Praetor in 93.

So far his advancement had been rapid, but evil times succeeded.
Domitian went from bad to worse. Always moody, suspicious, and
revengeful, he began to imitate the worst vices of his predecessors of
the line of Augustus. His hand fell heavily upon the Senatorial order,
and another era of proscription began, in which the dreaded delatores
again became the "terror" of Rome. It was a time of spoliation and
murder, and Pliny writes of it with a shudder. Contrasting with the
happy regime of Trajan that which prevailed in his youth and early
manhood, he declares that virtue was regarded with suspicion and a
premium set upon idleness, that in the camps the generals lacked
authority and the soldiers had no sense of obedience, while, when he
entered the Senate, he found it a craven and tongueless assembly (Curiam
trepidam et elinguem), only convened to perpetrate some piece of
villainy for the Emperor, or to humiliate the Senators by the sense of
their own impotence. Pliny was not the man to make a bold stand against
tyranny, and, during those perilous years, one can well believe that he
did his best to avoid compromising himself, though his sympathies were
wholly on the side of his proscribed friends. He was a typical
official, suave and polished in manner, yet without that perilous
enthusiasm which would simply have marked him for destruction. For two
years he was Prefect of the Military Treasury, an office directly in the
gift of the Emperor, and it would seem, therefore, that his character
for uprightness stood him in good stead with the tyrant even in his
worst years. He did not, like so many of the Roman nobles, retire from
public life and enter into the sullen opposition which enraged the
Emperors even more than active and declared antagonism.

In one passage, indeed, Pliny declares that he, too, was on the black