This working paper summarises an article, “Not Dark Yet…: Reading to the End of Pliny’s Nine-Book Collection”, which will appear in I. Marchesi (ed.), Betting on Posterity: Pliny as Bookmaker (OUP, 2014). It explores the pessimism (personal and political) that creeps into books 7, 8 and 9 of Pliny’s Epistles, and maps it against contemporary political developments and other literary responses to the Domitianic past and Trajan’s principate.