by Daisy Dunn
This was not a passing phenomenon Pliny had stumbled upon. Christianity was well established in the province when he arrived. It was the Christians of Bithynia and Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, and Asia whom Peter addressed in his First Epistle. And there were people who were brought before Pliny who professed to have been Christian up to twenty years earlier and who had since renounced their faith. But what was Pliny to do with them? He knew that trials of Christians had taken place in the past by cognitio – an investigation led by a senior senator.27 However there seems to have been no formal law against Christianity specifically and no protocol for dealing with religious perpetrators in such numbers. Pliny did not know how and ‘to what extent it is usual to punish or cross-examine [Christians]’.28 Should distinctions be made depending on age? Should those who repented of being Christian be pardoned?
For other matters he was uncertain about, Pliny was prepared to await a response from Trajan. This time, however, he decided to act at once, apparently too unsettled by what he had seen to risk delay. Without so much as a pause to seek the emperor’s advice, he devised his own procedure for trialling the accused. When so-called Christians were brought before him, he would ask them in the first instance whether or not they were Christian. If they said they were, then he would ask them again, and again a third time, threatening them as he did so with punishment. He would have been too young to remember the terrible punishments Nero had inflicted upon the Christians at Rome, but he must have heard of the crucifixions and human torches and allegations of their responsibility for the great fire that burned across the city for seven nights. If these were the sorts of punishment Pliny had in mind, then he would have been wise to recall how they had been viewed in Nero’s time. The sight of Christians hanging from crosses had inspired not only fear among the Roman people but also pity and compassion for, as Tacitus said, it was as if their punishments were being received ‘not for the public good, but to feed the savagery of one man’.29
Pliny believed that any Roman citizen who was brought before him under suspicion of being Christian deserved to be sent to Rome for trial. The accused who were not Roman citizens and who persisted in saying they were Christian, however, were to be executed. ‘For I had no doubt that, whatever it was they were confessing to, such obstinacy and obdurate perseverance ought to be punished.’30 But that was just it: what were they to be punished for? Pliny did not know. Domitian had exiled Christians but he had also exiled Stoic philosophers. Pliny had no reason to view Domitian’s treatment of Christians as anything other than part of a broader plan to crush anyone who might have challenged him. When finally Pliny wrote to Trajan to tell him what procedure he had put in place in his province, he asked him explicitly whether it was the name ‘Christian’ itself that was punishable, even if the ‘Christian’ had committed no crime, or whether it was ‘the crimes associated with the name’ which he ought to be punishing.31
It was only from interrogating the Christians that he learned what these ‘crimes’ were. According to Pliny, the Christians believed their own gravest crimes to be that they held meetings on an established day of the week before first light, during which they hymned to Christ as if he were a god; that they bound themselves by oath not to commit sins such as theft or adultery, not to break trust, nor to deny a deposit when it was called upon.32 Pliny discovered that, before he issued the edict banning hetaeriae, the Christians had also held meetings later in the day over food. Although they had ceased these meetings in compliance with his orders, their morning meetings were truly a cause for concern. The Christians called their meetings ekklesiai but for Pliny they were still hetaeriae and therefore potentially dangerous.33 Emperor Claudius had initially allowed Jews to live as they wished in Rome provided they refrained from holding meetings.34 Even among Romans private meetings were treated with suspicion. Throughout history various ‘sumptuary’ laws had been passed imposing limits on the size of dinner parties in a bid to prevent them from being used for political ends. The very earliest Roman laws had prohibited night-time meetings altogether. The fact that Christians were holding meetings in the dark rendered them all the more threatening. The Romans would come to see them as ‘a secretive and light-evading species’ and spread rumours of them being incestuous cannibals.35 The Christians would describe the Romans in turn as ‘light-evading’ for their refusal to engage with Holy Scripture.36
Pliny did not want simply to dismiss or punish the Christians he met. He was curious about what they believed. The cases brought before him became increasingly varied. Some were carried by informers and others arose from an anonymous book ‘containing the names of many Christians’ which was brought to his attention. When Pliny obtained this private list of alleged Christians he determined to use it. He would test every suspected Christian regardless of the source from which the accusation came. He would place statues of Trajan and the Roman gods in front of the accused, perhaps recalling how Caligula had offended the Jews by planning to have a statue of himself erected in the Temple of Jerusalem. And he would then ask the alleged Christians to invoke the Roman gods, honour the emperor’s image with incense and wine, and blaspheme Christ. If they followed these commands, then they were allowed to leave provided they denied being or having ever been Christian. Pliny had heard it said that nothing could force a true Christian to speak ill of Christ. Indeed, when Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, was given the opportunity to save himself from death by cursing Christ half a century later, he told the Roman before him: ‘I have been His servant for eighty-six years, and he has done nothing to dishonour me. How can I blaspheme the King who saved me?’37
For perhaps the first time in his life, Pliny felt truly ruffled. Roman governors in this period usually tried to avoid stirring up tension among provincials by allowing them to continue to live by their old laws instead of imposing too much of the Roman way of life upon them.38 Governors were, however, required to maintain order; the Christians seemed to threaten that order. Pliny was so alarmed by what he had learned from the Christians during his interrogations that he decided that it was now ‘even more necessary to seek the truth from two female slaves, who were called “deaconesses”, by means of torture’.39 Pliny did not need to elaborate, for it was standard practice among the Romans to take evidence from slaves accused of crimes under torture.40 But the criminality of the Christians of this province had not been established, and there was no guaranteeing that a slave under torture would reveal anything pertinent. As Pliny told Trajan, while exacting his punishments, he ‘found nothing except a depraved and unbridled superstitio’. It was at this point that Pliny sought Trajan’s guidance. He had come to the conclusion that Christianity in Bithynia was out of control. He had been able to discern no pattern in the people brought before him. The ‘Christians’ were of all ages, all classes, both genders, and from all areas of the province. The ‘contagion of superstition’ had spread not only through the towns and villages, but through the countryside as well. This part of Pliny’s letter would have given the Christians reason to rejoice. The fourth-century Christian historian Eusebius of Caesarea took the fact that non-Christians were writing of the persecutions and martyrdoms as a sign that Christianity was in good health.41
The destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem by Titus’ forces in AD 70 had left the Jews and early Christians with no central place of worship in Judaea, ‘the origin of the evil’ that had spread to Rome.42 The Romans might reasonably have supposed that the loss of the temple would presage the destruction of the faith, but the very fact that there was no centre meant that worshippers had had to adapt and spread the Word.43 Pliny did not connect the rise of Christianity with Roman activity in the east of the empire. He sought not a cause for the growth of the strange cult but a plan to reverse it. His progress through Bithynia had shown him that there was support for the Roman gods. There was still every chance that the tide of Christianity could be stemmed, as he informed Trajan:
It seems that [the superstition] can be stopped and correct
ed. Certainly it’s clear that the [Roman] temples which were previously empty have begun to be visited, and sacrifices which had been given up for a long time are being performed again, and the meat of sacrificial victims is being sold everywhere, though it was very rare a buyer could be found before. It’s easy to conclude from this that a lot of people could be reformed, if only they had a chance to repent.44
The performance of Roman-style animal sacrifice would be enforced across the empire by an edict of the emperor Decius in AD 249. For the moment, Trajan was prepared to take a passive approach to the problems Pliny had identified. His response to his letter must have come as a shock to Pliny. While he had done well to examine the Christians, Trajan told him, anonymous lists of names such as he had described had no place in their world.45 The proper way to make an accusation was face to face.46 Alarmed by the faith Pliny had placed in anonymous accusations, Trajan determined to correct him. Pliny had been wrong to use the evidence he had. By putting his trust in potentially unscrupulous informers Pliny had acted as Regulus and so many other men had under Nero and Domitian. Trajan advised a less active course than the one Pliny had in mind. He told him that there could be no single rule for handling Christians. From now on, he said, people who were brought before him and proven guilty were to be punished. But those who honoured the Roman gods and denied being Christian now were to be pardoned. As a general rule, Christians were not to be hunted out.
Trajan may have been advocating a more moderate approach but, to some early Christians, it was frustratingly illogical. Tertullian, a Christian writer born in Carthage about half a century after Trajan issued his instructions, believed that Roman hatred of the ‘name of Christians’ was driven by little more than ignorance of the faith.47 The emperor’s advice to Pliny not to go after Christians but to punish those who were brought before him seemed particularly duplicitous. In saying that Christians were not to be sought out implied that they were innocent, reasoned Tertullian, while ordering them to be punished implied that they were guilty. If you condemn them, why not also seek them out? If you do not seek them out, why not also acquit them?48 Trajan might have reduced the number of persecutions Pliny planned to carry out, but he fell short of stopping the violence altogether. Eusebius later observed that local persecutions were still commonplace in certain provinces, with some finding any excuse to bring Christians to harm.49
Pliny had not anticipated that his actions against the Christians might be met with reproach. Whether they did anything to diminish the trust Trajan had placed in him is impossible to say. There is no further word on the Christians in the letters and it is unclear where Pliny proceeded to next. He was in regular communication with Rome, but his life was now very much here, in Bithynia. Calpurnia was certainly still with him in the province when news arrived from Rome that her grandfather had died. Pliny tells Trajan in his very last letter that he has taken the liberty of giving her one of his official work permits so that she can find immediate passage home.50 He has done so out of urgency, he tells Trajan, and in hope of his approval. Pliny received a letter back. ‘Dearest Secundus,’ Trajan began, addressing Pliny by his last name, ‘you were right to have confidence in my response and ought not to have doubted it.’51 Trajan’s words, reassuring Pliny of his authority, make for rather an abrupt ending to their correspondence.
Trajan had shown that it was possible for an emperor to rule from outside Rome while he continued in his military campaigns.52 Through his letters to Pliny, he had also demonstrated how a ruler could make his authority felt in the furthest reaches of the empire by means of trusted representatives. Pliny was in many respects the ideal example of an emperor’s deputy. Over the following centuries the emperors would seek new ways to control their vast territories. Before Emperor Constantine founded his new capital at Byzantium in AD 324, and before the First Council of Nicaea convened in Bithynia to establish the Nicene Creed of the Church, the emperor Diocletian helped to establish a tetrarchy, whereby he ruled over one part of the empire and three colleagues ruled over other parts, so as to better govern Rome’s diverse provinces. Pliny had come to know the nature of these faraway landscapes and remoteness of their people long before these emperors did. His encounter with the Christians presaged the change that was to come at the heart of Rome’s empire. What would Pliny have made of Emperor Constantine declaring himself a believer in the ‘depraved and unbridled superstitio’ he had worked so hard to subdue? Perhaps a part of him would have felt that he had failed in his duty to maintain order in the province.
In AD 113 one of Pliny’s former colleagues in the treasury replaced him in his post. Did Pliny die in the province? Or did he follow Calpurnia back to Rome? It is certain that he had died by the time Hadrian succeeded Trajan as emperor in AD 117. Pliny would have been in his early to mid-fifties at the time of his death – no older than his uncle had been when he lost his life in the shadow of Vesuvius. He had at least outlived Regulus, his old enemy, whose absence he felt more strongly than he had anticipated.
Pliny left behind the makings of his own biography. Through his letters and speeches he had presented his life as falling in two distinct phases. After the uncertain times of Domitian came the glorious years under Trajan; it was not in Pliny’s interest to dwell on the fact that he had climbed the senatorial ladder in the service of a despised emperor. Pliny’s writings, as well as the sometimes exaggerated accounts of his historian friends, were what shaped the reputation of Domitian after his death. Through both his friendship with Tacitus and Suetonius and his own experience of watching the Roman people desecrate monuments across the city, Pliny anticipated how Domitian would be thought of forever after.
Given that Pliny left far more of himself behind in his letters than his uncle had done in his encyclopaedia, it is surprising that Pliny the Elder remains the more celebrated of the two men today. We document our lives so attentively that we tend to assume that something of us will remain after we die. The example of Pliny the Elder suggests otherwise. He is remembered not because he wrote about himself, but because he was written about by others, especially his nephew, who might have shared his fate had he not been so concerned with completing his studies in the midst of the eruption of Vesuvius. As Pliny himself had said of his uncle, he was one of those men who had done what deserved to be written about and written what deserved to be read. Pliny the Elder’s death only cemented his fame: ‘look to the end’, as the Greeks said. His encyclopaedia preserved the findings of many who had come before him and would concern all who came after him. The Natural History survived because it was not personal.
The fact that Pliny was so mindful of his own place in the world and anxious to secure a legacy for the future did not make him the antithesis of his uncle. For all he fretted about his position in Rome, what really made Pliny happy was what lay outside the city, in the fields and meadows of his estates. He was a man who saw the world through its details – of wills and inheritance, of water levels, of seasonal change. If only subconsciously, he perpetuated his uncle’s celebration of Nature by embracing it in its purest forms and favouring the modest over the elaborate, his silent study over his grand porticoes, his bronze sculpture of a wrinkly old man over more distinguished masterpieces; his beetroot and snails over oysters and snow. He was a career man who escaped by discovering the world beyond.
EPILOGUE
Resurrection
When the Bishop of Vercelli visited Como in 1578 its cathedral was still unfinished. The foundations of the building had been laid in 1396, and the magnificent Gothic nave and aisles, designed by Lorenzo degli Spazi, one of the architects of the cathedral at Milan, had since been erected behind its stark facade. The cathedral honoured the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and sculptures of the Madonna and Child, St John the Baptist, and the patron saints of Como peered down over the bishop as he approached. Far larger and more noticeable than these, however, were the sculptural niches to either side of the main portal. Each contained a statue, almost two metr
es tall, of a man seated and grasping a book. Both were wide-eyed, long-necked, bony-kneed, and spectacularly hirsute. One had slightly longer hair than the other, but they both wore it in tight ringlets – the older man’s falling around his ears, the younger’s piled up on top of his head, like a plate of snails. Around their shoulders were sober robes and mozzetta-style capes. Bishop Bonomio might have assumed they were holy men, but then he drew nearer and realised that they were not Christian at all. On the left sat Pliny the Elder, on the right, Pliny the Younger. They were more prominent than any of the other figures on the cathedral.1
They sat, solemn and contemplative, their eyes raised to Heaven, pagans disguised as good Christian men.2 Why erect these, wondered Bonomio, when there are so many ‘other saints’? A local sculptor named Giovanni Rodari had completed the two sculptures and, with the assistance of his two sons, mounted them in their elaborate niches.3 Decades had passed since the Verona grievance but, faced with a choice between obeying the local bishop’s pleas to remove the sculptures as unworthy of their place on a Christian building, and yielding to the supremacy of the Veronese claim on the two Plinys, the people of Como elected to keep them where they were.
Pliny, one-time persecutor of Christians, now rested like an icon over a Christian place of worship. Had his letters to Trajan been misplaced? Had his trials and the punishments he exacted in Bithynia been forgotten? Not by everyone. Benedetto Giovio, the sixteenth-century scholar who had done so much to perpetuate the connections of Pliny and his uncle with Como against the misplaced assertions of the Veronese, had even quoted from Pliny’s letter on the Christians in his Historiae Patriae. Benedetto was still alive when two large plaques were added to the cathedral to commemorate each man’s scholarship, offices, imperial ties and, in Pliny’s case, his ‘immense generosity to his homeland’. In a further display of affection, a small ancient plaque that was discovered beneath a step in an ‘unremarkable home’ in Como was built into the south wall of the building so that everyone could remember Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, their great patron.4
