He also left more than £4000 for public baths, and a sum of nearly £16,000
to his freedmen, and for communal feasts. On two of his estates he built
or repaired temples at his own expense.(1107) His private benefactions
were on a similar scale. It is not necessary to adopt the cynical
conclusion that Pliny has told us all his liberality. The kindly delicacy
with which Pliny claims the right of a second father to make up the dowry
of the daughter of his friend Quintilian, might surely save him from such
an imputation.(1108) In the same spirit he offers to Romatius Firmus the
£2500 which was needed to raise his fortune to the level of equestrian
rank.(1109) When the philosophers were banished by Domitian, Pliny, who
was then praetor, at the most imminent risk visited his friend
Artemidorus, and lent him, free of interest, a considerable sum of
money.(1110) The daughter of one of his friends was left with an
embarrassed estate; Pliny took up all the debts and left Calvina with an
inheritance free from all burdens.(1111) He gave his old nurse a little
estate which cost him about £800.(1112) But the amount of this good man’s
gifts, which might shame a modern testator with ten times his fortune, is
not so striking as the kindness which prompted them, and the modest
delicacy with which they were made.
Yet Pliny, as we have said, is only a shining example of a numerous class
of more obscure benefactors. For a thousand who know his Letters, there
are few who have read the stone records of similar generosity. Yet these
memorials abound for those who care to read them. And any one who will
spend a few days, or even a few well-directed hours, in examining the
inscriptions of the early Empire, will find many a common, self-complacent
prejudice melting away. He will discover a profusion of generosity to add
to the beauty, dignity, or convenience of the parent city, to lighten the
dulness of ordinary life, to bring all ranks together in common scenes of
enjoyment, to relieve want and suffering among the indigent. The motives
of this extraordinary liberality were indeed often mixed, and it was, from
our point of view, often misdirected. The gifts were sometimes made merely
to win popularity, or to repay civic honours which had been conferred by
the populace. They were too often devoted to gladiatorial shows and other
exhibitions which only debased the spectators. Yet the greatest part of
them were expended on objects of public utility—baths, theatres, markets,
or new roads and aqueducts, or on those public banquets which knitted all
ranks together. There was in those days an immense “civic ardour,” an
almost passionate rivalry, to make the mother city a more pleasant and a
more splendid home. The endless foundations for civic feasts to all
orders, in which even children and slaves were not forgotten, with a
distribution of money at the close, softened the sharp distinctions of
rank, and gave an appreciable relief to poverty. Other foundations were