Pliny was a friend and admirer of Martial, and, with his usual generous hand, he made the poet a present when he left Rome for ever to pass his last years at Bilbilis.(905) The needy epigrammatist was only a distant observer, or hanger-on of that world of wealth and refinement in which Pliny was a conspicuous figure. But from both Pliny and Martial we get very much the same impression of the literary movement in the reign of Domitian. Pliny himself is perhaps its best representative. He is a true son of the Roman schools, as they had been revived and strengthened by Vespasian, for a life of many generations. Pliny does not think slightly of the literary efforts of his own day: some of them he even overrates. But already the Roman mind had bent its neck to that thraldom to the past, to that routine of rhetorical discipline, which, along with other causes, produced the combination of ambitious effort and mediocre performance that, for the last three centuries of the Empire, is the characteristic of all literary culture. From his great teacher Quintilian Pliny had imbibed a profound reverence for Cicero.(906) Alike in his career of honours and his literary pursuits, he loves to think that he is treading in the great orator’s footsteps. In answer to a taunt of Regulus, he once boldly avowed his preference for the Ciceronian oratory to that of his own day. Demosthenes is also sometimes his model, though he feels keenly the difference that separates them.(907) Indeed his reverence for Greece as the mother of letters, art, and civic life was one of Pliny’s sincerest and most honourable feelings. To a man who had been appointed to high office in Greece he preaches, in earnest tones, the duty of reverence for that gifted race whose age was consecrated by the memories of its glorious prime.(908) Pliny’s Greek studies must have begun very early. At the age of fourteen he had written a Greek tragedy, for which, however, he modestly does not claim much merit.(909) He had always a certain taste for poetry, but it seems to have been merely the taste created or enforced by the constant study of the poets under the grammarian. Once, while detained by bad weather on his way back from military service in Asia, he amused himself with composing in elegiac and heroic verse.(910) Later in his career, he published a volume of poems in hendecasyllabic metre, written on various occasions. But there was no inspiration behind these conventional exercises. He was chiefly moved to write in verse, as he naïvely confesses, by the example of the great orators who beguiled their leisure in this way. Among his published poems there were some with a flavour of Catullan lubricity, which offended or astonished some of his severer friends, who thought such doubtful lightness unworthy of a grave character and a great position.(911) No better illustration could be found of Pliny’s incorrigible conventionality in such things than the defence