To accomplish this end became the great object of Pliny’s life. To this we owe the inimitable series of Letters by which the friend and minister of Trajan has lived, and will live on. In some respects the Letters of Pliny are even more valuable than the voluminous and many-coloured correspondence of Cicero. Cicero lived in a momentous age. He was one of the chief actors in a great revolution which materially altered the course of the world’s history. Pliny lived in a comparatively “still” period, when one of the greatest of the Roman sovereigns was at the helm of public affairs; so in his picture we find none of the stress and storm which live along the pages of Cicero’s correspondence. It is an everyday life which Pliny depicts with such skill and vivid imagery, the life, after all, which “finds” the majority of men and women. But it was the bright side of ancient society which Pliny loved to describe. Without his Letters we should have had no notion of the warm and tender friendships--of the simple pleasures--of the loving charities--of the lofty ideals of so many of the _élite_ of Roman society in the second century. It has been well said that Pliny felt that he lacked the power to write a great history, such as that which Tacitus, with whom he was closely associated, or even his younger friend Suetonius in an inferior degree, have given us. So he chose, fortunately for us, to strike out another line altogether, a perfectly new line, and in his ten Books[23] of Letters he gives us simply a domestic picture of everyday life in his time. * * * * * They were no ordinary Letters; we can without any great effort of imagination picture to ourselves the famous Letter-writer touching and retouching his correspondence. Some modern critics in judging his style do not hesitate to place his Latinity on a level with that of Cicero. Renan, no mean judge of style, in words we have already quoted, speaks of “la langue précieuse et raffinée de Pline.” The subjects he loved to dwell on were sometimes literature, at others, the beauties of nature, the quiet charms of country life--“me nihil æque ac naturæ opera delectant,” he wrote once. He eloquently describes the Clitumnus fountain, and the villa overlooking the Tiber valley; very elaborate and graceful are his descriptions of scenery; yet more attractive to us are his pictures of the “busy idleness” of the rich and noble of his day.