The Letters of Pliny the Younger, vol 1 | Page 9

of a senator, or finds Martial his travelling expenses. All the rising young authors and barristers in Rome looked to him for encouragement and support; he was ready to attend their public readings, to rise when the reading was over and say a few words of encouragement, to canvass for them if they were standing for office, and enlist on their behalf all the influence at his command. And he only asked in return a little deference and acknowledgment of his kindness! Most interesting of all, we find him giving a farm to his old nurse, and asking a friend to look after it for her. He sends a slave of his, who was troubled with consumption, to Egypt for a change of air, and afterwards to the colony of Forum Julii, the modern Frejus on the Riviera. Pliny writes of the slaves of his household just as any kind- hearted Jamaican planter would have written before the Emancipation Act, and it is to be noted that the head slaves of a Roman gentleman's establishment were often Greeks of high literary attainments, and treated by their masters as intimate and affectionate friends. Pliny narrates with a shock of uneasiness and horror the story of a Roman knight who was beaten to death by the servants of his household, and, though he admits that the knight had been cruel and overbearing, such an untimely fate brought home to him the insecurity of all masters--that insecurity which led the Romans to punish with such merciless severity any attack by a slave upon his owner. Not that Pliny had any cause for self-reproach! He tells us in a charming letter his rule of conduct with his dependants, and the theory on which he conducted his household. According to his view, "Servis respublica quaedam et quasi civitas domus est." Consequently, he allowed them to make wills and leave their property as they desired, provided only that the recipients were also members of the household, and, what was better still, he speaks of his "facilitas manumittendi"--his readiness to give them their freedom for faithful service. One can well imagine that Pliny's was a model family, that it was his pride to be in every sense of the word a just paterfamilias, and that he showed his slaves great consideration for their welfare. He complains, indeed, jocularly in one place that too much kindness is not good for servants, as it leads them to presume upon the easy-going temperament of their master, but that is only a good- natured grumble on the perennial servant problem.
Pliny was thrice married, twice under Domitian, but his second wife died in 97, and the lady who figures in the letters is his third wife Calpurnia, grand-daughter of Calpurnius Fabatus, and niece of a lady named Hispulla. We get a charming picture of their mutual happiness in a letter written by Pliny to Hispulla, who had had charge of his wife's education when she was a girl. He praises her intelligence, her economy, her love for him, and the interest she takes in his career. When he is pleading in the courts she has messengers to bring her word of the success of the speech and the result of the trial; when he is giving a reading to his friends, Calpurnia sits behind a curtain and greedily drinks in the praises they bestow. She sets his verses to music, and Hispulla, who made the match, is neatly rewarded at the conclusion of the letter by Pliny saying that both he and his wife vie with one another in seeing who can thank her the more. When Calpurnia was obliged to leave her husband and go to Campania for her health, we find Pliny writing her tender love-letters, describing his anxiety on her behalf, telling her how he conjures up the very things he most dreads, how he reads and re-reads her letters, which are his only comfort, and begging her to write him certainly once, and if possible, twice a day. Then in the prettiest passage of all, he tells her how, at the hours when he used to visit her, he finds his feet carrying him to the door of her chamber and turns away from the threshold of the empty room, sad as a lover who finds the door closed against him. The glimpses which Roman literature affords us of the conjugal happiness of man and wife are comparatively few. Cicero, indeed, wrote in a similar strain to his wife Terentia, and used even tenderer diminutives than Pliny, but the sequel was that he soon afterwards divorced her and married a rich ward. We do not know the sequel in the case of Pliny. All we know is that he nearly lost his wife in a dangerous illness brought