Pliny the Younger Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus

late 1st century · He had laid on a lettuce apiece, three snails, two eggs and honeyed wine chilled with snow; his friend had gone to a house that served oysters and sea urchins

Look here! You promise to come to dinner and then do not come? Sentence is passed: you shall pay back the cost to the last penny, and it is no small sum.

Heus tu! Promittis ad cenam, nec venis? Dicitur ius: ad assem impendium reddes, nec id modicum.

Letters 1.15, to Septicius Clarus

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c. AD 100 · He adds that he sat by the nets with a writing tablet in place of a spear

You will laugh, and you may. I, the man you know, have caught three boars, and very fine ones too.

Ridebis, et licet rideas. Ego, ille quem nosti, apros tres et quidem pulcherrimos cepi.

Letters 1.6, to Tacitus

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c. AD 107

The chariot races were on, a kind of show that does not hold me in the least. Nothing new, nothing varied, nothing that it is not enough to have seen once. So I wonder all the more that so many thousands of grown men should be so childishly eager, again and again, to see horses running and men standing in chariots.

Circenses erant, quo genere spectaculi ne levissime quidem teneor. Nihil novum nihil varium, nihil quod non semel spectasse sufficiat. Quo magis miror tot milia virorum tam pueriliter identidem cupere currentes equos, insistentes curribus homines videre.

Letters 9.6

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events of AD 79 (letter of c. 107) · A letter to the historian about the eruption of Vesuvius, which he lived through at seventeen

And night came, not like a moonless or cloudy night, but like the dark of a closed room when the lamp is put out. You could hear women wailing, infants crying, men shouting.

et nox — non qualis illunis aut nubila, sed qualis in locis clausis lumine exstincto. Audires ululatus feminarum, infantum quiritatus, clamores virorum

Letters 6.20, to Tacitus

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c. AD 111 · After reporting a great fire at Nicomedia, where people only stood and watched and there was not a pump or a bucket. The craftsmen's guilds served as fire brigades

Consider, my lord, whether you think a guild of craftsmen should be set up, of no more than a hundred and fifty men. I shall see to it that no one but a craftsman is admitted, and that the right once granted is not turned to other uses. It will not be hard to keep watch on so few.

tu, domine, dispice an instituendum putes collegium fabrorum dumtaxat hominum CL. Ego attendam, ne quis nisi faber recipiatur neve iure concesso in aliud utantur; nec erit difficile custodire tam paucos.

Letters 10.33, to the Emperor Trajan

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