Pliny’s Bithynian governorship and Trajan’s Christian rescript

Bithynia-Pontus, on the Black Sea’s southern curve, was rich and unruly. Pliny the Younger arrived as legate with special powers, tasked to fix the books and steady the cities. From Nicomedia he wrote to Trajan with meticulous questions: aqueduct budgets in Nicaea, guilds in Amisus, and how to handle people called Christians. Each letter traveled by sea past Byzantium and up the Adriatic to Rome, a thin packet of black ink and compressed anxiety [3].

Trajan’s replies are a window into imperial method. On Christians, his rescript was terse and procedural: “They are not to be sought out; if accused and convicted they must be punished.” And: “No anonymous accusations are to be received in any sort of proceeding.” The formulas clacked back east like a judge’s gavel, setting a standard that provincial governors from Ephesus to Antioch could cite [3].

Pliny’s docket mixed the moral with the mundane. He asked about the baths at Prusa—should funds be diverted, who approved the contracts? He investigated status disputes and citizenship claims, wary of fraud that might gnaw municipal revenues. In the council halls of Prusa and the harbors of Heraclea Pontica, the sound of policy was the scrape of styluses and the murmur of town elders counting sesterces.

What emerges is an imperial conversation that makes the center’s authority feel local. Rome was present in Nicomedia’s archives and Prusa’s baths, not as a distant shout, but as measured sentences. The colors here are administrative: gray wax, brown papyrus, the purple stamp of a governor’s seal. From Bithynia to Rome and back, law moved on ships and horses, the empire’s arteries pulsing with decisions [3].