The launch of a new literary biography of the younger Pliny, who grew up to become a lawyer, senator, poet, collector of villas, curator of drains and personal representative of the emperor overseas. Counting the historian Tacitus, biographer Suetonius and poet Martial among his close friends, Pliny the Younger chronicled his experiences from the catastrophic eruption through the dark days of terror under Emperor Domitian to the gentler times of Emperor Trajan.