walked and played tennis to keep himself in health, wrote Greek and
Latin lyrics, and maintained a keen interest in all that went on in the
capital. Corellius Rufus is another of the older men of whom Pliny
writes with sincere affection, and he helped to pay the debt of
gratitude he owed him by numerous acts of kindness to his daughter
Crellia. Voconius Romanus is another of his closest friends, and Pliny
tells us that he wrote such admirable letters that you would think the
Muses themselves must speak in Latin. His literary associates numbered
among them Caius Cornelius Tacitus, Silius Italicus the poet--whose
veneration for Virgil was so great that he kept his master's birthday
with more solemnity than his own, and visited his tomb on the Bay of
Naples with as much respect as worshippers pay to a temple,--Martial the
epigrammatist, Suetonius Tranquillus the historian, and others such as
Passennus Paullus, Caninius Rufus, Virgilius Romanus, and Caius Fannius,
whose works have not survived the wreck of time, though Pliny showers
upon all of them enthusiastic and indiscriminate praise. Again, he
enjoyed the friendship of a number of distinguished foreigners,
professional rhetoricians and philosophers, who came back to Rome after
their sentence of banishment, passed by Domitian, had been revoked by
Nerva and Trajan. Euphrates, Artemidorus, and Isaeus were the three
most famous, and their respective styles are carefully described by
Pliny. Even more interesting perhaps is the gallery of Roman ladies,
whose portraits are limned with so fine and discriminating a touch.
Juvenal again is responsible for much misconception as to the part the
women of Rome played in Roman society. The appalling Sixth Satire, in
which he unhesitatingly declares that most women--if not all--are bad,
and that virtue and chastity are so rare as to be almost unknown, in
which he roundly accuses them of all the vices known to human depravity,
reads like a monstrous and disgraceful libel on the sex when one turns
to Pliny and makes the acquaintance of Arria, Fannia, Corellia, and