A source-book of ancient history - The Search For Mecca

Pliny the
Younger.
Suetonius,
about 75-
160 A.D.
Aulus
Gellius,
born about
130 A.D.
Revival of
Hellenic
literature.
Dio Chrysostom,
about
40 to after
1X2 A.D.
Plutarch,
p. 74.
Kpictetus,
about 50-120.
320 Introduction to the Sources
When Rome renounced the repubHc, so far as to consider
her emperors good, she lost her motive for literary
art. Her writers became shallow and insipid, without
thought or imagination, who could only repeat what they
had read. The best of this class was Pliny the Younger,
an orator, and for a time governor of Bithynia. One of
his speeches, a eulogy on Trajan, which has come down
to us, is an example of the tiresome, feeble style of the
day. His Letters, polished yet trivial, are valuable for the
study of the social life and literary activities of his time.
The principate of Hadrian is represented in literature by
Suetonius, for a time the emperor's secretary. In his
Lives of the Ccesars he arranges his material topically, with
little reference to chronological order. Though accurate
in his presentation of political matters, generally too of
personal details, he has marred his writings by the introduction
of a great amount of unfounded gossip and
calumny against the princes and their families. He was a
compiler without literary talent. The same is true of a
younger contemporary, Aulus Gellius, whose Attic Nights
is a storehouse of literary, religious, political and legal
antiquities. The title is due to the circumstance that
the compilation of the work occupied the author's evenings
during a winter spent in Athens.
A revival of Hellenic literature in the second century
A.D. produced some authors of unusual merit. The
literary activity of Dio Chrysostom, a rhetorician and
moralist, extends from Vespasian to Trajan. Among his
Orations are some which treat interestingly of morals and
of political and social conditions in Greece. About the
same time Plutarch wrote his Lives, referred to in the
chapter on Greek sources.
In the same generation with
Plutarch lived Epictetus, a Stoic philosopher, who taught