A Roman Gentleman: Pliny the Younger

One of our best sources for family life among the Italian elite in the early empire is the correspondence of Pliny the Younger, a wealthy, cultured upper-class Roman from the north Italian town of Comum (modern Como), who lived from about 61 to about 112 CE. Pliny began a legal career at the age of 18, and embarked upon the senatorial career track (cursus honorum), eventually attaining the position of suffect consul late in the year 100. He served under both the hated emperor Domitian and his successor, the beloved Trajan.

Pliny wrote many letters to friends, family, and political acquaintances, and had nine books of his private correspondence (comprising 247 letters) published during his lifetime. This means that the letters were not only chosen with a view to the impression they would make on readers, but were also subject to revision - or even rewriting - after they were first sent (Hoffer 1999: 9-10). The letters, then, are not exclusively private documents, but are intended to project a persona of Pliny as a cultivated, humane gentleman with all the proper feelings. Nevertheless, they provide valuable evidence for the life and ideals of elite Romans of the early empire - their interest in marriage as a union of compatible people who would promote family interests and pass down the family name and wealth, their feelings towards wives and children, and their role models (Bradley 1993: 247-50; A. E. Hanson 1999a).

Here we will look at Pliny’s own family experiences, which were not unrepresentative of his class and time. He was born Publius Caecilius Secundus, the son of a local magistrate of Comum. His father died when Pliny was still a child, so he had a tutor impuberum, a guardian appointed for males under 14 and females under 12 who had no living paterfamilias (male head of household, a father or paternal grandfather). It was not at all unusual for a Roman to lose his (or her) father before puberty, and consequently tutores played an important role in Roman society (Saller 1994: 181-203). A tutor was not a parent-substitute as guardians are today; he did not live with his ward (pupillus/pupilla) but rather was a watchdog of the ward’s financial and legal interests. Pliny was brought up by his mother, of whom he speaks fondly in the letters. On the other hand, he says nothing whatever about his father; perhaps there is a note of wistfulness in a letter to a certain young man, Genialis, who had been reading Pliny’s speeches with his father:

Lucky you, who happened to have both the best and most closely related role model {exemplar)! Indeed the man you have as most suitable to be imitated is the one whom nature wished you most to resemble. (Ep. 8.13)

Not that Pliny himself lacked for role models: his tutor was the war hero Verginius Rufus, who had twice turned down the chance to be emperor during the civil wars of 68-9. Verginius continued to serve as political mentor to Pliny long after he reached adulthood (Ep. 2.1; 6.10; 9.19). Perhaps more influential, however, was Pliny’s maternal uncle, Gaius Plinius Secundus (Pliny the Elder), the famous scholar and commander of the imperial fleet at Misenum on the Bay of Naples, who died in 79 ce while rescuing those in the path of the erupting Mt. Vesuvius. In his will, the elder Pliny made his nephew heir on condition that he take his name; Publius Caecilius Secundus then became Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus. This practice, though known today as ‘‘testamentary adoption,’’ was not adoption in the Roman legal sense, though it had a similar purpose: to secure an heir to whom the testator’s family name (nomen) and property could be passed on (Corbier 1991a; Gardner 1998: 128-30). The elder Pliny can be considered a sort of‘‘father-substitute’’ for his nephew; he was living with his sister and her son at the time of his death, and Pliny speaks of him with admiration (Ep. 3.5; 5.8; 6.16).

Pliny’s mother may have died not long after her brother; there are no letters to her, and Pliny mentions among his possessions praedia materna, property inherited from his mother (Ep. 2.15). Like most Roman aristocrats, Pliny had substantial holdings in different parts of Italy, with at least six villas in all, including several at Comum as well as in Umbria, a house on the Esquiline in Rome and a villa outside Rome near Ostia (Duncan-Jones 1982: 22-4).

Pliny married at least twice; some scholars posit three wives, though the letters mention only two (Hoffer 1999: 232-3). Only the last one, Calpurnia, receives letters; Pliny married her sometime after his previous wife’s death in 97 ce. Even after his remarriage, he remained on excellent terms with his former mother-in-law, Pompeia Celerina, who was very rich and encouraged Pliny to treat her house and wealth as his own (Ep. 3.19). Indeed, he joked that her slaves gave him better service than his did (Ep. 1.4).

Like Pliny, Calpurnia was from Comum. Both her parents were dead, so she was raised by her paternal grandfather (who, as the oldest male ascendant, was her paterfamilias) and her father’s sister, Calpurnia Hispulla. The families evidently had known each other a long time; Pliny says that Hispulla, whom he calls a ‘‘model of family devotion’’ (pietatis exemplum) had revered his own mother as a daughter would. Moreover, Hispulla apparently took an active role in arranging the marriage; as Pliny says, ‘‘we vie with each other in thanking you: I because you gave her to me, she because you gave me to her, as if you chose us for each other’’ (Ep. 4.20). Pliny’s relationship with his grandfather-in-law was less relaxed than with Hispulla; Calpur-nius seems to have been a rather irascible old man, and the letters to him have a nervous and apologetic tone.

Generally, women married for the first time around 20 and men around 30 (Saller 1994: 25-41; Treggiari 1991a: 398-403). Among the senatorial elite, both sexes tended to marry about five years earlier; we might recall that the Augustan marriage laws expected men to be married by 25 and women by 20. Thus a husband in a Roman marriage was usually about ten years older than his wife. In Pliny’s case, the discrepancy was much greater, since he had been married before: he was around 40, whereas Calpurnia was about 15. This huge difference in age must have affected the dynamic of their marriage significantly. Indeed, Pliny’s letters to and about Calpurnia evince a mixture of romantic love and avuncular solicitude.

We have three letters written by Pliny to Calpurnia when he was in Rome on business (as a public figure and practicing lawyer, he had to spend a lot of time in the city) and she was in Campania, recovering her health. They are noteworthy for their avowals of romantic passion, previously found in Latin literature only in elegiac poetry for real or imagined mistresses. It has been said that these letters ‘‘blend together, for the first time in European literature, the role of husband and lover’’ (Sherwin-White 1966: 407).

Never have I complained more about my preoccupation with affairs, which did not allow me to escort you to Campania for health reasons or to follow your footsteps. . . . Indeed,

I would long for you with concern even if you were strong, for to hear nothing for a while about a person one most ardently loves brings distress and anxiety. ...I fear everything, I imagine everything, and as is the nature of those who fear, I most conjure up what I most dread. All the more intemperately do I beg you to give thought to my fears with one or even two letters every day. For I will be more secure while I am reading, and as soon as I have read, I will start to fear again. Farewell. (Ep. 6.4)

This highly stylized plea had its desired effect, for soon after Pliny responds to Calpurnia’s letter (which, unfortunately, we do not have):

You write that you are strongly affected by my absence and that you have this one comfort, that you can hold my little books instead of me and often even place them in my stead. It is pleasing that you miss us [sic; Pliny uses the authorial ‘‘we’’], pleasing that you find relief in these remedies; I in turn read your letters repeatedly and take them again and again into my hands as if they were new. But all the more am I inflamed with longing for you: for if someone’s letters are so pleasant, how much sweeter are her conversations! But write as often as possible, although this causes torture as well as delight. Farewell. (Ep. 6.7)

Pliny even plays the exclusus amator, the lover shut out by his mistress, who moons around outside her door:

It is incredible how much I long for you. Love first of all is the reason, and then also the fact that we are not accustomed to be apart. Thus I keep awake a large part of the night imagining you; thus it is that in the daytime, during those times when I used to call upon you, my feet themselves lead me (as it is most aptly put) to your chamber, and finally I depart, sick and saddened, like one shut out upon an empty threshold. ... (Ep. 7.6)

It is difficult to get a sense of the young woman to whom these letters were addressed. Apparently Calpurnia was intellectually inclined: in addition to holding Pliny’s books when she couldn’t hold him, she also (according to Pliny’s letter to Hispulla, cited above) sang poems he had written and set them to music, took an anxious interest in the outcome of his law cases, and even hid discreetly behind a curtain when he gave public recitals (Ep. 4.19). She was not the robust type; it is hard to imagine her running the sort of risks Turia had in shielding her husband from his enemies. But both Calpurnia and Turia faced the same difficulty: inability to bear children. We learn of this from a remarkable pair of letters, the first to Calpurnia’s grandfather, Calpurnius Fabatus, the second to her aunt Hispulla:

[to Fabatus] The more eager you are to see great-grandchildren from us, the sadder you will be to hear that your granddaughter has had a miscarriage. Since, in her girlish way, she did not know she was pregnant, she disregarded certain things that pregnant women ought to be careful about and did things she ought to have disregarded. She has paid for this error with a great lesson, as she was led to the brink of death. Thus, though you have to accept reluctantly that your old age has been deprived of, so to speak, a posterity already underway, you ought also to thank the gods that while they denied you greatgrandchildren for the time being, they preserved your granddaughter... For you do not wish for great-grandchildren more ardently than I wish for children... May they only be born and change this sorrow of ours to joy. Farewell. (Ep. 8.10)

[to Hispulla] Since I consider that your feeling toward your brother’s daughter is even more tender than a mother’s indulgence, I know I should announce to you first the final outcome, so that gladness, coming first, will not leave room for uneasiness.... Now she is joyful, now, already restored to herself and to me, she begins to revive and to ascertain the crisis through which she passed. All the same, she was in the greatest danger (it can now be safely said). It was not her fault, but to a certain extent the fault of her youth. Thus her miscarriage and the sad proof of a pregnancy she did not know about. So although your longing for the brother you lost was not granted comfort by a nephew or niece, remember that this has been deferred rather than denied, since she is safe and it

Can still be hoped for. At the same time, explain to your father this misfortune, which is more readily excused by women. Farewell. (Ep. 8.11)

Pliny published these two accounts of his wife’s miscarriage in a book of letters mostly concerned with elite gossip and literary matters. As with the funeral oration by Turia’s husband, subsequently carved in stone, the modern reader is taken aback by the willingness of a Roman husband to make public his wife’s (and his) fertility problems. The explanation must lie in the pressures placed upon men and women of the Roman elite to reproduce themselves, both in the service of the state and for the perpetuation of family lines and properties. In Pliny’s case, the pressure seems to have come primarily from his grandfather-in-law. A very old man whose own son was dead and whose daughter was childless, Calpurnius was anxious to see an heir from his granddaughter before he died. As it happened, Pliny did not need to worry about the inheritance penalties that childlessness brought under the Augustan law, for Trajan had granted him the ius liberorum, the ‘‘right of children’’ which gave the recipient the same rights as a person with three children (Evans Grubbs 2002: 37-9). In thanking the emperor for the grant, Pliny declared that with Trajan on the throne, ‘‘all the more do I desire children, whom I wished to have even in that very sad time [the reign of Domitian], as you can well believe from my two marriages’’ (Ep. 10.2).

Pliny was right to emphasize Calpurnia’s narrow escape from death. Elsewhere, he refers to the tragic deaths of two daughters of Helvidius Priscus, who both died giving birth to girls, ‘‘it seems so sad to me that well-born girls in the flower of their youth were destroyed by their fertility’’ (Ep. 4.21). Ironically, Augustus’ legislation, which required that women be married by age 20, may have increased the risk of miscarriage and death in childbirth from teen pregnancies. It is often assumed that the Roman elite practiced some sort of family limitation, perhaps through abortion (though this was dangerous for the mother) or contraception (though this was often unreliable) (Dixon 1992: 119-22; Frier 1999: 94-100; Hoffer 1999: 228-33). There were reasons for even the wealthier classes to want to limit the number of children, in particular, to avoid fragmentation of family properties; the Romans did not have primogeniture, and all legitimate children, male and female, would inherit from their father. Pliny himself, when explaining why he established an alimentary scheme at Comum to support local children (on the model of Trajan’s alimenta, meant to encourage Italian families to have children; see B. Rawson 2001), refers to the‘‘tedium and hard work of rearing’’ (Ep. 1.8). But his letters also provide plenty of evidence for the Romans’ desire for offspring and their sorrow at the loss of children, particularly those who had passed early childhood and were approaching adulthood (Ep. 2.7; 4.2 and 7; 5.16).

Pliny and Calpurnia do not appear to have ever had children. In about 110 ce, Pliny was appointed by Trajan to go out to the province of Bithynia and Pontus (northern Turkey) as governor, where among the problems he encountered were recalcitrant members of a new religious cult, Christianity (Ep. 10.95-6, with Sherwin-White 1966: 772-87). Calpurnia went with him; the last letter we have of Pliny, sent from Bithynia, informs Trajan that he has allowed Calpurnia to use the imperial post to return to Italy upon her grandfather’s death in order to be with her aunt [Ep. 10.120]. Pliny himself probably died around 112 while still in Bithynia.