Pliny the Younger

Pliny the Younger (born 61/62 ce, Comum [Italy]—died c. 113, Bithynia, Asia Minor [now in Turkey]) was a Roman author and administrator who left a collection of private letters that intimately illustrated public and private life in the heyday of the Roman Empire.

Born into a wealthy family and adopted by his uncle, Pliny the Elder, Pliny began to practice law at age 18. His reputation in the civil-law courts placed him in demand in the political court that tried provincial officials for extortion. His most notable success (100) was securing condemnation of a governor in Africa and a group of officials from Spain. Meanwhile, he had attained the highest administrative posts, becoming praetor (93) and consul (100).

Pliny had financial ability and successively headed the military treasury and the senatorial treasury (94–100). After administering the drainage board of the city of Rome (104–106), he was sent (c. 110) by Emperor Trajan to investigate corruption in the municipal administration of Bithynia, where apparently he died two years later.

Like the historian Tacitus, his contemporary, Pliny accepted the Roman Empire as it was, serving under “good” and “bad” emperors and making the conventional complaints against the latter in his writings. Between 100 and 109 he published nine books of selected private letters, beginning with those covering events from the death of Emperor Domitian (September 97) to the early part of 100. The 10th book contains addresses to Emperor Trajan on sundry official problems and the emperor’s replies.

The private letters are carefully written, occasional letters on diverse topics. Each holds an item of recent social, literary, political, or domestic news, or sometimes an account of an earlier but contemporary historical event, or else initiates moral discussion of a problem. Each has a single subject and is written in a style that mixes, in Pliny’s terminology, the historical, the poetical, and the oratorical manner, to fit the theme. The composition of these litterae curiosius scriptae (“letters written with special care”) was a fashion among the wealthy, and Pliny developed it into a miniature art form.

There are letters of advice to young men, notes of greeting and inquiry, and descriptions of scenes of natural beauty or of natural curiosities. Pliny also left a detailed picture of the amateur literary world with its custom of reciting works to seek critical revision from friends. Estate business is a frequent theme, and letters concerned with such matters reveal the abilities for which Trajan chose him to reorganize the municipal finances and local government of Bithynia.

Pliny’s letters introduce many of the leading figures of Roman society in the 12 years after the death of Domitian—men of letters, politicians, administrators, generals, and rising young men of rank. They make possible the social reconstruction of an age for which there is otherwise no serious historical record. He was adept at brief character sketches, his works being less satirical, more kindly, and possibly more complete than those of Tacitus. He was also a devotee of literature.

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Pliny published his forensic and literary speeches with care, and late in life he took to the contemporary fashion for light verse in the style of Martial. Though fulsome in the praise of contemporary writers, his judgment of the dead Statius was fair: “He was ever writing poems with greater pains than ability.” His letters to his fellow advocate Tacitus, then occupied with his first major work, tell the little that is known about the date and circumstances of the composition of the Historiae, to which Pliny contributed his account of the eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii and other cities. (Pliny was present at the eruption; Pliny the Elder was killed by it.) The biographer Suetonius was among Pliny’s protégés.