Letters

Pliny was a senator and advocate who published nine books of letters to friends. A tenth book contains his exchanges with Trajan, most of them written while he governed the province of Bithynia and Pontus on the south coast of the Black Sea, about AD 110–112.

In letter 10.96 he asks the emperor how to proceed against people denounced to him as Christians. He explains what he has done so far, and what former Christians told him under questioning: that they met before daybreak on a fixed day, recited a hymn “to Christ, as though he were a god”, bound themselves by oath to abstain from theft, adultery and breach of faith, and later met again for an ordinary meal. He adds that he had two women called deaconesses tortured and found only a “debased superstition”. In the same letter the translation has him order those who persisted “to be taken away to prison”; the Latin says only that he ordered them to be led away (duci iussi). Trajan’s answer (10.97) is that Christians are not to be hunted out; that those who are accused and convicted are to be punished, unless they deny the charge and prove it by praying to the gods; and that anonymous accusations are to carry no weight. Both letters are official documents by the men involved. Pliny’s knowledge of Christian practice is second-hand, drawn from the accused, and he writes as their judge.