Letters, Book 5

Book 5 of Pliny's letters belongs to about AD 105 to 106. It ranges from estate business and law cases to literature, and contains two of Pliny's best-known letters.

Pliny describes a delicate legacy settlement, thanks a friend for a gift of thrushes, and defends his habit of writing and reciting light verse by citing the great men who did the same. He mourns the historian Gaius Fannius, who died with his work on Nero's victims unfinished, and considers whether he himself should write history. The longest letter is a detailed description of his villa in Tuscany near Tifernum, its view over a natural amphitheatre of hills, its gardens, its fountains and its hippodrome. He urges his friend Suetonius to publish at last, reports the edict of the praetor Nepos on advocates' fees and the unsavoury affair of Nominatus, and describes defending Varenus against the Bithynians. The letter on the death of Fundanus' younger daughter before her thirteenth birthday, just before her wedding, is one of the most moving in the collection; her tombstone has survived in Rome. Pliny also sends a sick freedman abroad to recover and records a young noble's fine recitation.

The book shows Pliny's sympathy and his care with words at their best. The Tuscan villa letter is a key source for Roman houses and gardens, and the Latin is clear and polished.