Caninius Rufus

Caninius Rufus was a wealthy landowner of Comum (modern Como), the same northern Italian hometown as Pliny the Younger, who addressed at least nine surviving letters to him in the early 2nd century AD. He is attested chiefly through that correspondence as a man of cultivated leisure and literary aspiration: Pliny repeatedly urged him to take up serious writing, including an epic on Trajan's Dacian wars, and to him Pliny sent his celebrated description of a villa on the shore of Lake Como with its fishing and study. Outside Pliny's letters little independent record of him survives, but within them he stands as a vivid representative of the provincial Italian gentry and literary circle that surrounded Pliny around 100-110 AD.