Pliny/Trajan and the Poetics of Empire

in I. Marchesi, ed., Pliny the Book-Maker: Betting on Posterity (Oxford Univ. Press: Oxford 2015) 13-108.

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.

Review of A. N. Sherwin-White, Commentary on the Letters of Pliny (Oxford 1966), with particular reference to prosopography.

Museum Helveticum 75: 155-168, 2018

This article proposes to re-examine what purposes the letters of Pliny the Younger to and about his wife Calpurnia serve in Pliny's quest for lasting fame. It shows that from their hybrid genre of elegiac epistolography to their seemingly intimate themes, these letters' form and content have aims that go beyond flaunting Pliny's perfect private and public life and his numerous talents, and that his writing to an absent wife is as much a pretext as a perfect backdrop to convey messages about himself and about his prose. This article concludes that Pliny stages himself as a lover to show his readers, by a mirror effect, how they should love him, and that his wife's behaviour and their conjugal relationship are ultimately transmuted into templates for the ideal reader's behaviour and the ideal relationship between Pliny and his readership.

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

2013

This paper re-contextualises Book 10 of Pliny’s Letters within the corpus of imperial correspondence transmitted by inscriptions, papyri and juristic compilations. It takes stock of provocative recent readings of Book 10 by Greg Woolf, Philip Stadter and Carlos Noreña, but its larger goal is to shift attention from the Pliny-Trajan correspondence to the wider phenomenon that it represents. The important of the vast volume of correspondence between the emperor and office-holders in the provinces extended far beyond the functional dimensions of sharing information and enabling decision making across long distances. Regular correspondence was essential to building and maintaining the emperor’s personal ties to the aristocratic friends and slave and freed dependents on whom the administration of the empire depended. It was also an important space in which the ruling elite reaffirmed shared beliefs about the justice, good judgement and above all the humanitas of Roman administration.