowd, which is more worthless than the tunic, but among certain serious men; and when I recall them sitting so insatiably at a thing so empty, so dull and so endlessly repeated, I take a certain pleasure in not being taken by this pleasure.
6.4| And so during these days, which others waste in the idlest of occupations, I have been very gladly spending my leisure on literature. Farewell.
7.0| Pliny to his friend Romanus
7.1| You write that you are building. Good: I have found an advocate for my cause, for now I build with reason, since I build with you. For in this too we are not unalike, that you build by the sea and I by Lake Como.
7.2| On its shore I have several villas, but two especially, as they delight me, so they give me trouble.
7.3| One, set on rocks in the Baian manner, looks out over the lake; the other, equally in the Baian manner, touches the lake. And so I am accustomed to call the former tragedy and the latter comedy, the former because it is raised as if on buskins, the latter because it is as if on slippers. Each has its own charm, and each is the more pleasing to its owner by their very difference.
7.4| This one enjoys the lake more closely, that one more widely; this embraces one bay in a gentle curve, that one on a very lofty ridge divides two; there a straight carriage-drive extends on a long track above the shore, here it bends gently in a most spacious terrace-walk; that one does not feel the waves, this breaks them; from that one you can look down on fishermen, from this fish yourself, and cast a hook from the bedroom and almost from the little bed, as from a small boat. These are my reasons for adding to each what it lacks, on account of what it has in excess.
7.5| Yet why do I give you a reason? With you, to do the same will be reason enough. Farewell.
8.0| Pliny to his friend Augurinus
8.1| If, praised by you, I begin to praise you, I fear I shall seem less to put forward my judgment than to return a favour. But though I may seem to, I think all your writings most beautiful, and especially those about me.
8.2| This happens from one and the same cause. For you write best of what concerns your friends, and I read as best what concerns me. Farewell.
9.0| Pliny to his friend Colonus
9.1| I particularly approve that you are so grievously affected by the death of Pompeius Quintianus that you extend your love for the lost man into longing, not like most, who love only the living, or rather pretend to love, and do not even pretend except those whom they see flourishing; for they forget the wretched no differently than the dead. But in you there is lasting loyalty and such constancy in love that it cannot end except with your death.
9.2| And by heaven, Quintianus was a man who deserved to be loved by his own example. He loved the fortunate, he protected the wretched, he longed for the lost. And what probity was in his face, what hesitation in his speech, how in equal balance gravity and kindness! what zeal for letters, what judgment! with what dutifulness did he live with a father most unlike himself! how little did it hinder him from being thought an excellent man that he was an excellent son!
9.3| But why do I inflame your grief? Although you loved the young man so that you would rather have this than silence about him, especially from me, by whose praise you think his life is adorned, his memory prolonged, and that very age at which he was snatched away able to be restored. Farewell.
10.0| Pliny to his friend Tacitus
10.1| I wish to obey your precepts; but boars are in such short supply that Minerva and Diana, whom you say are to be worshipped alike, cannot come together.
10.2| And so I must serve Minerva only, but delicately, as in retirement and in summer. On the road I composed some rather slight things, to be deleted at once, with that chattiness with which conversations in a carriage are spun out. To these I added a few in the villa, when nothing else pleased. And so the poems lie quiet, which you think are most conveniently finished among woods and groves.
10.3| I have gone over one or two short speeches again; although that kind of work is unlovely and graceless, and more like the labours of the country than its pleasures. Farewell.
11.0| Pliny to his friend Geminus
11.1| I received your most pleasant letter, chiefly because you wished something to be written to you that could be inserted in the books. Material will turn up, either this very one that you indicate, or some better one. For there are in this a few stumbling blocks: cast your eyes about and they will meet you.
11.2| I did not think there were booksellers at Lugdunum, and all the more gladly I learned from your letter that my little books are sold, and I am delighted that they keep abroad the favour they have gathered in the city. For I begin to think it sufficiently finished, when judgments of men separated by such diversity of regions agree about it. Farewell.
12.0| Pliny to his friend Junior
12.1| A certain man was scolding his son because he bought horses and dogs rather expensively. After the young man had gone away I said to him: "Listen, have you never done anything your father could rebuke you for? 'Have done,' do I say? Do you not at times do what your son, if suddenly you were the father and he the son, would reprove with equal gravity? Are not all men led by some error? Does not one indulge himself in this, another in that?"
12.2| I wrote this to you, prompted by an example of immoderate severity, out of our mutual affection, lest at some time you too should treat your son too bitterly and harshly. Consider that he is a child and that you once were one, and exercise your fatherhood so as to remember that you are a human being and the father of a human being. Farewell.
13.0| Pliny to his friend Quadratus
13.1| The more eagerly and attentively you have read the books I composed on the avenging of Helvidius, the more earnestly you ask that I write out for you what lay outside the books and around the books, in short the whole order of the affair, in which by your age you did not take part.
13.2| When Domitian was killed I determined with myself and considered that there was great and fine material for pursuing the guilty, avenging the wretched, bringing oneself forward. Moreover, among the many crimes of many men none seemed more atrocious than that in the senate a senator had laid hands on a senator, a praetorian on a consular, a judge on a defendant.
13.3| I had besides a friendship with Helvidius, as great as it could be with a man who, for fear of the times, hid a mighty name and equal virtues in retirement; I had it with Arria and Fannia, of whom one was Helvidius's stepmother, the other the mother of his stepmother. But it was not so much private ties as public right, the indignity of the deed and the consideration of example that spurred me.
13.4| In the first days of liberty restored, each man had for himself demanded his own enemies, the lesser ones at least, with an unordered and tumultuous outcry, and at once had crushed them. I, thinking it both more moderate and more steadfast to press a most monstrous defendant not by the common odium of the times but by his own crime, when that first onset had by now sufficiently ceased to roar and anger, growing weaker by the day, had returned to justice, although I was then especially sad at the recent loss of my wife, sent to Anteia (she had been married to Helvidius); I asked her to come, because my fresh grief still kept me within my own doors.
13.5| When she came I said: "I have resolved not to endure your husband's death unavenged. Announce it to Arria and to Fannia" (they had come back from exile), "consider yourself, consider them, whether you wish to be added to a deed in which I do not need a companion; but I would not so favour my own glory as to begrudge you a share in it." Anteia carried the message, and they did not delay.
13.6| The senate met opportunely within three days. I had always referred everything to Corellius, whom I knew as the most far-sighted and wisest man of our time: in this, however, I was content with my own counsel, fearing he would forbid it; for he was more hesitant and cautious. But I could not bring myself to the point of not telling him on the same day that I was going to do what I was not deliberating whether to do, having learned by experience that on a matter you have resolved you should not consult those whose advice, once asked, you ought to obey.
13.7| I come into the senate, I ask the right to speak, I speak for a short while with the greatest assent. When I began to touch on the charge, to point out the defendant, though still without a name, from every side I was cried down. One said: "Let us know who it is about whom you report out of order"; another: "Who is the defendant before the motion?"; another: "Let us who survive be safe."
13.8| I listened unperturbed and undaunted: so great is the power of the honour of an undertaking, and so much does it differ for confidence or fear whether men are unwilling that you do something or do not approve it. It is long to review everything that was thrown about then on this side and that.
13.9| At last the consul: "Secundus, you shall speak in your turn, if you wish anything." "You had permitted," I said, "what you have permitted to everyone until now."
13.10| I sat down; other business was transacted. Meanwhile one of my consular friends, in a private and carefully managed conversation, rebukes me as having gone forward too boldly and incautiously, calls me back, warns me to desist, and adds: "You have made yourself marked for future emperors." "Let it be so," I said, "if they are bad."
13.11| He had scarcely gone when another came: "What are you daring? Where are you rushing? To what perils do you expose yourself? Why trust in the present, uncertain of the future? You are provoking a man already prefect of the treasury and soon to be consul, and besides propped up by what favour, what friendships!" He named a certain one who was then commanding in the east a very large army, not without great and doubtful rumours.
13.12| To this I replied: "All things I have foreseen and gone through in my mind beforehand," and I do not refuse, if chance so brings it, to suffer punishment for a most honourable deed, while I avenge a most shameful one.
13.13| Now it was time for opinions. Domitius Apollinaris, consul designate, speaks, Fabricius Veiento speaks, Fabius Postuminus, Bittius Proculus, colleague of Publicius Certus, about whom the matter was being raised, and stepfather of my wife whom I had lost, after these Ammius Flaccus. All defend Certus, not yet named by me, as if named, and by their defence take up the charge as if left in the middle.
13.14| What else they said it is not necessary to relate: you have it in the books; for I followed everything in their own words.
13.15| Avidius Quietus and Cornutus Tertullus speak against them: Quietus, that it was most unjust that the complaints of the grieving be shut out, and that therefore the right of Arria and Fannia to complain should not be taken away, and that it makes no difference of what order a man is, but what cause he has;
13.16| Cornutus, that he had been given by the consuls as guardian of Helvidius's daughter, when her mother and stepfather asked for it; that now too he could not bear to desert the parts of his duty, in which yet he would both set a limit to his own grief and carry through the most restrained feeling of those excellent women; who were content to remind the senate of the bloody flattery of Publicius Certus and to ask that, if the penalty of a most manifest disgrace were remitted, at least a mark like a censor's be branded on him.
13.17| Then Satrius Rufus, in a middle and ambiguous speech, said: "I think an injury has been done to Publicius Certus if he is not acquitted; he was named by the friends of Arria and Fannia, named by his own friends. We should not be anxious; for it is we, who think well of the man, who are also to judge. If he is innocent, as I both hope and prefer and, until something is proved, believe, you will be able to acquit him."
13.18| These men spoke, each in the sequence of his summons. It comes to me. I rise, use the opening which is in the book, reply to each. It is wonderful with what attention, with what shouts they received everything, those who a little before were crying me down: so great a turn followed either the dignity of the matter, or the outcome of the speech, or the constancy of the pleader.
13.19| I finish. Veiento begins to reply; no one bears it; he is shouted over and drowned out, so much so that he said: "I ask, Conscript Fathers, that you do not force me to implore the help of the tribunes." And at once the tribune Murena: "I permit you, most distinguished Veiento, to speak." Then too there was shouting against him.
13.20| In the delay, the consul, the names having been called and the division completed, dismissed the senate, and left Veiento almost still standing and trying to speak. He complained much of this "insult," as he called it, in a Homeric verse: "Old man, truly the young fighters are wearing you down."
13.21| There was hardly anyone in the senate who did not embrace me, kiss me and heap praise on me in rivalry, because I had brought back a custom long interrupted, of taking thought for the public good at the cost of taking on private enmities; because, in short, I had freed the senate from the odium in which it burned among the other orders, in that, severe to all others, it spared only senators by a kind of mutual pretence.
13.22| This was done in Certus's absence; for either he had suspected something of the sort or, as his excuse ran, he was unwell. And Caesar indeed did not send back to the senate a motion about him; yet I obtained what I had aimed at:
13.23| for Certus's colleague received the consulship, Certus his successor, and what I had said at the end plainly came about: "Let him give back under the best of emperors the reward he received from the worst." Afterwards I put my speech together again as best I could, and added much.
13.24| A chance event happened, but not as if by chance: after the books were published, Certus, within a very few days, caught by an illness, died.
13.25| I have heard from those who report it that this image haunted his mind and this his eyes, as if he saw me standing over him with a sword. Whether this is true I would not dare to affirm; yet it matters for the example that it should seem true.
13.26| You have a letter that, if you think of the length proper to a letter, is no smaller than the books you read; but you will charge it to yourself, who were not content with the books. Farewell.
14.0| Pliny to his friend Tacitus
14.1| You do not applaud yourself, and I write nothing more sincerely than about you. Whether posterity has any care for us I do not know; we at least deserve that there should be some, I do not say for talent (that would be proud), but for zeal and labour and respect for posterity. Let us only go on in the course begun, which, as it has brought few forward into light and fame, so has brought many out of darkness and silence. Farewell.
15.0| Pliny to his friend Falco
15.1| I had fled to Etruria to do everything at my own will. But not even in Etruria is this so: I am disturbed by so many petitions from farmers on every side, and such querulous ones, which I read somewhat more unwillingly than my own; for my own too I read unwillingly.
15.2| For I am revising some little pleadings, which, after a gap of time, is both cold and bitter work. Accounts are neglected as if I were away.
15.3| Sometimes, however, I mount a horse and play the father of the household to this extent, that I run through some part of the estates, but as an exercise ride. You keep up your custom, and write me, rustic as I am, the doings of the city in full. Farewell.
16.0| Pliny to his friend Mamilianus
16.1| I am not surprised that you took the greatest pleasure from that very abundant kind of hunting, since you write, in the manner of historians, that the number could not be counted. For us there is neither leisure nor wish to hunt: no leisure because the vintage is in hand, no wish because it is small.
16.2| We carry off, nevertheless, in place of new must, new little verses, and shall send them to you, who so pleasantly demand them, as soon as they seem to have finished fermenting. Farewell.
17.0| Pliny to his friend Genitor
17.1| I received your letter in which you complain that a dinner, however sumptuous, was a weariness to you, because buffoons, perverts and fools wandered among the tables.
17.2| Will you not relax something of your frowns? For my part I have nothing of the kind, but I put up with those who have it. Why, then, do I not have it? Because nothing of what a pervert offers that is soft, a buffoon that is wanton, a fool that is silly, delights me as unexpected or witty.
17.3| I am telling you not a reason but my stomach. And indeed how many do you think there are whom those things by which you and I are taken and led offend, some as foolish, some as most troublesome! How many, when a reader or lyre-player or comic actor is brought in, ask for their shoes, or recline with no less weariness than you endured those "prodigies" (for so you call them)!
17.4| Let us therefore grant indulgence to the amusements of others, that we may obtain it for our own. Farewell.
18.0| Pliny to his friend Sabinus
18.1| With what attention, what zeal, and finally what memory you have read my little books, your letter shows. You yourself therefore give yourself trouble, in drawing out and inviting me, so that I wish to share with you as much as possible.
18.2| I shall do so, but by parts and as if sorted, lest by constancy and abundance I trouble that very memory for which I thank you, and force it, loaded and as if oppressed, to let go single items for the many, the earlier ones for the later. Farewell.
19.0| Pliny to his friend Ruso
19.1| You indicate that you have read in a certain letter of mine that Verginius Rufus ordered to be inscribed on his tomb: "Here lies Rufus, who, Vindex once driven off, claimed the empire not for himself but for the fatherland." You find fault that he ordered it, and add that Frontinus did better and more rightly, in forbidding any monument to be made for him at all, and finally you ask what I think of both.
19.2| I loved both; I admired more the one you blame, and so admired him that I thought he could never be praised enough, and whose defence I must now undertake.
19.3| All who have done some great and memorable deed I judge worthy not only of pardon but of the highest praise, if they pursue the immortality they have earned, and strive to prolong the fame of a name that will live even by their last inscriptions.
19.4| Nor do I readily find anyone except Verginius whose modesty in proclaiming it was as great as the glory from his deed.
19.5| I am myself a witness, having been warmly loved and approved by him, that only once, and I was listening, was he led so far as to relate this one thing about his own affairs, that Cluvius had once spoken thus with him: "You know, Verginius, what good faith is owed to history; so if you read anything in my histories otherwise than you would wish, I ask you to forgive it." To this he replied: "Do you not know, Cluvius, that I did what I did so that it might be free for you to write whatever you pleased?"
19.6| Come now, let us compare this same Frontinus on this very point in which he seems to you more sparing and more restrained. He forbade a monument to be built, but in what terms? "Expense on a monument is superfluous; the memory of us will last, if we have deserved it by our life." Do you think it more restrained to give one's lasting memory to be read throughout the world than to mark in one place in two little verses what you have done?
19.7| Although I have no purpose of blaming the one, but of defending the other; and what defence can be more just in your eyes than from comparison with the man you preferred?
19.8| To my mind neither is to be blamed, since each strove for glory with equal desire, by a different route, the one in seeking the titles due, the other in preferring to be seen to have scorned them. Farewell.
20.0| Pliny to his friend Venator
20.1| Your letter was all the more pleasing to me the longer it was, especially since it spoke wholly of my little books; that they are a pleasure to you I do not wonder, since you love all that is mine as you love me.
20.2| I myself am just now gathering my vintage, thin indeed, yet richer than I had expected, if it is to gather when one now and then picks a grape, looks in at the press, tastes the must from the vat, and steals up on the city servants, who now preside over the country folk and have left me to the secretaries and readers. Farewell.
21.0| Pliny to his friend Sabinianus
21.1| Your freedman, with whom you had said you were angry, came to me and, falling at my feet, clung there as though they were yours. He wept much, begged much, was also silent much; in sum he made me believe in his true repentance: I believe he is reformed because he feels he has done wrong.
21.2| You are angry, I know, and angry deservedly, that too I know; but the praise of gentleness is greatest just when the cause of anger is most just.
21.3| You loved the man and, I hope, will love him: meanwhile it is enough that you let yourself be moved by entreaty. It will be possible to be angry again, if he deserves it, which you will do the more excusably having been entreated. Relax something for his very youth, for his tears, for your own indulgence. Do not torment him, do not torment yourself too; for you are tormented when, so gentle, you are angry.
21.4| I fear I may seem not to ask but to compel, if I join my prayers to his; yet I shall join them the more fully and lavishly the more sharply and sternly I rebuked him, having threatened in plain terms that I would never ask you again. That was for him, whom it was right to frighten, not the same for you; for perhaps I shall ask again, and obtain again: only let it be such that it becomes me to ask and you to grant. Farewell.
22.0| Pliny to his friend Severus
22.1| The health of Passennus Paulus has caused me great anxiety, and for many most just reasons. He is an excellent and most honourable man, most fond of us; besides, in letters he emulates, reproduces and gives back the ancients, Propertius above all, from whom he draws his descent, a true offspring and most like him in that in which that man was foremost.
22.2| If you take his elegies in your hands, you will read a work polished, soft and pleasant, and plainly written in the house of Propertius. Lately he has turned to lyric poems, in which he fashions Horace as in those the other: you would think, if kinship in studies has any force, that he is a relative of this one too. There is great variety, great pliancy: he loves as one who loves most truly, grieves as one most impatient, praises as one most generous, plays as one most witty, in short, he completes everything as if each were the only one.
22.3| For this friend, for this talent, I was no less sick in mind than he in body; at last he has recovered, at last I have. Congratulate me, congratulate letters themselves too, which in his danger ran so great a peril as they will gain glory from his safety. Farewell.
23.0| Pliny to his friend Maximus
23.1| It has often happened to me when pleading that the centumviri, after long keeping themselves within the authority and gravity of judges, all suddenly rose as if conquered and compelled, and praised me;
23.2| often I have carried from the senate such fame as I most wished: yet I never took greater pleasure than recently from a conversation of Cornelius Tacitus. He was relating that a Roman knight had sat beside him at the recent games in the circus. After various learned conversations this man had asked: "Are you an Italian or a provincial?" He had replied: "You know me, and indeed from my studies."
23.3| To this the other said: "Are you Tacitus or Pliny?" I cannot express how pleasant it is to me that our names, as though proper to letters and not to men, are returned to letters, and that each of us is known through these studies even to people to whom he is otherwise unknown.
23.4| Another similar thing happened a few days ago. There reclined with me an excellent man, Fadius Rufinus, and above him a fellow townsman of his, who had come to the city for the first time that day; Rufinus, pointing me out to him, said: "Do you see this man?" Then much about our studies; and the other said: "It is Pliny."
23.5| I shall confess the truth: I reap a great fruit of my labour. If Demosthenes rightly rejoiced because an Attic old woman recognized him thus: "This is Demosthenes," ought I not to rejoice in the fame of my name? I do indeed rejoice, and I say that I rejoice.
23.6| Nor do I fear to seem too boastful, when I put forward the judgment of others about me and not my own, especially to you, who envy no one's praises and favour ours. Farewell.
24.0| Pliny to his friend Sabinianus
24.1| You did well in receiving your freedman, once dear to you, back into your house and your heart at the urging of my letters. This will profit you; it certainly pleases me; first, because I find you so tractable that you can be ruled even in anger, then because you grant me so much that you either obey my authority or indulge my prayers. So I both praise and thank you; and at the same time I advise for the future that you show yourself placable to the faults of your household, even if there is no one to plead for them. Farewell.
25.0| Pliny to his friend Mamilianus
25.1| You complain of the throng of camp business and, as if you enjoyed the utmost leisure, you read, love and demand my sports and trifles, and urge me not moderately to compose more like them.
25.2| For I begin to seek from this kind of study not only amusement but glory too, after the judgment of you, a man most learned, most weighty, and above all this most truthful.
25.3| At present the conduct of business distracts me, moderately but still; when that is over I shall send something of the same Muses into that most kindly lap. You will give wings to my sparrows and little doves among your eagles, if they please even you; if they please only themselves, you will take care to have them kept in a cage or a nest. Farewell.
26.0| Pliny to his friend Lupercus
26.1| I said of a certain orator of our age, upright and sound indeed, but not grand or ornate enough, aptly I think: "He makes no mistake, except that he makes none."
26.2| For the orator ought to be raised up and lifted, sometimes even to boil over and be carried away, and often to approach the precipice; for generally beside the high and lofty lie steep drops. The road is safer over level ground, but lower and more depressed; falls are more frequent for those who run than those who crawl, but for the latter, if they do not slip, there is no praise, for the former there is some even if they slip.
26.3| For as in certain arts, so in eloquence nothing commends more than the risky. You see how great shouts are wont to be raised by those who climb on a rope to the top, when they seem about to fall at any moment.
26.4| For the things most wonderful are those most unhoped-for, most perilous, and as the Greeks express it better, hazardous. Therefore a helmsman's merit is by no means the same when he sails on a calm sea and on a stormy: then, with no one admiring, unpraised and inglorious he enters port, but when the ropes shriek, the mast bends and the rudders groan, then he is famous and next to the gods of the sea.
26.5| Why this? Because you seemed to me to have marked in my writings some things as swollen which I thought lofty, as shameless which I thought bold, as excessive which I thought full. But it matters a great deal whether you mark things as blameworthy or as striking.
26.6| For everyone notices what projects and stands out; but with keen attention one must judge whether it is immoderate or grand, high or monstrous. And to touch on Homer above all, whom could it escape in either direction: "and around, the great heaven trumpeted..." "in the air the spear leaned" and that whole line: "nor does a wave of the sea roar so loud"?
26.7| But there is need of examination and balance, whether these things are incredible and empty or magnificent and heavenly. Nor do I now think that I have said or could say anything like them (I am not so mad), but I want this understood, that the reins of eloquence must be loosened, and the rush of talents not broken back in the narrowest circle.
26.8| "But the case of orators is one thing, that of poets another." As if Marcus Tullius were less daring! Though I leave him out; for I think there is no doubt. But does Demosthenes himself, that standard and rule of the orator, hold himself back and restrain himself when he says those very well-known words: "foul men and flatterers and accursed ones," and again "I did not fortify the city with stones or with bricks," and at once "not to throw Euboea forward from the sea in front of Attica," and elsewhere: "But I think, men of Athens, by the gods, that he is drunk with the greatness of what he has done"?
26.9| What is bolder now than that most beautiful and longest digression: "for it is a disease"? What of these, shorter than the foregoing but equal in daring: "then I, against Python swaggering and pouring in a flood upon you"? From the same stamp: "but when someone, like this man, has grown strong through greed and wickedness, the first pretext and a small stumble throws everything off and dissolves it." Like these: "roped off from all the rights in the city" and likewise, in that very place: "You, Aristogeiton, have betrayed pity in these matters, or rather have abolished it altogether. Do not, then, moor at those harbours which you yourself silted up and filled with barriers." And he had said: "I see none of these places passable for him, but all steep, ravines, pits." And next: "I fear that you may seem to some to be training up whoever in the city wishes always to be wicked," and not enough: "for I do not suppose that our ancestors built these courts for you so that you might rear such men in them," in addition: "but if he is a huckster of wickedness and a retail-dealer and a money-changer" and a thousand such, to omit those which Aeschines calls marvels, not words.
26.10| I have fallen into the opposite: you will say that he too is blamed for these. But see how much greater is the man who is blamed than the man who blames, and greater for these very things too; for in other things his force, in these his grandeur shines out.
26.11| Did Aeschines himself, however, abstain from what he carped at in Demosthenes? "For ought the orator and the law to utter the same? but when the law sends out one voice, the orator another." In another place: "then it appears about everything in the decree." Again elsewhere: "but sitting in ambush and lying in wait at the hearing, you drive him into illegal arguments."
26.12| He so approved of it that he repeats it: "but just as in the horse races you drive him on into the very course of the business." Now those more carefully and tightly put: "but you make sores..." or "having seized him as a plunderer of affairs sailing through the commonwealth?"
26.13| I expect that some things from this letter, such as "the rudders groan" and "next to the gods of the sea," you will pierce through with the same marks as those I am writing about; for I understand that, while asking pardon for the former, I have fallen into those very things you had marked. But pierce them if you like, provided you set a day right now on which we may examine both those and these face to face. For either you will make me timid or I shall make you rash. Farewell.
27.0| Pliny to his friend Paternus
27.1| How great the power, how great the dignity, how great the majesty, in short how great the divinity of history is, I have felt both often at other times and lately. A certain man had recited a most truthful book, and had kept a part of it back for another day.
27.2| Behold, some friends of a certain man came, begging and imploring him not to recite what remained. So great is the shame of hearing what they did, in men who feel none at doing what they blush to hear. And he indeed granted what was asked (his good faith allowed it); the book, however, like the deed itself, remains, will remain and will always be read, the more because not at once. For men are spurred to learn what is put off. Farewell.
28.0| Pliny to his friend Romanus
28.1| After a long time I received your letters, three together, all most elegant, most loving, and such as they should be that come from you, especially when longed for. In one of them you impose on me a very pleasant service, that your letter be delivered to Plotina, a most revered woman: it shall be delivered.
28.2| In the same you recommend Popilius Artemisius: I at once provided what he asked. You also say that you have gathered a moderate vintage: this complaint I share with you, though in a most different part of the world.
28.3| In your second letter you report that you are at times dictating and at times writing a great deal, and so make us present to you. I thank you; I would thank you more if you had wished me to read those very things you write or dictate. And it was fair that you should know my writings as I know yours, even if they concerned someone other than me.
28.4| You promise at the end, when you have heard something more certain about the arrangement of our life, to be a runaway from your household affairs and to fly to us at once, we who are already weaving you fetters which you can in no way break.
28.5| The third letter contained that the speech for Clarius was delivered to you, and that it seemed fuller than it was when you heard me deliver it. It is fuller; for I inserted much afterwards. You add that you sent other letters written with more care; you ask whether I received them. I did not receive them, and am eager to. So send them at the first opportunity, with interest added indeed, which I (can I be more sparing?) shall reckon at centesimae. Farewell.
29.0| Pliny to his friend Rusticus
29.1| As it is better to do one thing outstandingly than many things moderately, so it is better to do very many things moderately if you cannot do one thing outstandingly. With this in view I try various kinds of studies, trusting none enough.
29.2| Therefore, when you read this or that, you will pardon each piece as one among many, not as one standing alone. Or is there an excuse in number in the other arts, but a harder law in literature, in which achievement is more difficult? But why do I speak of pardon as if ungrateful? For if you receive the next with the same kindness as the earlier, praise is rather to be hoped for than pardon begged. To me, however, pardon is enough. Farewell.
30.0| Pliny to his friend Geminus
30.1| You praise to me, often in person and now by letter, your Nonius, because he is generous to certain persons: I praise him too, if only not to these alone. For I want one who is truly generous to give to his country, his relatives, his connections and friends, but friends, I mean, who are poor, not like those who give chiefly to those who can give most.
30.2| These men, with gifts limed and barbed, I think do not bring out what is their own but snatch what is another's. There are those of like nature who take from one what they give to another, and seek the fame of generosity through avarice.
30.3| The first thing is to be content with one's own, then, in a kind of circle of fellowship, to approach those whom you know especially to be in need, sustaining and cherishing them. If he does all this, he is to be praised in every way; if one thing only, less, but still to be praised:
30.4| so rare is even an example of imperfect generosity. Such a craving for having has seized men that they seem to be possessed rather than to possess. Farewell.
31.0| Pliny to his friend Sardus
31.1| Since I left you, I have been no less with you than when I was at your house. For I read your book, going over again and again especially (for I shall not lie) what you wrote about me, in which you were most abundant. How many things, how various, how not the same about the same man and yet not different you said!
31.2| Shall I give praise and thanks together? I can do neither enough, and if I could, I should fear it would be arrogant to praise for the very things for which I was giving thanks. One thing I shall add: all seemed to me the more praiseworthy the more pleasing, the more pleasing the more praiseworthy they were. Farewell.
32.0| Pliny to his friend Titianus
32.1| What are you doing, what are you going to do? I myself live a most pleasant life, that is, a most leisurely one. Hence I do not wish to write longer letters, but wish to read them, the former as one fastidious, the latter as one at leisure. For nothing is lazier than the fastidious, or more curious than the idle. Farewell.
33.0| Pliny to his friend Caninius
33.1| I have come upon a matter that is true but very like a fiction, and worthy of that most joyful, lofty and plainly poetic talent of yours; I came upon it while over dinner various marvels were being related from this side and that. The author is greatly trustworthy: although what has a poet to do with trust? Yet he is an author whom you would have believed even if he were about to write history.
33.2| There is in Africa the colony of Hippo, close to the sea. A navigable lagoon lies beside it; from this an estuary comes out after the manner of a river, which by alternate turns, as the tide either checks or drives it, is now carried into the sea, now given back to the lagoon.
33.3| Every age here is taken with the love of fishing, sailing and even swimming, especially the boys, whom leisure and play invite. Their glory and courage is to be carried out farthest: he is the victor who leaves farthest behind both the shore and the swimmers with it.
33.4| In this contest a certain boy, bolder than the rest, was making for the farther waters. A dolphin met him, and now went before the boy, now followed, now circled him, finally went under him, set him down, went under him again, and carried him, trembling, first out to the deep, then turns to the shore and gives him back to the land and his comrades.
33.5| The report creeps through the colony; all run together, look at the boy himself as a marvel, question him, listen, tell. The next day they besiege the shore, look out to sea and at anything like the sea. The boys swim, among them that one, but more cautiously. The dolphin again at the time, again to the boy. He flees with the rest. The dolphin, as if to invite and call him back, leaps up, dives, and winds and unwinds various circles.
33.6| This on the second day, this on the third, this on many, until shame of fear came upon men reared in the sea. They approach and play with it and call it, even touch and stroke it as it offers itself. Boldness grows with trial. Most of all the boy who first tried it swims up to it as it swims, leaps on its back, is carried and carried back, thinks himself recognized and loved, loves in return; neither fears, neither is feared; his confidence and its gentleness grow.
33.7| Nor less do other boys go along on the right and the left, urging and warning. There went with them (this too is wonderful) another dolphin, only a spectator and companion. For it neither did nor suffered anything like it, but led that other one forth and back, as the other boys do the boy.
33.8| Incredible, yet as true as what went before: the dolphin, the carrier and playmate of the boys, was also wont to be drawn onto land, and dried on the sands, and when it had grown warm, rolled back into the sea.
33.9| It is agreed that Octavius Avitus, legate of the proconsul, out of a misplaced scruple poured perfume over it when it was drawn up on the shore, and that it, from the strangeness and smell of it, fled back into the deep, and was not seen except after many days, languid and sad, and soon, strength restored, took up its former playfulness and its usual services.
33.10| All the magistrates flowed together to the spectacle, by whose arrival and moderate stay the community was worn down with new expenses. Finally the place itself was losing its quiet and its seclusion: it was resolved to kill secretly that to which people were thronging.
33.11| With what pity, with what abundance you will lament it, adorn it, exalt it! Although there is no need for you to invent or add anything; it is enough that what is true not be diminished. Farewell.
34.0| Pliny to his friend Tranquillus
34.1| Resolve my uncertainty: I hear that I read badly, at least verses; for speeches I read well enough, but verses so much the less. I think therefore, when about to recite to intimate friends, of trying my freedman. This too suits an intimate audience, that the man I have chosen will read not well, but better, I know, if indeed he is not thrown into confusion.
34.2| For he is as new a reader as I am a poet. I myself do not know what I am to do meanwhile as he reads: whether I should sit fixed and silent and like a man with nothing to do, or, as some do, accompany what he delivers with murmurs, eyes and hand. But I think I dance no less badly than I read. Again I say, relieve my anxiety and write back truthfully whether it is better to read very badly than either not to do these things or to do them. Farewell.
35.0| Pliny to his friend Atrius
35.1| I have received the book you sent, and I thank you. At present, however, I am extremely busy. So I have not yet read it, although otherwise I want to very much indeed. But I owe such reverence both to literature itself and to your writings that I think it irreverent to pick them up unless my mind is at leisure.
35.2| I heartily approve of the care you take in going over your works again. Still, there is some limit: first, because too much care wears a work away more than it improves it; and second, because it calls us back from more recent work, and at the same time neither finishes the earlier pieces nor allows us to begin the later ones. Farewell.
36.0| Pliny to his friend Fuscus
36.1| You ask how I arrange my day in summer at my Tuscan estate. I wake when I please, usually around the first hour, often before, rarely later. The shutters stay closed; for in the silence and the darkness, wonderfully withdrawn from whatever distracts, free and left to myself, I do not make my mind follow my eyes but my eyes follow my mind, for they see what the mind sees whenever they see nothing else.
36.2| If I have anything in hand I think it out, think it out word for word, like someone writing and correcting, sometimes less, sometimes more, according as it could be composed and held in the memory with difficulty or with ease. I call my secretary, let in the daylight, and dictate what I have shaped; he goes away, is called back again, and is again dismissed.
36.3| At the fourth or fifth hour (for the time is not fixed and measured), as the day invites, I betake myself to the terrace or the covered colonnade, think out the rest and dictate it. I get into a carriage. There too I do the same as when walking or lying down; my concentration lasts, refreshed by the very change. I sleep again for a little, then walk, then I read aloud a speech, Greek or Latin, clearly and with emphasis, not so much for the sake of my voice as of my digestion; but at the same time my voice is strengthened as well.
36.4| I walk again, am oiled, take exercise, and bathe. While I dine, if my wife is with me or a few friends, someone reads aloud from a book; after dinner there is comedy or a lyre-player; then I walk with my people, among whom there are some learned men. So the evening is drawn out with varied conversation, and even the longest day is well laid to rest.
36.5| Sometimes something in this routine is changed; for if I have lain or walked a long time, after my sleep and my reading I ride, not in a carriage, but on a horse, which takes less time because it is faster. Friends turn up from the neighbouring towns and draw part of the day to themselves, and sometimes, when I am tired, come to my rescue with a well-timed interruption.
36.6| Sometimes I hunt, but not without my writing tablets, so that even if I have caught nothing I may still bring something back. Time is given also to my tenants, though not enough, as they themselves think; and their rustic complaints make my literary work and these city occupations more welcome to me. Farewell.
37.0| Pliny to his friend Paulinus
37.1| It is not in your nature to demand these conventional and, as it were, public courtesies from intimate friends against their own interest; and I love you too steadily to fear that you will take it otherwise than I would wish if I do not see you entering on your consulship right on the Kalends, especially since I am detained by the need to let my farms, which will settle things for a good many years, and in which I must adopt new plans.
37.2| For in the previous five-year period, despite large rebates, the arrears have grown; as a result most of my tenants no longer take any care to reduce their debt, since they despair of being able to pay it off in full; they even seize and consume whatever is produced, like men who think they will no longer be saving it for themselves.
37.3| So I must confront these growing evils and find a cure. There is one way of curing them: if I let the farms not for money but for shares of the crop, and then put some of my own people in charge as overseers of the work and guardians of the produce. And besides, there is no more just kind of return than what the land, the weather and the season bring in.
37.4| But this calls for great honesty, sharp eyes and many hands. Still, it must be tried, and, as in a chronic illness, any remedies that a change may offer must be attempted.
37.5| You see how far from frivolous is the reason that does not allow me to attend the first day of your consulship; yet I shall celebrate it here too, as if I were present, with prayers, with joy and with congratulations. Farewell.
38.0| Pliny to his friend Saturninus
38.1| Yes, I do praise our friend Rufus, not because you asked me to do so, but because he is most deserving of it. For I have read his book, perfect in every respect, to which my love for the man himself has added much charm in my eyes. Still, I have judged it; for those who read with malice are not the only judges. Farewell.
39.0| Pliny to his friend Mustius
39.1| On the advice of the soothsayers I must rebuild the temple of Ceres on my estate, better and larger; it is certainly old and cramped, although on its fixed day it is extremely crowded.
39.2| For on the Ides of September a great crowd gathers from the whole district, much business is transacted, many vows are made and many are paid; but there is no shelter nearby from either rain or sun.
39.3| So I think I shall be acting both generously and devoutly if I build the temple as beautifully as possible and add colonnades to the temple, the temple for the use of the goddess, the colonnades for the use of men.
39.4| I would like you, then, to buy four marble columns, of whatever kind you think best, and to buy marble with which to adorn the floor and the walls. We shall also have to make a statue of the goddess herself, since that old wooden one has lost some of its parts through age.
39.5| As for the colonnades, nothing occurs to me for the present that it seems I need to ask you to send from where you are, except that you should draw up a plan suited to the site. For they cannot be built round the temple, since the temple ground is hemmed in by a river and its precipitous banks on one side, and by a road on the other.
39.6| Beyond the road there is a very broad meadow, in which the colonnades could quite fittingly be laid out facing the temple itself; unless you find something better, you who are accustomed to overcome the difficulties of sites by your skill. Farewell.
40.0| Pliny to his friend Fuscus
40.1| You write that you were very pleased by my letter in which you learned how I spend my summer leisure at my Tuscan estate; you ask what I change from this in winter at my Laurentine villa.
40.2| Nothing, except that the midday sleep is cut out and a good deal of time is taken from the night, either before or after daylight; and, if there is the pressing need of a case to plead, which is frequent in winter, there is no longer any place after dinner for a comic actor or a lyre-player, but what I have dictated is gone over again and again, and at the same time the memory profits from the frequent correction.
40.3| There you have my habits in summer and in winter; you may add spring and autumn to these, which lie between winter and summer and, just as they lose nothing from the day, gain a very little from the night. Farewell.
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