Letters From Calpurnia, Pliny's Wife A.D. 111-113

About the Book

KIRKUS DISCOVERIES – Review “In this one-of-a kind project, Harrington uses equal parts research and imagination to explore love, religion and empire in the earliest part of Christian history. The author’s historical novel—as she calls it—is actually less a novel than a series of cleverly fabricated messages from a wife to her husband. The true seed from which the narrative grows is a handful of real letters by Pliny the Younger, a second-century Roman statesman and writer, to his third wife Calpurnia. For context Harrington directly cites one of Pliny’s laments to his young bride: ‘You can soothe my worry only by writing to me day and night.’ Thus, Harrington’s book is comprised of a sequence of such ‘writings’ that Calpurnia might have composed to calm her vexed husband. In re-creating this epistolary record Harrington undertakes some serious historical speculation of her own regarding the couple’s religious orientation. As it turns out, Pliny’s Letters provide historians with a tantalizing glimpse into early Christian history from the perspective of an unconverted, sometimes hostile Roman. Harrington shows an impressive knowledge of the many sects that populated the religious landscape of the early second century. Her novel is as much a tender romance as it is a genuinely innovative restaging of the spiritual debates that animated early Christianity. This book is full of Johannines, Gnostics, Rabbinic scholars, Kabbalists, neo-Platonists and Stoics all vying for authority in what was still a fluid period in religious history. Harrington’s extensive bibliography provides the documentation to support this very authentic recreation. Her research pays off handsomely—it never overwhelms the simple, beautiful portrait of marital love that she sets at the center of her book. Uniquely compelling.”

In addition to Calpurnia’s letters, this book contains maps, bibliography, timeline and index, which may be previewed at www.JudithHarrington.com. The author has professionally recorded the novel as an audio book, which is available exclusively through her website.


From the Introduction      “. . . During a Fulbright year (1993-94) in Turkey, I discovered these letters while working in the library of the Christian shrine, Meryamana Evi, located in the mountains above the ruins of Ephesus. Written in Latin and Greek on vellum and papyrus, they were apparently composed by a Roman matron named Calpurnia to her husband, Gaius Plinius, whom she also addresses as Caecilius and Lucius. According to tradition, the shrine, known to local Turks as Panaya Kapulu (house of the holiest one), is the ancient heart of the Johannine Community, whose members composed the Gospel of St. John. The site, identified in the visions of the German nun Anne Catherine Emmerich, is recognized by Roman Catholics as the location of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven. I found the manuscript inside a large Latin hymnal among a jumble of archaeological documents, votives left by cured pilgrims, and religious relics donated for decades by Christian and Muslim visitors from all over the world. I traced the manuscript to an ancient papyrus dump discovered by Grenfel and Hunt in the 1890’s near ‘Behneseh’ at Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, 300 kilometers south of Alexandria. During the last decade, I have been trying to authenticate my discovery. My attempts were complicated by tragic circumstances of the 1999 earthquake in northwestern Turkey that resulted in the disappearance of the original manuscript; to protect it, I am sending you my translation under the title Letters from Calpurnia, Pliny’s Wife. This collection, with the letters organized into eight books and an epilogue, is as sequential as I have been able to determine. Apparently, Calpurnia wrote most of the letters I include here to her husband, Pliny the Younger, from Ephesus between A.D. 111 and 113 while he was Emper

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