Letters, Book 2

Book 2 of Pliny's letters, published in the early second century AD, covers the years around AD 100. It mixes public business in the senate and law courts with letters on friendship, literature and country life.

It opens with the public funeral of Verginius Rufus, the general who had twice refused the empire and who had been Pliny's guardian, at which Tacitus gave the eulogy. Pliny describes the orator Isaeus, helps a young woman with a debt-laden inheritance and attacks a host who served his guests wine graded by their rank. The longest letter reports the trial in the senate, before Trajan, of Marius Priscus, former governor of Africa, whom Pliny and Tacitus prosecuted for extortion and cruelty. Other letters describe the decline of the centumviral court, where hired applauders now cheer the speakers, and recommend friends for office. The most famous is a room-by-room description of Pliny's villa at Laurentum on the coast near Ostia, with its colonnades, heated baths and private suite. The book closes with three stories of the legacy-hunter Regulus.

The Priscus trial and the villa letter are important evidence for Roman government and architecture. Pliny's Latin is polished and readable, with pointed phrasing and occasional Greek, and these letters show his range from public record to private sketch.