The reference in Tacitus to the cruel persecution of Nero, and the yet briefer notices in Suetonius, are, of course, of the highest value; but the detailed story of Pliny, where he tells the Emperor actually what was taking place in the province of which he was governor, and gives us his own impressions of the works and days of the Christians, is and ever will be to the ecclesiastical historian the most precious testimony of a great pagan to the position which the Christians held in the Roman Empire some eighty years after the Resurrection morning.
We have already, it will be remembered, dwelt at some length on what was evidently in Pliny’s mind on the subject—on the impressions, after a careful and lengthy investigation, which this unpopular sect made upon him. He tells his imperial friend and master exactly what he thought; and it is clear that the great Emperor was strangely moved by Pliny’s words, and framed his famous rescript upon the report in question on the gentler lines we have dwelt upon above.
The value of such a picture of very early Christian life, painted by an eminent pagan statesman and scholar in the midst of such a work, so carefully arranged, so thought out, prepared, as we have seen, for posterity, as the Letters of Pliny were, can never be too highly valued.
II
VOGUE OF EPISTOLARY FORM OF LITERATURE
How Pliny was admired and copied in the Roman world of literature we learn from the subsequent story of Roman literature preserved to us.
With the exception of the writings of Suetonius, Pliny’s friend, for a lengthened period after the reign of Trajan, an age splendidly illustrated by the writings of Tacitus and Pliny, little literature has come down to us; very silent, indeed, after Trajan’s age seems to have been the highly cultured and literary society of Rome of which Pliny writes in such vivid and appreciative terms.
Thoughtful men seem to consider that in the Roman Empire, under Hadrian, under the noble Antonine princes and their successors, “the soil, the race, the language were alike exhausted.” Be that as it may, there is no doubt that from the time of Trajan until the latter days of the wondrous story of Rome, late in the fourth century, apart from a group of purely Christian writers, Latin literature was practically extinct; certainly it produced nothing worthy to be transmitted to later ages.
Perhaps a solitary but not a very notable exception might be made in the few fragments that have come down to us of Fronto, the tutor and dear friend of Marcus Aurelius. These fragments are chiefly pieces of his correspondence with his pupils Marcus and his shortlived colleague in the Empire, Lucius Verus. It is not, however, probable that these letters were ever intended for publication or for general reading. It has been said with some truth that the Emperor Marcus and his scholar friend and tutor wrote to each other with the effusiveness of two schoolgirls.[24] In one particular these correspondents evidently agreed—they both disliked, and tried to despise, the fast growing Christian community.