In the Shadow of Vesuvius: A Life of Pliny
By Daisy Dunn, William Collins
324pp, £20/$29.95
Every schoolchild used to know something about Pliny. He left behind a huge corpus of letters and speeches, but is famous for two things: years after the event, he wrote a description of the eruption of Vesuvius, which killed his uncle, Pliny the Elder, and which happened when he was 17.
The second most well-known fact about him is that when working as an imperial legate in the province of Bithynia, he corresponded with Trajan, and asked his advice about how to deal with the Christians. Pliny was all for having them put to death, and thought, incorrectly as it turned out, that they could be persecuted to extinction. Trajan was a little more moderate, and opposed to the use of anonymous informers. The correspondence is one of the very few sources we have for how early 2nd-century Romans viewed the young faith.
