Dialogues of the Dead

Pliny the Elder.--The account that you give me, nephew, of your behaviour amidst the tenors and perils that accompanied the first eruption of Vesuvius does not please me much. There was more of vanity in it than of true magnanimity. Nothing is great that is unnatural and affected. When the earth was shaking beneath you, when the whole heaven was darkened with sulphurous clouds, when all Nature seemed falling into its final destruction, to be reading Livy and making extracts was an absurd affectation. To meet danger with courage is manly, but to be insensible of it is brutal stupidity; and to pretend insensibility where it cannot be supposed is ridiculous falseness. When you afterwards refused to leave your aged mother and save yourself without her, you indeed acted nobly. It was also becoming a Roman to keep up her spirits amidst all the horrors of that tremendous scene by showing yourself undismayed; but the real merit and glory of this part of your behaviour is sunk by the other, which gives an air of ostentation and vanity to the whole.

Pliny the Younger.--That vulgar minds should consider my attention to my studies in such a conjuncture as unnatural and affected, I should not much wonder; but that you would blame it as such I did not apprehend--you, whom no business could separate from the muses; you, who approached nearer to the fiery storm, and died by the suffocating heat of the vapour.