Pliny the Younger

Pliny the Younger was a Roman senator, consul and governor of Bithynia under Trajan, nephew and heir of the elder Pliny who died at Vesuvius, and the friend of Tacitus and Suetonius. His Letters, published by himself in nine books with a tenth of his correspondence with the emperor, are the polished record of a cultivated official’s life: his villas, his freedmen, his readings, the eruption that killed his uncle, and the famous exchange with Trajan on what to do about the Christians, the earliest pagan account of them. They are the model of the literary letter and the best picture of the Roman upper class at its most decent.