the elder Pliny and Spurinna, is distinguished by a virtuous calm, an almost painful monotony of habit, in which there seems to have been nothing to reform except, perhaps, a certain moral rigidity.(827) Above all, and surely it is the most certain proof and source of the moral soundness of any age, the ideal of womanhood was still high, and it was even then not seldom realised. There may have been many who justified the complaint of moralists that mothers did not guard with vigilant care the purity of their children. But there were women of the circle of Tacitus and Pliny as spotless as the half-legendary Lucretia, as they were far more accomplished, and probably far more charming. It is often said that women sink or rise according to the level of the men with whom they are linked. If that be true, there must have been many good men in the days of the Flavian dynasty. The younger Pliny, whose name, before his adoption, was Publius Caecilius Secundus,(828) was descended from families which had been settled at Como since the time of the first Caesar.(829) They belonged to the local aristocracy, and possessed estates and villas around the lake. Pliny’s father, who had held high municipal office, died early, but the boy had the great advantage of the guardianship of Verginius Rufus, for whose character and achievements his ward felt the profoundest reverence.(830) That great soldier had been governor of Upper Germany at the close of Nero’s reign, and, with a deference to old constitutional principles, which Pliny must have admired, had twice, at the peril of his life, refused to receive the imperial place at the hands of his clamorous legions.(831) Pliny was born in 61 or 62 A.D., the time which saw the death of Burrus, the retirement of Seneca from public life, and the marriage of Nero with Poppaea.(832) His infancy therefore coincided with the last and wildest excesses of the Neronian tyranny. But country places like Como felt but little of the shock of these moral earthquakes. There was no school in Como till one was founded by Pliny’s own generosity.(833) But the boy had probably, in his early years, the care of his uncle, the author of the _Natural History_, who, during the worst years of the Terror, was living, like many others, in studious retirement on his estates.(834) The uncle and nephew were men of very different temperament, but there can be little doubt that the character and habits of the older man profoundly influenced the ideals of the younger. The elder Pliny would have been an extraordinary character even in a puritan age; he seems almost a miracle in the age of the Claudian Caesars. He was born in 23 A.D., in the reign of Tiberius; and his early youth and manhood cover the reigns of Caligula and Claudius. He was only 32 when Nero came to the throne. He returned to Rome in 71 to hold a high place in the councils of Vespasian.(835) That more than monastic asceticism, that jealous hoarding