Pliny The Younger - The Letters of the Younger Pliny

There is a bareness about an age that has neither letter-writers nor biographers. Virginia Woolf was writing about Dorothy Osborne and the seventeenth century when the bare landscape becomes full of stir and quiver and we can fill in the spaces between the great books with the voices of people talking. The Romans are the first letter-writers of the Classical world, or, rather, theirs are the letters which chance has preserved to satisfy our curiosity about people as persons, each one unpredictable and full of contradictions and different from his fellows. Greek literature keeps the quality of bareness: the great sweeps of thought are there, and the magnificent power to analyse human capacity and weakness, but there is no one, with the possible exception of Socrates, whose personal idiosyncracies are known. We pick up scraps where we can from Aristophanes or Xenophon or Plutarch; and there are the pitiably few undisputed letters of Plato or the touching details of humble persons which survive in the occasional papyrus letter, but no one reveals himself as the true letter-writer never fails to do. So the Greek statue stands aloof with his stylized enigmatic smile, while the Roman portrait bust is recognizably someone like ourselves, and its irregular features speak for a single individual at a point of time.

Roman letters can take many forms. Ciceros poured out freely, without thought of subsequent publication, and the Emperor Marcus Aurelius and his tutor, M. Cornelius Pronto, wrote almost daily to each other letters which are personal and wholly unselfconscious. Horace, Statius and Martial addressed verse letters to their friends; Pliny published his personal letters himself in carefully arranged selections. But it is a fallacy to suppose that only the first type of letter is self-revealing we come to know Chesterfield and Walpole through their letters, if not as intimately as the Pastons or Charles Lamb. Horaces form of letter-essay, which reappears in Montaigne and Addison, never loses its personal note, and Plinys letters have a wealth of autobiographical detail to capture the imagination and fill in the spaces with the voices of people talking.

Cicero is generally thought to be most representative of the great writers of the late Republic, and his letters provide the most revealing information about his times. It is 150 years before the Empire has its letter-writer in Pliny. He has left a more faithful and less prejudiced picture of Rome as he knew it than did any of his contemporaries, and in him we can best see how a Roman of his class lived and thought at the turn of the first century. It is also possible to build up a remarkably complete record of his career and his personal life, for which all the facts come from four inscriptions (the most important of which are translated on pages 3034) and his letters: there are 247 letters in the nine books of the personal correspondence, and 121 official letters to and from the Emperor Trajan published separately in a tenth book.