Pliny the Younger (Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus)
Birthplace	Como
Occupation	Politician, author

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Pliny the Younger

(Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus; Gaius Plinius Caecilius Junior, or Minor). Born A.D. 61 or 62 in Novum Comum (now Como); died circa 114. Roman writer and statesman.

Pliny the Younger became a consul in 100 and served as imperial governor of the province of Bithynia and Pontus from 111 to 113. He adhered to the traditional views of the Roman senatorial aristocracy, who were opposed to the Julio-Claudian and Flavian dynasties but were reconciled to the imperial power under Nerva and Trajan. Of Pliny’s many works, only a collection of letters in ten books and an oration in praise of Trajan (Panegyric on Trajan) have been preserved. His legal orations and poetry have been lost. The letters, which contain valuable information on the culture, everyday life, and economic and political history of imperial Rome, include a gallery of portraits of Pliny’s contemporaries. One of the main sources for reconstructing the social aspects of upper-class life under the Roman Empire, Pliny’s letters are also considered models of the epistolary genre.

WORKS

C. Plini Caecili Secundi epistolarum libri novem…. Edited by M. Schuster.… Leipzig, 1952.
In Russian translation:
Pis’ma Pliniia Mladshego. Translated by M. E. Sergeenko [et al.]. Moscow-Leningrad, 1950.

REFERENCES

Sokolov, V. S. Plinii Mladshii. Moscow, 1956.
Guillemin, A. M. Pline et la vie littéraire de son temps. Paris, 1929.
Unità, G. Vita, valore letterario e carattere morale di Plinio il Giovane. Rome-Milan, 1933.

Mentioned in

References in periodicals archive

Tanzer, The Villas of Pliny the Younger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1924), 3.

THE CONTESTED INSPIRATION OF KENT'S LANDSCAPING INNOVATION: NATIVE INGENUITY, RENAISSANCE ITALY, ANCIENT ROME, OR CHINA

T14), which features excerpts j from letters written by Pliny the Younger about the eruption of Vesuvius.

POMPEII'S SECRETS: Scientists are discovering how people lived and died in the ancient Roman city that was buried for centuries under the ash of Mount Vesuvius

"I Lie Awake" begins with the words of Pliny the Younger as he writes to his young wife Calpurnia how much he misses her the first time they are apart in their early married life: "You will not believe what a longing I have for you." He lies awake at night thinking of her and during the day wanders into her chamber "at those hours I used to visit you." Not finding her there, he feels like a rejected lover, though he knows she will return.

Music reviews

In social terms, however, Pliny the Author is the authoritative agent of this apparatus and, in fact, includes this apparatus as part of his personage; Pliny the Younger's portrait reflects this social perspective.

Now you see them: slaves and other objects as elements of the Roman master

Respect for one's elders is now an alien concept, like dining chez Pliny the Younger.

What happened to class?

"Today, beers like the Abyss, Pliny the Younger, the Dark Lord and many others are blowing up taste profiles with their complexity and creativity," Paul Evers said.

Crux fermentation project underway in Bend

The texts of Tacitus judicial discourses have not been saved until nowadays, but according to Pliny the Younger's hints, his former colleague at Quintilianus school, we only suspect that they enjoyed great success since they were written with talent, in an elevated style, similar to his later historical works.

Tacitus on oratory and rhetorics

Josephus, the Jewish historian; Tacitus and Suetonius, both Roman writers, also refer to Christus while Pliny the younger refers to the Christians' habit of "meeting on a certain day to remember Christus".

Read up on the history of Jesus; letters@coventrytelegraph.net Letters letters@coventrytelegraph.net

Roman commoners loved their chariot races (although Pliny the Younger demurred, dubbing the races a "futile, tedious, monotonous business"), and they also loved their charioteers.

The learned word

Szpiro takes a roughly chronological approach to the topic, travelling from ancient Greece to the present and, in addition to offering explanations of the various mathematical conundrums of elections and voting, also offers biographical details on the mathematicians and other thinkers who thought about them, including Plato, Pliny the Younger, Pierre Simon Laplace, Thomas Jefferson, John von Neumann, and Kenneth Arrow.

Numbers rule; the vexing mathematics of democracy from Plato to the present

Concerning the many women who appear in the letters of Pliny the Younger (61 C.E.-112 C.E.).

Publications received

One notable absentee is Pliny the Younger, though it is his exchange of letters with Emperor Trajan in 112, when his governorship of Bithynia brought him into contact with the Christian "problem" (10.96-97), that provides us with our earliest direct evidence for official Roman concerns about the new religion.

The Power of Sacrifice: Roman and Christian Discourses in Conflict