People in Pliny

Abstract

Alluding to the scanty sources for the reign of Trajan, the historian Gibbon came out with a melancholy pronouncement: ‘the glimmerings of an abridgement or the doubtful light of a panegyric’. Gibbon's mind was on warfare and government. A later age is drawn to a wider and more subtle theme: the study of society. A document of unique value exists, the correspondence of Pliny. It illuminates class and rank and behaviour—and a whole region of Northern Italy. For other lands of the Roman West the evidence is poor and scattered. The written record has little more to disclose than the families of Seneca and Julius Agricola or the pedigree of the Antonine emperors. One has recourse to inscriptions and the study of nomenclature.Pliny reveals persons of all orders, from consular magnates to small men and local friends. He also covers a wide range in time, from several long-lived survivors who had come to manhood under Claudius and Nero to youths of predictable promise whose consulates would adorn the first years of Trajan's successor. Further, the interrelation with other types of evidence is highly instructive. The information is abundant enough to permit some negative inferences. It is worth giving a thought to categories and groups that are absent from the correspondence or sparsely on show. Other ‘circles’ may therefore be surmised in the life of the capital. The categories are both social and regional. Certain cities of the North happen to make no contribution.