As an adult in the Senate, Pliny was more in his element. Like Cicero, he spoke out against corrupt provincial governors, but his audience was more patient than in the old days. Since Augustus, cases of extortion would be heard in the Senate and advocates might speak on one case for five hours or more. Pliny took part in several long cases, including twisted ones brought by Bithynians, and this was one reason why Trajan later sent him to sort out this province. Yet a senator's horizons had changed so much since Cicero, as Pliny, his admirer, exemplifies. There was none of Cicero's free political struggle, played out before senators and the people. Young senators still became tribunes of the people, but the emperors held the enhanced tribunician power. A main concern for holders of the job was simply whether to continue practising as a barrister while holding it, the modern Member of Parliament's dilemma. As for elections, the thrilling manipulations of Cicero's times had vanished. Elections to high office were largely prearranged before being put before the Senate. Pliny, the new member, was particularly distressed by the other members' habit of writing obscenities on the ballot papers which were distributed for their assent.' It was one of their few liberties in the matter. The prearranged choices were then read out to the people in the Campus Martius.
At best, senators could publicize the values by which an emperor would be publicly assessed. In this light, Pliny's Panegyric on Trajan is not just tedious flattery. It sets up 'modesty' and 'moderation' as values for Trajan, the 'most excellent'; it even dwells on 'liberty'.
Significantly, it is not the 'liberty' of Cicero's early years. Pliny acclaims Trajan for being a consul 'as if he was only a consul' and for showing care for equity and the law.4 But as Trajan himself is the 'maker of consuls', it is equitable that he should stand out above them and 'teach' them. This 'liberty' depends on another's grace and whim, exactly what Cicero had detested about Julius Caesar. As Pliny's own letters observe, everything now is 'under the decision of one man': he has undertaken the 'cares and labours of all' on behalf of 'the common good'. A few things flow down to us from that 'most benevolent fountain' but they come in a 'salubrious blend'.1 Or so a senator could simply hope. In this age of monarchy senators were expected to acclaim their First Citizen in fine phrases, like the backing to a singer. 'Trust us, trust yourself,' they chanted, or 'Oh, how fortunate we are . . .' In reply, said Pliny, Trajan shed tears.'' Under Augustus, eulogies of members of the imperial family had been circulated 'for posterity' through the provinces, where we still rediscover them. Under Trajan, for the first time, acclamations of the Senate were inscribed and circulated likewise for posterity's benefit. Perhaps they will turn up too, for our moral good.
In a slave-society, where senators owned thousands of disposable human beings, this loss of liberty may seem rather marginal. It was also a loss for males only, the only political sex. But it affected what the articulate male class wrote and what they spoke: the political distance since Cicero (let alone Pericles) affects the culture which Romans left behind for posterity, the turgid epic poems (though some now over-estimate them) and the verbose, evasive rhetoric. Despite the cult, among some Romans, of a 'Stoic' inner freedom from passion and emotion, an educated Roman could no longer truly be his 'own man'. Romans had liberties, but they did not have liberty constrained only by their free consent. This change affected their feelings and self-respect, and it put them in moral predicaments which we still recognize, not least in our modern 'People's Republics' and our memories of the 'Iron Curtain' years. Since 96 both Nerva and Trajan, Pliny said, had brought back 'freedom'. But it was a relative concept: the point was that under Domitian the despotism had been so much worse.
Here, Pliny's published letters parade a particularly interesting alternative. They stress a particular set of friendships which he cultivated with the families of a philosophically minded coterie in Rome. They were direct descendants of the 'Stoic' opposition to Nero and the brave Helvidius who had spoken out under Vespasian. 'Thunderbolts', Pliny tells us, had been falling all around him during the time of Domitian's worst tyranny, but he himself had risked protecting a philosopher in the city. However, Pliny was a praetor-magistrate under Domitian, and his year of office was almost certainly 93. At that time members of this philosophical group had been arrested and executed and their biographies of former brave martyrs under Nero were ordered to be burned. As praetor, Pliny may well have helped to carry out the burning. Assiduously, he presents himself later as a friend of the families, but he discreetly fails to emphasize that after his praetorship he went on to another distinguished office during Domitian's reign.
Of all our surviving Latin authors, it is the poet Ovid who lived longest under Augustus, but eighty years later it is Pliny, not Ovid, who best conforms to Augustus' 'vision' of Roman society. Like Augustus himself, Pliny was profoundly unmilitary: he makes no mention of the military prowess of some of his correspondents. His crowning honour, he tells us, was a Roman priesthood, the proud job of augur which Cicero, too, had held. His one Augustan failing was his total lack of children, but not for want of trying: he was married three times, with wives who miscarried. Like Cicero, Pliny went out for a while to govern a second-rank province, Bithynia, but here too his role was shaped by Augustus' legacy. While abroad, freedom and justice were directly his business, but both were exercised in a changed imperial context.
Pliny had already had experience of the Bithynians as an advocate at Rome; even among Romans of the new generation his Greek was exceptionally good (he had written a Greek play when aged fourteen); Trajan was wise to choose him for a Greek-speaking province which had recently emerged as chaotic. Like Cicero, Pliny travelled round the cities of his province on a yearly assize-tour, but unlike Cicero he had been chosen by an emperor. Like all other governors in this period, he arrived with written instructions from the emperor, but unusually for his province he was to be its first imperial legate, the
'emperor's man', sent to sort it out. In you, Trajan reminds Pliny, the provincials can see my own care for them.7 No such higher authority had existed for Cicero and his friends. Like Cicero, Pliny was aware of the glorious free past of the great cities of Greece, but his letters show the tightened checks which now intruded on the locals' civic freedom. He is required to inspect the cities' financial accounts; he has been ordered to ban clubs and societies in the cities for fear that they will promote popular trouble. It is Pliny, then, who bans local fire brigades, putting social peace before safety. Trajan's answers are often respectful of local practice, more so than Pliny himself, but only within these strict constraints. They are much tighter constraints than those applied by Cicero, let alone by kings or governors in the previous history of Greek Asia. The years from 96 to 138 blend into the age which Edward Gibbon declared to be the happiest in human history. But as in Rome, so in civic life in the Greek-speaking world, there had been a real loss of liberty. It is enshrined for us, a moral lesson, in the gap between Pliny's letters and their models, Cicero's marvellous correspondence, which had immortalized the turning point of an age of true liberty for his class.
In return, Pliny's Greek-speaking subjects presented him with all manner of local bad practice, including slaves in the Roman army, a total illegality. There were also those hardy perennials, a devious philosopher who was claiming tax privileges or some poorly run building projects and the embezzlement of funds by local city councillors: Cicero, too, had confronted all manner of local financial fraud. But again and again Pliny writes for Trajan's advice on the smallest matters or to make the slightest proposals. Cicero had had no emperor to consider: governors in his lifetime were more concerned to restore their personal finances at the provincials' expense. One reason why Pliny wrote so often, and sometimes so irritatingly, was surely to cover his own tracks. Like his predecessors, he might be prosecuted by the provincials on leaving office, under the procedures Augustus had formalized.
53
A Pagan and Christians
Meanwhile, this is the method I have fo
llowed with those who were denounced to me as Christians. I interrogated them
whether they were Christians. If they confessed that they were, I interrogated them a second and third time, threatening them
with capital punishment. Those who persevered I ordered to be taken away. For I did not doubt, whatever it was that they
were confessing, that their contumacy and inflexible obstinacy ought to be punished. Pliny to Trajan, Letters 10.96
During a tour of his province Pliny was confronted with people who were most unusually obstinate: they refused to worship the gods. They were brought to him for punishment; he gave them every chance by questioning them three times; if they persisted in their 'madness', he ordered them to be taken away and executed. A few of them had the Roman citizenship which protected them against physical punishment by a governor abroad. Correctly, Pliny sent the citizens off to Rome for trial, illustrating the value of the privilege.1
Their 'madness' was Christianity. When yet more Christians were denounced to Pliny (he appeared to be receptive), some of them denied the charge. So Pliny devised a test. Would they call on the gods? Would they pray to an image of Trajan and offer incense and wine? Would they curse Christ? Some of them then stated that they had once been Christians but had given the practice up. They passed Pliny's test, but were these ex-Christians guilty of crimes committed in their Christian past? On their own account of their 'madness', they had behaved while Christians in a moral, if misguided, way. In order to be sure, Pliny tortured two female Christian 'ministers', who were evidently deaconesses, not women priests. He found only a 'wicked and immoderate superstition', not the lurid tales of group-sex and cannibalism which others ascribed to the sect.
Pliny's encounter is extremely important because it left him uncertain and in need of advice from the emperor. Trajan's answer then set guidelines which were observed not only by Hadrian, but by subsequent emperors until the mid-third century. The Christians were not an unknown problem to important Romans. After Paul's trial Christians had continued to be sentenced in Rome, even in the dark year 93 when Pliny had been a judicial magistrate, or praetor.2 He had not been present personally at such trials, but nonetheless he knew what to do with a stubborn Christian believer. There were well-known precedents by now and such people were 'godless'. As a result they might provoke the anger of the gods; they were not being asked to do much, only to offer the gods a pinch of incense, but if they refused they should be killed. The really awkward problems were the ex-Christians. After his enquiries, Pliny was strongly inclined to let them off, and so he wrote to Trajan, encouraging him to agree. Trajan replied that existing Christians were not to be 'hunted'; anonymous denunciations must not be received; lapsed Christians, the nub of Pliny's problems, must indeed be left alone. This answer limited the dangers for the Church. In the words of a modern atheist historian, the Romans' prosecution of the Christians was to be a matter of 'too little and too late'.
The legal grounds of Pliny's actions have been endlessly debated, but there was also a wider conflict of values. If the poor suffering deaconesses had read Pliny's nine books of published letters, what would they have made of the values which these presented so artfully? They would have disliked Pliny's indecent verses, especially those on his 'Tiro' and male loves: their Apostle Paul had implied that such sexual acts were a cause of earthquakes. They would also have disliked his respect for suicide. Like other Roman contemporaries, Pliny admired suicide if it was a reasoned end to a life which had become impaired by extreme sickness or old age.' To Christians, suicide was a sin against God's gift of life: suicides would long be denied Christian burial.
Unlike most Christian members, Pliny was extremely rich, a Roman senator who had inherited or married into at least six properties in Italy. Nonetheless, he wrote very often of his gifts and help to others. He bestowed civic and cultural gifts on his home town, Comum: he gave it a set of baths and their decoration (but not their maintenance), a temple and a third of the cost of a schoolteacher for Comum's children. This teacher was Comum's first ever after the primary stage (the parents, even then, were to contribute the other two-thirds of the cost, but they could at least select the teacher themselves). Pliny also gave favours to friends, even to his old nanny, and he set aside a capital sum whose revenue would support no fewer than 175 children at Comum (they were poor children, but they would be citizen-soldiers and mothers for the future). Despite three marriages, Pliny had no children himself to be his heirs.
Pliny's gifts were part of a widespread donor culture among the rich on which civic life depended throughout the Empire. In Pliny's case, the gifts were not self-interested bids for power. He was locally very prominent already. Rather, he gave for the ideals of culture and civic life which he himself upheld. His letters then publicized his gifts. The deaconesses, by contrast, would have told him to give indiscriminately to the poor, because the poor were blessed by God. Gifts (they believed) were not just for deserving friends or local townsmen. Gifts could earn their donor spiritual treasure in heaven, an idea which Pliny never entertained. Gifts should also be made discreetly, not trumpeted abroad in letters and honorary inscriptions.
Pliny also had hundreds and hundreds of slaves, at least five hundred (to judge from his will) and no doubt many more. Here, the deaconesses would be less bothered: Paul had told slaves to 'serve the more' and Christian slave-owning had continued. It was rather fine when Pliny described how he did not interfere in the capacity of his ex-slaves to make wills and bequests: few Roman masters were so restrained, preferring to take 'legacies' back for themselves. Pliny was quite unlike the bad slave-owners in his class, men like the frightful Macedo, whose slaves (Pliny described) had murdered him by his bathing pool. Pliny stood for a kinder style, but with a sharp eye, too, on the masters' safety and the interests which kindness served. The changes in Roman laws for sick or old slaves since Claudius' reign had had similar prudential concerns: they arose from the underlying fear of a slave-war and their concern was to assure the slave-masters' survival and 'interests'.
There was also something fine about Pliny's family values. It was good to read him telling others to criticize their own faults first (taking out the 'beam' in their own eye, just as Jesus had preached): it was particularly good to read him saying the same to an all-powerful Roman father about his erring son. Paul, too, had told fathers not to be harsh to their children 'in case they should despair'. Pliny's praises of his wife were most intriguing. Calpurnia was his third wife (two having died) and was very much younger than himself. The deaconesses would like to read how Pliny claimed to have formed her manners and literary tastes: Christian wives, Paul had said, must submit to their husbands. But it was boastful of him to publicize what loyalty Calpurnia was showing.4 She read Pliny's works repeatedly (Pliny tells us) and even learned them by heart. When he spoke in court she would send messengers to and fro to hear how his speech was being received. She would wait anxiously behind a curtain while Pliny recited his own works in public; she 'drinks in greedily the praises of myself. Calpurnia even set his awful verses to music and sang them to the lyre. The coarse songs to boys were not, one assumes, in Calpurnia's songbook.
To Christians, this mousy submissiveness was also a virtue. The problem, simply, was Pliny, its self-centred end. What Calpurnia stood for were the virtues of 'little Italy': shrewdness, frugality and, as Pliny writes to tell her aunt, 'she loves me'.1 Pliny has therefore been upheld as the first person in European literature to 'blend together the role of husband and lover'. Cicero in fact precedes him (in his early years of marriage only), but in both men the strongest love is love of himself. Yet Calpurnia existed in a social setting which Christians accepted too. Women of her class (like many rich Christian women) would often be married by the age of sixteen; they could not prosecute a case in their own right in court; paternalist laws protected them from lending money to just any person who appealed to them. A similar paternalism remained strong in the laws of the later Christian Em
pire.
In Christian society, a girl might opt out as a virgin, or be vowed to virginity by her parents. In Pliny's world, there were no lifelong virgins. There was, however, no alternative route to female 'freedom'. Since the 'licence' of the Julio-Claudian years the women of Rome's Stoic philosophic cliques were now the most likely to join in an intelligent discussion or to show resolve in a public crisis. Elsewhere, Pliny could not credit that a woman might have literary skills. When one Roman lady wrote witty letters in old-fashioned Latin, Pliny assumed that her husband must have written them himself or taught his wife how to do it. In Christian churches, too, women were certainly not expected to teach or publish or even to send and receive letters (which might be billets-doux).
In upper-class circles, nonetheless, Christianity soon found female converts: heresy was even thought to be particularly attractive to females. Pliny's social world could have helped the deaconesses to see why. In a rich household, there was almost nothing for the lady to do all day. Slaves looked after her husband; in the evenings he had male guests and listened to music or yet more recitations, but not to anything so limited as conversation a deux over dinner. Pliny likes to describe the exemplary retirement routines of unusually active old men. These 'keep-fit' gentlemen read and exercise but even when they go for a drive they rarely take their wife with them. The female of a grand household might end up passing her day by playing board-games.6 In an intended comment on the changes in 'luxury' between the generations, Pliny describes how one distinguished grandmother amused herself by keeping a troupe of pantomime-dancers in her household. She always sent her upright young grandson away, of course, before he could watch the troupe performing. Her raffish tastes, Pliny says, were not those of 'our age'. Although she maintained them when in her late seventies, she had taken them up long before, in days when Nero was still young.7 After Pliny, in the absence of such fun, one alternative for such a bored person would be the Church.
The Classical World Page 64