Pliny the Younger

Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus was born at Novum Comum (modern Como) in northern Italy about AD 61. Orphaned young, he was adopted by his uncle, the naturalist Pliny the Elder, and was at Misenum with his mother when the elder Pliny set out to his death in the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. He trained as an advocate, rose through the Roman magistracies under Domitian, Nerva and Trajan, and held the consulship in AD 100.

His nine books of literary letters, addressed to friends such as Tacitus and Suetonius, were arranged and published by Pliny himself. They describe villas and gardens, trials in the Senate and the centumviral court, recitations, a ghost story, and his eyewitness account of Vesuvius. A tenth book gathers his official correspondence with the Emperor Trajan, written while he governed Bithynia and Pontus (probably about AD 110–113), including the famous exchange on how to treat the Christians; he is thought to have died in office about AD 113.

Pliny's letters were composed and polished with publication in mind, and have since been read as a portrait of the upper-class Roman world of the late first and early second centuries. The English version offered here is William Melmoth's translation of 1746, revised by F. C. T. Bosanquet in 1878.