The Letters of Pliny the Younger

Pliny the Younger’s correspondence with numerous friends—besides Tacitus, he also knew the historian Suetonius and the poet Martial—provides one of the great records of what life was like during Roman times. There are 247 surviving personal letters and 121 official memoranda to the Emperor Trajan. Only Cicero’s 914 letters (largely to his friend Atticus and written a century and a half earlier) excel Pliny’s in importance, whether as a self-portrait of the author or as a tableau of social life during the early Empire.