Pliny the Younger
Pliny the Younger wrote the only eyewitness account of the eruption of Vesuvius and left 247 letters that are the best portrait of Roman upper-class life. Born at Comum around AD 61, he lost his father young and was adopted by his uncle, Pliny the Elder, whose name he took. He was seventeen and staying at Misenum on 24 August AD 79 when the eruption began. He declined to go with his uncle, who sailed towards it and died, and stayed reading Livy. He described both — the column shaped like an umbrella pine, the ash, the sea sucked back, his mother urging him to leave her behind — in two letters written twenty-five years later to Tacitus. They are the reason the eruption type is called Plinian. He had a conventional and successful career: advocate in the centumviral court, quaestor, tribune, praetor, prefect of the treasury, consul in AD 100, and augur. He was sent around AD 110 as imperial legate to Bithynia and Pontus, a province in financial disorder, and his correspondence with Trajan survives as book ten — a unique record of a provincial governor consulting an emperor about aqueducts, fire brigades, building costs and prisoners. One exchange is the earliest external description of Christian practice: Pliny reports that they meet before dawn, sing to Christ as to a god, and bind themselves by oath not to steal or commit adultery, and asks how to proceed. Trajan replies that they are not to be sought out, and anonymous accusations are to be ignored. He died around AD 113.
- Lived: 61 CE – 113 CE
- Nationality: Roman
- Roles: senator, lawyer, writer
