repented of the order for his execution, and to have endeavored to recall it, when too late. Fannia immediately took measures to have her husband's biography written, in a republican sense, by Herennius Senecio, who lost his life in consequence of his performance; and the resolute widow was again requested to withdraw, and henceforth keep her distance from Rome.

Meanwhile, her step-son and pupil, the second Helvidius Priscus, who was probably very near the age of Pliny, and had become one of his most intimate friends, was ready and apparently eager to take up the banner of opposition. All that we know concerning the circumstances of his banishment is contained in a letter written by Pliny to Quadratus, who had been reading with great interest the official report of the proceedings in the Senate, when, immediately on the accession of Nerva in 96, Pliny publicly arraigned the accusers of the second Helvidius, and, after conducting the case with great skill and spirit, triumphantly secured his rehabilitation. Quadratus now writes, asking for some further particulars of the affair, which Pliny willingly gives, congratulating himself upon the whole matter very frankly.

His knightly reputation as the natural defender of distressed ladies appears in the fact that it was he to whom Anteia, the wife of the younger Helvidius, instantly applied for sympathy and help, when the incubus which had paralyzed the whole civilized world for fifteen years was lifted by the death of Domitian. All the preliminary consultations appear to have been held with those three patriotic women of three successive generations, Anteia, Fannia, the widow of the elder Helvidius Priscus, and the aged Arria, the still surviving widow of Thrasea; the last two having but just returned to Rome after their third exile.

It was a time of great private sorrow with Pliny, for the wife of his own youth

was only a few weeks dead; but he would not suffer his personal depression to interfere with his public duty and the vindication of his friend's name. "I reflected," he observes naively, the moment Domitian was dead, that now I had got a great and noble opportunity to succor those who had been suffering unjustly, to arraign the true criminals, and to bring myself forward. And though I was devotedly attached not only to Helvidius, but to Arria and Fannia, yet I was less influenced by personal affection than by civic indignation, reverence for law, and the desire of furnishing a righteous precedent."

Before resuming the thread of Pliny's own history, we may notice the only two allusions which the letters contain to the subsequent fortunes of the family of Thrasea. Both are of a peculiar and affecting character. In a letter to one Priscus, perhaps a relative of his friend, Pliny deplores the dangerous illness of Fannia, contracted through exposure and fatigue at the bedside of Junia, a vestal virgin, whom she had been nursing, at first voluntarily, afterwards by order of the pontiffs. It was the regular custom, if the vestals fell seriously ill, that they should be removed from their house in the Forum, and delivered to the care of some distinguished Roman matron; but Fannia's strength, which may well have been impaired by the shocks and hardships of her life, had broken down under the strain. She had a racking cough and obstinate fever, and seemed to be failing in rapid consumption. Pliny had evidently no hope, and he dwells with mournful admiration on the retrospect of her noble life. He recalls how, during the trial of Senecio for having written her husband's memoir, Fannia was interrogated as to whether she had requested the preparation of the book. "I did request it," was her quiet answer. "And did you furnish notes to the narrative?" "I did." "Was your mother Arria privy to your inten

tion?" "She was not." From first to last, says Pliny, not a quiver in her intonations, not a sign of fear. "And yet," he proceeds, "how gentle she was, how polished! Just as lovable as she was admirable!" And he adds that he shall feel as if the foundations of his own house were shaken when Fannia is

no more.

The one remaining reference to the doom which seemed to pursue this interesting race relates how the younger Helvidius had two beautiful daughters, both of whom were early married, and died within a few days of each other, each in her first confinement, and leaving an infant girl.

The year in which Pliny secured the reversal of the sentence against his friend Helvidius

of Nerva

own age.

that of the accession was the thirty-fifth of his He was now in the flower of his manly prime, and in the seventeen years which had elapsed since he said good-by to his ill-fated home at Misenum he had made himself an honorable and, as the rather capricious Muse of History has willed it, an undying name. He was a successful lawyer, with a large and very lucrative practice. He was renowned as one of the most accomplished scholars of his day, an enthusiastic student and unstinted patron of letters. He was on terms of intimacy with all the other literati of the period, with Tacitus, Martial, Suetonius, and Silicus Italicus, and was a great favorite in society.

With Tacitus he had a warm and enduring friendship, untroubled by the faintest touch of jealousy on Pliny's part, who freely acknowledged his own inferiority to the great historian. "I was never more flattered in my life," he writes to his friend Maximus, "than by something which Tacitus told me the other day. He said that, during the last games in the circus, he was sitting next a Roman knight, with whom he fell into quite a learned conversation. At last

the knight said, 'Excuse me, but are you a Roman or a provincial?' Tacitus replied, 'I think you must know me by my works.' 'Oh, then,' cried the knight, 'you are either Tacitus or Pliny, and which?' I cannot begin to tell you," Pliny adds, "how delightful this was to me."

Scattered through the nine books of letters of Pliny's own editing there are a score or more to Tacitus, most of them relating to literary matters, of which the flavor has pretty thoroughly evaporated, thereby offering a strange contrast to the universal and imperishable human interest of the story of the great eruption. On one occasion he naively suggests that Tacitus should find a place in his history for a detailed account of the celebrated suit which he and Herennius Senecio (the man who suffered for writing the life of Helvidius at Fannia's request) had successfully conducted, on behalf of the province of Bætica, against its unprincipled governor, Bæ

bius Massa.

There was undoubtedly a touch of vanity in our friend's composition, but vanity, after all, of that candid and lovable sort which goes along with a disposition to take the most favorable view of all humanity, one's self included. Selfpraise, moreover, was not thought unbecoming by the Romans.

In the years between twenty and thirty-five, Pliny had gone through the regular grades of public office which had to be traversed by every Roman who aspired to political distinction. He had been decemvir under Domitian in 81, military tribune in 82, when he served with the army in Syria, quæstor in 87, tribune of the people in 91, and soon afterwards prætor. He tells us in one place that he abstained from pleading causes during his tribunate; and several circumstances go to show that he found it both agreeable and prudent to keep as much as possible in the shade during the last three frenzied

years of Domitian. It appeared, after the death of the tyrant, that Pliny's escape had been rather narrow, for a complaint had already been lodged against him by the notorious informer Regulus, which would undoubtedly have been prosecuted if the Emperor had lived longer. Now, however, an honorable. career was once more open to the talents of decent men. In 98, when Pliny had been, as before mentioned, disappointed in the hope of an heir by his second marriage, he received from Trajan, who had just succeeded Nerva, a grant of the immunities awarded to the father of three children, and was made prefect of the treasury of Saturn. In the year 100, at the age of thirty-eight, he was consul with Tertullus, in 101 he was made commissioner of the Tiber, in 103 he was augur. It was during these crowded and upon the whole brilliantly successful years that Pliny became possessed, over and above his patrimonial estates, of those two beautiful country-seats of which he was so extravagantly fond, and of which he has left us a curiously detailed description: the suburban villa, namely, at Laurentum on the Mediterranean, a few miles from Ostia, to which he could ride down from Rome after a day's work in the courts; and the great Tuscan farm at Tifernum on the Tiber, the modern Città di Castello. The description of the Laurentine villa in particular is so circumstantial that every reader thinks, until he has tried, that it would be perfectly easy to reconstruct it. Various attempts have been made, which differ rather amusingly among themselves, the best being undoubtedly that of a Frenchman named Haudebourt, who visited the spot in 1830, and was confident that he discovered authentic remains of the building within the limits of the estate of Castel Fusano. The general plan of the house is, however, perfectly clear. It was a long, low structure, fronting the Mediterranean shore, and set close

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to the water's edge, which has advanced about half a mile since Pliny's day. From the entrance-hall at the back, which was approached by a driveway through closely set shrubbery, you passed on through a D-shaped court," surrounded by pillars, and a second hall, to the chief dining-room of the mansion, which projected over the sea from the centre of the front, so that, as Pliny says, you heard through windows, open on three sides, the lapping of the waves, and looked back through the long vista of halls and courts and entrance porch to the woods in the rear of the villa, and the Alban hills beyond." The wing of the mansion which extended along the Mediterranean leftwards from the state dining-room was only one story in height, and terminated in a library, with book-shelves and cabinets built into the wall, and "curved into an apse, so that its windows might take the sun all round." The wing which ran backwards toward the woods, at a right angle from the first, contained the rooms appropriated to the slaves; "but they are so nice," observes the master, with honorable pride, "that they might serve for my guests as well." On the other side to the right, that is to say, of the projecting triclinium came a group of living or reception rooms: first a cubiculum politissimum;1 then a pièce which might serve either for a parlor or a small supper-room, "exceedingly bright, with sunshine and a broad sea-view;" behind this two small suites of parlor and bedroom, "sheltered from all the winds." Then came the elaborate arrangement of baths indispensable in the house of a Roman gentleman; then two towers, with delightful rooms in the upper stories; then a tennis-court, and a garden "sweet with violets" and surrounded by walks bordered with rosemary and box, and pergole wreathed

1 A cubiculum was any room furnished with couches. If it were merely a bedroom, it was usually called a cubiculum nocturnum.

in vines. These charming pleasure grounds were again embraced and sheltered on two sides, for on the front they were open to the sea, by what Pliny evidently considered the great architectural feature of his mansion, -a long colonnade, with an arrangement of casements which could be closed on the side from which the wind blew, so that it was always pleasant to walk there, and which, by the style of its architecture, was really, he opines, more suitable for a public work than for the modest dwelling of a private individual. Where the cloister abutted on the sea, there was a third tower, with an apartment reserved for the master's sole behoof, where he could shut himself up to his favorite studies, and feel "as if he had retired from the villa itself."

But after all, the Laurentine villa was only a bijou, an unpretending suburban retreat from the social and professional excitements of the city close at hand. The Tuscan estate was very different. A much more magnificent house was there, and a great farm also, with laborers' dwellings and agricultural activities on a large scale. There Pliny was lord of the manor, patron and benefactor of the whole region round, and especially of the town of Tifernum, whose temple he rebuilt at his own expense; and he defers by a few days a promised visit with his new wife to her grandfather and guardian, because it would never do for them not both to be present at its dedication. There also, by way of performing his whole duty as a country gentleman, he sometimes hunted in the mountains, though the genuine sportsman will smile to hear that he always took his book along, and will be quite ready to join in the mirth which was evidently excited by the fact that once he actually trapped three boars, sitting and reading, all the while, in sight of the nets.

Here in Umbria, as everywhere, he reveled in the scenery: "The outlines

of the landscape are most beautiful. Imagine a sort of immense natural amphitheatre, a broad plain surrounded by mountains, which are clothed to their summits in magnificent old woods. . . . The summer climate is balmy. There is always life in the air, but they are breezes rather than winds which blow there. . . . The meadows, which are starred with flowers, produce clover and other herbage of the sweetest and most tender quality. They are watered by a multitude of small streams, tributaries of the Tiber, which is still navigable where it divides my fields, and, though shrunken in summer, is quite equal in winter and in spring to taking my produce to the city. The view of the site from the mountain above is enchanting. You seem to be gazing upon some exquisitely composed picture rather than upon solid land." (How true this is to the curiously ideal character, the inalienable picturesque, of the Italian landscape in all time!) "The villa crowns the summit of a low hill, and the ascent is so gradual that you make it unconsciously. Far behind are the Apennines." The beauteous region commanded by the windows of this country home, the valley of the upper Tiber traversed by the great Flaminian highway, was then cultivated through all its length, and overflowing with the glorious abundance of the most generous land on earth. It was reserved, during the next few centuries, for ruthless ravage and ultimate desolation. It was to be the marching-ground of all the great barbarian armies. The hordes of Alaric and Attila, the slightly more disciplined forces of Odoacer and Theodoric, of Witegis and Belisarius, surged back and forth over that fair expanse; taking and retaking its strongholds, trampling upon its crops, feasting on its fatness, burning its villages, murdering its tenantry. But no prevision of those ghastly scenes in the long death agony of the Roman state troubled the bright