The Classical World (82 page)

Pliny,
Letters
1.9

Pompeii and the Bay of Naples were by no means all of Italy. For an insight into the values of the Roman Senate’s ‘new intake’ from much further north, we are lucky to have a priceless survival. From the 90s until 112, from Domitian to the reign of Hadrian’s predecessor Trajan, we have texts which present the values of just such a new man in the Senate, the younger Pliny.

Pliny was the adopted son of the elder Pliny, his uncle, whom he admired as a famous polymath (the elder is best known to us for his long work on natural history, part of which is concerned to list ‘corrupting’ luxuries). The younger Pliny published nine books of his own letters, but they are not private letters like those nowadays ‘made available’ to modern biographers. Most of them uphold particular ways of behaving or showing discrimination. They are intended to be both examples to others and artful proofs of Pliny’s own ‘modesty’ in action. The literary letter, like satire, is a special distinction of Latin
literature, but no letters (not even Cicero’s) are more elegant and more artful than those which Pliny released. They are the nearest we have to a Roman’s autobiography.

A tenth book of letters was published after Pliny’s death, containing letters which he had written in 111/2 during his governorship of Bithynia, a province in north-western Asia. One of his subjects there, unknown to him, was the young Antinous, Hadrian’s future lover. This tenth book is uniquely valuable because it survives with replies written by or for the Emperor Trajan. They are classics of Roman government in action. Some fifty years earlier the governor of this province had been Petronius, the master of elegant wit and luxury. His letters home to Nero would have been so very different.

Justice, freedom and the perils of excessive luxury are important themes for Pliny because he was a Roman barrister, a senator, a governor and also a moralist. He presents the lifestyle of his friends, members of ‘our age’ whom he confesses, artfully, to favouring almost too much. Many of them come from ‘Plinycountry’, wayup in northern Italy, beyond the river Po.
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Places like modern Brescia or Verona or Milan had not even had Roman citizenship by right in the 70s
BC
. Pliny presents this ‘little Italy’ from a priceless angle, although some of it is so undistinguished on the bigger stage. But he has a sharp eye for people worth cultivating and a happywayof picking future winners. If Hadrian had ever read the letters in his own villa, he would have found some of his own current appointees described by Pliny in an earlier, pleasant setting in their lives.

Pliny was born in 61/2, some fourteen years before Hadrian. He was too young for the worst of the Julio-Claudians and his family were not living close to Rome. His home town was Comum (modern Como), on the very frontiers of north Italy beside the dazzling beauty of its lake. In the 50s
BC
Julius Caesar had first put it on the Roman citizen-map. Pliny’s father had already been prominent in the town, but he himself was the first in the family to rise up the ladder of a senatorial career. He was acutely aware of this honour, even noting that the great Virgil had not attained it. It relied on a verybig fortune, partly his family’s, partly acquired by marriage and inheritance. Like other senators, his income came mostly from land, most of which was let to tenants (a return of 6 per cent per year on capital has been
inferred, not bad in decades of low inflation). Pliny also went in for money lending, which was riskier but much more lucrative. Unlike old Cato in the 180s
BC
, Roman senators could now write quite openly about their involvement in usury. Any minority prejudice was long gone: this openness is one aspect of the Roman majority’s frankness about money.

Pliny’s career was extremely successful. In the year 100, before the age of forty, he had become a consul and in thanks, as was usual, he delivered a panegyric of the Emperor Trajan in Rome. Pliny then expanded his speech and delivered it again in three separate sessions, two hours long, before selected friends. The over-long lecture is a Roman invention: why, Pliny asks, should hearers not suffer just because they are friends? Roman reciters, like too many modern lecturers, hoped for ‘feedback’. Pliny then published his enlarged
Panegyric
with a final tribute to himself.

Panegyrics were to have a lively future, typifying court-life in the later Empire, but Pliny looked backwards for his literary hero. As a new man, an orator and a public figure, he felt a special affinity with Cicero. From his teacher, the great Quintilian, he learned to imitate Cicero’s style and to admire his moral example. These qualities were still socially relevant. At Rome, Pliny’s rivals in the courts included amoral ‘informers’, people who would prosecute men of their own class on slight pretexts. They favoured blunt language and an un-educated style, whereas Pliny, the Ciceronian, was proud to present such a very different image, while not being above an opportunist prosecution himself.
²

From the age of eighteen onwards, much of Pliny’s public activity concerned cases of inheritance under Roman law. As an advocate, he was restrained by law from taking large fees. Instead, he expected ‘favours’ as part of the network of ‘duties’ which made up the mutual obligations of an important Roman’s life. As in so much modern business, one good turn was expected to deserve another: Romans are closer to modern life in this respect, to the ethos of social exchanges in modern Manhattan or to ‘exhibition loans’ between museums, than their critics sometimes realize. Cicero was the apt model for ‘duties’, for ‘dignity’ and for law-court speeches, as he also was for Pliny’s polished letters. Pliny also wrote short poems and recited them, in
long batches, to his long-suffering friends. To our surprise, Cicero was helpful here also. Some of Pliny’s short poems were on rather risqué subjects, but he discovered a lascivious little poem in which Cicero referred to kissing his male secretary, Tiro. The discovery of this poem helped Pliny, he claims, to overcome his own hesitations. Why, he then wrote in verse, should I not tell of my Tiro too? Some people (Pliny tells us) criticized him for writing naughty poems, but by citing Cicero, he could counter their complaint. To judge from surviving specimens, the literary level of his verses was a greater reason for concern. Pliny presents them as light amusements of his spare time, but he also claims that Greeks were learning Latin in order to enjoy them. They can only have been disappointed.

As an adult in the Senate, Pliny was more in his element. Like Cicero, he spoke out against corrupt provincial governors, but his audience was more patient than in the old days. Since Augustus, cases of extortion would be heard in the Senate and advocates might speak on one case for five hours or more. Pliny took part in several long cases, including twisted ones brought by Bithynians, and this was one reason why Trajan later sent him to sort out this province. Yet a senator’s horizons had changed so much since Cicero, as Pliny, his admirer, exemplifies. There was none of Cicero’s free political struggle, played out before senators and the people. Young senators still became tribunes of the people, but the emperors held the enhanced tribunician power. A main concern for holders of the job was simply whether to continue practising as a barrister while holding it, the modern Member of Parliament’s dilemma. As for elections, the thrilling manipulations of Cicero’s times had vanished. Elections to high office were largely prearranged before being put before the Senate. Pliny, the new member, was particularly distressed by the other members’ habit of writing obscenities on the ballot papers which were distributed for their assent.
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It was one of their few liberties in the matter. The prearranged choices were then read out to the people in the Campus Martius.

At best, senators could publicize the values by which an emperor would be publicly assessed. In this light, Pliny’s
Panegyric
on Trajan is not just tedious flattery. It sets up ‘modesty’ and ‘moderation’ as values for Trajan, the ‘most excellent’; it even dwells on ‘liberty’.
Significantly, it is not the ‘liberty’ of Cicero’s early years. Pliny acclaims Trajan for being a consul ‘as if he was onlya consul’ and for showing care for equity and the law.
⁴
But as Trajan himself is the ‘maker of consuls’, it is equitable that he should stand out above them and ‘teach’ them. This ‘liberty’ depends on another’s grace and whim, exactly what Cicero had detested about Julius Caesar. As Pliny’s own letters observe, everything now is ‘under the decision of one man’: he has undertaken the ‘cares and labours of all’ on behalf of ‘the common good’. A few things flow down to us from that ‘most benevolent fountain’ but they come in a ‘salubrious blend’.
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Or so a senator could simplyhope. In this age of monarchy senators were expected to acclaim their First Citizen in fine phrases, like the backing to a singer. ‘Trust us, trust yourself,’ they chanted, or ‘Oh, how fortunate we are… ’ In reply, said Pliny, Trajan shed tears.
⁶
Under Augustus, eulogies of members of the imperial family had been circulated ‘for posterity’ through the provinces, where we still rediscover them. Under Trajan, for the first time, acclamations of the Senate were inscribed and circulated likewise for posterity’s benefit. Perhaps they will turn up too, for our moral good.

In a slave-society, where senators owned thousands of disposable human beings, this loss of liberty may seem rather marginal. It was also a loss for males only, the only political sex. But it affected what the articulate male class wrote and what they spoke: the political distance since Cicero (let alone Pericles) affects the culture which Romans left behind for posterity, the turgid epic poems (though some now over-estimate them) and the verbose, evasive rhetoric. Despite the cult, among some Romans, of a ‘Stoic’ inner freedom from passion and emotion, an educated Roman could no longer truly be his ‘own man’. Romans had liberties, but they did not have libertyconstrained only by their free consent. This change affected their feelings and self-respect, and it put them in moral predicaments which we still recognize, not least in our modern ‘People’s Republics’ and our memories of the ‘Iron Curtain’ years. Since 96 both Nerva and Trajan, Pliny said, had brought back ‘freedom’. But it was a relative concept: the point was that under Domitian the despotism had been so much worse.

Here, Pliny’s published letters parade a particularly interesting
alternative. They stress a particular set of friendships which he cultivated with the families of a philosophically minded coterie in Rome. They were direct descendants of the ‘Stoic’ opposition to Nero and the brave Helvidius who had spoken out under Vespasian. ‘Thunderbolts’, Pliny tells us, had been falling all around him during the time of Domitian’s worst tyranny, but he himself had risked protecting a philosopher in the city. However, Pliny was a praetor-magistrate under Domitian, and his year of office was almost certainly 93. At that time members of this philosophical group had been arrested and executed and their biographies of former brave martyrs under Nero were ordered to be burned. As praetor, Pliny may well have helped to carry out the burning. Assiduously, he presents himself later as a friend of the families, but he discreetly fails to emphasize that after his praetorship he went on to another distinguished office during Domitian’s reign.

Of all our surviving Latin authors, it is the poet Ovid who lived longest under Augustus, but eighty years later it is Pliny, not Ovid, who best conforms to Augustus’ ‘vision’ of Roman society. Like Augustus himself, Plinywas profoundly unmilitary: he makes no mention of the military prowess of some of his correspondents. His crowning honour, he tells us, was a Roman priesthood, the proud job of augur which Cicero, too, had held. His one Augustan failing was his total lack of children, but not for want of trying: he was married three times, with wives who miscarried. Like Cicero, Pliny went out for a while to govern a second-rank province, Bithynia, but here too his role was shaped by Augustus’ legacy. While abroad, freedom and justice were directly his business, but both were exercised in a changed imperial context.

Pliny had already had experience of the Bithynians as an advocate at Rome; even among Romans of the new generation his Greek was exceptionallygood (he had written a Greek playwhen aged fourteen); Trajan was wise to choose him for a Greek-speaking province which had recently emerged as chaotic. Like Cicero, Pliny travelled round the cities of his province on a yearly assize-tour, but unlike Cicero he had been chosen by an emperor. Like all other governors in this period, he arrived with written instructions from the emperor, but unusually for his province he was to be its first imperial legate, the
‘emperor’s man’, sent to sort it out. In you, Trajan reminds Pliny, the provincials can see my own care for them.
⁷
No such higher authority had existed for Cicero and his friends. Like Cicero, Pliny was aware of the glorious free past of the great cities of Greece, but his letters show the tightened checks which now intruded on the locals’ civic freedom. He is required to inspect the cities’ financial accounts; he has been ordered to ban clubs and societies in the cities for fear that they will promote popular trouble. It is Pliny, then, who bans local fire brigades, putting social peace before safety. Trajan’s answers are often respectful of local practice, more so than Pliny himself, but only within these strict constraints. They are much tighter constraints than those applied byCicero, let alone by kings or governors in the previous history of Greek Asia. The years from 96 to 138 blend into the age which Edward Gibbon declared to be the happiest in human history. But as in Rome, so in civic life in the Greek-speaking world, there had been a real loss of liberty. It is enshrined for us, a moral lesson, in the gap between Pliny’s letters and their models, Cicero’s marvellous correspondence, which had immortalized the turning point of an age of true liberty for his class.

In return, Pliny’s Greek-speaking subjects presented him with all manner of local bad practice, including slaves in the Roman army, a total illegality. There were also those hardy perennials, a devious philosopher who was claiming tax privileges or some poorly run building projects and the embezzlement of funds by local city councillors: Cicero, too, had confronted all manner of local financial fraud. But again and again Pliny writes for Trajan’s advice on the smallest matters or to make the slightest proposals. Cicero had had no emperor to consider: governors in his lifetime were more concerned to restore their personal finances at the provincials’ expense. One reason why Pliny wrote so often, and sometimes so irritatingly, was surely to cover his own tracks. Like his predecessors, he might be prosecuted by the provincials on leaving office, under the procedures Augustus had formalized.