Key topics: Pliny the Younger, Epistulae 7.27 (the haunted house letter — ghost story, philosophical skepticism), Pliny, Epistulae 10.33–40 and 10.90 (correspondence with Emperor Trajan on administrative questions including Christians — Ep. 10.96–97 context), Pliny, Epistulae 1.6, 2.6, 6.4, 6.7, 7.5, 7.24, 9.6, 10.5–7 (personal and social letters: hunting, dinner parties, family, freedmen, requests), Pliny's tone modulation: the intimate personal letter versus the formal imperial correspondence — lexical and syntactic markers of each register, Roman social structures: patron–client relationships, the role of the emperor as correspondent and judge, epistolary conventions of petition and response, Indirect question clauses (num, -ne, utrum…an, quis, quid, quando) with subjunctive — frequent in Pliny's deliberative letters, Non-syllabus sight-reading skill-building with parallel prose texts chosen by the teacher.
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