AP Latin · Pliny's Letters · Unit 2
Pliny, Letters 6.20
The companion to 6.16: the same eruption, but this time the seventeen-year-old Pliny’s own night — the crowd, the darkness, his mother telling him to leave her behind.
Who is writing, and to whom. Again Pliny the Younger to the historian Tacitus, who, having read the letter on the death of Pliny’s uncle (6.16), has now asked what the nephew himself went through. Pliny opens by quoting Aeneas beginning his own account of a city’s last night.
What is happening. Pliny (aged seventeen) stayed at Misenum with his mother while his uncle sailed off. Through the night of 24–25 August 79 CE the tremors build; at dawn he is still reading Livy. The family joins a panicking crowd out of the town, watches the sea recede and a black cloud spread over the bay, is caught in total darkness and falling ash, and finally sees the sun return, sickly, over a landscape buried like snow. They will not leave Misenum until there is news of the uncle.
How to read this letter. Same style as 6.16 — balanced antithesis, ellipsis of est / sunt, verbless clauses — but with more historic infinitives (bare present infinitives standing for the imperfect: orare, hortari, descendere) and more direct speech. Pliny deliberately reuses whole phrases from 6.16: the two letters are one event from two vantage points.
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Reading check
Answer in your head, then open each to compare. These target the same skills the AP asks for: literal accuracy, recognising constructions, and citing Latin.