Complete letters

663 Pages·2006·2.53 MB·English

by  the Younger. Pliny

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Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Pliny,
the Younger.
[Correspondence. English]
Complete letters / Pliny the younger; translated with an
introduction and notes by P. G. Walsh.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
1. Pliny, the Younger—Correspondence. I. Walsh, P. G.
(Patrick Gerard) II. Title.
PA6639.E5W3513 2006 876’.01—dc22 2006011797
Typeset in Ehrhardt
by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd., St Ives plc ISBN 0–19–280658–0 978–0–19–280658–1
1
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
Complete Letters
PLINY THE YOUNGER
Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
P. G. WALSH
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
COMPLETE LETTERS
PLINY THE YOUNGER (AD 61/2–c.112) was born into an equestrian family at
Comum in northern Italy. After the death of his father, his uncle the
Elder Pliny and the eminent consular Verginius Rufus became his
guardians. After early schooling at Comum, he studied rhetoric under
Quintilian at Rome. Following minor offices and brief military service,
he became quaestor, plebeian tribune, and praetor under Domitian. After
that emperor’s assassination, he became a high civil servant as prefect of
the treasury. Under Trajan in AD 100 he advanced to the suffect
consulship, and in 103 was appointed curator of the Tiber. His crowning
appointment came in 109-10 as governor of Bithynia-Pontus, where he
probably died about two years later. The letters, part autobiography and
part social history, cast a vivid light on Pliny’s wide-ranging roles as
advocate in the courts, as politician in the Senate, as cultivated
littérateur, as man of property on his extensive estates, as provincial
governor, and as devoted husband. They are also revealing on many
aspects of social life in the early Empire, for example on education, on
the treatment of slaves, on religion and the rise of Christianity, and on
the eruption of Vesuvius.
P. G. WALSH is Emeritus Professor of Humanity in the University of
Glasgow. This is the sixth of his translations of Latin authors in Oxford
World’s Classics, following Apuleius, The Golden Ass, Petronius,
Satyricon, Cicero, The Nature of the Gods and On Obligations, and
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy. He has also published
extensively on Livy, on the Roman novel, and on patristic and medieval
Latin.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
THIS volume makes no claim to scholarly originality. I acknowledge my
debt in particular to three predecessors. The first is to Betty Radice’s
revised Loeb edition, and in particular to the carefully compiled Index.
When I reviewed this edition many years ago, I failed to pay adequate
tribute to its solid merits. Secondly, in coping with the problems of Book
X, I have profited greatly from the excellent contribution of Wynne
Williams in the Aris and Phillips series; his edition of Pliny’s
correspondence with Trajan is a model volume for student use. But my
greatest debt is to the masterly work of scholarship of A. N. Sherwin-
White, to which I have constantly turned for enlightenment.
The solid contributions of nineteenth-century continental scholarship
are not acknowledged here. But the image of John of Salisbury, ‘We are
dwarfs, standing on the shoulders of giants’, should always be in the
forefront of our minds as we attempt to transmit that accumulated
knowledge to the next generation of readers and students.
I owe a great debt of gratitude to Judith Luna, for her encouragement
at the early stages, and for her efficiency and courtesy in improving the
typescript and guiding it through the press. Thanks, too, to Elizabeth
Stratford for meticulously checking, correcting, and improving the
typescript.
CONTENTS
Abbreviations
Introduction
Note on the Text and Translation
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Pliny the Younger
COMPLETE LETTERS
BOOK ONE
BOOK TWO
BOOK THREE
BOOK FOUR
BOOK FIVE
BOOK SIX
BOOK SEVEN
BOOK EIGHT
BOOK NINE
BOOK TEN
Map of Bithynia and Pontus
Explanatory Notes
Indexes:
I. Aspects of Social Life
II. Pliny’s Correspondents
III. General