In Our Time - Pliny the Younger

Episode Date: December 12, 2013

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of Pliny the Younger, famous for his letters. A prominent lawyer in Rome in the first century AD, Pliny later became governor of the province of Bithynia, on the Black Sea coast of modern Turkey. Throughout his career he was a prolific letter-writer, sharing his thoughts with great contemporaries including the historian Tacitus, and asking the advice of the Emperor Trajan. Pliny's letters offer fascinating insights into life in ancient Rome and its empire, from the mundane details of irrigation schemes to his vivid eyewitness account of the eruption of Vesuvius.With:Catharine Edwards Professor of Classics and Ancient History at Birkbeck, University of LondonRoy Gibson Professor of Latin at the University of ManchesterAlice König Lecturer in Latin and Classical Studies at the University of St AndrewsProducer: Thomas Morris.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. For more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. After a fire which destroyed several houses and two public buildings, a local government official wrote to his superior asking for permission to set up a fire brigade. His modest request for a force of 150 men equipped with fire engines and buckets was turned down. There were concerns that a fire brigade might become a focus of political opposition. This took place almost 2,000 years ago, in the ancient city of Nicomedia in Asia Minor.

We know about it because the correspondence between the local Roman governor Pliny the Younger and his emperor Trajan has survived. Plinya was a successful lawyer born in the first century AD who became a prominent member of the Roman administration. His greatest legacy is the hundreds of letters he wrote to friends, colleagues and the Roman emperor himself. They described life in ancient Rome at the height of its powers in detail, from the law courts to dinner party etiquette and even include an stunning eyewitness account of his uncle's death

in the eruption of Vesuvius. With me to discuss the life and letters of Pliny the Younger are Catherine Edwards, Professor of Classics and Ancient History at Birkbeck University of London, Roy Gibson, Professor of Latin at the University of Manchester, and Alice Kernig, lecturer in Latin and classical studies at the University of St. Andrews. Catherine Edwards, Pliny was born around 60 AD in northern Italy.

Before we talk about him, could you tell us about the extent and power of the Roman Empire at that time? Well, the Roman Empire was really an enormous area. It stretched from the Atlantic coast to the Black Sea. It covered Syria. It covered Egypt. It was a vast, vast extent of territory with a population of perhaps 50 or 60 million people. It was divided into around 45 provinces, and these were ruled from Rome by really quite a small number.

of senior Roman officials with a kind of support staff under them. And it went into North Africa. Did you mention it? It did indeed. I mentioned Egypt. It covered North Africa and indeed under the Emperor Trajan, it also includes even Romania. And it made money from all these provinces. How did it gather the money in? How did it get to be so rich?

Well, the Roman Empire gathered money by various means from its different provinces. And some of the provinces were responsible for collecting their own taxes and that's particularly true of some of the eastern provinces, such as Bethanya Pontus, where Pliny was later the governor. And this money was remitted to Rome, also, and particularly it's used for paying for the very large Roman army of around 400,000 soldiers,

which helps the Romans keep control of their vast empire. Was there in a sense in which Rome was always at war in one place or another? Yes, there were some periods of greater conflict than others, and the period during which Pliny was, writing his letters as one that were kind of relatively stable phases of the Roman Empire. What's known about Pliny himself, about his background? Pliny grew up in Comum, in the north of Italy. He came from a wealthy family. The most sort of distinguished relative is his maternal uncle, the elder Pliny, who's

very well known to us as a great scholar. One of his works is the natural histories which has survived to this day and is a repository of all sorts of rather bizarre information. Plinique was clearly a very talented young man. He had his early education in Coman but later moved to Rome where he learnt from the distinguished orator Quintilian and rapidly established himself as a distinguished performer in the law courts in Rome.

He came from the second aristocratic strand in Roman societies, as I understand it. Could you say what the second was? Right, well the equestrian order as it's referred to you is they're the second tier really of the Roman aristocrat. that not the senatorial elite, although Pliny does go on to become a Roman senator, so he enters the senatorial class. Many equestions are also extremely wealthy and many equations fulfill official roles within the government of the Roman Empire. Roy Gibson, he had a very successful career in public life. Can you outline the steps that he took to make himself so, in the end, so prominent?

The main steps in Roman career are Quistor, Pretor and Consul, and he has. made each of these in quite a short time. In his late 20s, after a series of minor magistrates and service in the army in Syria, he becomes Quistar. It's not just any Quistar. There's 20 Quistor, but if you're chosen to be the imperial Quistar, you accompany... What does a Quistor do? Well, it's the entry point into the Senate, and you're also a minor magistrate also.

But he's chosen as one of the imperial... real quistores, so he's attached to demission and he doesn't have to undergo election. Is he chosen that because he's passed exams or he's shown flare in the courts? It would be his flair in public speaking, which would show itself above all in the courts because the quistores would be expected to help emperors write their speeches, for example. And then he continues to be closely associated with and to be promoted by demission. and in the year 93, he's Pretor, which is a rather unfortunate year, because it's the year that Domitian turns against the senatorial aristocracy.

There's a trial in which police involved, and they're prosecuting a corrupt governor of Spain called Bibius Mata, and his fellow senator, who's prosecuting, perhaps to be a member of this clique called the senatorial opposition. Sorry, the stoic opposition. and it seems that there is a counter-prosecution against his fellow prosecutor, Senecio, which then leads Domitian to attack this clique. Now, his fellow prosecutor is executed as are several other members of the Roman senatorial class,

but not Pliny himself. He seems to escape, and it is even promoted by Domitian to a post called the, He's head of the treasury of the military treasury. So he was either a loyalist or a cunning careerist, I suppose? Well, he was not unlike many members of the Roman aristocracy. To be in any position of power when Domitian is assassinated is almost by right to have been favoured by Domitian, but it's how he deals with it in the years after Domitian is assassinated

that makes him interesting. But he became a senator and then consul. He was the first person in his family to become a senator. So his leptych class has had a very more than distinguished career. Absolutely, his uncle, the elder Pliny, pursued career at the equestrian level where you become a minor official as a governor of a province. And the elder Pliny ends his career as commander of the Western Fleet, which is based in the Bay of Naples in my senate and the northern Naples.

And that's why he's there when Vesuvius erupts in the... in AD 79. But when he gets to Rome, he inherits, after his uncle dies, he inherits great wealth. Yes, and he also inherits the name Pliny at that point. His name is Kikilius Sukundas up until then. It's when the uncle dies, he gets to the Implenia and he gets the uncle's estates as well. So he goes up the scale. He's well known in the law courts. He survives this terrible purge or attack in the Senate. He becomes a senator, he becomes a consul, he becomes an augur, which is high priest. And then he, towards the end of his life, which was a rather short life, he was appointed governor in the Roman province of Bithynia Pontus.

Why is that appointment made? Well, provinces are divided into war zones and into peaceful zones. And the war zones, the governor is appointed by the emperor and the peaceful zones. The governor is appointed by the Senate. but unusually Traygeon interferes and wants to appoint his special rep. Emperor Trojan, yes. He wants to interfere in the appointment for Bithynia Pontus. Why does he?

Well, the reason it appears to be that there is financial mismanagement among the cities. I mean, it's a very wealthy Greek-speaking area. It's just the area south and east of modern Istanbul. And there seems to be huge infrastructure projects in the cities. They're building theatres. they're building aqueducts, they're building baths. And a lot of the cities are getting themselves into problem through overspending or through bad planning.

And he wants Pliny to go and sort this out. One of Pliny's areas of expertise is finance because he's specialised in inheritance law, which sounds unglomerous, but it was very important in Rome. Yes, we've thought a rush through his creditors, Greg, an inheritance law, but he also was to do with the Treasury. He spread himself around, didn't he? Yes, he did.

he, of course, he was also a published literary figure as well. So, yes, he covered many bases. Was this as far as he was concerned a step up, which is a good thing to become a member of a, sorry, governor of a province? It wasn't, yes, not everyone wanted to be governor of a province, but it would be seen as a distinguished way to end your career. The most distinguished governorship outside the military provinces would, would be Asia, which is basically the western coast of Turkey,

and his elder contemporary Tacitus, appears to have been governor of Asia. Pliny didn't quite reach that same level. Alice Gernick, almost everything we know about Plyne, Plyne the Younger, comes from his own letters. Can you tell us how many they were and were they intended for publication? Well, we have ten books of letters from Pliny. So books one to nine contain about 247. letters, all of them written by Pliny to over a hundred different addresses, members of his family, friends, acquaintances. And then there's book 10 as well, which is rather different.

That has another 121 letters in it. And that's correspondence between Pliny and the Emperor Trajan, most of it dating to the time when he was governor of Bethinia. So we have in book 10 just one correspondent, but in fact two letter writers, because in that book, unusually we get replies, so 52 of the letters are replies from Trajan to Pliny. Whether they were all intended for publication or not, how closely these letters, what relationship they have to real letters that Pliny actually sent is a moot point and we'll probably never know for sure. The letters look like real letters. There are various letters that show that Pliny's clearly an ongoing correspondence with various people. But it's also clear from what Pliny says about

the efforts he goes to to revise his law court speeches for public. for example, that he's very keen on polishing, editing material prior to publication. So it's a reasonable guess that the letters that we have, at least in books one to nine, possibly also in book 10, are edited, revised, polished versions of letters that may have been sent as real letters at one point in time. He saw himself partly, as many things, as a literary man, and he saw this as part of his literary legacy, didn't he? Yes, absolutely. some people wonder whether the letters are almost published as an insurance policy in case his law court speeches don't survive

and he takes the opportunity throughout the letters to tell us all sorts of things about his literary life, his literary products. Can you give the listeners just an introductory spread as to what these letters are about, the subjects he covered? Well, one of the things that strikes you when you read through them is really the sheer variety of topics that Pliny touches on. So he'll write to fellow authors, for example, exchanging ideas about work that is being prepared for publication

or things that have already been published. He'll write to members of his family. He'll write to his wife, Calpurnia, saying he misses her when she's away or he's worried about her health after a miscarriage. He writes to her grandfather to console him on the fact that he hasn't yet become a great-grandfather. There are lots of letters of request where Pliny is asking favours from people. So, for example, there's a letter to Tacit. where he says,

I'm helping to set up a school in my native town of Comum, could you help find tutors? There are letters of thanks when people have done what he's asked and also replies to requests that people make of him. So there's one letter, for example, where someone has asked him to help find a husband for his niece and plenty of rights with some advice. Letters of consolation, letters that give us accounts

of the death or suicide of significant figures, letters of congratulation, Letters of advice, he'll write to aspiring young orators, telling them, giving them advice about how to improve their technique. And along the way, also, we get all sorts of glimpses and commentary on life under demission and then life under Trajan. So really a huge variety of themes. Was it odd for someone to address the emperor directly,

as directly seated, and to get answers to the letters, sometimes long answers from the emperor? No, it probably wasn't odd. it's probably actually something that was just part and parcel of being a governor of a province. It's clear from other evidence that we have that there is an ongoing regular correspondence between the centre of Rome and the provincial governors. The fact that they have survived is important, but scholars like yourselves say they really do give a snapshot of a whole culture. Yes, absolutely.

So they give us a snapshot of all sorts of images of Pliny's life, all sorts of aspects of Pliny's life. And through that, we get glimpses of the literary world, we get glimpses of how social relations worked, how patrons and clients interacted with each other, all sorts of advice. Pliny's asked for lots of legal advice as well about inheritance disputes and so on. Catherine, what picture do we get of Pliny himself from this?

Well, I think the picture we get of Pliny is really very interesting. Initially, Pliny can seem tremendously self-confident and pleased with himself. He seems to be constantly... He certainly is. I mean, he's constantly giving us examples of his own behaviour as models of, you know, a proper way for a respectable Roman senator to act. But lying behind all that, there seems to be perhaps a deeper anxiety. It's very interesting how many of the letters are looking back to the past.

They're not about necessarily what happened this week, what Pliny's plans are for the future, but he's constantly referring back to the reign of Domitian and his own behaviour under Domitian. Now, just tell the listeners who Domitian is and why is important, please. Domitian is the emperor under whom Pliny's career really took off. Quite a long time, Emperor, for Empress of the Day. He was, indeed. He was Emperor until 96, when he was assassinated, become extremely unpopular. Roy was mentioning earlier the kind of purge of the senatorial elite in 1990. but Pliny had flourished under Domitian

and his letters are constantly reminding us of his own friendship, his own relations with people who had been opponents of Domitian to reassure us that actually he wasn't a bad guy he was a friend to Arilena's Rousticus he was a friend to the kind of the widows and offspring of those who had been exiled or executed

he's very keen that We shouldn't forget that about him. Yes, but it is as if he's sort of making up for the fact that he was promoted by demission and a friend of demissioners, I presume, but the letters written later say, oh, I was against him a lot of the time, and supported those against him. This particular woman, Fania, what she called. Fania, yes, Fania is a fascinating figure. I was her support.

I think she's a wonderful person. I'm being a bit, not flippant, but I'm just, why don't you tell me what really was going on? Well, I don't know if we can ever know exactly what was going on. on, but Pliny seems to have been able to steer a course between offending Domitian on the one hand and alienating his opponents on the other hand. So he's very keen to underline how he himself underwent kind of, and he was in a perilous situation at various points, and he even reveals to us that when Domitian died, there was actually an indictment against Pliny on his desk.

You know, so he almost was prosecuted by demission, and he was only saved by demission being assassinated. I mean, the ladders are wonderful, but sometimes you just, you really have to smile at the smugness, and there's a dinner, how to run a dinner party. He said, not for me getting dancing girls from Cadiz. I have poetry readings, and persons playing the liar. You think some party, really.

He's very keen to emphasise just how model his behaviour is not only in his working life, not only in the law courts, but also as a host, in another latter, he talks about with disapproval about Roman aristocratic hosts who have a dinner party and they have three categories of wine for the different categories of guests. So the host and his close friends will have the really expensive wine, but then there are kind of, you know, the sort of lesser guests

who have the cheaper wine. And the freedmen, the ex-slave guests, they have the cheapest wine of all. And Pliny says, when I give a dinner party, we all have the same wine. And someone says, oh, isn't that terribly extravagant, Pliny? And he says, no, no, we all have the cheap wines. It's not extravagant at all. So he's showing us both how he knows how to give a dinner party and that a dinner party is about sharing equally, temporarily at least,

with everybody you've invited. But he's also not extravagant, and that's a point he quite often makes. He's not a man for luxury. Well, Gibson, could you give us some closer idea of the political times through which he lived? He was born in the time of Nero. But then, as we know, he lived through a year of the four emperors. So can you just give there some idea of what was going on at the top

that he had to guard against or deal with throughout his life? Well, the year of the Four Emperors would be when he was quite young when he was seven, so he would have some... This was the resonances. This was the possibility. Absolutely, yes. And there was a terrible civil war in that year. And the threat of civil war would come back later in his career.

under Nerva. But in between the death of Nero and the reign of Nerva comes of Vespasian, who's the father of Domitian, and then Titus and then Domitimuson himself. And as we have already mentioned, it's a time when he's closely promoted by Domitian and he then tries to live it down.

Unlike Tacitus, who in the very first paragraph of his great work, the history says quite openly, I was promoted by, by Domitian. Pliny seems to have tried to divert attention away from the fact that he was so closely associated with Domitian by attacking someone else in the Senate in the year after that Domitian died. And the idea he accused this person

of being involved in a trial and execution of one of the victims of 93 when Domitian turned against the historic opposition. And the Emperor at the time, Nerva, didn't really want to pursue this particular accusation because he wanted to keep everything nice and quiet and not stir up the embers, but it seems to have marked out Pliny as someone,

the kind of person that the new regime would want to promote, and then he himself then becomes fast-tracked towards the consulship. So even though Pliny himself was closely favoured by Domitian, he seems to be able to somehow slip that particular reputation quite quickly. but he keeps, as Catherine has said, keeps on coming back to it throughout the letters to make sure that everyone's got the message that he's quite innocent.

You can't blame a man for wanting to stay alive because if he hadn't taken care, he would have been one of those executed. Yes, yes, absolutely, but he criticises others for precisely that attitude in the letters, and that's what he says that he was disgusted in the Senate when he tried to start prosecuting somebody,

that there's people in the Senate shouted out, you know, let those. of us who have survived live and so he attacks that that attitude himself but the great thing about the letters is that it's very easy to see the

attempts to justify himself. He hasn't taken such great care that we can't see it. Alice Kearney he was a lawyer it seems he was a very successful lawyer indeed what insights into

what was happening in the court of that day Do his letters give us? All sorts of insights. So we get to see Pliny as advocate in all sorts of contexts. We've already heard about one or two more political trials. We see Pliny acting for the prosecution in some really big trials, in particular against provincial governors who've been charged, Pliny acts on behalf of the provinces that they've governed

and brings them to trial for mismanagement or corruption. So who side is he on there? Pliny acts for the prosecution in a country. couple of cases. So prosecuting governors on behalf of the provinces for the mismanagement of the governors. But he also takes on one or two defence cases, a couple of governors who preceded him in Bethinia. He defends them against charges that are brought about their time in Bethinia. So we see him, he gives us, in the accounts of those cases, he gives us really detailed descriptions of the ways in which he puts his legal arguments together, the legal wrangle

that go on behind the scenes about exactly what charges should be leveled, where these people should be tried, what punishments are admissible. We see him sharing the prosecution or defence with other notable figures, including Tacitus in one case. And we also see Pliny flooring his opponents with the force of his rhetoric. We also see Pliny in other legal context. So there are lots of letters where people write to Pliny for legal advice, particular about inheritance disputes.

Was the law a great force in Rome at that time, a time of assassinations of emperors and so on, and yet this lawyer is going about his legal business in a methodical, continuous way, with lots of detail, lots of order, lots of cases? What was the status of it and the force of it at that time? Well, the law is one place you always come back to to thrash out all sorts of things.

So the law courts are places where you thrash out political ideas too. But did the emperors ever say, look, I'm above the law, I can get out of my way, I want to do this? Not in so many words, but it's very clear that emperors attend trials and that, you know, there are one or two trials that Pliny talks about where the emperor Trajan or the never has been in attendance. So, not in so many words, but the emperor is present sometime. Catherine Edwards, two particularly celebrated letters contain an account of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD,

which Pliny witnessed and where his uncle, Pliny the Elder, died. And can you tell us how he, when he came to describe these events? Why he wasn't there with his uncle, first of all, when he came to describe these events and then discuss how he did it, please. Well, Pliny and his family were at Mizanam, where his uncle was in command of the Western Fleet. So they're sort of living temporarily on the Bay of. of Naples in 79.

And Pliny at this time is 18 years old. Now, the occasion for describing the eruption, it comes several decades later, and it ostensibly Tacitus, the great historian, has written to Pliny and asked him for an account of the death of his uncle. Romans were very interested in accounts of how great people died.

So this is a letter then written several decades after the event, and I think that's an important thing to bear in mind. So Pliny describes how the events on the 24th of all August 79, there's the sight of this terrible cloud in the shape of an umbrella pine. Now, his uncle, who's completely fascinated by natural phenomena, decides immediately he's going to set out by boat and go and have a closer look, see what's going on. So off goes Uncle Pliny is about to set off when a messenger arrives saying that some friends

of his are in grave peril and want to be rescued. So what starts out as a scientific expedition becomes a rescue mission. Uncle Pliny sets off and he sails down to Stabi, very in the vicinity of Vesuvius, and we're told how he greets his friends there who are all terrified. Uncle Pliny remains calm and thinks it's very important to communicate, you know, calm to his companions. And so he decided he's going to have a bath and have dinner. So they have this sort of normal evening almost. While Vesuvius is erupting all around them.

While the CVs is erupting all around them, Uncle Pliny goes to bed, but he's woken up before dawn because debris is falling so fast that he's actually going to be trapped in the bedroom if he doesn't come out at once. And at this point, the whole party is terrified. They decide to go down to the beach.

And actually, younger Pliny tells us that everyone else is motivated by terror. Uncle Pliny is motivated by reason, as ever. But Uncle Pliny has perhaps been a little bit too brave, because in the end, he does actually die on the beach, apparently suffocating rather than killed by debris, because his companions do manage eventually to escape

and report, obviously, on exactly how bravely Uncle Pliny met death. This is something pointed out by the great Italian academic Umberto Echow. When you read the letters about the death of the uncle, Pliny means to give a very heroic account, but if you read between the lines, you can see that the elder Pliny had no idea what he was doing. He had no plan and that's why he

So you believe Becker rather than the younger rather than the nephew? I do on this particular point but it's clear that he had no plan because the winds are coming in onto the shore. They can't get back out and he could

have tried to escape by land I suppose but doesn't try any of that just goes to sleep as Catherine says. But that doesn't get in the way the fact that this description is still today, I'm told, by volcanologists thought very highly of. Now, why is that way? He got it right and he described volcanoes, as I understand it, in ways they had not been described till that point. Yes, I mean, Pliny does give us an awful lot of detail about the class...

But the point is the detail seems to be accurate. Yes, yes, absolutely. Yes, I mean, we have, we're told that the elder Pliny took loads of notes, and they may very well have survived with his companions who did manage to get away. And then we also have the second letter that Pliny writes is his own experience of watching the volcano and the consequences of that. From across the bay? From across the bay.

Now, younger Pliny at this point is 18. He's very studious and doesn't accompany his uncle on the grounds that he's got homework to do. His uncle's told him to get on with his livy reading. So he's sitting there with his book. So he's, you know, just as the older Pliny is perhaps being a little bit too heroic. The younger pliny is perhaps also a little bit too. oblivious to what's going on. Friends urge him that he really needs to do something. He and his

mother need to escape, but they say, oh, we know, we can't leave until we've heard what's happened to Uncle Pliny. Eventually, you know, the sky turns black. They kind of, they feel they have to do something and to leave. They're worried the house is going to fall down on top of them. And they leave, they're followed by the townspeople and Pliny, you know, presents himself here as the kind of heroic figure leading everyone else, although then they actually, they stop and decide perhaps they're not going to go any further. We do get a very strong sense of the complete terror that everyone must have felt. The sky's absolutely black.

A lot of people think it's the end of the world. And Pliny himself confesses to thinking, I thought my life was going to end with the world ending. I was just going to say that the type of eruption that Pliny describes, there's a lot of skepticism about it in the 19th century because this was not the kind of eruptions that people had seen. And it wasn't until the eruption of Martinique, I think, in 1903. people realised that there were these kind of super hot,

paraclastic flows and surges. And again, it wasn't really until Mount St. Helens and everyone saw it televised in 1980, that people began to really put the Pliny letter together with the paraclastic flows and surges. So there was a lot... He was proved right 19 years, 100 years on. Oh, yes, absolutely. Yes, indeed.

Alex Koenick, let's talk a little about Pliny as a literary man. He wrote poetry, the letters is a literary form. He liked to write two writers about writers. He went to reading groups. He organised reading groups. Can you develop that, please? Yes, well, literary production and consumption

are a huge recurring theme throughout books one to nine. So Pliny gives us all sorts of glimpses of himself as a writer. Catherine's already mentioned that there's this wonderful image of Pliny as a very young man when Vesuvius is blowing up, doing his homework, and actually emulating his uncle. And in the letters that he writes about Vesuvius, Pliny the younger is trying to be Pliny the Elder

in terms of the detailed information about these natural phenomena because that's something that Pliny the Elder puts into his natural histories. So, yes, Pliny writes all sorts of verse in particular. He apparently liked to write erotic love poetry. We get lots of discussion of the ways in which he's constantly refining and revising his speech.

Did you rush over erotic love poetry though? Did I rush over? I think it's best to rush over Pliny's erotic love poetry. it's not of the highest quality. Fine. In that case, we must put it on side. Yes. So he tells us, for example, about all the recitations that he goes to. And we get accounts of some recitations that didn't go so terribly well,

where the reading fell flat. Pliny also gets frustrated with other people around him who don't attend recitations as assiduously as him. Catherine's already mentioned that Pliny sets himself up as an exemplary figure, and he's exemplary in the literary world, in the self-sacrificing effort he makes to attend. To keep these book clubs going. And then he's constantly exchanging material with people like Tacitus,

where they're clearly commenting on each other's work prior to publication. And, yeah, he... It's interesting these letters when we get these letters, like the letters from the women at Vindalanda, all of a sudden, the great facade of the great Roman emperor, part of society breaks down into something that's lived, isn't it? Something that's easy to grasp, but like a book club, and like

can you come to my party, it's not dressy tonight, that sort of thing. Anyway, that's an aside. Catherine, let's take him to Bithynia, where he's a governor, and he writes to Emperor Trajan. What sort of things was he asking of his Emperor? Well, he consults Trajan about a whole

range of issues. Some of them seem perhaps quite trivial to us, others more obviously significant, But some of the main concerns are about deployment of soldiers. That's obviously a very sensitive area. So when he's talking about, you know, how many soldiers a senior official should be allowed to have as his kind of bodyguard, you know, the Trajan's quite clear about, you know, not exceeding the prescribed number. There's, as Roy's already mentioned, a lot of concern with spending that's been going on

and these big building projects that the local towns in Bethanya Pontus have been undertaking and not bringing to completion. So he's constantly asking for surveyors and architects to be sent out to see if some of these problems, some of these half-built buildings can be kind of sorted out and made useful. And also the administration of justice. I mean, that's a key area.

He consults Trajan about, for instance, some people who've been condemned to be slaves in the mines. And it turns out some of these people, despite that earlier judgment, have ended up working in a rather cushier role as public slaves and Pliny is concerned as to what the proper course of action is with these people. Roy Gibson, this is the only book that contains replies, so he have Pliny's letters and Trajan's letters.

Now there's some dispute as to whether the Trajan himself wrote all these letters, although his authority seems to be in all of them. It's very easy for us to assume a model where there's a civil service who are dealing with what seemed to us relatively trivial replies. But I think you can tell from the letters themselves that it's very likely that Trajan did dictate all the replies because he gets irritated with Pliny, as when Pliny asked for an architect.

He says, don't ask me for an architect. They mostly come from the Greek-speaking parts of the empire. Anyway, you can find one. And occasionally, instead of replying to Pliny's main point, he'll go off in a tent. and he'll say, and I told you you had to sort out the corruption there. So they have all the marks of a man who is dictating letters on the hoof, and plenty of writes to him two to three times a month.

And if he was getting the same number of letters from all over the empire, he's a very, very busy man. But it seems to be that was one of the main tasks of a good emperor. Do we have an impression that Trajan had a consistent policy in province? province. For instance, he turned down the requests for a fire brigade. Would he turn down fire brigade requests all over the empire? If there was a history of political factions, political cliques growing up, then yes, I'm sure he would. But emperors, on the whole, want two things from provinces. They want peace and quiet and they want taxes. They don't have a big imperial

ideology beyond that. They don't sit there formulating policies to be enforced across the empire as a whole. It's a very reactive model of government where governors send in requests and then he will take them one by one. How does Trajan come out of this right? He comes out as, well, the tone of the letters is quite amusing. It's like a

headmaster speaking to a senior prefect as it were. There's all sorts of personal concern which mask the fact there's an enormous gulf and status between the two. One has all the power and the other one is doing his bidding. But he comes out as a

who takes interest in the minutiae of the empire, as in the fire brigades. You think that half the city of Nicomedi had burned down, but he says no fire brigades because they could turn into a political faction. But he takes interest in even minor cases, including, for example, the Christians community that is fine. Oh, no, that's what I was going to come to. Alice Kearning, we have a very significant letter

where Pliny asks for advice about how to deal with the Christians, an increasing number, it seems, at that time. in the province. Can you take us through that? Well, it's a fascinating pair of letters, 96 and 97. This is about 110 AD. Yes. It's fascinating, not least, because it's one of the earliest non-Christian references to Christianity to survive.

And in the pair of letters that we get, we get a glimpse of Christianity as Pliny anecdotally encounters it. And then we also get, in Trajan's reply, a sort of an official line on Christianity. So Pliny writes to Trajan's, as so often in book 10 to say, look, there's this naughty problem that's come up, and so I'm asking your advice. He's never been present at trials of Christians before, and there are a few details he's not sure about,

including what do you do with people who have been Christian, but have said that they are no longer Christian? Was the basic problem, excuse me, was the basic problem at that time that the idea was, if you worshipped anybody, well, you had to, you worshipped the emperor, and they said, no, we have one God who is not the emperor, he is Jesus Christ. Well, what emerges from these letters is that it's not actually a faith issue, really. It's more an anxiety that Christianity is the breeding ground for political sedition and that also there are acts associated with Christianity that might be potentially criminal. Can you develop that?

Well, one of the rumours that floats around at this time about the Eucharistic feast, for example, is that it's potentially cannibalistic. but then there's a sort of suspicion of all sorts of sects because they might be inducing slightly lawless activity so how does Pliny, when he gets his advice, how does he deal with the Christian? What does he do as a result of this?

How do I deal with these people? What does Trayton tell him and what does Pliny do? Well, Pliny says, I'm waiting for your advice, but in the meantime, what I've been doing is dividing them into three categories. So the people who admit after being interrogated three times with full warning that if they say they're Christian, they'll be punished. If they admit they go off a punishment, actually in the case of non-citizens, that's execution. Christianity is, Trajan confirms, is a crime in itself. The people who've denied that they were ever Christian are made by Pliny to revere the statues of the Roman gods and indeed the imperial statue too.

And they're dealt with very easily. And then there's this category of people he's not sure about which Trajan gives him advice on, what about these people who were Christian but say they aren't now? And Pliny's been interrogating them and finding out more about what their activities were as Christians. And he says to Trajan in his summing up that what he's discovered is that really Christianity is a sort of rather depraved eccentric sect. Trajan's reply is, Piny, you're doing the right thing. Here are some parameters.

we don't hunt down Christians. When people... Fear false allegations, he says, doesn't he? Well, he says that false... He's more worried about anonymous accusations. Accusations that are circulating anonymously, he says, are not in tune with our age, so we don't want to listen to them.

Is there anything to add to the Trajan Pliny correspondence, which is as interesting as the Christians? Well, I think that is... For many readers, that has been... the most fascinating of all of Pliny's letters in some ways because it is, you know, little did Pliny know, but Christianity was going to take over the empire. So there is the kind of irony to reading that exchange. And is it unique as a description of Christianity in the Roman Empire at that time? It's a very early description. I mean, we do have

references to Christians from somewhat later and fleeting reference actually in Tacitus to the treatment of Christians under the Emperor Nero, which of course was several decades. previously but then Nero is an eccentric, weird emperor rather than a sensible emperor like Trajan. Finally, we're getting towards there, my friend, Roy Gibson. What's the current thinking among scholars like yourself of the significance of these letters? In the last decade or so, we've moved from using history, sorry, Plinyas as a historical source. We've really been talking a lot today about Plinya as a source for history and he's very valuable. But in the last decade or so, there's going to move to looking at him

as a literary artist because there's nine books, nine books of letters, private letters, one book of imperial letters. And each of these books is arranged with the care of a book of poetry. So there's careful

a variety that will go on in each of the books. And there's symmetry at the beginnings and ends of books. He'll have similar word usages and so on or he'll have some similar subjects that talk to each other. So it's been moving in the direction of looking at him as a literary artist and taking him as seriously as any poet. Anything derived to that, Catherine?

Well, I think that's absolutely right. And it is the sort of sense that, you know, it's very interesting, these letters are not in chronological order, but they're very, they're very self-conscious, they're presenting us a very carefully crafted portrait of Pliny as an exemplary figure. Well, I think that's all we have time for. Thank you very much indeed. Catherine Edwards, Alice Kearig and Roy Gibson and next week we'll be talking about complexity theory

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