Justified True Belief

(●) The Roman governor who wrote to his emperor asking what to do about the Christians, and in asking described them. + Somewhere around AD 112, in a province on the south shore of the Black Sea, a conscientious Roman official sat down to write one more letter to his emperor. He had written plenty of others. He had asked about a drainage ditch that was really an open sewer, about whether a town could build itself new baths, about what to do with convicts who had quietly been put to work as municipal servants instead of serving their sentences. This one was about a group of people who had been denounced to him as Christians, and the difficulty was that he had never tried such a case and did not know the rules. In explaining the difficulty he described what he had found. That description is the reason his name belongs on a Christian bookshelf. He is not a friend of the church, not a convert, not a sympathizer, and not even particularly curious. He is a hostile witness, writing in order to be told how to proceed, and he reports that ordinary provincials were meeting before daylight and singing, by turns, to Christ as to a god, and binding themselves by oath never to cheat, steal, commit adultery, or break their word. Within roughly eighty years of a crucifixion outside Jerusalem, a Roman magistrate in northern Asia Minor had to stop trials because there were too many defendants, and the temples of his province had gone quiet. A caution about his dates, and one about his name. No ancient writer records the year of his birth or the year of his death. The birth year of 61 or 62 is worked backwards from a single clause in one of his own letters, where he says he was in his eighteenth year when Vesuvius erupted, and the death date of about 113 rests on nothing but the silence that follows his last letter from the province. As for the name, there are two Plinys, and the famous encyclopedia belongs to the other one. The Natural History, thirty-seven books on everything from elephants to the medical uses of cabbage, was written by his uncle, Pliny the Elder, who adopted him and then died in the eruption. The nephew wrote letters.

(●) c. AD 61: Born at Comum below the Alps, into money without ancestors, and left fatherless young. + Comum, the modern Como, sits at the southern tip of a long finger of lake water with mountains on both sides, about twenty-five miles north of Milan. It was a comfortable provincial town full of the sort of family that owned land, sat on the local council, and had never produced a senator. That was his family. His father was Lucius Caecilius Cilo; his mother Plinia was the sister of the elder Pliny, and the boy’s own name at birth was Gaius Caecilius Secundus. He became Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus later, when his uncle made him heir and son. His father died while he was a child, and the man appointed to look after him was a figure out of recent history: Lucius Verginius Rufus, a neighbour from the same stretch of country, who as governor of Upper Germany in AD 68 had crushed a revolt, been offered the empire by his own soldiers, and refused it. Writing about the old man’s funeral thirty years later, Pliny is plain about what the connection meant to him: "he was left my guardian, and always treated me with a parent’s affection." Verginius proposed him for honours, came out of retirement to vote for him, and once told him, "Had I a son of my own, I would entrust you with this matter." His schooling was the best available. He studied rhetoric under Quintilian, the most famous teacher of public speaking in the Roman world, and also under a Greek named Nicetes Sacerdos. Rhetoric in that world was not decoration; it was the trade of the courts and the senate, and a boy trained in it was being trained to win cases and to speak for his city. Pliny was good at it early, and he never quite got over being good at it.

(●) AD 79: Vesuvius took his uncle, and the nephew stayed behind with a book. + He was seventeen, in his eighteenth year as he counted it, living with his mother at Misenum on the Bay of Naples, where his uncle commanded the Roman fleet. Early in the afternoon his mother pointed out a cloud of unusual size and shape over the bay. The elder Pliny, who had just bathed and gone back to his books, went up to higher ground to look, decided the thing was worth investigating, ordered a boat, and offered the boy a place in it. The boy said he would rather go on with his work, and adds, with the precision of a man who has thought about this for twenty-seven years, that it was his uncle who had given him the writing to do. What followed he described in two letters that are still the best eyewitness account of a volcanic eruption from the ancient world. The cloud, he says, rose like a pine tree, a tall trunk spreading into branches at the top. His uncle sailed toward the mountain to help people off the shore, put in at Stabiae farther along the bay, slept, woke to a house shaking and a yard filling with ash, walked down to the beach, lay down on a sheet, and died there. Back at Misenum the boy sat in the courtyard with his mother while the buildings swayed, and reached for a book. Not a light one either: Livy, the historian whose account of Rome ran to a shelf of volumes. What he says he did with it is the kind of thing nobody invents about himself: "As I was at that time but eighteen years of age, I know not whether I should call my behaviour, in this dangerous juncture, courage or folly; but I took up Livy, and amused myself with turning over that author, and even making extracts from him, as if I had been perfectly at my leisure." A friend of his uncle’s scolded them both, the mother for her calm and the boy for his indifference, and the boy went back to his history book. Two details are easy to get wrong. He wrote both letters around AD 106 or 107, more than a quarter of a century after the event, because Tacitus asked him for material. And the date of 24 August, which is the date his manuscripts give, has been questioned: the food remains, the clothing and the coins found in the ruins have convinced many archaeologists that the eruption came in the autumn. The traditional day is a reading of his text, not an independent record.

(●) AD 81 to 96: He climbed the ladder of offices under Domitian while seven of his friends were killed or exiled. + A Roman career was a ladder with fixed rungs, and he climbed every one of them. He began pleading at about eighteen in the centumviral court, the big civil court at Rome that handled inheritance disputes, which is to say the sort of case where two branches of a family spend a year arguing over a dead man’s land. Then a posting abroad as a military tribune, a junior staff officer attached to a legion, this one in Syria, where he met a philosopher named Artemidorus and formed a friendship that later cost him something. After that the rungs came in their fixed order. Quaestor, the junior finance officer whose single year in post carried a man into the senate for life. Tribune of the people, an office that centuries earlier had let its holder halt the business of the state with a word and by Pliny’s day was mostly a title on the way up. Praetor, around AD 93, a senior magistrate who presided in the courts and stood one step below the consuls. And then prefect of the military treasury, the fund that paid soldiers’ discharge bonuses. He was a man the government found useful. The government, for the last fifteen years of that climb, was the emperor Domitian’s. He had taken the throne in AD 81, and he spent the end of his reign looking for enemies inside the senate, which was the room Pliny had spent his twenties climbing into. In 93 Pliny and a senator named Herennius Senecio prosecuted Baebius Massa for plundering Baetica, the rich southern province of Spain, and won. Within months Senecio, the colleague who had stood up beside him in that case, was dead, executed for writing a book in praise of a man Domitian had killed. Pliny sets out the rest of the bill in one remarkable sentence. He had gone out to visit Artemidorus at the time Domitian expelled the philosophers from Rome, and lent him money, "at a time when seven of my friends were either executed or banished; Senecio, Rusticus, and Helvidius having just been put to death, while Mauricus, Gratilla, Arria, and Fannia, were sent into exile; and scorched as it were by so many lightning-bolts of the state thus hurled and flashing round me, I augured by no uncertain tokens my own impending doom." The doom never came, and that is the part his readers have always had to weigh. Seven friends were destroyed; he kept his praetorship, kept his treasury post, and was promoted again as soon as Domitian was dead. He tells us the lightning fell around him, and the record shows him still standing, which is either the survival of a brave man who happened to be lucky or the survival of a careful one. He does not pretend he resisted. When he finally moved against one of Domitian’s informers, a senator named Publicius Certus who had helped destroy Helvidius, he waited until the emperor was in his grave.

(●) AD 100: Trajan made him consul, and he turned the vote of thanks into a book. + The two emperors who followed Domitian, Nerva and then Trajan, rewarded him quickly: prefect of the treasury of Saturn, the state treasury itself, and then in September of AD 100 a suffect consulship, one of the short replacement terms that let more men hold the office than the two who opened the year. For a man from a family with no senators in it, this was the top of the ladder. The consul was expected to thank the emperor in the senate. Pliny did, and then went home and expanded the speech into a written oration of ninety-five chapters, the Panegyricus, which is to say ninety-five chapters of formal public praise, and read the whole thing aloud to his friends over three afternoons. He seems to have enjoyed it thoroughly; he notes that they sat through two days of foul weather and then made him add a third. It is the only one of his speeches that survives, which is a small joke of history, since it is the speech he had the least need to make. That same year brought the case everyone remembered. Marius Priscus, a former governor of Africa, was accused of taking bribes to condemn and execute innocent people, and Pliny and Tacitus were appointed by the senate to prosecute him together. They won; Priscus was expelled from the senate and banished. Pliny, who was incapable of describing a triumph without describing his own part in it, still managed to describe his colleague generously, noting that Tacitus replied for the prosecution with the lofty dignity that was the chief charm of his oratory.

(●) c. AD 100 to 109: He published nine books of letters and spent a fortune on his home town. + The letters came out in instalments over about ten years, and they were written to be read by strangers. That is worth knowing before trusting any of them: a private letter catches a man off guard, and these never are. They are polished, arranged, and conscious of posterity, which is why they make such a vivid picture of the age and such a flattering picture of their author. We have from them a dinner party, a ghost story, a tame dolphin, the reluctance of people to attend a friend’s poetry reading, the layout of two villas room by room, and a description of his own daily routine so leisurely that it is hard to believe he ever held office. They also show what he did with his money, and here the flattery is earned. He gave Comum a public library and made a speech at its dedication. He set up a yearly fund for the freeborn children of families of small means, and explained in a letter that he had deliberately chosen something unglamorous: "I was not engaging myself to exhibit public games or gladiatorial combats, but to establish an annual fund for the support and education of young men of good families but scanty means." He contributed to a schoolmaster’s salary so that the boys of the town would not have to be sent away to Milan to be taught. By his own accounting he had given the town eleven hundred thousand sesterces out of his own patrimony, meaning the estate he had inherited rather than any public fund, which at the rate Domitian paid a legionary comes to something over nine hundred years of a soldier’s wages. A long inscription that once stood over the public baths at Comum, known now from a fifteenth-century copy and a single surviving fragment in Milan, lists his offices and his gifts, including a bath building and a bequest for the upkeep of his freedmen. The private life is quieter. He married three times; the first two wives are shadows, and the third was Calpurnia, granddaughter of Calpurnius Fabatus, another landowner of Comum. The letters to her are genuinely affectionate and the letters about her are sad: she miscarried, not knowing she was pregnant, and they had no children. He also kept a friendship with the poet Martial, paid his travelling expenses when he left Rome, and on hearing of his death wrote that his verses would probably not outlive him. They did.

(●) c. AD 110: Trajan sent him to Bithynia to put the accounts right, and he wrote home about everything. + Bithynia and Pontus was a province of Greek cities along the south coast of the Black Sea, and it was a mess: municipal finances in disorder, unfinished public works, convicts walking free, rival towns feuding. Trajan sent Pliny out with special powers to sort it out, and Pliny, with a slight fever and a bad run of winds, reached the province on the 17th of September, just in time, he notes happily, to celebrate the emperor’s birthday on the eighteenth. Which September it was, nobody can say: the letters never give a year, and scholars divide between 109 to 111 and 110 to 112 or 113, so every date for this part of his life is an estimate worked out from the contents of the file. What he did there, he did by asking. Book ten of the letters is his official file, his queries and Trajan’s replies preserved side by side, and it is the single best picture we have of how the Roman empire was actually administered. May Nicomedia, the provincial capital, build an aqueduct after wasting millions on two that failed? May Prusa have new baths? What should be done about the prisoners serving as public slaves? May Nicomedia form a fire brigade? (No, said Trajan, who did not like private associations of any kind.) Trajan’s answers are short, practical, and occasionally tired, and at least once he reminds his governor why he was sent: "You will remember you were sent into Bithynia for the particular purpose of correcting those many abuses which appeared in need of reform." The letter about the Christians sits in that file like any other item of business, filed between a privilege asked for a friend and a complaint about an open sewer. That is the most important thing about it. Pliny was not writing a treatise on a new religion and had no idea he was writing anything that would be read twice. He was a provincial governor with an unfamiliar case and a habit of asking for instructions, and the habit is why the church has the document at all.

(●) c. AD 113: The letters stop in mid-province, and no one recorded his death. + The correspondence simply ends. Nothing in it refers to anything later than about AD 112 or 113, no ancient author mentions him again, and the usual conclusion is that he died in Bithynia while still in office, at about fifty-two. For a man who wrote other people’s obituaries with such care, and who gave the old soldier Verginius Rufus a full page of funeral, it is a strangely blank ending. We do not know where he is buried. Somebody else published the last book. The official correspondence with Trajan was not part of the collection he arranged, and it reads like a working file rather than a literary one, so it was almost certainly put out after his death by a friend or a secretary with access to the papers. Whoever did it saved the most historically valuable thing he ever wrote. It nearly did not survive even so. The nine books of private letters come down through several medieval families of manuscripts, but the tenth book, the one with the Christians in it, hung on a single late-antique codex, a bound book of the kind that had replaced the scroll, kept at the abbey of Saint-Victor in Paris. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer, set his edition from it at Venice in 1508, and then the manuscript was lost. Six leaves of it are left, now in New York. So the earliest outside account of Christians at worship came through the fourteen hundred years between Pliny and the printing press on that one thread, and the thread was cut once it had been used.

What He Taught

(T1) Stubbornness deserved punishment whatever the belief behind it. + Picture a magistrate’s morning. A list of names, a clerk, a crowd, and a man on the bench who wants to get through the docket before the heat. The governor’s job was not to decide whether a religion was true. It was to decide whether a defendant would obey a lawful order given in open court, and Pliny devised a simple order to give. Say the prayer to the gods. Offer wine and a pinch of incense to the emperor’s statue, which he had brought into the courtroom for the purpose. Curse Christ. Anyone who did all three walked out, and he says he let them go, on the reasoning that no real Christian could be made to do any of it. Anyone who would not was asked a second and a third time, under threat, and then executed. Notice what he has not established: not that they killed anyone, not that they stole, not that they plotted. What he punishes he names himself, pertinacia and inflexibilis obstinatio, a stubbornness with no give in it, which Roman lawyers filed under contumacia, contempt of a magistrate’s authority. Roman officials had a name for religion they regarded as foreign, excessive and socially corrosive, superstitio, and Pliny uses it of what he found. But the charge he actually sustains is the refusal itself. He had written, twelve years earlier in AD 100, a famous sentence in the other direction. Addressing the senate in praise of Trajan, he declared that nowhere would they flatter this emperor as a god, nowhere as a divine power, because they were speaking of a citizen and not a tyrant, a father and not a master. That was the high Roman theory. In Bithynia he had the emperor’s image carried into court and used a dish of incense as a test of loyalty, and so far as anything he wrote shows, he never noticed the tension between the two. Christians did, and so did everyone who ever had to choose.

(Q) "I asked them whether they were Christians; if they admitted it, I repeated the question twice, and threatened them with punishment; if they persisted, I ordered them to be at once punished: for I was persuaded, whatever the nature of their opinions might be, a contumacious and inflexible obstinacy certainly deserved correction." + Source: Pliny, Letters 10.96 (Melmoth translation, revised by Bosanquet). The opening of his account of procedure, a few lines after he has admitted that he has never attended such a trial and does not know the rules. "Punished" here means executed for the non-citizens; the Roman citizens among them he sent to Rome, as the law entitled them to demand (T1).

(T2) What the Christians confessed to was a hymn before daylight and a promise to keep their word. + Some of the accused said they had left the group years before, one or two of them twenty years before, and those people had no reason left to protect it. So Pliny asked them what it had actually involved, and they told him, and what they described was a meeting and a meal. Three words in his report carry more than he knew. They sang, he says, a carmen, which is any set piece of words in verse, a song or a chant, sung invicem, by turns, which sounds like two halves of a room answering each other, the alternating pattern the church would later call antiphonal singing. They sang it to Christ "as to a god," and that little phrase is the heart of the matter: the man executed in Judaea was receiving, from working people in a Black Sea province, the thing Romans reserved for gods. And they bound themselves with a sacramentum, which in Latin means a soldier’s oath of loyalty, and which Christians would eventually use as their own word for baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Pliny, who knew none of that, recorded the oath’s content: no fraud, no theft, no adultery, no broken word, no denying a deposit left in trust. It is, almost item for item, the second half of the Ten Commandments. Then they went away and came back to eat together, an ordinary meal, which they had given up when his own edict banned assemblies. Two of the people he interrogated, and these two under torture, were slave women whom he calls ministrae, servers or attendants, the feminine of minister, the Latin word that stands where the Greek of the New Testament has diakonos, the word behind "deacon." Peter had written to churches scattered across this very region, addressing his letter to "those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia" (1 Peter 1:1). Perhaps fifty years later a Roman governor in Bithynia took down, from hostile witnesses, the outline of what those congregations did on their fixed day, before it was light.

(Q) "They affirmed the whole of their guilt, or their error, was, that they met on a stated day before it was light, and addressed a form of prayer to Christ, as to a divinity, binding themselves by a solemn oath, not for the purposes of any wicked design, but never to commit any fraud, theft, or adultery, never to falsify their word, nor deny a trust when they should be called upon to deliver it up; after which it was their custom to separate, and then reassemble, to eat in common a harmless meal." + Source: Pliny, Letters 10.96 (Melmoth translation, revised by Bosanquet). The witnesses here are former members, questioned after they had already cursed Christ and sacrificed to the emperor’s image; whatever they were protecting, it was not the church. Melmoth’s "addressed a form of prayer to Christ, as to a divinity" renders a Latin phrase more usually given as "sang a hymn to Christ as to a god" (T2).

(T3) The new superstition had spread faster than his courtroom could punish it. + He stopped the trials. That is the detail to hold on to, because a Roman governor with the power of life and death did not suspend proceedings out of tenderness. He suspended them because of the arithmetic. Too many people were being denounced, from too many ranks, of both sexes and every age, and the prosecutions were spreading as prosecutions do once they start, with an unsigned pamphlet handed in to the court carrying a list of names. The thing had gone out of the towns and into the villages and the farms, which in an agricultural province means it had reached most of the population. His evidence for the scale is the most concrete in the letter, and a reader can picture all of it. The temples, he says, had been nearly deserted and were filling up again now that he had started executing people. The old rites were being performed once more. And the animal market had recovered: the sacrificial victims, which until recently had found almost no buyers, were selling. A man does not mention the price of sheep unless he has noticed that something has gone badly wrong with the religion of his province. So he proposed an amnesty. Let it be known that anyone who repents will be pardoned, he tells the emperor, and great numbers can be reclaimed. That is a sentence written by a competent administrator who has looked at the size of the problem and concluded that he cannot execute his way out of it, eighty years after the movement’s founder was put to death by a Roman governor in Judaea.

(Q) "In fact, this contagious superstition is not confined to the cities only, but has spread its infection among the neighbouring villages and country. Nevertheless, it still seems possible to restrain its progress. The temples, at least, which were once almost deserted, begin now to be frequented; and the sacred rites, after a long intermission, are again revived; while there is a general demand for the victims, which till lately found very few purchasers." + Source: Pliny, Letters 10.96 (Melmoth translation, revised by Bosanquet). He is arguing that the situation can still be recovered, and the proof he offers is how bad it had become. The "victims" are sacrificial animals; the demand for them is his index of religious observance, rather as a modern official might cite attendance figures (T3).

(T4) Praise a good ruler in public and you have instructed the next one. + Everyone has sat through a speech of thanks that nobody believed, least of all the speaker. Under Domitian the senate had made a great many of them, and Pliny says frankly that they used to grudge such speeches even a moment’s attention, because the thing was as hateful as it was false. So when his turn came he tried to do something else with the form. A panegyric is a speech of formal public praise, and his argument was that praise of a genuinely good ruler is a way of teaching his successors without presuming to lecture them: here is what applause sounds like, and here is what earns it. The content is more interesting than the occasion. He tells the senate that they will nowhere flatter this emperor as a god or a divine power, since they are speaking of a citizen rather than a tyrant, a father rather than a master. Then comes the line that outlived the occasion, and he introduces it as something he is hearing and learning for the first time himself: it is not the prince who stands above the laws but the laws that stand above the prince, and the same rules bind Caesar as consul that bind anybody else. Whether Trajan deserved it all is another question, and flattery is flattery even when the flattered man is decent. But the principle was set down in public, by a serving consul, in front of the senate, and it is the principle without which the later Christian argument that rulers are themselves under judgment has nowhere to stand. Christians in the empire had already arrived at the arrangement from the other side. Paul told Timothy to see that "supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way" (1 Timothy 2:1-2). Prayer for the emperor, not prayer to him. That distinction is exactly the one Pliny made in the senate in AD 100 and forgot in a Bithynian courtroom twelve years later, and the people he executed were the ones still making it.

(Q) "My principal object in doing so was, to confirm the emperor in his virtues, by paying them that tribute of applause which they so justly deserve; and at the same time to direct future princes, not in the formal way of lecture, but by his more engaging example, to those paths they must pursue if they would attain the same heights of glory." + Source: Pliny, Letters 3.18 (Melmoth translation, revised by Bosanquet). Writing to a friend about why he expanded his consular vote of thanks into the published Panegyricus. He goes on to say that instructing princes how to behave is a noble but presumptuous business, while holding up a good one as a beacon is just as useful and much more modest (T4).

(T5) A household is a kind of commonwealth, and a slave’s last wishes bind. + An illness went through his household and killed several of his slaves, some of them young men, and it upset him enough to write about it. Roman law gave a slave nothing to bequeath, because a slave could own nothing; whatever he had scraped together belonged to his master, and on his death the master simply kept it. Pliny had long since stopped behaving that way. He manumitted freely, which means he set slaves legally free, and he let the ones who were still slaves make what he calls a kind of will, which he then carried out as though it had legal force, on the one condition that the legacies stayed inside the household. His reason is the striking part: for slaves, he says, the house they live in is a kind of state and commonwealth. A man with nothing to leave was allowed to leave it to his own people. He is just as interesting about his grief. He knew the fashionable position, that a dead slave is a loss of property and that a man of spirit should be above minding. He will not have it. Their fortitude and philosophy he will not dispute, he says, but humane they certainly are not, since it is the very test of true manhood to feel the sorrow you are trying to resist. Elsewhere he had sent a favourite freedman, Zosimus, to Egypt at his own expense for the sake of his lungs, and when the bleeding came back he wrote to a friend in Gaul to ask for the loan of a house. This is humanitas, the Roman ideal of civilized kindness, working about as well as it ever worked: real decency inside an institution he never once thought of questioning. Paul had written to a slave owner in a Phrygian town about a runaway, asking him to take the man back "no longer as a bondservant but more than a bondservant, as a beloved brother" (Philemon 1:16), and had told the Galatians that in Christ "there is neither slave nor free" (Galatians 3:28). Pliny reached the kindness and not the brotherhood, and the limit showed the moment he needed information badly enough. In Bithynia he had two slave women tortured.

(Q) "I have allowed them to make a kind of will, which I observe as religiously as if they were legally entitled to that privilege. I receive and obey their last requests and injunctions as so many authoritative commands, suffering them to dispose of their effects to whom they please; with this single restriction, that they leave them to some one in my household, for to slaves the house they are in is a kind of state and commonwealth, so to speak." + Source: Pliny, Letters 8.16 (Melmoth translation, revised by Bosanquet). Written to a friend named Paternus after an epidemic in his household. The letter is one of the warmest things a Roman slave owner ever wrote, and one of the clearest measures of how far warmth could go while the institution stayed exactly where it was (T5).

(Q) "I predict (and I am persuaded I shall not be deceived) that your histories will be immortal. I frankly own therefore I so much the more earnestly wish to find a place in them." + Source: Pliny, Letters 7.33 (Melmoth translation, revised by Bosanquet). He is writing to Tacitus, and the rest of the letter supplies the story he would like included: his part in the prosecution of Baebius Massa, and the risk he ran. The prediction was right and the request was granted by the wrong book. Tacitus never mentions him; the histories that survive have a gap where those years belong; and the piece of Pliny that the world kept was a memo to an emperor about a sect he did not trouble to understand.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) One item of provincial housekeeping became the earliest outside description of Christian worship. + A century later a Christian lawyer in Carthage was writing an open defence of his people to the Roman authorities, and he went looking for precedents. He found this one. Tertullian, in the Apology, sets it out: "For the younger Pliny, when he was ruler of a province, having condemned some Christians to death, and driven some from their steadfastness, being still annoyed by their great numbers, at last sought the advice of Trajan, the reigning emperor." He then quotes the emperor’s answer and takes it apart as a lawyer takes apart a badly drafted statute: "O miserable deliverance, under the necessities of the case, a self-contradiction! It forbids them to be sought after as innocent, and it commands them to be punished as guilty." That is how the letter entered Christian literature, and it travelled from Tertullian’s Latin into the first history of the church. Eusebius of Caesarea, writing in Greek in the early fourth century, shows no sign of having read Pliny himself, but he had read Tertullian, whom he quotes, and he reports the episode at second hand: Pliny disturbed by the number of the martyrs, the emperor’s ruling that Christians were not to be hunted out but punished when found, and the detail that they rose at dawn and sang hymns to Christ as to a God while renouncing adultery and murder. The sentence Pliny wrote to excuse himself for suspending a prosecution had become, for Christians, a piece of evidence. What makes it evidence is precisely that he was not trying to provide any. A friendly witness describing Christian worship might be describing the worship he wished existed. A hostile magistrate, writing to his emperor, recording under interrogation what former members said the meetings involved, and concluding that the whole thing was absurd, has no motive at all to get it flattering. He got it right because he had no reason to get it wrong.

(†) His letter fixes a date, a place, and a hymn sung to Christ, and it stops there. + The letter is often asked to carry more than it says, and sometimes allowed to carry less, so it pays to be exact about what is in it. - A date and a place. Bithynia and Pontus, about AD 112, roughly eighty years after the crucifixion, written by a Roman governor to a Roman emperor. Both men are named, the province is named, and the document sits in a file of ordinary administration. - Christ worshipped as a god, by ordinary people. Not a teacher revered, not a memory honoured. A hymn sung to him before daylight, by farmers and townspeople and slaves, in a province where nobody had a reason to invent the practice. - A church with a shape. A fixed day, antiphonal singing, a binding oath, a common meal, and two women called ministrae who held some office in it. The ones who told him they had quit twenty years earlier, the lapsed, as the church came to call those who fell away under pressure, put Christians in the province by roughly AD 92, which is to say within living memory of the apostles. - Moral seriousness as the thing an enemy noticed. Pliny expected the usual charges, the secret crimes rumour attached to the sect, and what he turned up was an oath against fraud, theft, adultery and breaking faith. He had gone looking for a conspiracy and found a code. - What it does not give. No resurrection, no gospel, no doctrine beyond the hymn, no name of any Christian book or teacher. He tortured two slave women to get to the bottom of it and came away with "an absurd and extravagant superstition." He tells us what Christians did on a particular morning in a particular province. He never asked, and so cannot tell us, what they believed about the man they were singing to.

(†) Trajan’s short reply set the terms of Roman persecution for a century and a half. + The emperor wrote back briefly, as he usually did, and what he sent was less a law than a set of working instructions. Nothing of universal application could be laid down, he said, no fixed form a governor could simply apply to the next case. The governor was not to go hunting for Christians. If they were brought before him and the charge was proved they must be punished, but anyone who denied the faith and proved the denial by invoking the gods was to be pardoned, however suspect he had been before. And anonymous accusations were to be refused outright, as a dangerous precedent and unworthy of the age. The effect of that short reply lasted until the middle of the third century. Being a Christian remained a capital matter, but the empire did not look for Christians, which meant that whether a congregation lived in peace or buried its leaders depended on whether a neighbour chose to inform. That is how the old bishop Polycarp died at Smyrna, and how the martyrs of Lyons died in Gaul: local accusation, local magistrate, and the same test of cursing Christ and swearing by Caesar. It also explains the shape of Christian writing in the second century, which is full of open letters to emperors and governors arguing that Christians commit no crimes, since under Trajan’s rule the crime was the name and the only defence left was to attack that. Not until the emperor Decius in AD 250 required everyone in the empire to sacrifice and produce a certificate did Rome go looking. Tertullian saw the contradiction and said so. Rome had ruled that these people were not worth seeking out and were still worth killing when found, which is not a policy but an embarrassment with a signature on it. The embarrassment is Pliny’s doing, in the sense that he was the one who asked. So far as anything survives, nobody before him had put the question to an emperor in writing and got an answer that could be filed and followed.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: the incense, the torture, and the name itself. + He was, by the standards of Roman governors, a decent man, and that is what makes his own account of these trials so useful. What counts against him is not what later readers did with his letter. It is what he set down, in his own hand, that he did himself. - The name was the crime. He says plainly that he could not find out what the offence consisted of, that the people in front of him had confessed to nothing worse than a hymn and an oath, and that he executed them anyway for refusing to recant. Peter had written to churches in that same province with the answer to exactly this: "Yet if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in that name" (1 Peter 4:16). Pliny created the situation Peter had described, and a Christian reading the two documents side by side can see both halves of it at once. - The incense. What he required was small, cheap, and impossible. A few grains on a brazier in front of a statue settled the case, and the refusal to offer them is the whole of what he condemned. "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s" (Matthew 22:21) draws the line his test was designed to erase, and the people who would not cross it were giving the same answer the apostles had given the Sanhedrin, the ruling council in Jerusalem, when it ordered them to stop speaking: "We must obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29). - The torture. Two slave women, called servers in their congregation, were tortured on his order so that he could check the story, and he reports it in the same even tone he uses for aqueducts. He is the man who let his own slaves make wills because a household is a commonwealth (T5); the two things are about five years apart in the same career, and the second is what his kindness came to when it met an official need. The gospel that reached Bithynia had already called a runaway slave "a beloved brother" (Philemon 1:16). - The curiosity that stopped. He had the answer in the room. People were dying in front of him rather than say three words, and he wrote the behaviour down as obstinacy and moved on to the next item. Peter had told those same congregations to be "always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you" (1 Peter 3:15). They were ready to give it. He never asked the question. One more line belongs in the account, and it is his own. Writing to a friend on hearing of Martial’s death, he said of the poet’s verses that they would probably not outlive their author. He was wrong about Martial, wrong about which of his own works would survive, and wrong about which letter in his files mattered. A man can be a careful observer of everything except the thing in front of him.