PLINIUS CÆCILII SECUNDUS

PLINIUS CÆCILII SECUNDUS, C., a celebrated Roman orator, was the son of L. Cæcilii, and Plinia, the sister of Pliny the elder, and born in the village of Como, in Cisalpine Gaul, though others have considered Verona as the place of his birth. He was born A. D. 62, in the eighth year of the reign of Nero, the same year in which the poet Persius died; and there seems every reason to believe that he died A. D. 107, in the forty-fifth year of his age, and in the tenth year of the reign of Trajan. Having been left fatherless at an early age, he was adopted by his uncle; and, through his care and that of Virginii Rufus, received the best education that Rome could furnish. Amongst others, he derived much advantage from the talents of Quintilian; and he seems at a very early age to have devoted his attention to poetry. In his fourteenth year he had already written a Greek tragedy, though he does not venture to affirm that it was of much value. He had no sooner finished his youthful studies than we find him in Syria, acting as military tribune; and in his eighteenth year, A. D. 80, he was living with his uncle at Misenum, in Campania, where he was commander of the fleet at the moment of the eruption of Vesuvius, which proved fatal to him. Of the calamity, and the phenomena attendant on it, he gives a very affecting and beautiful account, in two letters to the historian Tacitus. On his return to Rome he commenced his career as an orator, and soon became one of the most distinguished ornaments of the Roman bar. He rose gradually through different ranks till he reached the office of prætor; but towards the end of the reign of Domitian, he drew upon himself the indignation of that monarch, by his able defence of Helvidius, whom Domitian had doomed to destruction; and he was only saved from sharing the fate of many others by the death of the emperor. About the period of Nerva's accession (A. D. 96) he lost his wife, the step-daughter of Vettius Proculus, and the following year married Calpurnia, of an illustrious family, with whom he lived very happily, though by neither of his wives had he any children. Trajan raised him, A. D. 100, to the rank of consul suffectus, upon which occasion he delivered that celebrated panegyric on the emperor which has been preserved to us.

The second year after his consulship he was appointed by Trajan to the administration of the province of Bithynia; and it was whilst he was in this office that he wrote that letter to the emperor which bears such honourable testimony to the Christian religion, and which induced Trajan to mitigate the laws which bore so heavily on those who professed that faith. On his return from his province he seems only to have survived a few years, which were probably spent in retirement in his magnificent villas, of which he possessed several in different parts of Italy.

He was of the most amiable disposition, kind to his inferiors, generous and hospitable to his friends, amongst whom he numbered Quintilian, Suetonius, Silius Italicus, Martial, and Tacitus. He was the active and zealous patron of learning, dividing his time between his professional employments and the pursuits of literature. He has been accused of being jealous of the reputation of some of his friends; and there is no doubt that he was vain of his own acquirements. Next to Cicero there is certainly no orator so distinguished; yet of his numerous orations not one has been preserved except his Panegyric on Trajan, in which he returns thanks for having raised him to the consulship. It was received with great applause, and is without doubt one of the most beautiful specimens of Roman eloquence that we possess. He exhibits before us Trajan, invested, not merely with the majesty of a prince and commander, but with all the virtues which dignify a private character. His noble spirit, his integrity, his love of learning, are all beautifully portrayed; but in his praise he sometimes exceeds the bounds of propriety, so as to give it the appearance of flattery. He has also too great fondness for antithesis, and too constant a repetition of particular expressions. In his language, also, we have sometimes to regret the simplicity which distinguishes the works of an earlier age.

His epistles are addressed to different persons, upon a variety of occasions, and are divided into ten books, of which the last contains only those to Trajan, with his answers. As Sidonius Apollinaris speaks only of nine books, some have thereby been induced to consider the tenth as not the genuine production of Pliny; and indeed others have also refused to include the ninth. The subject-matter of these letters is of a very pleasing character. The reader is interested not more by the variety of circumstances presented to the mind, than by the agreeable manner in which they are told. They possess also great historical value, from being memorials of a period of which we have only a few unimportant hints. We refer more particularly to the two letters on the life and death of Pliny the elder, and that to Trajan on the character of the Christians. As the letters of Cicero are of great value in elucidating the events of the later years of the republic, and in making us more intimately acquainted with the leading statesmen of that time, so those of Pliny are equally valuable in admitting us to an acquaintance with the very different times of the empire.

The best edition is that of Schöfer, with the notes of Gesner and Ernesti, Leipzig, 1805, two vols. 8vo.