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Updated: June 7, 2025
It is truly lamentable to reflect that while the rational and on the whole truthful descriptions of Aristotle and Theophrastus were extant and accessible, Pliny's nonsense should in preference have gained the ear of mankind. As a stylist Pliny recalls two very different writers, Seneca and Cato.
Some rich men in Rome had the mania for antiques Corinthian bronzes were the rage in Pliny's day as badly as those who haunt our modern sale-rooms. Pliny's hobby, if he had been living in our time, would probably have been books. He is one of the most bookish men of antiquity. Wherever he went his books went with him; in his carriage, in his gardens they never left his side.
In his section on example as a rhetorical argument he shows how stories and fables may enliven and enforce a point. He illustrates by Pliny's story of the grateful dragon, and by Appian's story of the grateful lion, how a speaker may enlarge on the duty of gratitude among men.
Hastings had been sore opposed to the new arrangements, both as regarded business and boarding, from the very first, and, though he could not conquer Pliny's determination, had managed to make it very uncomfortable for him; had chosen also to lay the principal blame of the entire arrangement where, indeed, it belonged on Theodore, and glowered on him accordingly.
After a winter and spring of varied activities the friends gathered at Pliny's villa had eagerly looked forward to a brief peace. Pliny's law business had been unusually exacting. He had worked early and late, and made a series of crucial speeches, and when spring came on he had allowed neither work nor social demands to interfere with his attendance at the almost numberless literary readings.
As we have said, Pliny was an eclectic, and an eclectic is the last person to understand the frame of mind which glories in martyrdom. Such was Pliny's attitude towards the purely religious side of the question, but that, after all, was not the main issue.
For, from Pliny's doubt how he was to act, his silence concerning any subsisting law on the subject, his requesting the emperor's rescript, and the emperor, agreeably to his request, propounding a rule for his direction without reference to any prior rule, it may be inferred that there was, at that time, no public edict in force against the Christians.
Tacitus again that supreme master of irony must have occasionally curled his thin lip on reading some of the epistles which were addressed to him by his friend Pliny. It is a tribute to Pliny's powers of literary discernment that he appreciated the marvellous ability of Tacitus, though had he failed to do so, we should have rated him for his blindness.
But he left his poems with Maltravers, and getting on shore by the remains of Pliny's villa, was soon out of sight. Maltravers that evening read the poems with attention. His first opinion was confirmed. The young man wrote without knowledge. He had never felt the passions he painted, never been in the situations he described.
Nothing so detestable ever came from the Minerva Press. I have read Theocritus again, and like him better than ever. As to Latin, I made a heroic attempt on Pliny's Natural History; but I stuck after getting through about a quarter of it. I have read Ammianus Marcellinus, the worst written book in ancient Latin.
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