Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Correspondence of Pliny and Trajan on the Christians.

The Pliny-Trajan correspondence from the early 2nd c. is the earliest outside attestation of the existence of Christians. Tacitus and Suetonius write shortly afterwards about earlier periods, but who knows how dependable the reports they replied upon were, whereas this is the report of a guy about contemporaries. Pliny writes to Trajan to find out norms for interrogating the new sect, and it's damn interesting.

2 comments:

JUSIPER said...

Whenever you mention Trajan, I always want to pronounce it Tray-Jean with an accent on the second syllable, pronounced the French way.

el blogador said...

There's a Greek professor (i.e., ethnically Greek) whose name is 'Traianos'. I think that's almost as cool as the Romanian name 'Romulus' (also pretty fucking sweet).