“I must see the grown-up Pliny’s noble brow and my Calpurnia’s eyes—­and the Tartarean frown of Tacitus, who, I hear, is with you.  Quadratus says you are at the smallest of your Como villas.  The mood suits me.  At Tusculum or Tibur or Praeneste or Laurentum you might have longed for me in vain.  In your Arcadian retreat expect me on the tenth day.”

The hale old woman took a terrible advantage of her years and her tongue to do as she chose among her acquaintances.  And Pliny was more or less at her mercy, because his mother and she had been friends in their girlhood, and because her grandson, Quadratus, was among the closest of his own younger friends.  Unluckily, too, she had taken a violent fancy to Calpurnia.  She spared her none of her flings, but evidently in some strange way the exquisite breeding and candid goodness of the younger woman appealed to her antipodal nature.  She had lived riotously through seven imperial reigns, gambling, owning and exhibiting pantomimes, nourishing all manner of luxurious whims, whether the state lay gasping under a Nero or Domitian, or breathed once more in the smile of Trajan.  Her liking for Calpurnia was of a piece, her acquaintances thought, with her bringing up of her grandson.  No boy in Rome had had an austerer training.  He was never allowed to mingle with her coarser companions, and when the dice were brought in she always sent him out of the room—­“back to his books.”  No breath of scandal had ever touched his good name, and his tastes could not have been more prudent, his grandmother used to say, with uplifted eyebrows, had he had the “inestimable advantage of being brought up by Pliny’s uncle.”

After a winter and spring of varied activities the friends gathered at Pliny’s villa had eagerly looked forward to a brief peace.  Pliny’s law business had been unusually exacting.  He had worked early and late, and made a series of crucial speeches, and when spring came on he had allowed neither work nor social demands to interfere with his attendance at the almost numberless literary readings.  His “conscientious and undiscriminating concern for dead matter,” Quadratilla once said, “rivalled Charon’s.”  Calpurnia, never strong, but always supplementing at every turn her husband’s work, had felt especially this year the strain of Roman life.  Tacitus, already a figure in the literary world through his Agricola and Germania, had made a beginning on his more elaborate Histories and been enslaved to his genius.  Pompeius Saturninus and his clever wife, Cornelia, were hoping for a little rustic idleness before beginning the summer entertaining at their place in Tuscany.  The group under Pliny’s roof was completed by Calpurnia’s lovely aunt, Hispulla, and Fannia, whose famous ancestry was accentuated in her own distinguished character.  Pliny’s old schoolfellow, Caninus Rufus, had come to his adjacent villa, bringing with him their common friend, Voconius Romanus.  These friends had entered upon one of the holiday seasons rarely granted to people of importance.  Their debts to the worlds of business or society or literature held in abeyance, they were lightly devoting their days to fishing and hunting, sailing and riding, while the keenness of their intellectual interests—­they belonged to a very different set from Quadratilla’s—­was restfully tempered and the sincerity of them deepened by a thorough-going intimacy.