We are less able to judge the literary part of the flattering epistle (iv. 3) to Antoninus, afterwards Emperor, which is so much in the extravagant style of Roman compliment that, in the absence of the work referred to, it gives us no critical information whatever. The literary characteristic of the future Pius appeared to Pliny to be the mixture of the severe with the agreeable—of the grave with the gay, which made his style extraordinary sweet, as the eighteenth century would have said. The usual honey and its maker-bees put in the usual appearance to express Pliny’s sensations when he reads his correspondent’s Greek epigrams and iambics. He thinks of Callimachus or Herodes (doubtless our just recovered Herondas). Only neither has done anything so humane, so venust, so sweet, so loving, so keen, so correct. How could a Roman write such Greek? It is more Attic than Athens, and Pliny grudges such a writer to the Greeks, though there is no doubt that if Antoninus would only write in his mother tongue he would do better still. IV. 14, enclosing some hendecasyllabics which have not come down (from other specimens they are a tolerable loss), contains some interesting and curious remarks on the always burning and never yet settled question of morality in literature. Pliny adopts to the full, as a matter of principle, the doctrine which his friend Martial had both practised and preached, that naughty things, and even the naughtiest words, may figure in poetry,—that, as Pliny himself puts it, with the still higher authority of Catullus— “Nam castum esse decet pium poetam Ipsum—versiculos nihil necesse est.” Only he himself declines to use the naughty words,[362] not out of prudery, but out of timidity. He follows this up with the sounder doctrine that everything must be judged in its own kind. Footnote 362: _Verba nuda._