Letters of Pliny Part 24

[Footnote 1028: Slaves who were purchased by the public. M.]

[Footnote 1029: The most probable conjecture (for it is a point of a good deal of obscurity) concerning the beneficiary seems to be that they were a certain number of soldiers exempted from the usual duty of their office, in order to be employed as a sort of body-guards to the general. These were probably foot; as the equites here mentioned were perhaps of the same nature, only that they served on horseback. Equites singulares Caesaris Augusti, &c., are frequently met with upon ancient inscriptions, and are generally supposed to mean the bodyguards of the emperor. M.]

[Footnote 1030: A province in Asia Minor, bounded by the Black Sea on the north, Bithynia on the west, Pontus on the east, and Phrygia on the south.]

[Footnote 1031: The Roman policy excluded slaves from entering into military service, and it was death if they did so. However, upon cases of great necessity, this maxim was dispensed with; but then they were first made free before they were received into the army, excepting only (as Servius in his notes upon Virgil) observes after the fatal battle of Cannae; when the public distress was so great that the Romans recruited their army with their slaves, though they had not time to give them their freedom. One reason, perhaps, of this policy might be that they did not think it safe to arm so considerable a body of men, whose numbers, in the times when the Roman luxury was at its highest, we may have some idea of by the instance which Pun the naturalist mentions of Claudius Isodorus, who at the time of his death was possessed of no less than 4,116 slaves, notwithstanding he had lost great numbers in the civil wars. Pun. Hist. Nat. x.x.xIII. 10. M.]

[Footnote 1032: A punishment among the Romans, usually inflicted upon slaves, by which they were to engage with wild beasts, or perform the part of gladiators, in the public shows. M.]

[Footnote 1033: It has been generally imagined that the ancients had not the art of raising water by engines; but this pa.s.sage seems to favour the contrary opinion. The word in the original is sipho, which Hesychius explains (as one of the commentators observes) "instrumentuns ad jaculandas aquas adversas incendia; an instrument to throw up water against fires." But there is a pa.s.sage in Seneca which seems to put this matter beyond conjecture, though none of the critics upon this place have taken notice of it: "Solemiss," says he, "duabus manibus inter se junctis aguam concipere, et com pressa utrinque palma in modum ciphonis exprimere" (Q. N. 1. II. 16) where we plainly see the use of this sipho was to throw UP water, and consequently the Romans were acquainted with that art. The account which Pliny gives of his fountains at Tusc.u.m is likewise another evident proof. M.]

[Footnote 1034: This was an anniversary custom observed throughout the empire on the 30th of December. M.]

[Footnote 1035: About $132,000.]

[Footnote 1036: About $80,000.]

[Footnote 1037: About $400,000. To those who are not acquainted with the immense riches of the ancients, it may seem incredible that a city, and not the capital one either, of a conquered province should expend so large a sum of money upon only the sh.e.l.l (as it appears to be) of a theatre: but Asia was esteemed the most considerable part of the world for wealth; its fertility and exportations (as Tully observes) exceeding that of all other countries. M.]

[Footnote 1038: The word carte, in the original, comprehends more than what we call the pat in our theatres, as at means the whole s.p.a.ce lit which the spectators sat. These theatres being open at the top, the galleries here mentioned were for the convenience of retiring in bad weather. M.]

[Footnote 1039: A place in which the athletic exercises were performed, and where the philosophers also used to read their lectures. M.]

[Footnote 1040: The Roman foot consisted of 11.71 inches of our standard, M.]

[Footnote 1041: A colony in the district of Cataonia, in Cappadocia.]

[Footnote 1042: The honorary senators, that is, such who were not received into the council of the city by election, but by the appointment of the emperor, paid a certain sum of money upon their admission into the senate. M.]

[Footnote 1043: "Graeculi. Even under the empire, with its relaxed morality and luxurious tone, the Romans continued to apply this contemptuous designation to people to whom they owed what taste for art and culture they possessed." Church and Brodribb.]

[Footnote 1044: A Roman cubit is equal to a foot 5.406 inches of our measure.

Arbuthanot's Tab. M.]

[Footnote 1045: About $480.]

[Footnote 1046: About $120.]

[Footnote 1047: A diploma is properly a grant of certain privileges either to particular places or persons. It signifies also grants of other kinds; and it sometimes means post-warrants, as, perhaps, it does in this place. M.]

[Footnote 1048: A city in Bithynia. M.]

[Footnote 1049: Cybele, Rhea, or Ops, as she is otherwise called; from whom, according to the pagan creed, the rest of the G.o.ds are supposed to have descended. M.]

[Footnote 1040: Whatever was legally consecrated was ever afterwards unapplicable to profane uses. M.]

[Footnote 1041: That is, a city not admitted to enjoy the laws and privileges of Rome. M.]

[Footnote 1042: The reason why they did not choose to borrow of the public at the same rate of interest which they paid to private persons was (as one of the Commentators observes) because in the former instance they were obliged to give security, whereas in the latter they could raise money upon their personal credit. M.]

[Footnote 1043: These, in the original inst.i.tution as settled by Augustus, were only commanders of his body-guards; but in the later times of the Roman empire they were next in authority under the emperor, to whom they seem to have acted as a sort of prime ministers. M.]

[Footnote 1044: The provinces were divided into, a kind of circuits called conventus, whither the proconsuls used to go in order to administer justice. The judges here mentioned must not be understood to mean the same sort of judicial officers as with us: they rather answered to our juries. M.]

[Footnote 1045: By the imperial const.i.tutions the philosophers were exempted from all public functions. Catariscus. M.]

[Footnote 1046: About $24,000.]

[Footnote 1047: Geographers are not agreed where to place this city; Cellarius conjectures it may possibly be the same with Prusa ad Olympum, Prusa at the foot of Mount Olympus in Mysia.]

[Footnote 1048: Domitian.]

[Footnote 1049: That is, whether they should be considered in a state of freedom or slavery.

[Footnote 1050: "Parents throughout the entire ancient world had the right to expose their children and leave them to their fate. Hence would sometimes arise the question whether such a child, if found and brought up by another, was ent.i.tled to his freedom, whether also the person thus adopting him must grant him his freedom without repayment for the cost of maintenance." Church and Brodribb.]

[Footnote 1051: "This decision of Trajan, the effect of which would be that persons would be slow to adopt an abandoned child which, when brought up, its unnatural parents could claim back without any compensation for its nurture, seems harsh, and we find that it was disregarded by the later emperors in their legal decisions on the subject." Church and Brodribb.]

[Footnote 1052: And consequently by the Roman laws unapplicable to any other purpose. M.]

[Footnote 1053: The Roman provinces in the times of the emperors were of two sorts: those which were distinguished by the name of the provinciae Caesaris and the provinciae senatus. The provinciae Caesaris, or imperial provinces, were such as the emperor, for reasons of policy, reserved to his own immediate administration, or of those whom he thought proper to appoint: the provinciae senatus, or proconsular provinces, were such as he left to the government of proconsuls or praetors, chosen in the ordinary method of election. (Vid. Suet, in Aug.

V. 47.) Of the former kind was Bithynis, at the time when our author presided there. (Vid. Ma.s.son. Vit. Plin. p. 133.) M.]

[Footnote 1054: A province in Asia, bordering upon the Black Sea, and by some ancient geographers considered as one province with Bithynia. M.]

[Footnote 1055: About $2,000. M.]

[Footnote 1056: Cities of Pontus near the Euxine or Black Sea. M.]

[Footnote 1057: Gordium, the old capital of Phrygia. It afterwards, in the reign of the Emperor Augustus, received the name of Juliopohs. (See Smith's Cla.s.sical Diet.)]

[Footnote 1058: Pompey the Great having subdued Mithridates, and by that means enlarged the Roman empire, pa.s.sed several laws relating to the newly conquered provinces, and, among others, that which is here mentioned. M.]

[Footnote 1059: The right of electing Senators did not originally belong to the censors, who were only, as Cicero somewhere calls them, guardians of the discipline and manners of the city; but in process of time they engrossed the whole privilege of conferring that honour. M.]

[Footnote 1060: This, probably, was some act whereby the city was to ratify and confirm the proceedings of Dion under the commission a.s.signed to him.]

[Footnote 1061: It was a notion which generally prevailed with the ancients, in the Jewish as well as heathen world, that there was a pollution in the contact of dead bodies, and this they extended to the very house in which the corpse lay, and even to the uncovered vessels that stood in the same room. (Vid. Pot. Antiq. V. II. 181.) From some such opinion as this it is probable that the circ.u.mstance, here mentioned, of placing Trajan's statue where these bodies were deposited, was esteemed as a mark of disrespect to his person.]

[Footnote 1062: A thriving Greek colony in the territory of Sinopis, on the Euxine.]

[Footnote 1063: A colony of Athenians in the province of Pontus. Their town, Amisus, on the coast, was one of the residences of Mithridates.]

[Footnote 1064: Casaubon, in his observations upon Theophrastus (as cited by one of the commentators) informs us that there were at Athens and other cities of Greece Certain fraternities which paid into a common chest a monthly contribution towards the support of such of their members who had fallen into misfortunes; upon condition that, if ever they arrived to more prosperous circ.u.mstances, they should repay into the general fund the money so advanced. M.]

[Footnote 1065: By the law for encouragement of matrimony (some account of which has already been given in the notes above), as a penalty upon those who lived bachelors, they were declared incapable of inheriting any legacy by will; so likewise, if being married, they had no children, they could not claim the full advantage of benefactions of that kind.]

[Footnote 1066: This letter is esteemed as almost the only genuine monument of ecclesiastical antiquity relating to the times immediately succeeding the Apostles, it being written at most not above forty years after the death of St. Paul. It was preserved by the Christians themselves as a clear and unsuspicious evidence of the purity of their doctrines, and is frequently appealed to by the early writers of the Church against the calumnies of their adversaries. M.]