In the polite world of Rome, literature was extremely fashionable. Everybody was writing and insisting upon reading his compositions to his friends. These literary labours were often pursued with amazing diligence. Both Pliny and his uncle devoted themselves to reading and writing almost from morning to night, and Pliny the Younger tells how he was laughed at for carrying his notebooks with him even when he was out boar-hunting. By the time he was fourteen he had written a Greek tragedy. His sketch of a day’s doings at his country villa shows the literary perseverance of a Roman gentleman. He rose at six and began to compose in his bedroom. Then he would summon his secretary to take down the result from dictation. At ten or eleven he would continue his work in some shady colonnade, or under the trees in the garden, after which he drove out, still reading. “A short siesta, a walk, declamation in Greek and Latin, after the habit of Cicero, gymnastic exercise, and the bath, filled the space until dinner-time arrived.” Even during dinner a book was read aloud and the evening was enlivened by acting or music or conversation. Many of Pliny’s friends, such as Suetonius and Silius Italicus, emulated this studious existence, and his uncle even excelled it. The elder Pliny consulted two thousand volumes in the writing of his Natural History alone, and he left one hundred and sixty volumes of closely written notes and excerpts. Nor was this an unimportant circle of literary bookworms. On the contrary, it was the highest society of the day. The elder Pliny was on terms of daily intercourse with the Emperor Vespasian, and the younger Pliny besides being governor of Bithynia was intimate with Trajan.