Pliny the Lover: by the book (original) (raw)
Related papers
International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 2009
Recent considerations of the letters of Pliny the Younger have continued to focus on their content and particularly on the question of Pliny's self-promotion through that content. Ilaria Marchesi chooses a different and more difficult approach to the Epistulae, one that examines the collection as a literary object that Pliny has painstakingly constructed to secure a lasting place for his work within the canon of Latin literature. In order to do so effectively, Pliny's corpus must interact with its antecedents, alluding to them, redeploying their motifs, and thereby redefining genres to suit his own enterprise. Marchesi rightly sees Pliny's claim to an arbitrary arrangement of the letters as signaling his reliance on his poetic predecessors' careful arrangement of collections, and so it is natural that she begins her examination of intertextual allusion with poetry before proceeding to the more predictable genres of oratory, historiography and epistolography. In her subtle consideration of pairs or small groups of letters, she sees Pliny's interaction with earlier works as one of several structuring agents for the letter collection. The first chapter notes that the nature of Pliny's work invites sequential reading, while at the same time promoting paired and thematic reading-by addressee, situation or intertextual reference. Pliny rejects right away traditional letter arrangement-a signal that this is no ordinary book of letters. Furthermore, distribution of multiple letters to individual addressees throughout the corpus suggests even more alternative paths of reading the collection. Pliny's allusive agenda is apparent immediately in 1.2 and 1.3 with Vergilian allusions; the former directly quotes Aeneid 6.129 and invites its addressee to read and correct one of Pliny's speeches, while in the latter Marchesi sees a more subtle reference to the same Vergilian line, as Pliny recommends the fruits of literary retreat as a source of lasting fame. In one of many such observations that mark the complexity of Pliny's literary acumen, Marchesi further notes that the Vergilian allusion in 1.3 has already been redeployed by
Fact and Fiction in Pliny's Epistles: The Augustan Poetry Book and its Legacies
in J. Soldo and C.R. Jackson and (eds.), res vera, res ficta: Fictionality in Ancient Epistolography, (De Gruyter), pp. 19-42, 2023
Pliny stands at the intersection between epistolary (biographical) fiction and fact. He is routinely studied by two academic constituencies whose critical assumptions do not necessarily align: ancient historians and literary critics. Statements about biographical fiction in Pliny often proceed from unargued assumptions about 'how literature works'-assumptions generally derived from study of the Augustan poets. I argue that assumptions about autobiographical fiction in Ovid cannot simply be transferred to Pliny. We need to construct individual theories for individual authors, working from the text up to personalized theory, rather than from generalized theory down to text. The Augustan poetry book is central to the development of Latin letter collections (in sharp contrast to the lack of influence from poetry books on the Greek epistolographical tradition). But the poetics of the two Roman forms are fundamentally different. In Ovid's Amores, the signifier is centripetal and returns to reflect on its own programmatic status within a collection; but Pliny's letters are centrifugal and generally move outwards from internal signifier to external signified. Prospects for reading events in Pliny's life as primarily instantiations of a literary programme are diminished.
AAnt 60, 2020
Literary self is an essential component of Pliny's self-representation. Pliny's literary self-portrait is shaped the way he wants it to be by a diverse set of literary techniques utilized in the letters. My paper explores the questions formulated in the letters that thematize the selection and composition of text, and the answers given to them (not necessarily in the form of assertive sentences). This interpretation is not independent from the self-representative character of the letters, yet, it exceeds it on the premise that another dimension may be opened to the understanding of the letters, which points towards the development of the literary and artistic taste of the first century, and its directions.
It is alive! Ressignificance in Pliny’s epistolary books
New Classicists, 2024
Nine books, 247 letters, and more than 100 addresses. Until recently, Plinian letters were usually read as isolated pieces limited to themselves. They were perceived as some diary or, at best, a mere historical account. Nevertheless, Pliny’s book collection is one of the most diverse literary works from Ancient Rome, and, indeed, its multifarious style, regularly overlooked, represents well the profound depth Imperial prose could reach. This article intends to demonstrate some of the features Pliny used to lay down the foundations of a well-designed literary project made of letters ripped from their original contexts. The letters resonate with each other differently in their new body and gain new meanings. In order to do so, we will use as a metaphor a popular figure from a novel written by Mary Shelley, the creature born from Victor Frankstein’s work. Pliny, in that sense, is the creator of an ancient modern Prometheus.
Each Man's Father Served as his Teacher: Constructing Relatedness in Pliny's Letters
Recent scholarship has examined Pliny's efforts to embed his acts of patronage in the rhetorical context of paternity. This paper examines how Pliny employs the discourse of paternity in representing himself as a mentor and exemplary model for young men, with particular focus on Book 8 of the Letters. Though he lacks a child or adoptive heir himself, Pliny embeds his work in a tradition in which Roman writers from the Elder Cato onward presented literary authority as coextensive with paternal authority. In Ep. 8.14, Pliny presents an idealized image of education by fathers or paternal surrogates that legitimates both his receipt of benefits from his mentors and his own efforts to instruct young men in the manner of a father. Pliny presents his published work as a model for Genialis in Ep. 8.13 and his personal life as an example for Junius Avitus in Ep. 8.23. Ep. 8.10, 11 and 18 provide further contexts for Pliny's discourse of paternity. Two additional examples of the creation of relatedness in elite Roman culture (interactions with caregivers and the experience of contubernium) are briefly discussed. I consider in conclusion how study of Pliny's Letters may contribute to the larger cross-cultural project of understanding how otherwise unrelated persons, through informal activities such as mentorship, may construct relationships more salient to them than their biological or legal kinships.