Preface
by Ashley Roman Francese
September 13, 2026
This site contains Latin text, notes, vocabulary, and media for selections from the Letters of Pliny the Younger, intended for readers of Latin. The initial selection of letters for this edition was done in the winter of 2024–25 by Bret Mulligan, who based his choices on the selections included in the new version of the Advanced Placement Latin course overseen by the College Board. All letters on the AP syllabus are included here, along with a number of others.
The Latin text is that of R. A. B. Mynors, C. Plini Caecili Secundi Epistularum Libri Decem (Oxford Classical Texts, 1966). In June of 2025 Jenna McCulloch (Dickinson '27) performed an initial macronization (and conversion of consonantal u to v) using the Alatius macronizer. The macrons were checked and corrected in the course of editing.
I created the initial draft of the vocabulary lists using The Bridge in June of 2025. These lists were also corrected in the course of editing. In June of 2025 Christopher Francese compiled a list of older editions in the public domain that could be drawn on for notes.
In the summer of the 2025 I led a DCC high school Internship group in reading the passages selected from Pliny’s letters and in gathering and drafting notes. Students used the older commentaries to gather notes they thought were helpful, omitting those they did not find helpful. They also would occasionally suggest their own notes. When reading the text, I would bold phrases that the students struggled with, even with the gathered notes, and then draft further notes on those phrases. The members of that high school internship group were:
- Henri Lepri
- Vivien Wang
- Lyra Majumdar
- Raana Thacker
- Florian Shah
- Susie Yang
- Anna Monaco
- Bennet Olsen
- Mackenzie Sanford
We completed a draft of all of the initial selections from Bret Mulligan. I added additional selections based on the students’ interest and gathered and drafted notes with their help.
The summer 2025 group typed out the harvested notes by hand. In the fall of 2025, after having been one of the summer interns, Raana Thacker created Commentarius.org, an application based on ClaudeAI that performs the optical character recognition and re-formatting of notes from the older editions. Anjali Gaba, another summer DCC intern from a different project, created a comprehensive key to the older school editions of Pliny's letters, listing which letters each edition covered. Christopher Francese then used Commentarius to harvest and reformat a more comprehensive set of notes from the older editions.
Meagan Ayer did an editing pass for formatting in October of 2025.
From October to January of 2025–26 I led a group of high school students who were interested in continuing their summer internship. During this pass, the members of this Volunteer Pliny Group (VPG) read the text and notes and used a method that I call the "traffic light" system, highlighting in green notes they wanted to keep, possibly useful notes in yellow, and notes they wanted to leave out in red. The members of the Volunteer Pliny Group were:
- Vivien Wang
- Florian Shah
- Bennett Olsen
- Sam Porter
- Ryan Hair
- Sophie Yang
- Demi Zheng
- Anjali Gaba
In the winter of 2026, I led a group of college internship students in reading the letters and editing the notes and vocabulary lists. During this pass, I added some notes from Sherwin-White’s historical commentary, which was very useful for historical matters. The members of the winter college internship were:
- Samantha Ritschel, Dickinson College, 2026
- Erin Hinchey, Dickinson College, 2027
- Delaney Bloom, Dickinson College, 2027
- Teresa Sunthang, Dickinson College, 2027
- Maia Lindsey, Dickinson College, 2028
- Aranjit Dhillon, Dickinson College, 2028
- Susie Yang, Columbia University, 2029
Christopher Francese did a final editing pass of all of the letters in the summer of 2026. He finished editing the notes and vocabulary lists, double-checked the macrons, added images and many hyper-links to the notes, and organized the introductory material.
Cover image: Detail from Angelica Kauffmann (1741–1807), "Pliny the Younger and his Mother at Misenum, 79 A.D." 1785. Princeton University Art Museum, y1969-89.