Volume 42, Number 8 · May 11, 1995
Feast of Pliny
By Ingrid D. Rowland
The Villas of Pliny from Antiquity to Posterity
by Pierre de la Ruffinière du Prey
University of Chicago Press, 377 pp., $65.00
Among all the ancient Romans who ever lived, an earnest public servant named Caius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, or Pliny the Younger (c. AD 61–113), is one of the few who have offered posterity a glimpse of their personal lives. He has done so in a series of letters, most of them composed between 96 and 113 AD, and addressed to the people who made up his corner of the Roman Empire: his wife, his in-laws, his mentors, his protégés, his friends, and the emperor Trajan, with whom he enjoyed the peculiar kind of friendship an ordinary mortal might have with a person whose titles include 'Lord God.'
Review, 4836 words
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