Letters, Book 1

Pliny the Younger (Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, about AD 61 to 112), nephew and adopted son of the Elder Pliny, was a senator, lawyer and consul under Trajan. He published nine books of personal letters, carefully selected and polished, in the first decade of the second century. Book 1 opens the collection, and its first letter, to Septicius Clarus, explains that the letters have been gathered at his friend's urging.

The book sets out Pliny's world. He worries about publishing his speeches and sends them to friends for correction; he answers an approach from his old enemy the informer Regulus; he tells Tacitus how he went boar-hunting with writing tablets and a notebook and found that the woods inspire thought. He contrasts the empty round of social duties in Rome with writing at his Laurentine villa, praises the philosopher Euphrates, and complains of poetry audiences who arrive late and leave early. He describes the deliberate death of the ailing Corellius Rufus, finds a husband for a friend's niece, scolds a guest who missed dinner, defends long speeches to Tacitus, and helps the young Suetonius buy a small country estate.

Each letter treats a single subject and is a small work of art. The Latin is elegant, clear and not difficult, which has made Pliny a standard school and university author and a valuable source for upper-class life in Trajan's Rome.