SOURCE: Stout, Selatie Edgar. Introduction to Scribe and Critic at Work in Pliny's Letters: Notes on the History and Present Status of the Text, pp. 1-10. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1954.

In the following essay, Stout offers a publication history of Pliny's Letters and notes that textual criticism on the work from the 1800s sheds important light on the authoritativeness of the source of the manuscripts used by scholars.

For about 375 years after the death of Pliny the Younger, which probably occurred a.d. 113, his Epistulae were circulated in two corpuses, one containing the nine books of the Letters to His Friends and the other containing in a single book the correspondence between him and the Emperor Trajan.

In a prefatory letter introducing Book i of the Letters to His Friends Pliny says that he has put together for publication some of his letters that had been written with...