Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/236

Rh PLINY Latinity, entitled Panegyricus, is extant. 1 &quot; The good old custom,&quot; he says in his opening sentence, &quot;of com mencing all public business with prayers to the gods is especially to be observed by a consul, and on an occasion of offering public thanks to the best of princes by the command of the senate and the state.&quot; The piece teaches us a good deal about the imperial policy and the military career of Trajan ( 13-16). Between Pliny and Trajan the sincerest regard and even affection seem to have subsisted. In the last book of the Epistles, which contains a hundred and twenty-one letters and replies on matters of business connected with the pro vince between Pliny and the emperor, the latter is always addressed as &quot; Domine &quot; (sire), the former as &quot; Secunde (or mi Secunde) carissime.&quot; Most of these were written by Pliny as propraetor (103-5) of Bithynia and Pontica, and they show the careful interest taken in the welfare and pro sperity of the cities under his charge. The replies of the emperor are characteristically brief ; they are written in good and literary Latin, and show Trajan to have been a man of letters as well as a man of business. Pliny s celebrated inquiry what should be done with recusant Christians, in which he says 2 that &quot; not only cities but country towns and rural districts have been touched by the contagion of this superstition,&quot; is briefly replied to; &quot; conquirendi non sunt, &quot; writes the emperor. &quot; si def er- antur et arguantur, puniendi sunt, ita tamen ut qui negaverit se Christianum esse, idque re ipsa manifestum fecerit, id est supplicando dis nostris, quamvis suspectus in praeteritum, veniam ex poenitentia impetret.&quot; Pliny had said : &quot; Those who obstinately persisted that they were Christians, after being warned of the consequence, I ordered to be led off to punishment, not doubting that, whatever it was tkat they professed, their inflexible obstinacy deserved it.&quot; Doubts have even been raised as to the genuineness of a passage which appears so inconsist ent with the established Roman policy of tolerating every superstitio. But it is clear that what Pliny doubted was the fidelity to the emperor of those who refused to make the customary religious offerings to his statue. It was zeal for loyalty that led him into a course which his humane nature condemned. 3 Pliny was twice married, but had no children. The emperor bestowed on him the jus trium liberorum, which conferred certain state privileges upon those who brought up that number of legitimate children to become Roman citizens. Three affectionate letters, none of them long, are addressed to his second wife Calpurnia Hispulla. In health Pliny seems to have been far from robust. He speaks of his slight and thin figure, &quot; gracilitas mea, &quot; 4 though in his youth he had seen military service in the East. 5 He was fond too of hunting, but used to boast that he combined the worship of Diana with that of Minerva. 6 Pliny s great wealth was most liberally bestowed, both privately and publicly. He undertakes to rebuild a temple of Ceres on his estate, entirely at his own cost, with a 1 He alludes to it in iii. 13, and in iii. 18 he explains how the address in the senate was afterwards expanded into a book, and recited for three consecutive days to his friends. The title Panegyricus appears then to have been given to it. 2 x. 96, 9. 1 The context shows that he had some suspicion that the Christians were forming secret and illegal societies (hctaeriae, 8). This is his only excuse for having put two deaconesses (ministrae) to the torture, to find out what they really held. 4 ii. 11, 15. 6 iii. 11, 5. 8 ix. 10. In i. 6 he gives a droll account of his hunting wild boars, and reading books while the beaters were at work : &quot; ad retia sede- bam ; erat in proximo non venabulum aut lancea, sed stilus et pugil- lares ; meditabar aliquid enotabamque, ut si mauus vacuas plenas tamen ceras reportarem. &quot; new statue and the addition of a portico, with walls and floor decorated with marbles. 7 To his friend Romatius Firmus, a fellow-townsman, he writes 8 that in order to have the pleasure of seeing him an eques he offers 2500 to make up the equestrian census. To Calvina, in addi tion to nearly 1000 which he had given her as a marriage portion, he offers to remit the whole of the mortgage debt on an encumbered estate which she had inherited from her father. He founded and endowed with landed property an almshouse for people of free birth of both sexes. 9 He presented his nurse with a farm worth nearly 1000 ; 10 he gave fifty sestertia n as a marriage present to the daughter of his tutor Quintilian ; he gave up to the township of Comum a sum of about 3500, which, having been illeg ally left to it by Saturninus, Pliny, as his heir, could have claimed for himself,- and this in addition to over 10,000 which he had already given to the same township. He generously returned a large percentage of the sum he had sold his vintage for, when the produce had been found to disappoint the purchasers. 12 In a beautiful letter to Sabinianus ly he kindly intercedes for a libertus with whom his friend was offended. In a word, the letters are full of acts of Pliny s goodness and generosity, and these are not boastfully expressed, but rather with the view of inciting others by his example. There are few, if indeed any, remains of Roman prose literature which are as elegant, as interesting, and as varied as Pliny s Letters. They were evidently written and published 14 on the model and precedent of Cicero s Letters. They are all carefully composed, and couched in the most graceful and polished Latinity. The first letter is a reply to a friend, Septicius, who had often requested Pliny to collect and publish his more carefully written correspond ence, &quot;si quaspaullo curatius scripsisset. &quot; An admirer of nature, and with the faculty for observation perhaps learnt from his uncle, he sometimes describes, and in the most beautiful language, the scenes or wonders he had visited. 15 Of his spacious and beautiful villas in Tuscany and at Laurentum he has given full and detailed accounts, which are of especial value as almost the sole authority on the difficult subject of Roman houses. 16 The Tuscan estate appears to have been his favourite residence. In reply to his friend Fuscus (ix. 36) he gives a pleasing account of the daily life and studies of a refined and temperate man, and a considerate country gentleman, neighbour, and landlord. Of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D., and the death of his uncle, he gives a minute and evidently faithful account as an eye-witness. This is contained in two long letters 17 to his friend Tacitus the historian. Two excellent ghost-stories are given, 13 and a letter to Tacitus on the omens of dreams 19 shows that both the friends had considerable credulity on this subject. Like Cicero, but not so frequently, Pliny occasionally 20 &quot; venti lates &quot; his Greek, and he tells us that at the age of fourteen he wrote a Greek tragedy, adding jocosely, &quot; qualem ? inquis : nescio ; tragoedia vocabatur &quot; (vii. 4, 2). Like Cicero too, he was fond of art ; he describes with enthusiasm 21 a Corinthian bronze statuette which he had just purchased out of a legacy received. As a writer Pliny the younger is as graceful, fluent, and polished as the style of the elder Pliny is crabbed and obscure. Indeed, the Latinity of the epistles cannot fairly be called inferior to that of Cicero himself. There are few indications of the &quot; deterioration &quot; 7 ix. 39. A similar offer is made to Trajan, including the dedica tion of his statue, Ep. PI. et Tr. , 8. 8 i. 19. u vii. 18. 10 vi. 3. 11 About 430, vi. 32. 12 viii. 2. 13 ix. 21. &quot; Tune prtecipua maiisuetudmis laus, &quot; he well says, &quot; cum irne causa justissima est.&quot; 14 Keil (Praef. to ed. Teubner, 1865, p. 1) quotes Sidouius Apolli- naris, Epist. ix. 1, to show that nine books of his Letters were edited by Pliny himself. 15 E.g., the sources of the Clitumnus, viii. 8, and the floating islands on a lake at Ameria, viii. 20. 16 See ii. 17 and v. 6. The former describes in glowing terms the Laurentian villa, though he says of it in iv. 6, &quot; nihil ibi possideo prater tectum et hortum, statimque harenas&quot;; but he is comparing the extent of other landed properties. 17 vi. 16 and 20. 18 vii. 27. 19 i. 18. It is &quot;clear from Ann. vi. 28 that Tacitus had some belief in astrology. Pliny the elder wrote his history of the German wars &quot; soiunio monitus,&quot; Ep. iii. 5, 4. 20 E.g. in i. 18 and 20 ; ii. 3 ; iv. 7 ; ix. 26. 21 iii. 6. He says, however ( 1), that in bronzes he was not much of a critic : &quot; in hac re certe perquain exiguum sapio. &quot;