Thread by @marinamaral2

This is what you get when you don’t show up for Pliny’s dinner party in Rome (circa 97 AD):

“My Dear Septicius Clarus,

Look here, you accepted my invitation to dinner and then did not show up. You will be assessed for the costs, to the last penny, and they are not small.

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You will have to foot the bill for all these preparations:

lettuce, one head per head; snails, three apiece; eggs, two each; pasta [to wit: spelt grits]; all the above served with mulsum and snow–yes, you will pay the tab for the snow too, in fact especially for the snow...

... because it died on the dish as a result of your negligence; then olives, boiled beets, gourds, onions, and one thousand other items no less elegantly prepared.

You would have heard comic skits, or a reader, or a musician, or–considering my generosity–all three.

... But you preferred oysters, stuffed sow’s womb, sea urchins, and Spanish bombshells, at whose home, I for one cannot imagine. But you will pay your debt.

You have acted with malice aforethought, maybe not to yourself, but certainly to me, but yes, to yourself as well.

... How much fun we would have had, how we would have laughed, how serious we would have been too.

You can dine at many homes with more pomp and circumstance, but nowhere with more fun, candor, and openness.

... In short: come to my next party, and unless you prefer to make your excuses to others in future, make your excuse to me forever.

Cordially yours,
Gaius Pliny.”

In another letter he wrote:

“I will come to supper, but must make this agreement beforehand, that I go when I please, that you treat me to nothing expensive, and that our conversation abound only in Socratic discourse”

I think I hate this guy.

“My estate, it is true, is almost entirely in land, though I have some money out at interest; but I shall find no difficulty in borrowing any sum I may want. I can get it from my wife's mother, whose purse I may use with the same freedom as my own;”

“Have you heard—I suppose, not yet, for the news has but just arrived — that Valerius Licinianus has become a professor in Sicily?”

Pliny loved a good gossip

“... You will think, perhaps, this situation, wretched and deplorable as it is, is what he well deserves for having stained the honourable profession of an orator with the crime of incest.”

WHAT

“That emperor had determined that Cornelia, chief of the Vestal Virgins, should be buried alive, from an extravagant notion that exemplary severities of this kind conferred lustre upon his reign.”