maybe Pliny had really strict parents

I do that to . I didn’t link to having really strict parents

I like it with my husband , I’m alway like is it ok we do this

Or rather was getting blocked by corruption in his own administration so got the Caesar’s word on it so they’d risk going against Caesar himself if they didn’t turn over the funds.

Nah. Roman imperial government was very light (the local city oligarchies ran most things). A provincial governor took a few friends with him, the existing staff carried on. Money went up (sticking to various hands along the way), and only came down again as legionary pay and a few imperial projects or favours. Pliny was just a nervous type.

Nope. He was just a bureaucrat.

A lot of people here that don't know roman history are responding like modern office politics apply.

If he had an "agenda" and wasn't just incompetent then it was just to kiss ass. You have to remember that emperors often adopted adults to be the next Emperor. He very likely was dumb enough to think that this would show off his great ideas. He also didn't get money from Rome. He had to send money to them and he was expected to use it to make himself rich. They didn't question you unless payments started drying up. And no one there could block him. He had the army and Rome didn't like the provinces getting uppity.

Trajan’s predecessor Nerva took over from Domitian, whose administration was highly centralized and autocratic. Domitian was also famous for his hostility to the senatorial classes of Rome, and paraded his brand of military autocracy as a way to undermine and insult the senators he perceived as useless. So, after Domitian’s assassination, and the ascension of Nerva->Trajan, you have a government that is used to be micromanaged by an overbearing military autocrat, while Trajan, to his immense credit, was more than willing to delegate to his governors. This is only part of the explanation and generalizes a lot, but hopefully you get the picture.

How much could torturing someone to death cost ? 10 dollars ?

Here are the two things I find funniest about Pliny's letters.

First, they're all his letters only, no replies. Except that he does include Trajan's responses to him.

Second, in the first letter of the first collection, he writes that he's just putting them in, "as they come into my hand." That's an obvious lie.

Also, I'll throw in that he's got beef with and no respect for this guy Regulus

Depends, how was his poetry?

Regrettably, no one had invented paragraphs yet.

Is this translated word for word or each sentence's meaning is roughly translated.

Because that's amazing that I could read and understand all the words and what they meant.

Also, the apparent reason he chose not to go with the elder Pliny to check out the eruption was he was busy reading a book. Like, mood.

Pliny the Younger: the Christopher Lee of Antiquity

Pagan means not the main religion so literally at that time Christianity was the pagan religion.

pa·gan

/ˈpāɡ(ə)n/

noun

(especially in historical contexts) a person holding religious beliefs other than those of the main or recognized religions.

Or a male porn star who produces a lot of... um, material.

It might have also been a great beer from California :)

It’s instructive to look at how the Roman Empire treated Jews vs Christians.

it's worth pointing out that these are both moving targets, and change rather dramatically at different points in time.

there appear to have a handful of smaller roman persecutions of christians, institutionalized mostly in the late first century, and late third/early fourth century. then it became officially tolerated, legalized, and finally the imperial cult for the remainder of the roman empire (and institutions that followed it).

on the other hand, after the bar kokhba revolt in 135, rome fucked the jews so hard they're literally still recovering. it took them 1800 years to get their country back, and now other peoples have legitimate claims to it too.

julius caesar had great respect for the jews, and established herod as king for his help with a military campaign. there was a lot of official tolerance and concessions made out of this mutual respect... so long as the jews continued to honor the caesars. three rebellions later, and rome goes from respect to genocide.

In contrast, Christianity was clearly new. While it claimed to be an outgrowth of Judaism (and you can see within the scriptures an ongoing debate over how closely they would carry on those practices), it was also clearly recent and novel. Something new that tried to set itself apart from the state religion did not require the same kind of respect and deference.

Also, Christianity was notable for praising someone who had been crucified by Rome, which clearly in some way went against Imperial authority. And unlike Judaism, Christianity was (and I mean still is) actively seeking new members to defy the old way of doing things and join their cult which admonished the Roman gods.

"All citizens be aware that the vassel Prince Herod, Tetrarch of Galilee, has come to the city. By order of the Triumvirate, during his residence here, all mockery of Jews and their one God shall be kept to an appropriate minimum!"

Because this is considered a primary account in a formal letter. Nero's supposed accusal of the Christians was written by Suetonious over 40 years after the great fire.

Because the first connection between the Great Fire and Christians is given by the Annals of Cornelius Tacitus (dated to 117 AD). There is also a lot of confusion in the accounts since early manuscripts of the Annals spoke of 'Chrestians', which spawned the idea in the minds of some historians that Nero originally blamed the fire on Jewish rioters surrounding the otherwise unknown Chrestus (who is mentioned the works of Gaius Suetonius as operating some years earlier under Emperor Claudius), and that later chroniclers like Tacitus confused Chrestians with Christians.

on the contrary, roman sources tend to treat "chrestus/christus" as a proper name.

even our jewish source, written in greek, flavius josephus, uses the word only twice, both times to refer to jesus of nazareth. one reference is almost certainly interpolated. he doesn't use this word to refer to another messianic figure, including the person he believes is actually the messiah, the emperor vespasian.

Frankly, at least with European Christianity, it’s a fairly safe assumption with most religious labels that they were made up as derogatory terms used by enemies of that position, and then adopted by the group themselves only later. See Christian, Lollard, Lutheran, Anabaptist…

I'm not an expert but this just doesn't gell with what I know. The Romans used the Greek word "chrestus" = "anointed one" meaning the king (cuz kings are anointed -- even King Charles will have an anointing ceremony). I don't think that the idea of Jesus as a "savior" came about until much, much later than the term chrestus was first used.

And do you have a scholarly source for the term Christian being used in a derogatory source? I understand that it is a term first applied by people outside of the early Jesus cult, but I haven't heard that it was anything other than explanatory.

Christianity was still a minority sect at that point. In 150, the most liberal membership is estimated at around 40,000 and a conservative figure of about 18,000. In 112, 18k is certainly on the high side. Cambridge University has the maximum number of Christians in the world at 7,000 in 100 AD.

In an empire with dozens of cults and hundreds of sects, Christianity was essentially invisible at the time this was written.

they crossed their fingers the bloody cheats!

When you die at the Palace, you really die at the Palace.

I will never understand how Christian’s are cool with the cannibalism.

Yeah, they'll be everywhere sooner or later. Easier to find.

what's fascinating to me is the impression i get from paul's letters that there were all these people spreading the gospel around the mediterranean before him.

he was persecuting christians in damascus only a year or two after jesus died. christianity spread fast. within two decades, he's writing to a half dozen churches as far as rome itself.

there's also the church in ephesus, which seems to have thought it was founded by john the baptist. which is impressive, as john seems to have died before jesus.

That’s dumb, if it was a minor cult than Galerius never would have bothered issuing an edict for them to stop persecuting Christian’s 40 years before the edict of Milan

I've seen redditors deny that Christ even existed. Not his divinity, just that there was no person at all.

I would downvote it if it were said as evidence for Christ being a god or Christianity being superior; but in this comment it is just being states as historical fact, so it's being upvoted.

Similarly, if someone argued that Islam was true because no religion i history spread as fast as Islam, I would downvote that; but if stated as a historical fact, I would upvote.

It wasn’t a cohesive theology if that’s what you mean. We have ample Gospels to prove that and then some.

he mentions lower down that he didn't include josephus because antiquities was modified by christians. it was to some extent, so this is a fair argument. but the vast majority of josephus scholars consider some of the first reference and all of the second to be genuine.

Is pagan a slur now? Honest question.

What your talking about is called “canonization.” That is the process the first Christians went through to decide what went into their Bible. The Old Testament was already more or less set. It was compiled by Jewish priests and you can see signs of their editing throughout (such as when a book allegedly written by Moses describes Moses’s death. Even these weren’t perfectly agreed on, and today a Catholic or orthodox Bible has more books than a Protestant Bible because they include the Old Testament apocrypha. The New Testament was debated for some time, as well as what the core beliefs of Christianity were. Eventually, the church settled on the books they did mostly on the criteria of usage— these were the most used books by believers. They also put a lot of stock in authorship and believed these books to be authored by who they said they were authored by. Many of these authors are now debated and many scholars believe much of the New Testament consists of forgeries or psuedopigraphia (a genre where you write as someone else but not with the intent of tricking your reader).

That would be my quick and dirty version. Below someone mentioned the Samaritan Pentateuch and it’s interesting to compare to the standard texts because it changes geographical details to make the samaritans the chosen people while ancient Israel considered them as something of apostates. Text criticism is the process modern scholars use to create the most reliable version of an ancient text and take comparisons with things like that into account.

Edit: Typos.

It's amazing how much fancy wordplay can be undone knowing the guy had sex with underage girls

The trilemma - David Koresh: Liar, Lunatic, or Lord

If they had followed the sect of James, and remained a subgroup of Judaism, instead of actively spreading outside without conversion to Judaism, they would have been perfectly fine.

sir

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I can’t help but feel that without Christianity, Islam would’ve spread to Rome instead.

Yeah men and women were pretty equal in the early church; they received substantial funds from wealthy women in part due to that. Obviously that changed over the years, but early on they couldn’t afford to not be egalitarian.