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moveantur, honestiores deportentur, tenuiores capite puniantur.' These two rescripts are with much probability taken to refer to the Christians; but they would obviously have been entirely unnecessary if Trajan's rescript was intended to authorise anything like a general persecution.

Into the question of the authenticity of these two letters I do not intend to enter. Several of the arguments used against them are disarmed by the view taken above, others are trifling and deserve very little weight. Indeed Aubé himself in his Histoire des Persecutions, after first stating his disbelief that the Letters as we have them are authentic, and after stating the principal difficulties involved in them, discovers difficulties. equally great in any other view, and in the end appears to retract his previously-expressed disbelief. What has sometimes seemed the greatest difficulty is Pliny's statement about the number of the Christians being so great that the temples were nearly deserted, whereas it is quite certain, and is even attested one hundred years later by Origen, that the Christians were then comparatively few. This difficulty is, I think, much obviated by three considerations: (1) Pliny, it is true, speaks of the 'numerus periclitantium,' and says 'multi omnis aetatis, utriusque sexus . . . vocantur in periculum'; but from a former passage in the letter it is quite clear that a considerable proportion of these were not Christians and never had been, but were simply accused by the malice of private enemies; (2) even if the temples were nearly deserted, it is not necessary to suppose that Christianity alone was the cause of this, when we remember that the Jews equally with the Christians would refuse to attend them, and that the former were probably far more numerous than the latter; and (3) the case with regard to the temples was probably much exaggerated by those whose interests were all involved in the temple-worship, like the silver shrine makers at Ephesus, and who may probably have complained to Pliny that their trade was being ruined.

One other objection may perhaps be mentioned, that Pliny neither makes any allusion to the Christians in any other letter, and indeed waits for at any rate more than year before he

brings the question before Trajan. In answer to this it seems sufficient to repeat that Pliny began by acting on and enforcing the edict with regard to hetaeriae and did not personally

regard the danger of Christianity as serious, and it was only when, as he says, 'ipso tractatu diffundente se crimine plures species inciderunt,') that he felt himself in a difficulty, and inquired, and this after all was the gist of his letter, whether it would not be better to give the accused an opportunity of recantation, which, though contrary to the principles of Roman law, seemed the most expedient course in the circumstances. 7

AUTHORITIES FOR THE TEXT

Up to the year 1502, although no less than five editions of Pliny's letters had been published in Italy, his correspondence with Trajan was altogether unknown, and in spite of allusions in Tertullian, Eusebius, or Orosius, apparently unsuspected. Of the four families into which Keil, in the preface to his critical edition of 1870, divides the MSS. of Pliny, members of three only had up to that time been discovered; (1) those containing the first four Books and six letters of Book V, and represented by the Codex Florentinus; (2) those, dating mostly from the fifteenth century, which contain eight books, the eighth being omitted, and Book ix, minus letter 16, inscribed as Book viii. This family is best represented by the Codex Dresdensis (3), a family containing nine books. The most complete representative of this family, the Codex Mediceus, was not brought to Italy till 1508, and was not used for any edition of Pliny till the second edition of Catanaeus in 1518; but the Roman edition of the letters published in 1474 contained some of the letters of Book viii, and must have been based on some unknown and imperfect member of this family. Based on some or other of these MSS. then, there had appeared (1) the editio princeps, in 1471; (2) the Roman edition in 1474; (3) a Neapolitan edition in 1476; (4) the edition of Pomponius Laetus in 1490; and (5) the edition of Beroaldus in 1498. The Pliny-Trajan letters appeared in none of these editions, which also wanted Ep. 16 of ix; and in Book viii, Epp. 8, § 3-18, § 11. But in May of 1502 Hieronymus Avantius of Verona, who had previously edited Sallust's Catiline for the Aldine Press, brought out 'C. Plinii Iunioris ad Traianum Epistole 46, nuper reperte cum

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eiusdem responsis.' These forty-six letters are those numbered in the present edition 41-121. The number forty-six is made up by including Trajan's answers under Pliny's letters, and by counting (in Ep. 58) the letters of Domitian and the edict of Nerva. The first of these letters (41-3) is numbered xxvii, and the last (120-1) lxxiii. In his dedicatory letter to Cardinal Bembo, Avantius says, 'Petri Leandri industria ex Gallia Plinii iunioris ad Traianum epistolas licet mancas depravatasque habuimus.' Taken alone these words throw little light on the sources of this edition, except that they were brought from France. The edition was evidently carelessly brought out; it is full of errors and misspellings, and in particular has all the Greek words and expressions either incorrectly given or altogether omitted. Later in the same year, the same forty-six letters were edited by Beroaldus at Bononia. In this edition a number of the mistakes made by Avantius are corrected, but the emendations are all such as might well occur to a sagacious editor, and there is no sign whatever of any original authority having been consulted. In 1506 the same letters were published for the third time by Catanaeus at Milan, together with the letters known up to that time of the nine books. His language in the preface would seem to imply that he had consulted a MS.: 'Fatear necesse est primum nobis in animo fuisse has epistolas intactas relinquere, quia uno tantum exemplari praeter impressa, nec illo admodum vetusto adiuti fuimus.' But both Orelli and Keil are of opinion that his emendations are due to his own conjectures only, and it is at any rate certain that if he had any MS. before him, it was merely the same mutilated copy which Avantius had used four years before. In 1508, however, was published the first Aldine edition of Pliny's letters, containing for the first time the hitherto missing letters in Book viii (placed now in its right order before Book ix), and also the first twenty-six letters (according to the Avantian numeration, 1-40 in my edition) of the Pliny-Trajan letters. He tells us in his letter of dedication to Aloisius Mocenigo, Venetian ambassador in Paris, how he was

1 The edition is dated January 1502, but as March was the first month of the Italian year, it is really eight months later than the edition of Avantius. Orelli, who regarded the edition of Beroaldus as

the earliest in his Historia Critica of 1833, corrected his mistake in 1838. Döring inexcusably makes the same mistake in 1843.

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enabled to do this: 'Ex quo tu e Gallia . . . has Plinii epistolas in Italiam reportasti, in membrana scriptas, atque adeo diversis a nostris characteribus ut, nisi quis diu assueverit, non queat legere coepi sperare fore aetate nostra ut plurimi ex bonis auctoribus, quos non extare credimus, inveniantur'; and farther on Sed tibi in primis habenda est plurima gratia, inclyte Aloisi, qui exemplar ipsum epistolarum reportasti in Italiam, mihique dedisti ut excusum publicarem. Deinde Iucundo Veronensi, viro singulari ingenio ac bonarum literarum studiosissimo, quod et easdem Secundi epistolas ab eo ipso exemplari a se descriptas diligenter, ut facit omnia . . . ad me ipse sua sponte . . . adportaverit, idque biennio antequam tu ipsum mihi exemplar publicandum tradidisses.' We are now better able to understand the vague reference to ' Gallia' made by Avantius. A quotation from Budaeus in his Annotationes in Pandectas, first published in 1506, will make it clearer still. In citing from viii 10, he says, 'Verum haec epistola et aliae non paucae in codicibus impressis non leguntur; nos integrum ferme Plinium habemus, primum apud Parisios repertum opera Iucundi sacerdotis, hominis antiquarii architectique famigerati.' This Ioannes Iucundus, or Giacondo, of Verona, was an ecclesiastic, scholar, and architect. In the latter capacity he was invited to Paris by Louis XII in 1499 to build the Pont Notre Dâme over the Seine. He was supposed, probably without reason, to have also built the Pont d'Hôtel Dieu, whence the distich

'Iocundus geminum imposuit tibi, Sequana, pontem ;
Hunc tu iure potes dicere pontificem.'

However, while at Paris, he seems to have discovered this codex of Pliny's letters (Keil's family 4), and to have made a copy of it, which he sent to Aldus. Another copy of a portion of the letters, the first twenty-six being for some reason which we cannot determine omitted, had previously been made, certainly before 1502, by one Petrus Leander, and by him sent or brought to Avantius. The original codex, after having been used as we have seen by Budaeus, was subsequently, before 1508, taken to Italy by Mocenigo and given to Aldus, who based his first edition either on the copy of Iucundus or the original codex or both. Since that time all trace of the original codex has been

lost. It has never been used by any editor of Pliny since the first Aldine edition, for though Catanaeus in the preface to his second edition of 1518 talks of having seen 'descriptas de vetussimo codice germanico plures ad Traianum et insuper quasdam eiusdem Plinii ad amicos epistolas,' his text slavishly follows the first Aldine published ten years before, and we can hardly acquit Catanaeus of wilfully ignoring this edition, and attempting to give a factitious originality to his own edition by this mention of the supposed 'codex germanicus.' The only original authorities therefore for the Pliny-Trajan letters have hitherto been the edition of Avantius for Epp., 41-121, taken from a copy of the Codex Parisiensis made by Petrus Leander, and the first Aldine edition for the whole, taken from a copy of the codex made by Iucundus, and possibly from a collation of the codex itself. Keil in his restoration of the original text has taken Avantius as his first authority for those letters contained in the edition, and the Aldine edition necessarily for the rest. His opinion, however, of the trustworthiness of Aldus, in spite of the materials at his disposal, is not very high. He believes that for the previously published letters Aldus did very little more than alter the edition of Avantius by emendations and interpolations of his own, while for the before unpublished letters he believes that he has followed the MS. less accurately than Avantius had for the others. I have now to mention a discovery which I have been fortunate enough to make quite recently in the Bodleian library, and which will, I believe, make it necessary somewhat to modify Keil's view of the Aldine edition, and at the same time will give us an earlier authority for the missing letters both of Book viii and of the Pliny-Trajan correspondence than the Aldine edition. On consulting the Bodleian copy of Avantius I found (1) that it was bound up together with the edition of Beroaldus of 1498; (2) that the missing letters in both editions, i.e. viii 8, § 3-18 § 11 in the latter, and 1-40 of the Pliny-Trajan letters in the former, were added in MS. in Carolingian minuscules on paper similar in size and appearance to that of the printed editions; (3) that the whole book, both printed and MS. portions, had in the margin a number of variant readings, in the same handwriting, and that very marked and striking. The book, it appeared from the titlepage, had belonged to Thomas Hearne the antiquary, who bought

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