Bithynia and Pontus, and during his tenure of office there must be dated the correspondence between Trajan and Pliny which has come down to us as the tenth Book of the "Letters of Pliny."
This Pliny has been described as the kindliest of Roman gentlemen, but he was far more than that. He was a noble example of the trained and cultured patrician, an ardent and industrious worker, an honest and honourable statesman of no mean ability,—very learned, ambitious only of political distinction when he felt that high rank and authority gave him ampler scope to serve his country and his fellows. He was, we learn from his own writings, by no means a solitary specimen of the chivalrous and noble men who did so much to build up the great Empire, and to render possible that far-reaching "Pax Romana" which for so many years gave prosperity and a fair amount of happiness to the world known under the immemorial name of Rome.
What we know of Pliny and his friends goes far to modify the painful impressions of Roman society of the first two centuries which we gather from the pages of Juvenal and other writers, who have painted their pictures of Roman life in the first and second centuries of the Christian era in such lurid and gloomy colours.
It is in the "Letters of Pliny" that the real story of his life and work has come down to us. These letters are no ordinary or chance collection. They are a finished work of great deliberation and thought.
About a century and a half earlier, the large collection of Cicero's correspondence was given to an admiring and regretful world. A renowned statesman, a matchless orator, and even greater, the creator of the Latin language, which became a universal language—the Letters of Cicero set, as it were, a new fashion in literature. They were really the first in this special form of writing which at once became popular.
The younger Pliny was a pupil of Quintilian, who was for a long period—certainly for twenty years—the most celebrated teacher in the capital. Quintilian is known as the earliest of the Ciceronians. The cult of Ciceronianism established by
