Quintilian, Pliny's tutor, was the real origin of the wonderful Pliny Letters.
Pliny was one of the ablest scholars of his age. He, like many of his countrymen, was ambitious of posthumous fame—he would not be forgotten. He was proud of his position—of his forensic oratory—of his statesmanship—of his various literary efforts; but he was too far-seeing to dream of any of his efforts in forensic oratory, or in the service of the State, or even in his various literary adventures which amused his leisure hours, winning him that posthumous fame which in common with so many other earnest pagan Romans he longed for.[1]
Pliny was an ardent admirer of Cicero; but Cicero the statesman and the orator, he felt, moved on too high a plane for him to aim at emulating; but as a writer of Latin, as a chronicler of his own day and time, as a word-painter of the society in which he moved, he might possibly reach as high a pitch of excellence as Cicero had reached in his day.
To accomplish this end became the great object of Pliny's life. To this we owe the inimitable series of Letters by which the friend and minister of Trajan has lived, and will live on.
In some respects the Letters of Pliny are even more valuable than the voluminous and many-coloured correspondence of Cicero. Cicero lived in a momentous age. He was one of the chief actors in a great revolution which materially altered the course of the world's history. Pliny lived in a comparatively "still" period, when one of the greatest of the Roman sovereigns was at the helm of public affairs; so in his picture
- ↑ There is a striking passage, based on Pliny's reflexions, in Professor Dill's Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, on this longing to be remembered after death, so common to the Roman (pagan) mind. "The secret of immortality, the one chance of escaping oblivion, is to have your thought embalmed in choice and distinguished literary form, which coming ages will not willingly let die (Plin. Ep. ii. 10. 4, iii. 7. 14). . . . This longing to be remembered was the most ardent passion of the Roman mind in all ages and in all ranks . . . of that immense literary ambition which Pliny represented, and which he considered it his duty to foster, only a small part has reached its goal. . . . The great mass of these eager littérateurs have altogether vanished, or remain to us as mere shadowy names in Martial, or Statius, or Pliny." Book ii. chap. i.
