Pliny the Elder was a Roman military officer during the early Principate, but was better known as the author of Natural History, a book in which Pliny described basically every natural phenomenon he had ever heard of in detail. It is still important today as the longest work to survive whole and intact from Antiquity and is a valuable record of the state of science in the first century. Pliny died in the eruption of Vesuvius while commanding a doomed evacuation/rescue effort, but his nephew Pliny the Younger wrote a detailed eyewitness account of the eruption. To this day, such eruptions are called Plinian.

Pliny's nephew, Pliny the Younger, was a career Roman bureaucrat and politician, and is important mainly because his correspondence, including his letters to the Emperor Trajan, survive, giving an idea of how Roman government worked in practice. Most notably, when governing Bithinya, he wrote letters asking Trajan what to do with this troublesome Christian movement, which Trajan replied by instructing him not to seek out Christians, but only to punish those who publicly practiced their faith, a kind of "don't ask/don't tell" approach to Christianity.