1I ask, my lord, that you guide me with your advice in my uncertainty whether I ought to guard the prisoners through the public slaves of the cities, as has been done up to now, or through soldiers. 1For I fear both that they are guarded too unreliably by the public slaves and that this duty may tie up no small number of soldiers. 2Meanwhile I have added a few soldiers to the public slaves. 2I see, however, that there is a danger that this very thing may be a cause of negligence for both, as these trust they can shift the common blame onto those, and those onto these.
Lectitō › Pliny the Younger › Letters, Book 10
Pliny · Epistulae X
Pliny, Letter 10.19
Soldiers or slaves as prison guards?
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Pliny, Epistulae X. Latin text: the Perseus digital text of Pliny's Letters, public domain; digital text from the Perseus Digital Library, CC BY-SA. Word analysis: drafted by our own tagger (trained on the hand-checked texts on this site), with every doubtful word checked by hand. English translation and section titles: written for this app, each checked against the Latin by a second reader.