The Art of Pliny's Letters: A Poetics of Allusion in the Private Correspondence

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T H E A RT O F P L I N Y ’ S L E T T E R S

In the first book on intertextuality in Pliny the Younger, Professor Marchesi invites a new reading of Pliny’s collection of private epistles: the letters are examined as the product of an authorial strategy controlling both the rhetorical fabric of individual units and their arrangement in the collection. By inserting recognizable fragments of canonical authors into his epistles, Pliny imports into the still fluid practice of letter-writing the principles of composition and organization that for his contemporaries characterized other writings as literature. Allusions become the occasion for a metapoetic dialogue, especially with the collection’s privileged addressee, Tacitus. An active participant in the cultural politics of his time, Pliny entrusts to the letters his views on poetry, oratory and historiography. In defining a model of epistolography alternative to Cicero’s and complementing those of Horace, Ovid and Seneca, he also successfully carves a niche for his work in the Roman literary canon. i l ar i a m arc hes i is Assistant Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature, and Director of the Classics Program at Hofstra University. Recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities Grant in 2005–2006 for her work on Pliny, she has published also on Horace and Petronius as well as the classical tradition in the Middle Ages.

T H E A RT O F P L I N Y ’ S LETTERS A Poetics of Allusion in the Private Correspondence

I L A R I A MA R C H E S I

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521882279 © Ilaria Marchesi 2008 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2008

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978-0-521-88227-9

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Contents

Acknowledgements Preface

page vi viii

Introduction

1

1 The semiotics of structure

12

2 Sed quid ego tam gloriose? Pliny’s poetics of choice

53

3 The importance of being Secundus: Tacitus’ voice in Pliny’s letters

97

4 Storming historiography: Pliny’s voice in Tacitus’ text

144

5 Overcoming Ciceronian anxiety: Pliny’s niche/nike in literary history

207

From dawn till dusk: four notes in lieu of a conclusion

241

Appendix to chapter 5 List of works cited General index Index locorum

252 258 272 275

v

Acknowledgements

I hesitate to admit that I discovered Pliny as a subject worthy of study only in graduate school, in the context of a course on the history of the book with John Bodel. It was his inspired teaching that first provided the impetus for this book, and his generosity and supportive advice have accompanied this project to its completion. My first and greatest debt is to him. Over the years many friends and colleagues have helped me think and write about Pliny’s texts, by patiently reading and discussing my manuscript in its various incarnations. It would be impossible to express fully my gratitude to each of them here, but I would like to single out three of my early readers: Alessandro Barchiesi, Lowell Edmunds and Denis Feeney. To their supportive criticisms this book owes the courage to try and export into a study of Pliny’s prose the delicate instruments usually reserved for poetic texts. To Roy Gibson and Gareth Williams goes my warmest gratitude for their painstaking readings and priceless suggestions. Roy’s enthusiasm for renewing the study of Pliny has sometimes surpassed even my own, and has helped me overcome many fits of skepticism and self-doubt. To Tony Woodman, a reader extremely generous with his time and as skeptical as he is selfless, I owe the distinct pleasure of having been forced to rethink many arguments. The Art of Pliny’s Letters is definitely a better book thanks to him. He still does not agree with many of the points I have made here, and should not be held in any way responsible for my obstinate disposition. I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a research fellowship in 2005–2006, which allowed me to take one year off from teaching in order to work on the final revision of this book. I am also extremely grateful to Hofstra University for having facilitated my leave, and to Steven Smith, a colleague and now a friend, to whose care I entrusted the Classics Program during my leave. His enthusiasm, commitment and professionalism have given me the peace of mind to work on my book without worrying about the fate of our students. vi

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I would also like to thank the environment of American academia. A project like this would have never seen the light of day had I not been given the chance to study and to work in the United States after my training in Italy. The past ten years have offered me a remarkable series of opportunities to reinvent myself and my work at every step. In this time I have also benefited much from the generosity of Stephanie Cobb, Christian Dupont, Matt Fox, George Greaney, Kristi Grimes and Esther Marion. From the various vantage points of their disciplines they have not only helped to make my Italian-sounding prose more readable but also taught me the real meaning of the word collegial. To the combined efforts of all these people this book owes its strengths; its defects must be ascribed to my stubbornness. It only remains to discharge the pleasant duty of the publishing member in any academic couple; that is, offering thanks to their spouse for their patience and support. To my husband Simone, who twelve years ago convinced me to look West from the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea and imagine a life together beyond it, I say only one thing: may we be fortunate enough to continue sharing every word of it. In the body of this book, I follow the standard system of abbreviations for ancient sources as detailed in the Oxford Latin Dictionary and the Greek–English Lexicon of Liddell and Scott. For modern sources in the bibliography, I have spelled out all journal titles in full.

Preface

This book is about what makes Pliny’s collection of private correspondence a literary work. While the epistles have previously been studied as a source of historical information, recent critical interest in Pliny has acquired a larger focus. Works such as Hoffer’s on the anxieties of Pliny the Younger or the collective endeavor of the Manchester and Menaggio conferences on Pliny and his social, political and cultural worlds have illuminated Pliny’s engagement with central issues of his times. These contributions, however, have largely been animated by an interpretation of the epistles that is exclusively instrumental: Pliny’s texts have been read, in fact, as a witness to the author’s strategic self-fashioning. If this partly new approach has the merit of advancing the critical debate beyond the earlier prevailing interest in his collection as a source of prosopographic evidence, it still insists on casting the epistles as a testimony to the life, however artificially and strategically constructed, of an individual. My work intends to reorient the reading of Pliny’s letters by considering them not only as a tool for understanding the author or his times but also as the object to be understood. My central contention is that, while Pliny consciously embeds in his texts the self-portrait of a man of strenuous political activity and incessant cultural commitment, this portrait cannot be separated from the textual corpus that articulates it. Pliny’s letters do not merely witness his cultural project; they constitute it. In other words, although in reading the letters we learn something about the person of the author and the intricate web of personalities that populate them, we should also expect to learn something about the letters themselves and the strategies through which they are constructed as self-sufficient, literary texts. Pliny’s letters are certainly documents that provide information on a reality located outside them: they contain useful data on Pliny’s own economic, political and oratorical activities; they convey a picture of power struggles, relations and customs in his circle of friends; they record the lives of some of his contemporaries and the deaths of many of his elders; viii

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they detail curiosities of the natural landscape he visited, the architectural virtue of the homes he inhabited, and the intricate paths he followed in his literary peregrinations. The letters have already been studied as pointers to an external reality (this is the heteronomous hypothesis guiding traditional socio-historical interpretations). They are, however, also open to a different approach, one which focuses on objects that do not lie outside but rather within them. This is the core of the autonomous hypothesis guiding my work: as well as illuminating the circumstances and the agent of their production, Pliny’s texts are self-reflexively concerned with the construction of their own literary identity. In the way the epistles are arranged and collected, in the allusions they make to the literature of the past, in the dialogue they establish with it in the present, they talk about themselves, and their self-reflexive attention is what makes them literary. Like any letter that is intended to outlive its primary purpose of relating news about its distant place of origin or its sender, Pliny’s epistles are more than mere testimonies. They are literary artifacts that function as ends in themselves. My work concentrates on one of the techniques that Pliny used in order to help his texts achieve literary status, namely allusion. With this term I indicate the incorporation in a given text of verbal clusters the origin of which may be traced to a specific antecedent and for which a reason for insertion in the new text can be found. Allusions are the second voice in Pliny’s text, the continuous, if subtle, counterpoint to his primary discourse. In particular, they are the peculiar vehicle he chooses to articulate his discussions of poetics. From my analysis, Pliny’s epistolary corpus emerges as a carefully organized work that experiments with the boundaries of its own genre by allusively evoking and interacting with a variety of its literary antecedents, both prose and verse, both nearer and more distant in time. In the epistles I analyze, I regard the interplay with the discernible models as part of a strategy that strives to locate Pliny’s corpus and its author in a relevant, albeit new, position within the entropic and shifting configuration of the literary genres in his age. In so doing, I study allusion more as a means than as an end. I see Pliny making two distinct but coordinated usages of allusion. First, poetic allusion – especially to Virgil, Catullus, Horace and Ovid – is one of the tools through which Pliny structures his collection so that it may achieve the coherence of a unitary work that should be read and preserved from cover to cover (or from the first to the last roll), while maintaining its composite nature as a collection of fragments that have been produced and first enjoyed (but not consumed) independently. I concentrate on the allusive pairing of epistles that appear at opposite ends of the collection,

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binding it together, or at key junctures within it, highlighting those junctures and reinforcing the forward movement of the reading. My contention is that Pliny’s technique not only relies upon poetic material but is poetic in nature. It is in fact from the highly elaborate poetic collections of the Augustan age that he inherited (with a certain degree of modification) both the tools he uses and the goals he strives to achieve. Second, but just as important, allusion appears as the principal tool of Pliny’s earnest bid to have his letters join the authoritative corpus of literary texts. Through the redeployment of particularly memorable fragments extracted from the canon, Pliny simultaneously reinforces the canon and enters into a creative dialogue with it. His strategy is twofold: on the one hand, his interaction with the literature of his past is guided by a careful plan of reinterpretation; on the other hand, his engagement with the present is animated by a militant desire to intervene in it. My analysis is devoted to three main areas (three genres of writing, largely speaking) in which Pliny wishes his voice to be heard: poetry, oratory and historiography. These areas of interest are not of equal importance to Pliny: he has something to say about poetry (and his own very limited career in that field), but he knows that his chances of joining the ranks of the poets are slim, and his comments are mainly perfunctory. He has much higher investments, however, in the fields of oratory and historiography. On this double ground Pliny engages his antecedents and contemporaries alike in a refined, often allusive, cultural debate. The letters to Tacitus are the main starting point for my hypothesis. It is here that Pliny most clearly articulates his views both on oratory – the art to which he devotes his greatest efforts, and on historiography – a genre he allegedly and ambiguously leaves for his friend Tacitus to excel in. Pliny’s allusions thus serve multiple purposes. They promote the structural cohesion of his work and create internal resonances in his collection. By contributing to the work’s philological endurance and its artfulness, they prepare the text for its reception into the canon. They are also the privileged vehicle of his request for admission to and direct intervention in that canon. Of course, the process of literary “canonization” of an author would not be completed if, in addition to the confirmation of the canonicity of past works and the intervention in the discursive practices of the present, it were not to include a projection of his (and his text’s) future reception into the canon itself. Pliny’s struggle with the overpowering figure of Cicero may be read as the third and final phase of the process. The last part of this book is devoted to Pliny’s (partially) successful attempt at challenging the epistolary corpus of his model with his own diligently edited and promptly

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published collection of letters. Pliny’s outlook on the future, I argue, is less bleak than has usually been presented: if he is resigned to having found all the other slots of the canon already taken, he knows that Cicero’s collection of private correspondence has not yet achieved canonical status, and so treats the still fluid situation of the epistolary genre as an opportunity to be seized. However authoritative, Cicero’s letters were not beyond the reach of Pliny’s emulative game: epistolography was the only genre in which a Bloomian “ephebe” could challenge the predecessor’s texts and eventually supplant them. My work proceeds mainly through close readings of individual epistles or closely related clusters of them. The somewhat unsystematic character of my book is due to two related features of its subject. First, my work mirrors Pliny’s desultory development of his arguments. Pliny works by juxtaposition of fragments and tesserae, rather than organized, clearly structured lines of argumentation. The search for coherence in Pliny’s collection is frustrated by the author’s own resistance to it. Pliny’s epistles are neither a treatise nor a novel, nor even a dialogue in the classical sense; however, they are also far from being a chaotic assemblage of casually collected fragments. The epistles are suspended between the options of paradigmatic and syntagmatic reading. Pliny proceeds through the addition of heterogeneous elements, but he also connects these fragments on a deeper level. Continuity is built allusively rather than “organically”; it is of a secondary, meditated nature. In one sense, then, my book goes against Pliny’s intentions, while in another it conforms to them. By collecting and organizing the themes he had disseminated and scattered among individual recipients and epistles, I try to construct coherent arguments out of Pliny’s fragments (and, in this, to undo what Pliny had done). By bringing to the surface some of the organizational threads of the collection and by inviting modern readers to see connections where the author and his first readers might have seen them, I carry forward what Pliny had intended his readers’ work to be. Secondly, Pliny’s letters are not simply the product of their author’s design. They also offer themselves as mirrors of their audience. By addressing a varied range of subjects and deploying a language in tune with the interests of their primary addressees, they also select their public. Depending on their own interests and expertise, readers are attracted to individual letters or specific groups of them. In my case, personal familiarity with the literary debates on poetry, rhetoric and historiography has led me to focus on precisely these issues. Other readers’ inquiries have been guided by their expertise in other disciplines. In this light, the variety of approaches to Pliny’s letters is not at all surprising. From the most traditional political

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and prosopographical investigations of Syme and Sherwin-White to the wide variety of perspectives collected in the Manchester and Menaggio proceedings, the emergent critical portrait of Pliny attests both the author’s kaleidoscopic literary identity and the rich and polymorphic interests of his readers. As a writer who entrusted his bid for literary fame to a profoundly dialogic work, I believe that Pliny would not mind appearing to each reader as his own.

Introduction

Pliny’s epistles have long suffered from a double critical misfortune. Their author was the practitioner of prose-epistolography, an understudied, because allegedly sub-literary, genre; and he was active during a traditionally devalued period, the disparagingly labeled Silver Age (now, in times of political correctness, known as the post-Augustan era). The situation, however, has recently changed. Not only have the chronological and generic confines of the Latin canon been expanded to include Pliny’s times and genre of choice, but his works have also become the object of renewed critical interest.1 Two international conferences were held in 2002 in Europe. The 2003 issue of Arethusa contains the proceedings of the international conference called Re-imagining Pliny The Younger, organized at the University of Manchester; while the volume Plinius der J¨ungere und seine Zeit presents the results of an Italo-German conference held on Lake Como. The two meetings differ in their approach – the former was experimental and bent on challenging received wisdom, the latter was more traditional and summative – and have produced different results. A glance at their titles suffices to show that a widening gap exists between Anglo-American literary criticism, interested in the literary and cultural interpretation of Pliny’s texts, and an Italo-Germanic block of socio-historically oriented critics, mostly concerned with their reverbalization.2 Regardless of their 1 2

The latest comprehensive printed bibliography dates back to Aubrion’s 1989 work. With all the caveats necessary in a time of high scholarly mobility, the taxonomy suggested above has historical grounds. The Italo-German and Anglo-American “schools,” with their different orientations, have actually come to dominate the critical debate on Pliny after the initial and very promising interest in Pliny in France had waned (Allain 1901–2, Guillemin 1929 and 1946; but see M´ethy 2007, released too late for my work). In the Italian camp, notable contributions on Pliny’s theory and practice of writing come from Cova 1966 and 1972, with epigonal continuation in Trisoglio 1972 and Picone 1978. In the German camp, B¨utler 1970 on Pliny’s philosophical interests and Lef`evre’s studies on individual epistles (1977; 1978; 1987; 1988; 1989; 1996a; 1996b) deserve mention, along with a more recent, theoretically sound essay by Schenk (1999: 114–16). Similarly devoted to individual texts are the analytical essays in English by Saylor (1972 and 1982). The two schools may also be distinguished on the basis of their members’ more or less pronounced oedipal relationship with their predecessors

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specific contributions, however, it is important that both meetings made Pliny their central focus and attempted a global re-evaluation of his work. If not with the general public, Pliny has found some favor with a specialized, but engagingly inquisitive audience. Three books published between 1997 and 2003 on either side of the Atlantic may also be considered relevant evidence of Pliny’s fortune, in particular because they do more than attest to a resurgent interest in his works. By inviting us to turn our attention away from the socio-historical questions that have dominated the field since the publication of SherwinWhite’s commentary on the letters in 1966, they indicate a new trend in Plinian studies.3 Matthias Ludolph’s Epistolographie und Selbstdarstellung. Untersuchungen zu den “Paradebriefen” Plinius des J¨ungeren (1997) and Stanley Hoffer’s The Anxieties of Pliny the Younger (1999), share more than their philologically and psychologically oriented titles may suggest. Even if, for chronological reasons, they ignore one another, Ludolph’s and Hoffer’s books are united by their shared focus on Pliny’s published epistles as the author’s elaborate self-portrait.4 Ludolph’s argument focuses on Pliny’s desire for fame as the primary motive for his literary enterprise; in his view, the care with which Pliny composed, arranged, and published his private correspondence is intended to gain him recognition and praise. This line of inquiry has two related consequences. First, on the plane of literary criticism, it leads Ludolph to insist that the letters of Pliny, though designed to give the impression of having been written to fulfill a practical purpose, are to be read as carefully planned literary artifacts. Second, on the level of cultural history, Ludolph reads into Pliny’s choice of entrusting a positive self-image to the genre of epistolary writing a sign of the conflict in his day between the outdated but still powerful Republican ethos, based on the quest for personal glory, and the limited and dangerous space in which this glory could be attained under the Principate. According to Ludolph,

3

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(capostipiti): English-speaking critics of Pliny, who are now Latinists and litt´erateurs, are mostly bent on challenging Sherwin-White’s and Syme’s historical approach, whereas Italian- and Germanspeaking contributions tend toward re-elaboration rather than revision of their authors’ teachers. Usually associated with Sherwin-White’s socio-historical perspective are the pages dedicated to Pliny in Syme’s Tacitus (1958), together with his fundamental article on “People in Pliny,” which corrects several details in Sherwin-White’s commentary (1968; for further prosopography, see also Syme 1960 and 1985a). Syme’s interest in Pliny continued later in his life, and his articles collected in Roman Papers are still one of the richest sources for reconstructing the history of Pliny’s culture and environment. The trend of historical analysis, which had been initiated by Mommsen’s biographical essay (Mommsen 1869), is fortunately still alive and well: see the thorough and up-to-date work of Birley 2000. The classical locus for discussion of authorial strategies of monumentalization is Greenblatt 1980 (cf. Leach 1990: 14–16). Hoffer and Ludolph acknowledge their debt to Greenblatt’s approach: whereas Hoffer cites him, Ludolph uses his language but appears to privilege the theoretical frame of Goffman 1959. For the interplay of the political and the literary, cf. Riggsby 1995 and 1998: 75–9.

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the strategy of publishing a collection of private letters as a literary artifact served two purposes. First, it situated Pliny’s activity in a field (literary otium) in which the striving for glory did not engage with the preeminence of the Princeps, to whom all initiatives in the traditional sphere of public life now belonged. Second, by always conveying his desire for glory only obliquely, Pliny preempted the envy elicited in his peers by any act of self-promotion.5 By diminishing the figure of their author, Pliny’s letters covertly convey a literary self-portrait. By practicing what Ludolph calls the rhetoric of understatement and redirecting the search for glory away from political self-promotion and into the sphere of literature, Pliny successfully negotiated the tensions of his culture.6 In Ludolph’s view, Pliny’s collection is designed to promote its author’s claim to fame, a fame that must reckon both with the priority of the Emperor and with the atmosphere of bitter competition among members of the senatorial aristocracy. What Ludolph reads as Pliny’s negotiation of his claim to fame, Hoffer labels as Pliny’s “anxieties.” For Hoffer, these anxieties constitute the shared preoccupation of Pliny’s times not to overstep the boundaries of public life imposed by the central power.7 Even if he acknowledges that Pliny’s anxieties “are often conscious” and attempts to draw a more nuanced picture of the problems, in practice he privileges the unconscious side of Pliny’s mind. The metaphoric language Hoffer favors is revealing: for him anxieties “creep into his texts” or “run closer to the surface,” his analysis finds “traces of anxiety” or “uncovers” them. The different terminology the two scholars deploy is symptomatic of a profound difference in the frames of reference in which they work. Both are interested in the traces left in Pliny’s texts of a conflict between the author’s subversive self-promotion and the social censorial mechanisms used to repress or to control expression of it. Ludolph and Hoffer, however, diverge in the psychological metaphor they apply. For Hoffer, Pliny is torn between his “drive to speak” of the deepest contradictions of his society and the reluctance “to be spoken of” opposed by society itself. For Ludolph, Pliny is perfectly in control of his literary work and adjusts it to smuggle a potentially subversive content under the acceptable pretense of modesty and levity. In 5

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The core of Ludolph’s documented sociological argument can be traced back to Syme’s fine (and witty) profiling of Pliny. Already at the end of his discussion of “Literature under Trajan,” Syme noted that Pliny’s published correspondence afforded its author a modest forum “to present the closest that was decent or permissible to the autobiography of an orator and a statesman” (Syme 1958: 98). See Ludolph 1997: 23–40 (Die Selbstdarstellung im Brief ) and 60–88 (Historisch-soziale Voraussetzungen). For a more detailed survey of Ludolph’s argument, see my review in Bryn Mawr Classical Review (2001). Ludolph’s frame shapes also Radicke 2003. The notion is taken up and refined by Gibson 2003.

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Hoffer’s book, Pliny’s letters are considered symptoms of a widespread social anxiety; in Ludolph’s book, they appear closer to Freudian Witz – that is, not the involuntary and pathological emergence of conflicting drives, but the socially negotiated expression of the repressed. If one were to choose between the two frames of reference, Ludolph’s approach might seem better suited to interpreting Pliny’s letters. As a culturally constructed and socially readable set of signs, their content is never fully unconscious in the way that the content of symptoms is. As the vehicle of a potentially disrupting and socially disturbing content, of course, they may never be fully conscious either. The letters’ role is to become the language of mediation.8 The most recent monograph on Pliny, Henderson’s Pliny’s Statue: The Letters, Self-Portraiture and Classical Art (2002), is likewise concerned with the potential autobiographical value of the letters. The book deals with three adjacent and interconnected letters of Book 3. At its core Henderson provides a reading of Epistle 3.6, a short humorous note in which Pliny describes a statue of himself that he intends to have placed in his hometown of Como. For Henderson the statue, along with the inscription that Pliny intends to have incised on its pedestal, is “a powerfully condensed icon for the whole edifice of the Letters as a monument to selfmythologization” (p. ix). Framed as it is between an epistle dedicated to the (over-) achievements of Pliny’s literarily prolific uncle and adoptive father (3.5) and one devoted to the death of Silius Italicus, another literary personality and enthusiastic portrait-collector (3.7), Pliny’s letter to Annius Severus is the vehicle of his authorial self-portrait. In its subtle approach to the self-deconstructing rhetoric of Pliny’s text, Henderson’s essay certainly improves on traditional accounts of Pliny’s effort to monumentalize himself in the letters. His focal point, however, appears to remain the indissoluble interplay of style and self which has characterized traditional inquiries into the correspondence. To be sure, there is a great deal of difference between a traditional use of the letters to reconstruct identities in prosopographical analyses and the post-modern notion of self that Henderson pursues with Barthian and Lacanian tools; yet, his reading of these (in his view) central epistles still treats texts as repositories of the rhetorical image of the writer’s self and as privileged, if ambiguous, vehicles for recovering it.9 8

9

For a general theory of literature as the cultural space in which mediation (“compromise formation”) takes place, see Orlando 1987. The meditated biographical presuppositions of the book (together with some intriguing examples) are spelled out in Henderson 2003, esp. 120–4.

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My work is certainly indebted to the studies of Ludolph, Hoffer and Henderson, in particular when it comes to the renewed attention to Pliny’s strategies of communication. It also, however, advances a different, less author-centered perspective. While all these critics are interested in detecting the traces left in Pliny’s texts by social censorial mechanisms designed to keep in check any subversive authorial self-promotion, I propose to bracket the author in favor of the autonomy of his writings. However mediated and practiced on an ever-shifting subject, Pliny’s autobiographical practices are still the focus of Ludolph, Hoffer and Henderson, and Pliny’s letters emerge from their readings as the tool through which the author effected change in his status either with his contemporaries or posterity. This kind of instrumental analysis still subjects Pliny’s text to readings that find their validation in the extra-textual reality of authorial agency. In my reading, on the contrary, it is not the texts that are in service of the author, but rather the author (with his record of more or less remarkable accomplishments, his political, cultural and even familial connections) who, in the Aristotelian sense, provides the efficient cause for the coming into existence of these texts. My approach thus insists on advancing an hypothesis of autonomy, not only in the generally accepted sense that the author is necessarily the artificial and fictional by-product of philological inference (since no direct, extra-textual access to his real intentions is available to the reader), but also in the more radical sense that authorial intention and strategies are subordinate to the functioning of the texts.10 If it is true that the self-reflexivity of literary texts is what produces a literary author, and not vice versa, it is also true that one should not locate in the author the final object of interpretation. In spite of what it may seem, my approach is not radically semiotic.11 After all, the survival for which Pliny the epistolographer designed his collection was not personal but textual; his bid at contemporary cultural relevance and eventual literary immortality did not primarily concern his figure but his works. They, not he, were designed to endure the passing of time and, by entering into the literary canon, acquire the status of a model. In my reading, authorial intention is not taken as the foundational agency behind a text, but rather as one of its necessarily secondary, though desired, effects. The renewed attention that has been devoted to Pliny in the most recent criticism is well complemented by a novel interest in the study 10

11

For a discussion of the problem of intentionality, see Hinds 1998. Hinds’ analysis is not a survey of two schools, but rather an outline of two theories in their purest and most extremist state. For an earlier survey of the same issue, see also Fowler 1997. The most recent appraisal of the question limited to modern languages is in Machacek 2007. Edmunds 2001.

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of epistolography as a genre.12 In what has become a vital field of research, three works devoted each to a different author but addressing similar issues of epistolarity have recently been published: Hutchinson’s reading of selected “literary” epistles by Cicero, Henderson’s analysis of Seneca’s correspondence about his villas, De Pretis’ dissertation on Horace’s epistles.13 A detailed survey of these monographs lies beyond the scope of this book, but their combined import may be used to prepare the ground for a discussion of Pliny’s contribution to the genre. In their discussions of the literary aspects of Cicero’s collection, the poetic epistolary quality of Horace’s poem, and the allusive (and elusive) semiotic strategies of the most notable post-Augustan epistolographer, these studies help to define the horizon of expectations of Pliny’s first readers. They do so both in the range of texts that they survey and in their shared attempt to provide, through both microand macro-textual analyses, a definition of literary epistolarity.14 Taken together, they come to complement and refine Cugusi’s inquiry into the theory and history of Latin letter-writing from the late Republic through the first two centuries of the Empire, thus far the most detailed treatment of the genre of Latin epistolography.15 In particular, in their treatment of epistolarity, they beneficially refocus the investigation from the analysis of the individual letter to the consideration of the larger organism of the collection. With varying degrees of insight and with different tools, these three studies cover the wide horizon of published epistolary corpora by taking into consideration the three main types of letter-writing that were common in Pliny’s time: the Ciceronian, semi-private letter dominated by immediate practical concerns and yet literarily stylized; the fully poetic epistles by Horace, drafted in verse and strictly akin to his Satires in content, argument and style; and the philosophical letter practiced by Seneca, in which the transparent epistolary fiction was subordinated to the transmission of an instructional content, which the author had, in other works, entrusted to other genres (the treatise or the dialogue). From this point of view, 12

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Panels on epistolography were included in recent American Philological Association meetings (“LetterWriting and Letter Collections in Late Antiquity,” New Orleans, 2003; “Letters and Letter-Writing in the Latin Middle Ages,” San Francisco, 2004), and a major conference on Ancient Letters took place at the University of Manchester in July 2004 (see Morello and Morrison 2007). Cambridge published a reader of Greek and Latin letters (Trapp 2003). Hutchinson 1998, Henderson 2004, De Pretis 2004. Literariness is one of the most slippery and intensely debated notions in current cultural vocabulary. New Critical attitudes, in particular, have come under attack for their potentially ahistorical treatment of texts labeled “literary.” See, for instance, Ebbeler’s vibrant response to Hutchinson 1998 (Ebbeler 1998), to be balanced with Nicholson 2000. Cugusi 1983.

Introduction

7

epistolography appears as one of the most heterogeneously composed and fluidly bounded genres in Latin literature.16 When he composed, revised and decided to publish an edition of his letters, Pliny faced a paradoxical problem: his collection was positioning itself inside a fluid genre, an area of the canon that was at once crowded with examples but devoid of exemplars. The Latin tradition of letter-writing offered no single dominant model for collecting individual pieces in a unitary body: the spectrum of solutions was too wide and the criteria to be observed in producing an epistolary collection were uncertain. Available exemplars ranged from the most loosely connected letters by Cicero, which had been published according to addressee and secondarily in chronological order, through Seneca’s more compact gathering of essays in epistolary form addressed to an individual, to the artfully planned poetic collection of epistles that Horace had arranged according to thematic and stylistic criteria, or that Ovid had used as his privileged means of communication from exile.17 In short, while traditional unwritten norms for what an epistle should look like did exist, and Pliny conformed to them, the “epistolary paradigm” Pliny had inherited left ample margins for independent experimentation with the architecture of the collection, and he certainly took advantage of them. Pliny’s most notable contributions to the genre of epistolary writing took place at the macro-level of the collection. It is here that he most clearly placed his epistles at the crossroads of the traditions of prose and poetry – midway between Cicero’s carelessly (because posthumously) arranged books of ad Familiares and architecturally composed poetic collections such as Horace’s first book of Epistles or Ovid’s Ex Ponto. The published collections of prose letters, which have so far been the main focus of Plinian criticism, did not avail themselves of the two principal techniques that distinguished Pliny’s modus inveniendi and disponendi. Neither Cicero nor Seneca appeared to be interested, as Pliny was, in whatever meaning the reader could extract from the disposition of the individual elements in the collection and the use of particularly memorable poetic fragments as structuring devices. These techniques were, on the contrary, typical of the tradition of verse letter-writing that, starting from the Augustan age, had been practiced by poets and with which Pliny’s first audience was no less familiar.18 The points of contact between epistles and poetic collections are not only 16

17 18

See Barchiesi 2001b: 149–50. On epistolary collections as a playable genre that may incorporate and re-use other canonical forms of writing, see Ker 2006: 31, developing Wilson 2001: 186. For a detailed overview of poetic epistolography, see Jacobson 1974: 331–48. Hints to the potential relevance of the tradition for Pliny’s project are in Cugusi 1983: 129–31 and 225.

8

The Art of Pliny’s Letters

occasional or local. Pliny learned from Horace and Ovid to pay the same attention as they did to the arrangement of the book and the deployment of a peculiarly poetic allusive art. Their poetic collections offered Pliny the techniques to have his work fall in their tradition. In Pliny’s day, the works of Latin poets, from the time of the Neoterics to his own age, set a commanding example of authorial self-consciousness and of publication practice that appealed to him for two fundamental reasons. They provided him with an example of how the collection form, with its ability to weave together individual units in thematic and stylistic strains, was able to confer a certain degree of cohesion on a plurality of short, apparently unrelated, texts, thus guaranteeing their philological endurance. They also represented a tradition that had (recently, but authoritatively) been formalized by Quintilian into a canon, divided by genre, which served as the basis for primary instruction in ludi litterarii (Inst. 10.1.85–96). Arranging his letters as an organized corpus and publishing them as a “poetic” collection allowed Pliny to invest individual texts with a higher claim to permanence in meaningfully coherent and articulated organisms than in isolation. Attention to form guaranteed their literary re-usability: along with preservation came the possibility of their becoming objects of direct imitation. Poetic examples were for Pliny more than an instigation to control macrotextually the variable of their literariness. They also constituted a primary example of a technique that he imported into his work, namely, the deployment of allusions as structuring agents. As I will show in Chapter 1, the disposition of Pliny’s allusions served to mark the structure of his collection as significant. By creating areas of higher semiotic density that stand out from the plainer fabric of the rest of the text, allusions emphasize their location on the textual map across which they are scattered. They confer cohesion on the epistolary macro-text. By virtue of its arrangement, reminiscent of the organizational model of earlier poetic collections, Pliny’s own collection of letters counteracted the ever-present danger, inherent in a composite work, of being dismembered either by editors in the process of its philological transmission or by readers in the course of its semiological reception. In creating a poetically compact work, Pliny exploited both sides of the model: not only did he confer philological compactness on his collection, but he also insured his text against any fragmentary dissemination and reception.19 Once the poetic model has been established as relevant for 19

He was not fully successful: in the French manuscript family of B and F only 100 letters survived. Cf. Mynors 1963: vi–viii.

Introduction

9

his collection, Pliny may hope that his readers will know that the meaning of the whole will be different, and greater, than the mere sum of its parts.20 The presence of a poetic technique in the work of a writer of prose is certainly not unprecedented. Prose permeability to poetry is particularly evident in post-Augustan writers. As it has been observed, authors such as Tacitus or Seneca displayed a strong tendency to model their prose on poetry. A parte subjecti, the mechanism of intertextual reference that can be seen to govern the composition of poetry was not a trade secret from which prose writers were excluded.21 In Latin prose writers there are instances of allusions to both Greek models (Plato in Cicero, Thucydides in Sallust, etc.) and Latin poetic sources: Naevius in Livy, for example, and, for authors closer to Pliny in time, Virgil in Tacitus, or Virgil and Horace in Petronius.22 The interconnection of prose and prose is of course attested and studied as well.23 Similarly, a parte obiecti, the habit of “reading intertextually,” to which Roman readers were educated by a pedagogy hinging upon imitation, was not specific to poetry.24 The notion of idonei auctores, which lay at the core of Roman instructional techniques, bridged the gap between the macro-genres of prose and poetry. The same principle of imitation governed the first stages of one’s career as an orator, a prose-writer, and a poet: the very concept of latinitas was imitative in nature.25 After surveying several cases of structuring allusions in Chapter 1, in the body of my work I consider Pliny’s negotiation of his position in the canon 20

21

22

23 24

25

In Love by the Numbers, Dettmer argues that Catullus’ poems are organized in nine concentric cycles centered around numerical patterns, cycles that Horace echoed and imitated in Books 1–3 of the Odes (1997: 236–61). Disagreement still remains on Dettmer’s results in terms of both the outline of the structures obtained and their significance, but the number nine dominating Catullus’ (and Horace’s) corpus might have some significance also for Pliny’s collection of nine books of private epistles. In prose, the number nine is significant also for the nine books of Valerius Maximus’ Facta et Dicta Memorabilia, a text that, like Pliny’s collection, claims from the start not to be historiography (V. Max. 1.1). Among examples of recent experiments exporting into the interpretation of prose texts the complex dynamics of reading that inform intertextual investigations of poetry, see Finkelpearl, who considers allusions to various prose and poetry texts in Apuleius (1990 and 1998). Allusions to Naevius in historiography have long been recognized. See, for example, Strzelecki 1963. For Tacitus, see at least Baxter 1971 and 1972, Putnam 1989 and Woodman’s work, especially the articles now collected in Tacitus Reviewed (1998). For Petronius, see Bodel 1994 and 1999. Seneca appears involved in allusive redeployment of poetic language in his prose: see Hine 2005 and Williams 2006: 155, who detects traces of Virgil in ad Helviam 7.3–7. For Seneca’s epistolary allusions (and his avoidance behavior), see Berthet 1979. See, for instance, Ash 1997 or Levene’s analysis of Cato’s presence in Sallust’s prose (2000). See the stress Edmunds places on the habits of reading in the first century bce (2001: 108–15), and Pliny’s own recommended course of study for Fuscus, symptomatically moving between prose and poetry exercises (Ep. 7.9). Several poets’ careers began in rhetorical schools. Seneca attests the osmosis between oratio and solutum carmen in the exemplary case of the gifted young Ovid (Con. 2.2.9). See Bonner 1977 and Kaster 1978.

10

The Art of Pliny’s Letters

of Latin literature.26 In particular, I focus on his attempts to inscribe his letters in the canon of imitandi auctores that his teacher Quintilian had recently drafted ad usum Delphini in the tenth book of his Institutio. In this process of canonization of his epistolary texts, Pliny entered into a close dialogue with his contemporaries (primarily Tacitus) on questions of oratory and historiography, and with his antecedents both in the poetic tradition (Catullus as reshaped by Horace’s post-neoteric poetics) and in the tradition of epistolography (Cicero). Chapters 2 to 4 are devoted to the proposition that Pliny defined the parameters of his new form of epistolography by opposition, simultaneously aligning it with and distancing it from the literary forms with which it shared the greatest affinities: poetry, oratory and historiography. Chapter 2 treats Pliny’s allusions to neoteric poetry as an ambiguous attempt to disentangle his literary program from Catullus’ conflation of stylistic novelty and political disengagement. A prudent ideologically and stylistically motivated departure from the neoteric poetic mode had already taken place in the first years of the Principate, and it has been detected in the poetic trajectories of Virgil, Propertius and Horace. Accordingly, only a post-Augustan Catullus is allowed to surface in Pliny’s book, one with distinct cultural connotations, whose text affects the body of the letters from rather unpredictable trajectories. Chapter 3 considers the dialogue in which the epistles engage with Tacitus as an authoritative voice in the contemporary debate on oratory. By responding to Tacitus’ theory and practice of oratory in the anxiety-defusing medium of the literary epistle, Pliny avoids an impending conflict with his great friend and rival; a potentially competitive relationship is resolved in the ambiguous, allusively Virgilian, language of a collaborative pursuit of studia. Chapter 4 addresses Pliny’s dialogue with historiography, moving from his theoretical assessment of the specific difference between history and oratory to his experiments with the writing of history in epistolary form. The letters dedicated to the eruption of the Vesuvius are particularly relevant. Although addressed to an historian and concerning matters admittedly worthy of history, Epistle 6.16 is written in a non-historical mode, with Pliny preparing the account of his uncle’s death for Tacitus’ pen. On the contrary, Epistle 6.20, which modestly declares its inconsequentiality for any historical account, is drafted in a different style, and offers a series of controlled allusions to poetic antecedents that complicate its lineage and 26

Through allusions poets negotiate with their readers and their culture the meaning and position of a text in the canon. On the dynamics of the genres at work in Latin poetry, see Conte 1974 and 1984; Conte and Barchiesi 1989; Barchiesi 1984 and 2001a, especially 49–78 and 141–54. In the English speaking world, West and Woodman 1979, Thomas 1986 and Lyne 1987.

Introduction

11

its interpretation. In these experiments the interplay of literary allusion and stylistic imitation constitutes Pliny’s response to Tacitus’ historiography in the making. A final chapter assesses Pliny’s relationship with the towering figure in whose shadow and on whose model he constructed his political life and literary career: Cicero. If in the political and oratorical spheres neither the times nor his own talent enabled him to rival his great predecessor, into the shared field of epistolography Pliny poured all his literary energies, with considerable success. In this field, he could contrast Cicero’s mere plans of publishing his correspondence with his own achievements. The care with which Pliny published his collection of epistles made it an object that could engage his predecessor’s work in a game of aemulatio, the result of which was not fully predetermined. Improving upon the haphazard survival of Cicero’s correspondence, Pliny could present his epistles as a carefully edited and timely published work; an organized body of writing that could challenge and eventually replace its model in the canon. It is important to keep in mind that the models relevant for Pliny’s work were not only single epistles but epistolary collections. These organized bodies of writing constituted the encyclopedia of Pliny’s readers, the always partially reconstructable culture the author and his audience shared.27 For the success of this ambitious project aiming at the “canonization” of his own texts, Pliny relied on his readers’ participation and at the same time challenged their expectations. The hybrid genre he constructed required the active involvement of his readers; they needed to be able to reconcile the novelty of Pliny’s allusively poetic enterprise with the traditional perception of what a letter should look like, how a collection should be arranged, and ultimately what to expect when reading a collection of prose letters. The shape of his work, a collection of prose letters, invited readers into a process of constant renegotiation of literary parameters. The relief in which he put the compositional aspects of his book drew attention to the potential semantic value of the work’s arrangement, just as the evocation of poetry, oratory and historiography in his texts required from his readers the same hermeneutic agility. In exchange for their collaboration in the semiotic process, Pliny gave his readers a text that was not only a repertoire of models for drafting individual letters, but also an example of what a carefully edited book could be. In this sense, as he repeatedly and amiably told his correspondents, he achieved something truly his own. 27

For the notion of the reader’s encyclopedia, see Eco 1979.

chap t e r 1

The semiotics of structure

L’universo `e scritto in lingua matematica, e i caratteri son triangoli cerchi e altre figure geometriche, senza i quali mezzi `e impossibile intenderne umanamente parola. Senza questi `e un aggirarsi vanamente per un oscuro labirinto. Galileo Galilei, Il Saggiatore

At the apex of his rhetorical career, with the delivery of the Panegyricus of Trajan, Pliny embarked on an ambitious project: collecting and releasing a selection of his private epistles. Little is known about the dating of the publication, and no critical consensus has been reached on its phases.1 Based on internal chronological references, however, the epistles themselves can be confidently located some time between 98 and Pliny’s hurried departure for Bithynia in 109 or later.2 In its final form, the collection totals 247 letters, organized into nine books.3 Macroscopically, the letters give a strong impression of authenticity and immediacy. They are what we are accustomed to call private letters: however stylistically (re-)elaborated, they display all the features we expect of a real correspondence.4 They are addressed to a variety of correspondents, all duly indicated in the opening 1

2

3

4

A thorough summary of the question and a plausible new hypothesis is being advanced in a yet unpublished work by John Bodel, who argues that the work we have is a composite unit assembled from a series of books published sequentially, in small groups or individually, over the preceding decade. Specifically, he proposes the following phases of publication: Books 1 and 2 were most likely published as a pair shortly after Pliny held the consulship in 100; in 103–4 Book 3 was released to form a triad rounded off by a metapoetic epistle (3.21 on the death of Martial). Around 105 Pliny then produced Book 4 independently; in 106–7 he published a comprehensive edition of Books 1–4, together with a newly collected Book 5. At the beginning of 108 he independently released the bulky Book 6; Books 7 and 8 came as a distinctively shaped pair as soon as Pliny heard that he was going to be sent to Bithynia. Finally, Book 9 was probably put together in relative haste from material drawn from the preceding three or four years, and published before Pliny left Rome in the summer of 110. The dates refer to the initial drafting of the individual epistles and are based on the established chronology of contemporary events covered or referred to by the letters. See Sherwin-White 1966: 37–41 and Syme 1985b: 183. For a detailed survey of Pliny’s manuscript tradition, see Mynors 1963: v-xxii and Reynolds 1983: 316–33. For the peculiar status of Book 10, containing the correspondence with Trajan, see infra. Cf. Winniczuk 1975 and Bell 1989.

12

The semiotics of structure

13

salutatio, and encompass a wide range of topics. In subject-matter, they vary from the most immediately transparent notes commenting on the daily transactions among Pliny’s familiares (friends and family) to the most stylistically and rhetorically engaged reports on notable biographical, social and political events, along with the occasional philosophical meditation. The variety in addressee, subject-matter and style is balanced by one sole factor, the constant presence of the sender’s epistolographic persona. Pliny’s editorial adventure in epistolography was neither unwarranted nor revolutionary. His direct involvement as a former consul and a senator in the political life of Rome under both Domitian and Trajan allowed him to make a strong claim for his readers’ attention. His friendship and family ties with similarly prominent players in the politics and culture of his day only reinforced it. His rhetorical prowess as a student of Quintilian, a successful lawyer, and an honored public speaker, recommended his Latinity for imitation – or, at least, raised it above suspicion. In addition to his personal merits, however, Pliny could count on the several (though heterogeneous) epistolographic precedents mentioned in the Introduction. Authors as different as Epicurus and Plato, Seneca and Cicero, Catullus, Horace and Ovid had all practiced various forms of epistolary writing. Even if no treatment of the literary genre of the epistle existed in Pliny’s time, there were both traditional unwritten norms for what an epistle should look like and examples of published epistolary corpora.5 Several collections of letters had appeared in the early years of the Principate and were already part of the mental library of his readers. Roman readers had seen epistles by Brutus dating from the late Republic (cf. Plin. Nat. 33.39). Though little appreciated, Varro’s collection of pseudo-satirical and philosophical letters was also known.6 Roman readers knew Caesar’s epistles addressed to the Senate, ad familiares, and to Cicero himself (cf. Plin. Nat. 14.66 and Suet. Jul. 56.5–7). Atticus and other less politically and culturally prominent figures had collections circulating under their names that have left traces in the accounts of later Latin writers. A prominent role appears also to have been played by Augustus’ epistolary collections (a book ad Gaium Nepotem mentioned by Gellius, 15.7.3; and sparse fragments of correspondence with 5

6

Sherwin-White 1966: 1 and Cugusi 1983: 43. Cugusi’s researches complement and often correct Peter’s fundamental but now outdated study of the epistle in Roman literature (1901). A useful outline of the epistolary tradition in Rome is in Mazzoli, with a bibliography that supplements Cugusi’s (1991: 198–227, esp. 223–7). Fragments of the Varronian epistles are preserved in Nonius and Charisius (Cugusi 1983: 178–9). The fact that they are mentioned and still known in the fourth century is in Cugusi’s view sufficient to prove that the epistles had been published. He ventures that, “in all likelihood,” Varro’s epistolary corpus was published posthumously.

14

The Art of Pliny’s Letters

other familiares).7 As a whole, this body of texts constituted a powerful, if implicit, point of comparison for Pliny’s work. It was against such an authoritative horizon of expectations that he knew his readers were going to measure his epistles once published. In the variegated landscape of the genre, however, one antecedent occupied a special position: Cicero’s letters represented a massive watershed that was particularly relevant for Pliny. It is regrettable that so little is known about the publication process of Cicero’s collections. Such information would have given an indication of how a text soon regarded as a classic came into being.8 Despite the uncertainty that also surrounds the exact date of their publication, we know that Seneca already considered Cicero’s epistles ad Atticum so important that he felt compelled to respond to them: nec faciam quod Cicero, vir disertissimus, facere Atticum iubet, ut etiam “si rem nullam habebit, quod in buccam venerit scribam” (Sen. Ep. 118.1–2: see below).9 On the one hand, Seneca’s testimony shows that in the Neronian age Cicero’s letters served as an influential example of how private correspondence could be published and attain a central cultural status. On the other hand, it also suggests that, while Cicero’s example was perhaps unavoidable, it was not beyond challenge and improvement.10 Chapter 5 will be devoted to exploring how Cicero’s model might have directly influenced Pliny. Pliny’s epistolary self-portrait revolved around his public role as a man of politics and letters, and he could expect his readers to associate his literary endeavor with the example set by Cicero’s work. Except for the circumstance that Cicero’s private letters had been published posthumously,11 several aspects of Pliny’s situation recalled that of his predecessor. In Pliny’s collection a set of most explicit and deferential citations also reinforces the circumstantial parallels with Cicero’s work. As we will see, it is not by chance that Cicero was the object of Pliny’s deepest anxiety of influence. By Pliny’s time Seneca’s Epistulae ad Lucilium had been added to the “canon” of epistolographic writings.12 Inviting comparison more with the 7

8 9

10 11 12

Cf. Tac. Dial. 13.2 (testes Augusti epistulae); Don. Verg. 61: Augustus vero . . . supplicibus atque etiam minacibus per iocum litteris efflagitare, ut sibi “de Aeneide,” ut ipsius verba sunt, “vel prima carminis  vel quodlibet   mitteretur”; Macr. 1.24.11, with Virgil’s reply to Augustus. On the canonization of Cicero, see Kaster 1998. Cf. also Sen. Ep. 21.4 (Nomen Attici perire Ciceronis epistulae non sinent) and 97.3–6 (Ipsa ponam verba Ciceronis, followed by a direct citation of Cic. Att. 1.16.5). Hutchinson comments that ad Atticum may be Seneca’s model “even if the work had only been recently published” (1998: 4, n. 4; my italics). One could stress, on the other hand, that because the work had only been recently published, Seneca’s letters could be an answer to the recent publication of Cicero’s ad Atticum. See Ker 2006: 26–7 and, on Ep. 118, 31–6. On the phases of publication of Cicero’s letters, see Chapter 5. Seneca is thought to have published Books 1–3 himself: in the last epistle of Book 3 he shows that he considers the collection closed (si pudorem haberes, ultimam mihi pensionem remisisses, sed

The semiotics of structure

15

philosophical correspondence of Plato and of Epicurus than with any collection of “utilitarian” letters (Gebrauchsbriefe, lettere di consumo), Seneca’s Epistulae morales could be seen as short treatises en travesti. Unsurprisingly, they often shared techniques of argumentation, conceptual material, and instructional concerns with actual texts Seneca published in more traditional, philosophical forms.13 Pliny’s letters appear closest to Seneca’s particularly in their construction of an epistolographic persona which may acquire exemplary value.14 Several items in Pliny’s collection specifically recall Seneca’s antecedents: Pliny’s 9.36 and 9.40, for example, which detail his daily routines in summer and winter, find a counterpart in Seneca’s Ep. 83. Pliny’s exitus letters are often stoically oriented: Ep. 1.12 on the death of Corellius Rufus even ends on a clear Senecan note on the inspirational role that exemplary figures play as ideal spectators of one’s own life (see Ep. 25.5–6 or 32.1). Even when, in Ep. 6.34, he alludes more directly to Ciceronian antecedents (Fam. 2.11.2, 8.8.10, 8.9.3), Pliny evokes the tirade against gladiatorial spectacles Seneca made in Ep. 7: Pliny’s incipit recte fecisti (“that was the appropriate action”) associates an un-Stoic behavior, the production of gladiatorial games, with the most precise Stoic vocabulary (katorthoma).15 Published collections of prose letters were not, however, the only possible referent for Pliny’s project. His audience was also familiar with a different tradition that remains outside the scope of most of Pliny’s criticism. Dating from the Augustan age, but with significant diffusion in Pliny’s times, verse letter-writing had been practiced by poets. Cugusi merely scratches the surface of the genre in one brief paragraph of his work (129) and lists as examples of verse epistolography the lost letters from Corinth of Sp. Mummius, the preserved epistolary fragments by Lucilius, and Catullus’ carmina 65 and 68a. He devotes hardly more space to Horace’s Epistles and Ovid’s Heroides and Ex Ponto, mentioning only in passing Statius’ Silvae

13

14 15

ne ego quidem me sordide geram in finem aeris alieni et tibi quod debeo impingam, Ep. 29.10) and in Ep. 33.1 he seems to answer to criticism of the preceding books (desideras his quoque epistulis sicut prioribus adscribi aliquas voces nostrorum procerum; cf. Lana 1991: 280–1). The question whether he also completed the publication of the remaining books is more debated. For a summary of the issue, see Cugusi 1983: 200–1 and, more recently, Fedeli 2004: 203–4. Cugusi argues in favor of considering Seneca’s epistles real letters, and provides a balanced assessment of their author’s equal insistence on authentic formulaic structures and on their eventual success with posterity. Cugusi comments also on the impact that the single-addressee structure of Cicero’s published corpus ad Atticum might have had on Seneca (1983: 200–3). This trend has been analyzed by Edwards 1997. Cf. Cicero’s etymological definition at Off. 1.8: Perfectum officium rectum, opinor, vocemus, quoniam Graeci “katorthoma” . . . vocant (I think we may call “right” the perfectly appropriate action, since the Greeks call it katorthoma [right action]). See also Long 2001: 210–11.

The Art of Pliny’s Letters

16

4.4, and surprisingly omitting Propertius 4.3. Cursory as it is, Cugusi’s review is interesting for a parallel he draws. Highlighting the presence of poetic epistles among Catullus’ nugae and Statius’ Silvae, Cugusi indicates that “the epigrammatic tone [of poetic epistles] made its way into the lettere d’arte, for example in Pliny” (131). The “close kinship” that he sees linking Pliny’s literary correspondence to the poetic traditions of love-elegy and epigram can be better specified. It is true that “there is a noteworthy identity of themes in Pliny and Roman love elegy, Pliny and Statius, and Pliny and Martial,”16 but there are also two distinct allusive signals that connect his collection with Horace’s Epistles and Ovid’s Ex Ponto. As we will see in the body of this chapter, the points of contact between Pliny’s epistles and poetic collections are not only occasional or local; Pliny alludes to the form of his antecedents’ books. Pliny’s work situated itself at the center of the gravitational pull exerted by the three traditions surveyed above. On the poetic side the metrical form prevailed over the epistolary quality of the texts (Catullus, Horace and Ovid had produced texts that were read primarily as poetry, not as letters); on the pedagogic and philosophic side, content prevailed over form (the same arguments Plato, Epicurus and Seneca advanced in their letters had often found expression in other genres such as the dialogue or the treatise); on the utilitarian side, the immediate circumstances of composition and the practical aims of the texts prevailed over their formal elaboration: Cicero’s letters, for example, owed their survival more to the relevance of their author’s cultural and political weight than to any stylistic elaboration. Paradoxically, Pliny’s main compositional novelty resided in the traditional quality of his product. As we will see, his collection preserved the authenticity and immediacy of its subject-matter in the wake of Cicero’s model; it was just as argumentative as the philosophical tradition because it revolved around distinct issues and nuclei of thought, but most of all it strove to acquire a poetic quality through the Hellenistic elaboration of its form. mixed signals: paradigmat ic and syntagmatic eff ects Like all large collections of individual fragments, Pliny’s nine-book corpus of private correspondence results from the interplay of two opposing forces that dominate both its composition and its reception. On the one 16

Cugusi 1983: 225.

The semiotics of structure

17

hand, the collection is an assemblage of independently conceived elements, with a distinctive original function and precise primary addressee. On the other hand, the work as a whole, in both its scope and structure, invites a sequential reading, which privileges forward motion over localized focus, continuity over break.17 The equilibrium between these two forces governs the literary organism, preventing it from becoming either a mere anthology of fragments haphazardly grouped together (like Cicero’s ad Familiares) or a fully fledged narrative in which individual elements are subordinated to an overarching organizational plan (like Seneca’s epistles ad Lucilium). In the present chapter, I investigate four conscious and coordinated strategies through which Pliny achieved a final balance between the recurring paradigmatic elements and the syntagmatic narrative drive essential to his collection.18 This balance is what allowed his letters to maintain, at least in part, the ability to stand in isolation, while conferring on his collection the quality of a unitary corpus. Four kinds of internal relationships may be organized into two pairs of opposed, reciprocally balancing, techniques, each pair facilitating either the paradigmatic or syntagmatic reading option for the texts. I will label these four types of relations as situational, thematic, narrative and intertextual connections. Two organizational features invite a paradigmatic reading of the collection: its statutory refusal of the singleaddressee criterion, and its programmatic non-chronological arrangement. Conversely, two balancing elements invite a syntagmatic reading: the narrative pairing of epistles and what I propose to call the intertextual pairing; the linkage, that is, of neighboring epistles through the allusion to a common poetic antecedent. I will not devote equal space to the four organizational processes for two reasons. While the first three strategies of arrangement take place on a macroscopic level and use prominent features of the text, intertextual pairings affect minimal portions of text and thus require a closer examination. Also, while poetic antecedents may be found for Pliny’s choice of juxtaposing variously addressed letters arranged out of chronological order with dyads of narratively sequential ones, his subtle strategy of intertextual pairing is totally his own. 17

18

In one of his less Delphic passages, Henderson states as much: “Latin letters were the most prestigious prose genre where book composition from a number of serial sub-units metonymized an expanding collection of books” (2006: 125). In addition to linear and fragmentary reading, a third possibility is, of course, a cyclical motion through the literary space. As we shall see in the conclusion, this option is not to be ruled out completely. For examples of localized circularity in space- and time-rendition in Ep. 2.7 and 5.16, see Riggsby 2003: 172–5 and 185–6. See Jakobson 1971. Jakobson identified combination and selection as the fundamental modes of arrangement for any linguistic sign, generating respectively relationships of contiguity and similarity. For the terminology, see Halliday 1976: 84–7.

18

The Art of Pliny’s Letters

Pliny’s fourfold compositional technique is unprecedented for epistolary prose. Cicero’s and Seneca’s monumental collections, the only two authoritative models available in Pliny’s time, had been arranged according to more univocal criteria of presentation: the unity of addressee and (rough) chronological order.19 Pliny is the first practitioner of the genre who adopts a more balanced organizational technique that is able to preserve both the independence of the individual letters and the cohesion of the work.20 Somewhat paradoxically, however, the novelty of Pliny’s adopted strategy coincides with its being fully traditional, albeit of a tradition rooted in a different genre. The equilibrium between paradigmatic and syntagmatic elements in the collection has, in fact, a quintessentially poetic quality. Had it been applied to texts drafted in verse, the artful arrangement of Pliny’s letters would have surprised no one. Horace’s Epistles and Ovid’s Ex Ponto, two collections which have left perceptible traces in Pliny’s text, had not lost their character of Hellenistic poetry-books because of their epistolary content. They had been composed, and were perceived, as highly formalized literary organisms, whose arrangement in allusive patterns was based on intrinsic elements of theme and diction as well as on extrinsic elements such as the time of (fictional) composition or the recurring addressees.21 In eschewing the two canonized models of prose epistolography, Pliny aligned his work with that of the no less authoritative collection-assembling poets. These hetero-generic models acted in two distinct ways on Pliny’s work: on the level of authorial invention, his use of allusive techniques was encouraged by their deployment in earlier (and contemporary) poetic 19

20

21

While surviving manuscripts concur in presenting Cicero’s corpus in addressee- and theme-based units, modern editors have privileged a chronological arrangement (Shackleton Bailey). See, however, Beard’s invitation to read also Cicero’s letters according to the traditional book division as respondent to an editorial design dating from, at the latest, the first century ce (2002: 116–30). For Pliny’s selfpositioning and reaction to the status of Cicero’s epistolary collection in his day, see Chapter 5. The utterly different status of Pliny’s tenth book is evident. Made up of the correspondence between the Emperor Trajan and the author in his public role as proconsul in Bithynia, it is documentary more than literary in nature. Letters in this book have been arranged (most likely by an editor) according to the more traditional criteria of unity of addressee and chronological development. On the special status of the final book, see Lilja 1970, Gamberini 1983: 374, Jones 1991, Ludolph 1997: 49–56 and M´ethy 2007. Two recent contributions propose to consider Book 10 as more than a mere documentary collection of unedited material, and stress the conscious process of selection that controlled the epistles published. While they propose to identify with Pliny the editor of this segment of his correspondence, they still admit to the differences in tone and style separating this book from the nine preceding. See Statder 2006 (with the concession to difference on page 67) and Woolf 2006. For attention to structure in poetry books of Augustan age, see Michelfeit 1969 and, with wider chronological scope, Van Sickle 1980. On Horace’s compositional strategies, see Rudd 1982: 160– 1, Dettmer 1983, Santirocco 1980, Zetzel 1980 and Ludolph 1997: 91–8. For Ovid’s Amores, see McKeown 1987, 1: 90–102; for the Ex Ponto, Helzle 2003: 41–5.

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collections; on the level of the audience reception of his texts, his redeployment of poetic antecedents was designed to evoke his models. To be sure, when he imported their techniques into the less dense medium of his prose, Pliny also had to adapt them. But the degree of modification that they had to undergo was less than we might imagine today. The poetic epistolary collections of Horace and Ovid were suitable models for Pliny because of their philological and semiological proximity to his own collection. As we will see, in Roman literary culture the dichotomy between prose and poetry did not constitute an impermeable barrier either for writers, who were trained in the practice of both modes, or for their audience, who approached the interpretation of both poetic and prose texts with the same expectations and hermeneutic tools. For Pliny, the authoritative examples of canonical poets-turned-epistolographers provided a pattern for creative imitation; for readers, their works were also the first background onto which they would project Pliny’s experiment. The publishing technique Pliny adopts is a surprising novelty. When he collects in each individual book miscellaneously addressed letters and declares from the outset that he has avoided the chronological criterion, he challenges the expectation horizon of his readers. Cicero and Seneca had taken exactly the opposite route. Both Cicero’s editors and Seneca (or Seneca’s editors) had chosen to group letters according to their addressee and, within that division, in chronological order.22 To be sure, Pliny’s corpus, through the index that may have accompanied it, might have been reorganized according to the same principle.23 Yet, recomposing the disiecta membra of the small internal corpora according to their addressee is something that Pliny leaves to the curious reader. As it stands, a principle of variety in addressees informs the work. Pliny is no less radical in rejecting the available models when it comes to the chronological principle. The Epistulae ad Lucilium had a fairly complicated but distinct internal chronology. The dating of each letter in the corpus might be tricky, but one can perceive the successive phases of composition in its larger units. Moreover, a subtle system of internal references projects onto the privileged initial addressee a progressive, rather than episodic, curriculum of instruction. As has been observed, the web of philosophic sources becomes thinner as the correspondence progresses, and the authorial voice in the text gradually 22

23

Cf. Nepos’ assessment of the value of Cicero’s correspondence with Atticus: quae qui legat, non multum desideret historiam contextam eorum temporum (in essence their readers will find an almost complete history of their time) (Att. 16.4). Cf. Hoffer 1999: 23, who draws attention to Nepos’ remarks. Cf. Robbins 1910.

20

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changes, modeling itself on the intellectual development of its (fictional, or at least passive) addressee.24 It is not by chance that Pliny’s first move in the collection is aimed at dispelling his audience’s expectations. From the start he claims considerable independence from his most predictable models. His dedicatory epistle to Septicius Clarus rules out the principles of unity in addressee and respect for chronology – at least on the level of its epistolary poetics. In prefacing his collection with a short, traditionally modest, proemial piece, Pliny adds a crucial detail that, by way of a negative parenthetical statement that distances his work from the genre of history, also distinguishes it from the most readily available examples of published correspondence.25 His work as self-editor, he states, has consisted merely in gathering his more carefully drafted letters and in arranging them casually, with no attention to their chronology. C. PLINIUS SEPTICIO SUO S. Frequenter hortatus es ut epistulas, si quas paulo curatius scripsissem, colligerem publicaremque. Collegi non servato temporis ordine (neque enim historiam componebam), sed ut quaeque in manus venerat. Superest ut nec te consilii nec me paeniteat obsequii. Ita enim fiet, ut eas quae adhuc neglectae iacent requiram et si quas addidero non supprimam. Vale. Dear Septicius, You have often encouraged me to collect and publish my letters, if I had written any a little more conscientiously. I have done that, arranging them in no chronological order (I was not composing history, you know) but as each had come to my hands. At this point it only remains to hope that you have no regrets for having given such advice and I for having heeded it. If this is the case, I’ll search for the letters that lie around still untouched, and I won’t suppress those that I will have added. Be well.26

The letter, however, does not work only as an implicit negative statement. If it dispels the readers’ expectations based on the Ciceronian or Senecan prose models, it also contains a programmatically positive allusion to an alternative tradition: the hybrid of epistolary and poetic forms practiced by Ovid in his Epistulae ex Ponto. As Syme first pointed out, Pliny’s proem epistle, which characterizes his collection as haphazard and disengaged, invites comparison with Ovid’s self-aware and equally detached disclaimer 24

25 26

For a discussion of the internal chronology in the Epistulae ad Lucilium, see Cugusi 1983: 196–201, with bibliography. See also Griffin 1976: 400, Edwards 1997: 29–32, Wilson 2001: 176–7 and 184–6, and Fedeli 2004: 203–5. On proemial topoi, see Janson 1964. For those of historiography, see Herkommer 1968. All translations are mine.

The semiotics of structure

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at the close of the third book of the Ex Ponto.27 In shaping his elegiac texts from exile as a collection of poetic epistles, Ovid had adopted the same casual pose as Pliny. While stressing, as is his wont, the harsh conditions of his relegation, Ovid downplayed the stylistic and literary value of his collection. Once collected, he wrote, he joined them in no particular order (postmodo collectas utcumque sine ordine iunxi, Pont. 3.9.53). That, in Ovid’s case, the gesture was rhetorical has been long since established, and recent scholarship on the Ex Ponto has demonstrated the existence of a complex organizational structure based on the epistles’ addressees.28 Little has been done to follow up, however, on the Ovidian clue placed by Pliny at the outset of his book. The slight interest readers of Pliny have demonstrated in exploring the Ovidian connection is strange: Ovid, after all, might be a plausible model for a Latin author who is about to turn epistolographer. In my view, the Ovidian note is a clear signal that Pliny’s corpus is meant to be read in connection with the poetic branch of the epistolary tradition. Before proceeding any further, one central point needs to be cleared up: I do not argue for Ovid’s philological primacy, but more modestly for his semiological relevance. Ovid’s letter-poems from exile might or might not have been Pliny’s choice model for imitation; there is not enough evidence to ascertain direct influence. They were, however, surely in his readers’ mental library, and Pliny was aware of it. In other words, Ovid’s poetry from exile was the antecedent, both necessary and sufficient, for understanding Pliny’s experiment with the structure of his collection and gauging its essential novelty.29 If Pliny’s allusively established claim of Ovidian filiation required the collaboration of the reader, this was not only because it appeared in a small verbal cluster, the Ovidian source of which might only have been grasped by an educated and alert audience, but also because its effectiveness depended, more essentially, upon this audience’s existence. Paradoxically, even if Pliny himself had not been an engaged reader of Ovid, his own readers were: the mere existence of Ovid’s collections in the readers’ mental library sufficed to establish them as a reference point for Pliny’s 27

28

29

Syme 1985b: 176. For comparison and contrast Henderson refers, instead, to Juvenal and Statius (2002a: 21 and note 18). See Irigoin 1980, Galasso 1995: 17–39, Helzle 2003: 41–5, and, most recently, Gaertner 2005: 2–5. For the impact that Ovid’s arrangement strategies may have had on a contemporary of Pliny, Martial, see Holzberg 2004–5, developing Fowler 1995. In treatments of the double addressee in epistolary material, the terminology has some margin of fluctuation. Rosati (1989: 6–7) distinguishes between internal and external readers (borrowing from Genette the language used in the Italian translation: “lettore intra- ed extra-diegetico”); Oliensis refers to the unaddressed, implicit addressees as “overreaders” (1998: 6); Altman insists on their role as “eventual readers” (1982: 88).

The Art of Pliny’s Letters

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experiment. No other work, beyond the initial allusion to the collecting mechanisms, was required to raise the audience’s metaliterary awareness. In my argument, I will thus not attempt to unearth additional points of contact between Pliny’s and Ovid’s texts, as I would do when arguing for philological preeminence of textual allusions. Rather, I will limit myself to indicating their contextual pertinence. When Pliny programmatically outlines his collecting criteria in 1.1 he follows a via negativa. The principle at work in the book is (allegedly) neither the same as annalistic history nor the one practiced in Seneca’s univocally addressed collection. Even if his letters’ arrangement, as Mommsen showed,30 does not fully contradict the chronology of their composition, the import of Pliny’s words (to be read ironically) remains the same. The falsely dismissive and modest attitude of the self-publishing author is surely a rhetorical trope, aptly and unsurprisingly entrusted to the proem, but it is also designed to suggest a positive, if allusively established, approach to the issue of the collection’s internal organization. If not chronology, what was then the organizational principle at work in Pliny’s collection? There is not a single, privileged strategy at work throughout; rather, we are presented with a variety of techniques, all poetic in nature. While they collaborate in maintaining the balance between the two opposed compositional options of the anthology and the epistolary novel, these relations work in different ways. Situationally and thematically linked letters provide some elements of continuity to the collection, but they also fragment it, suggesting that other ways of arranging the texts are always available. Narratively and intertextually linked epistles isolate precise areas in the work, thus interrupting the flow from one unit to the next, but they also impose a pre-determined causality and precise direction to the reading. Connected letters both suggest continuity and defy it; they bracket what falls between them and frame it. Some examples of each technique may help to clarify the fourfold distinction introduced above, starting from the two connecting techniques which have a prevailing paradigmatic effect (epistles that are thematically or situationally connected). Thematically connected epistles appear separately but within the same book in the collection and thus invite a non-sequential cross-reading of the text. Examples of this type include letters that address similar topics, such as those in Book 3 on the deaths of Silius Italicus (3.7) and Martial (3.21), which are in turn reinforced by a larger array of exitus-letters, all devoted to the passing away of famous personalities: 1.12, focusing on the suicide of Corellius, 3.16 on the exemplarity of Arria’s 30

Mommsen 1869.

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death, two themes that are taken up again, in a perhaps non-coincidental numerical parallel, by the epistle on the death of Pliny the Elder (6.16). The summative role played by 6.16 is probably due to the special relevance that Pliny assigned to the figure of his uncle: in his passing Pliny could depict the death of a man of learning together with the heroic exitus of a public figure worthy of serving as a historical example. These letters may have a fragmenting effect: their repetitive nature does not connect them in a series; rather, it turns them into potentially equivalent samples among which readers are free to choose. Their inclusion and arrangement in Pliny’s corpus appear to suggest that the collection may be treated as an anthology. When we take seriously Pliny’s own invitation to read his collected letters in an Ovidian light, we are able to find the same phenomenon in Ovid’s Tristia and even more explicitly in the Ex Ponto. In both collections of epistles from Tomis, Ovid piles up an almost interminable series of lamentations about his destiny, requests for intercession from his friends, and a balanced mix of admonitions to be faithful, and praise for having been so, to his wife. The redundancy of Ovid’s pleas is such that at the outset of Ex Ponto 3.7 he candidly admits to it: Verba mihi desunt eadem tam saepe roganti, iamque pudet vanas fine carere preces. Taedia consimili fieri de carmine vobis, quidque petam cunctos edidicisse reor. Nostraque quid portet iam nostis epistula, quamvis cera sit a vinclis non labefacta meis. (Ov. Pont. 3.7.1–6)

Words fail me, since I am always asking for the same things, and I am ashamed at this point that my vain prayers will sound endless. I can feel that you are tired of reading always monotonous poems and that you all have learned by heart what I request. You know in advance what a letter from me will bring you, even before the wax has been freed from my twines.31

The repetitive quality of Ovid’s pleas to the gods, his friends and his wife is not to be read as a mere consequence of his rhetorical training, the ability common to all classically trained speakers and writers to develop a basic point in a wide variety of ways. His poetry from exile is repetitive because it mimics the repeated attempts, addressed to different audiences, to win intercession with the princeps. In his defense the exiled poet could claim two extenuating circumstances. First, redundancy was a feature only of the collection, because his first audience was composed of many individuals. If 31

The same thought, triggered this time by the point of view of the critics, is in Pont. 3.9.1–4.

24

The Art of Pliny’s Letters

the original addressees had each been exposed to a particular set of arguments, no tedious repetition could be ascribed to the individual poems.32 Second, his situation did not change: tacitly confirmed from winter to winter, Ovid’s relegation increasingly seemed permanent. With his unchanging fate as exile Ovid paired the static monotony of his poetry. Both circumstances reinforced the fictional frame of the work: even in collected form Ovid’s poems maintain their quality as original documents, which had first been exchanged in a correspondence and have only eventually been collected in a unitary organism. The effect achieved by their grouping together, however, affects the collection as a whole. The endless return to the same language, metaphors, examples and points of argumentation defuses its potential narrativity. In Pliny’s collection situationally connected epistles contribute to the same fragmenting effect. Letters addressed to one recipient but placed at a certain distance and treating seemingly unrelated topics are, for example, 1.1 (the introduction to the collection), 1.15 (a dinner invitation drafted in a Catullan tone), 7.28 (on Pliny’s view of friendship) and 8.1 (on the illness of the slave reader), all addressed to Septicius Clarus. Similarly unrelated in topic, but all addressed to Caninius Rufus, are 1.3 (an invitation to put to a better – that is, literary – use one’s own otium) and 7.18 (on strategies for securing public beneficence after one’s death). Among Pliny’s favorite correspondents is also his father-in-law, Calpurnius Fabatus, who receives 6.12 (on recommendation letters and epistolary etiquette), 6.30 (on the staffing for a villa in Campania) and 7.11 (on the questionable sale of part of Pliny’s estate by one of his freedmen). Also with a presence significantly concentrated in the later books, Rosianus Geminus is addressed several items in the collected correspondence: 7.1 (on the care he should take during his recovery time), 7.24 (on the extravagant life of Ummidia Quadratilla), 8.5 (on the death of Macrinus’ wife), 8.22 (on the necessary forgiveness of other people’s defects but not of one’s own), 9.11 (on the exchange of literary favors and Pliny’s own editorial success) and 9.30 (on the nature and forms of generosity). By reinforcing the sense that we are reading a disordered gathering of independent texts, the recurrence of the same addressee contributes to the reality effect of the collection. Letters are perceived as being more strictly connected to their original communicative circumstances than to the new literary context determined by their 32

It is significant that one of the recurrent themes in both collections is precisely the issue of naming: addressees are first evoked through a signum (a code-epithet or a detail which identifies them in the Tristia) and then directly mentioned at the beginning of each poem in the Ex Ponto – testimony to a higher degree of confidence on the part of the relegated poet, or a complementary relaxation of the political censure surrounding his name in Rome.

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placement in the collection. These letters also invite a paradigmatic reading of the corpus: they suggest that the authorial dispositio is negotiable, that alternative paths of reading (either by theme or addressee) are always possible. Balancing the paradigmatic emphasis introduced into the collection by apparently redundant and potentially disruptive epistles, Pliny also includes letters that not only have the same addressee but also develop successive stages of a situation. These letters embody the opposite tendency from those surveyed above. By constructing a practically irreversible series, they also construct a forward-moving reader who cannot help being caught in the development of a plot.33 Examples of such narrative letters may be found in the blocks of correspondence addressed, for instance, to Arrianus Maturus on the trial of Marius Priscus of 98 ce (2.11 and 2.12), to Tacitus on the eruption of Vesuvius in Book 6 (6.16 and 6.20), or to Fuscus on Pliny’s daily activities during the winter and summer in Book 9 (9.36 and 9.40).34 Each epistle in these micro-cycles includes cross-reference to the other letter and refers to the time interval dividing them. In several cases, the spatial interval between letters addressed to the same person represents their closeness in time. This feature is particularly evident in the cases of 2.20 (last epistle of Book 2) and 3.1 both addressed to Rufus, 5.4 and 5.13 to Iulius Valerianus, 6.4 and 6.7 to Calpurnia, 7.6 and 7.10 to Macrinus, 7.7 and 7.15 to Saturninus, 9.21 and 9.24 to Sabinianus, and especially 9.36 and 9.40 to Fuscus. A special case may be offered by three sequential letters addressed to Calpurnius Fabatus, 7.16, 7.23 and 7.32, which mimic in their closeness the progressive unfolding of the same affair. In 7.16 Pliny volunteers the help of a friend who as a magistrate could ratify a recent manumission ordered by Fabatus; in 7.23 he asks that his father-in-law wait for the magistrate without moving out of the house to greet him; in 7.32 he reports back to Fabatus his friend’s impressions from the visit. Paired epistles refer to the same matters and reinforce the impression of a close dialogue between sender and addressee. They also confer on the collection a strong sense of continuity and uni-directionality.35 In the way they are arranged and should be read, the narratively connected letters conform to the interpretive grid laid out by Cynthia Damon for paired poems in Ovid’s Amores. They are related “causally” and contain 33 34

35

For the notion of “reading for the plot,” see Brooks 1984. To many of these letters I will return in the body of my work. A subtler connection via an indirect meditation on the notion of imitation is established between two letters addressed to Vibius Severus (3.18 and 4.28). For these, see below, Chapter 4. A peculiar case of clearly related letters that develop two stages in the same situation but which are addressed to different correspondents is offered by 7.7 and 7.8, which follow up on a question opened by 5.15.

26

The Art of Pliny’s Letters

“situational verbal references that connect them.”36 As epistles, however, they may be more stringently linked to Ovid’s similar experimenting with fragmented narrative, especially evident in Tristia 1. The first book of poems from the exile is a collection of poems written in itinere. Each fragment has been drafted in a particular set of circumstances that the poem carefully evokes: there is a poem of departure (1.3), two of travel across the Ionian sea (1.2 and 1.4 – reinforced by the paradigmatic example of Ulysses in 1.5);37 one written during the last stretch of the journey by land (1.10), when the crossing of the isthmus at Corinth becomes the occasion for a geographical musing on the happier routes by sea which Ovid’s ship will travel; and one final poem, anticipating the arrival in Tomis, is allegedly drafted while traveling across the Black Sea (1.11). It matters little if the chronology of the journey does not coincide with the sequential arrangement of the individual elegies in the book; after all, epic narratives were not alien to the incorporation of analepses – indeed, in their customary beginning in medias res they invited them. That Ovid is alluding to an epic model, one reduced to the dimension of the elegiac code, is confirmed first and foremost by the strategic placement of his miniature Troiae halosis in Tristia 1.3.25–6: it is here that he narrates in explicitly epic terms his departure from Rome. With the sole exception of three poems in the collection (1.7, 8 and 9), which form a triptych devoted to the most likely reactions of friends at home, the first book of the Tristia consists in the evocation through a narrative sequence of a chronotopically specific history, the mapping of the writing onto the journey.38 Ovid even states as much in the closing poem of Tristia 1: Littera quaecumque est toto tibi lecta libello, est mihi sollicito tempore facta viae. (Tr. 1.11.1–2)

Good or bad as it might be, every syllable you have read in this little book has been drafted during the difficult time of my journey.

To be sure, Pliny has nothing that even comes close to the strict narrativity of Tristia 1. Yet, the mere presence of epistles that develop successive stages of a plot invites a sequential reading of his work. Finally, the pairing of epistles via the subtler, but no less cogent, mechanism of intertextual connection contributes to the same syntagmatic effect. This type of connection consists in the reference made in contiguous epistles 36 37

38

Damon 1990: 277–8. The paradigm of Ulysses (happier than Ovid in his wanderings) that emerges from 1.5 is reinforced by the pairing elegy evoking Penelope as double for his wife in 1.6. See Wilamowitz 1926.

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to a shared poetic antecedent. By constructing an indissoluble, if understated, connection between two adjacent texts, intertextual connections provide the reader with an element of continuity where none was apparently available. Pliny’s corpus includes several adjacent, apparently unrelated, texts linked by a perceptible intertextual continuity. In this category, particularly noteworthy are Pliny’s allusion to Aen. 6.129 (in Ep. 1.2 and 1.3) and to the context of Catullus 8 (in Ep. 1.12 and 1.13).39 Intertextually connected epistles offer themselves as two stages of the same situation. This situation, however, is built neither around thematic nor around contextual elements. This last category perfectly embodies the hybrid, carefully balanced, quality of Pliny’s collection insofar as it preserves both the full independence of subtly connected texts and the necessary connection of still independent ones. These letters offer a previously unrecognized type of pairing in Pliny’s epistles and thus deserve a closer analysis. f irst steps with virgil Pliny’s readers do not have to wait long before they are offered the first example of his allusive compositional technique. It is in two metaliterary epistles strategically placed at the outset of Book 1 that Pliny quickly establishes a clear intertextual connection. On a first reading, 1.2 and 1.3 have little in common. The first is a short note addressed to Maturus Arrianus, apparently a cover letter for a book containing selected orations, in which questions of oratorical style and textual dissemination are lightheartedly addressed. The second is a stylized protreptic exercise addressed to Caninius Rufus, at once requesting news about the tenor of his life in the country estates in Comum and advising him on the correct use of his time while away from the City.40 C. PLINIUS <MATURO> ARRIANO SUO S. Quia tardiorem adventum tuum prospicio, librum quem prioribus epistulis promiseram exhibeo. Hunc rogo ex consuetudine tua et legas et emendes, eo magis quod nihil ante peraeque eodem   scripsisse videor. Temptavi enim imitari Demosthenen semper tuum, Calvum nuper meum, dumtaxat figuris orationis; nam vim tantorum virorum, “pauci quos aequus . . .” adsequi possunt. Nec materia ipsa huic (vereor ne improbe dicam) aemulationi repugnavit: erat enim prope tota 39

40

More doubtful but still intriguing is the case of 5.3.2 and 7.4.2, in which Pliny develops his discussion of poetry on Terentian grounds. In 5.3.2 he states aliquando praeterea rideo iocor ludo . . . homo sum; in 7.4.2, he completes the citation by insinuating numquam a poetice . . . alienus fui (cf. Ter. Hau. 77). For this connection, see below, Chapter 2. Detailed analyses of the epistles in question can be found in Ludolph 1997: 107–32. For a sociopsychological point of view, see Hoffer 1999: 29–44; for issues of imitation, see Vogt-Spira 2003: 54–6.

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in contentione dicendi, quod me longae desidiae indormientem excitavit, si modo is sum ego qui excitari possim. Non tamen omnino Marci nostri    fugimus, quotiens paulum itinere decedere non intempestivis amoenitatibus admonebamur: acres enim esse non tristes volebamus. Nec est quod putes me sub hac exceptione veniam postulare. Nam quo magis intendam limam tuam, confitebor et ipsum me et contubernales ab editione non abhorrere, si modo tu fortasse errori nostro album calculum adieceris. Est enim plane aliquid edendum – atque utinam hoc potissimum quod paratum est! Audis desidiae votum – edendum autem ex pluribus causis, maxime quod libelli quos emisimus dicuntur in manibus esse, quamvis iam gratiam novitatis exuerint; nisi tamen auribus nostris bibliopolae blandiuntur. Sed sane blandiantur, dum per hoc mendacium nobis studia nostra commendent. Vale. Dear Arrianus, Since I don’t expect to see you anytime soon, I am sending along the book I promised in my previous letter. I ask that you be your usual careful and exacting self as you examine my manuscript, in particular because I really don’t think I have ever written anything with such enthusiasm. I’ve tried to imitate your beloved Demosthenes, and also Calvus (my new love), but only insofar as the figures of speech go. The force of such great men, in fact, is within reach only of “the few whom the just . . .”. After all, the subject-matter itself was conducive to this (as I dare call it) emulation of mine: the point was basically all in keeping the speech at a constantly high pitch. And this challenge woke me up from my habitual slumber – if I am one who could be awakened at all. I did not shun, to be sure, the flourishes of our dear Marcus Tullius, whenever I thought it could be time to digress for a little onto a more pleasant road: I wanted to be sharp, you know, not harsh. Now, don’t think that I am making excuses and asking you to cut me some slack. To make your file even sharper, I’ll confess that both my friends and I think it might not be such a bad idea to publish it, but only if you will add your “aye” to our mistake, however consensual this might be. You know how it is: we all have to publish something – and wouldn’t it be great if I had something all ready to go? I know: I am lazy – and for more than one reason. My main reason, however, is that it appears the booklets I have cranked out so far seem to enjoy some success, even now that they have lost the appeal of the novelty; or so, at least, the booksellers tell me. They might be flattering me, but that’s ok, as long as their lies give me reasons to keep up my work. Take care.

In 1.2, Pliny tells his friend Arrianus that he strove in his writing to emulate the oratorical style of Demosthenes and Calvus, and declares his inadequacy. His imitation of the hallowed Atticist models, Pliny writes, was limited to their techniques, since the force of such great exemplars could be achieved by only a few blessed writers: nam vim tantorum virorum, “pauci quos aequus . . .” adsequi possunt. The allusion to (or, rather, quotation from) the Aeneid has long been recognized by modern scholars.41 But what does 41

See, e.g., Schuster 1952 and Mynors 1963.

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it have to do with Pliny’s musing on the proper use of rhetorical imitation? How does it contribute to defining the limits of his respectfully advanced Ciceronian emulation? Two elements guaranteed to Pliny that no reader would miss this reference. First, in their present order the three words are nowhere else to be found: the tag evokes a precise Virgilian context. Second, Pliny’s aposiopesis, the break in sentence syntax (the verb amavit needs to be supplied by the reader), invites mnemonic completion based on the context of origin. The three words Pliny redeploys in his text were originally uttered by the Sibyl to explain to Aeneas that everyone is allowed to descend into Hades but only a few are allowed to leave the kingdom of Death: Noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis; sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras, hoc opus, hic labor est. Pauci quos aequus amavit Iuppiter aut ardens evexit ad aethera virtus, dis geniti potuere. (Aen. 6.127–31)

Day and night the doors to the dark kingdom of Dis are wide open, but to retrace one’s steps and escape into the light of this world, this is the task, there lies the difficulty. Few have been able to do it, those whom the just Jupiter favored or whom virtue raised to the stars, the progeny of gods.

In Pliny’s new metapoetic context, the value of the allusion is clear, though somewhat embarrassing. A literary topos of modesty turned on its head provides the occasion for a first, seemingly almost proverbial, literary redeployment of Virgil’s text. Readers are invited to establish a parallel between Pliny’s literary enterprise and (si parva licet) Aeneas’ exceptional journey. Almost no trace of a metaliterary reading of the passage can be found in the Virgilian commentary tradition. Pliny has anticipated what will become a central element of later interpretations of Aeneas’ descent.42 Servius, for example, reads the Sibyl’s words literally and details the three categories of people who are allowed to enter the underworld while maintaining the ability to leave it at will (those born under a particularly good star, those who display an exceptional degree of virtue, the demi-gods).43 Pliny, however, forces the original context to acquire a metaliterary dimension: his 42 43

Cf., for example, Dante, De vulgari eloquentia 2.4.10. One may try to interpret as a hint of a metapoetic tradition Servius’ insistence on the “poetic nature” of Virgil’s passage in his preface to the gloss (aut poetice dictum est aut secundum philosophorum altam scientiam, qui deprehenderunt bene viventium animas ad superiores circulos, id est ad originem suam redire, Serv. ad loc.), but his constant use of the word poetice in the sense of “contrary to factual/philosophical truth” suggests otherwise (most clearly in 6.741 and 12.725). For the Aeneid, however, the question was already both poetical and narrative. The Sibyl’s words evoke two related

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respectful stylistic imitation of Calvus and Demosthenes does not go so far as to become a full-fledged emulative game. Once couched in a discussion of rhetorical etiquette, the Virgilian tag comes to convey an indirect and carefully negotiated intimation of the author’s own worth. But Pliny is here not merely reusing a famous turn of phrase, as he will do in the next epistle by labeling the busy Caninius unus ex multis. In the letter immediately following, he reinforces the relevance of Virgil’s passage for his work by including a second quotation from the same line. The connection across individual epistles suggests that the traditional, naturalizing assessment of the question of Pliny’s compositional technique should be revised. According to Guillemin, for instance, when Pliny wants to express his own thought his vast reading gets in the way, with the result that he unintentionally models his writing on literary examples. If one quotation would not suffice to argue for intentionality, and Guillemin’s framing of Pliny’s strategy as involuntary might be convincing, the appearance in the next epistle of the first half of the same Virgilian line can hardly qualify as casual.44 At first sight, the question at hand in Ep. 1.3 is similar to that touched upon in 1.2, and Pliny similarly elaborates on the necessary connection of literary and ethical issues. On account of their shared interest in publication, the two letters may appear to share a natural thematic connection. Ep. 1.2 begins with formulas that may recall the style of modern letters of manuscript submission to a publisher, and 1.3 alludes in its close to the eventual publication of the writings that Caninius’ leisure should produce, an invitation couched in the legal language of inheritance. Yet Pliny’s involvement in the activity of publishing and his ensuing invitations to friends to do the same are so pervasive in his work that they make the two letters hardly special.45 What is more, there seems to be no element that should impose a serial reading, even less a reading in the order in which they appear. Things change, however, when we look at the second text more closely.

44

45

models: one for Aeneas, namely Hercules, for whom both the genealogy as “dis genitus” and the personal note of virtue are apt, and one for his author, namely Homer. At this juncture in the text for both Aeneas and his poem’s author, the question is whether they will be able to live up to their models. Guillemin (1946: 85). Guillemin’s conclusion has already been criticized by B¨utler 1970: 8. Lef`evre 1996b discusses this specific Virgilian allusion in the context of Pliny’s literary imitation (of Cicero) (esp. 337). On Pliny’s collaborative revision of his works, see 1.2.1 and 5; 1.8.2–3; 2.5.1, 4 and 9; 3.13; 7.12; 7.17.7. On recitations as a way of improving the text, 5.12. On his success with readership, 1.2.6; 3.18; 4.5.2–3; 4.16; 4.26; 6.11; 8.3; 9.11; 9.18, and 9.20. A discussion of Pliny’s interest in publication and attention to literary endeavors in his circle is in White 1975: 293–300.

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C. PLINIUS CANINIO RUFO SUO S. Quid agit Comum, tuae meaeque deliciae? quid suburbanum amoenissimum, quid illa porticus verna semper, quid platanon opacissimus, quid euripus viridis et gemmeus, quid subiectus et serviens lacus, quid illa mollis et tamen solida gestatio, quid balineum illud quod plurimus sol implet et circumit, quid triclinia illa popularia illa paucorum, quid cubicula diurna nocturna? Possident te et per vices partiuntur? An, ut solebas, intentione rei familiaris obeundae crebris excursionibus avocaris? Si possident, felix beatusque es; si minus, “unus ex multis.” Quin tu (tempus enim) humiles et sordidas curas aliis mandas, et ipse te in alto isto pinguique secessu studiis adseris? Hoc sit negotium tuum hoc otium; hic labor haec quies; in his vigilia, in his etiam somnus reponatur. Effinge aliquid et excude, quod sit perpetuo tuum. Nam reliqua rerum tuarum post te alium atque alium dominum sortientur, hoc numquam tuum desinet esse si semel coeperit. Scio quem animum, quod horter ingenium; tu modo enitere ut tibi ipse sis tanti, quanti videberis aliis si tibi fueris. Vale. Dear Caninius, How are things in your (and my) lovely Comum? How is life in the beautiful villa, with its colonnade of eternal springtime, its deep-shading plane tree, its emeraldwatered rivulet, its low-lying and serviceable lake, its soft and yet firm grounds, its baths always drenched in sunlight, its living rooms for the many and the few, its day- and night-bedrooms? Do they absorb you all the time? Is your presence partitioned among them? Or is it the case, as always, that you are constantly called out by the duty to care for your estate’s business? If they own you, you are happy and blessed; if not, “you are like us all.” Why don’t you delegate those other chores? Trust me, it’s about time. In the deep and comfortable peace of your retreat you could devote yourself to writing. This should be your business; this, your leisure – your work and your rest, your occupation in the hours of wakefulness . . . and in those of sleep. Create something! And produce what is truly your own. Anything else in your patrimony will be handed over to a different owner when you are gone; only what you write will never cease to belong to you, once it will have started to be yours. I know the spirit and intelligence I am calling to arms. Now it’s up to you to find that self-esteem that, once you achieve it, will make others esteem you just as much. Be well.

The letter opens with an effective, rhetorically elaborate, musing on his friend’s villa that reads as a compendious description of an ideal place for leisurely working.46 Indeed, the epistle could be seen as a blueprint not only for Caninius Rufus’ villa, but also for the literary treatment of his own villas to which Pliny will later devote Ep. 2.17 and 5.6 (with an interesting aside 46

The geography may be allusive: Comum attracts a cluster of descriptive terms reminiscent of Catullan diction: Pliny’s deliciae reminds of deliciae meae puellae (Catullus 3.4), while tuae meaeque echoes Catullus 35.6, amici . . . sui meique (in the context of an invitation to enjoy literary products away from Comum: 35.3).

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in 9.7).47 The culminating rhetorical interrogative “does your villa own you?,” which Pliny uses to bridge the descriptive and prescriptive halves of his letter, introduces a first element of ambiguity. The language in which Pliny couches the fully traditional argument that one should own things, not be owned by them, creates, in fact, an apparent contradiction with the meaning it is supposed to convey.48 For all its idyllic circumstances, something is wrong in Caninius’ condition. Rather than being owned by him, the amenities of the villa at Comum “own” its owner (possident te). Pliny’s lexical choice creates an unbalanced situation and prepares the addressee for what is soon to become the letter’s central issue, namely, the right use of one’s free time. In keeping with the indications provided to a different addressee in the previous text, Ep. 1.3 insists that otium is best spent composing a literary work of art. Pliny reminds his friend that in order to produce something that will be forever one’s own, one has to create (and publish: effinge . . . excude) a work that will last beyond the boundaries nature has set for human life.49 Caninius should, therefore, delegate the menial tasks of his life as a landowner and devote himself to creative literary pursuits (studia). Literary otium, Pliny adds emphatically, is his work; this is the leisure which may best suit his friend while away from Rome: Hoc sit negotium tuum hoc otium; hic labor haec quies. What I propose to see as the second Virgilian echo is here not a direct quotation. However, both the proximity with the explicit recitation of other Virgilian material in 1.2 and the parallel rhythm of the sentence (hoc otium, hic labor, Plin. Ep. 1.3.3 / hoc opus, hic labor, Virg. Aen. 6.129) support a reading of Pliny’s expression as an audible allusion to the first half-line of Aeneid 6.129.50 With it, Pliny completes the quotation and establishes a connection between the two letters: they belong together because they collaborate to frame the exquisitely literary question of the balance between 47 48

49

50

For Pliny’s villas, see Buren 1948, Mansuelli 1978, Bergmann 1995, and McEwen 1995. See, for instance, Seneca, De Vita Beata 22.5: ad postremum divitiae meae sunt, tu divitiarum es (“in sum, in my case it is my wealth that belongs to me; in your case, it is you who belong to your wealth”). The nexus is proverbial: see Otto 1890: 270 (s.v. pecunia). Pliny is particularly fond of the precept; see Ep. 9.30.4: ea invasit homines habendi cupido, ut possideri magis quam possidere videantur (“people are overtaken by so much greed that they seem to be possessed rather than possessing”). The same opposition of active and passive attitudes toward goods (or people) was already in Cicero (Fam. 9.26.2: habeo, inquit, non habeor [a Laide]). For the Greek roots of the dictum, see Adams 2003: 315. The convergence in Horace of the Satirical and Epicurean traditions on issues of intellectual (vs. material) ownership is explored by Freudenburg 2002: 52–3. On the internal conflict in the dynamic redeployment of the pair otium–negotium in Pliny, see B¨utler 1970: 41–57. The expression had been appropriated already in the rhetorical discourse: cf. Quint. Inst. 6.2.7, on the moving of affectus as culminating task of judicial oratorical practice (huc igitur incumbat orator, hoc opus eius, hic labor est, sine quo cetera nuda ieiuna infirma ingrata sunt).

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socio-economic obligations and the pursuit of studia, and they do so in Virgilian terms.51 When connected intertextually these letters need to appear at this point in the collection and in this order: first an attentionraising quotation, then an allusion. While the former could be dismissed as merely ornamental, proverbial, or involuntary, a higher intertextual weight rests on the latter. The double contextualization that Pliny’s letters establish for literary enterprises as the difficult but rewarding katabasis of the epic hero is not unprecedented. When he couches the opening allusions to Virgil in a metapoetic language, Pliny is following in the footsteps of another poetepistolographer, Horace, who had equated Aeneas’ descent into Hades with the arduous task of the man of culture.52 As Guillemin already noted, Pliny’s diction in 1.3 is meant to evoke Horace, Ep. 1.3.28 hoc opus, hoc studium parvi properemus et ampli (“let us work on this task, let us push forward this endeavor, small and great alike”). Had it not been for the previous quotation of the same Virgilian line, Guillemin would be right in proposing Horace as the primary object of imitation and target of allusion.53 However, Pliny is not simply playing with a double allusion: his focus is just as much on Virgil through Horace as it is on Horace through his reading of Virgil. The contexts of Pliny’s and Horace’s 1.3 do indeed bear some resemblance to each other, in particular on account of the specifically legalistic terms in which both couch the issue of literary appropriation and inheritance.54 Contextual elements such as the similarity in dominant lexical register and the relative position in the collections prepare readers to perceive the local allusion. The date of the epistle is about 20 bce.55 Horace is writing back to the young literary man Florus, who is now away from Rome in Armenia with Tiberius’ retinue. With Florus other well-born and promisingly talented young men accompany the future Emperor on his mission in the farthest 51

52

53 54

By splitting the Virgilian line in two and alluding to each half in separate places, Pliny seems to indulge here in what Wills calls “divided allusion” (i.e., one source, two imitations). See Wills 1996: 36–7 and, for a fuller discussion, 1998. In Wills’ terms, this is a “double” allusion. Two texts enter into contact through an allusion, but only after an intermediary text has already established a connection with the earlier one through the same allusion (1996: 289, 382–3). Thomas labels this phenomenon a “window reference” (1986). McKeown, focusing on the Amores, already discusses the problem in terms of “double allusion” (1987, 1: 37–45). The same half-line of the Aeneid is quoted – with a lesser degree of seriousness, which Pliny might want to correct or at least bracket – by Ovid at Ars 1.431: Hoc opus, hic labor est: primo sine munere iungi (“This is the task, this is the toil: getting in bed with her without giving a gift first”). For a similar correction of improper poetic allusion in another of Pliny’s predecessors, see below the case of the Catullan echoes in 1.12–1.13. Guillemin 1929: 120. 55 See Mayer 1994: 10. See Kilpatrick 1990 and Freudenburg 2002: 37–42.

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south-east regions of the Empire.56 The poem fully complies with the epistolary rhetoric by asking information on the whereabouts of the addressee and his activities while dispensing advice on cultural issues. The first member of the studiosa cohors who is indirectly offered this kind of advice is Celsus: Quid mihi Celsus agit? Monitus multumque monendus, privatas ut quaerat opes et tangere vitet scripta Palatinus quaecumque recepit Apollo, ne, si forte suas repetitum venerit olim grex avium plumas, moveat cornicula risum furtivis nudata coloribus. (Ep. 1.3.15–20)

How is my dear Celsus doing? Has he been warned or should he still be warned that he should rely only on his own resources and leave in peace the works which Apollo has welcomed in his library? Let him not turn into a laughing stock, just like the crow left naked of all the colors she had stolen when the birds came back in flocks to ask for their feathers.

Anticipating the tone that will be used also to address Florus, the poem quite unexpectedly passes on legal advice, in the form of an Aesopic fable, to a practitioner of poetry. As it also will be true for Pliny, imitation is couched in the language of the law. When it comes to Florus, Horace exhorts him not to neglect poetry, and in the same breath praises him for his activity as a lawyer and jurisconsult: . . . Ipse quid audes? Quae circumvolitas agilis thyma? non tibi parvum ingenium, non incultum est et turpiter hirtum. Seu linguam causis acuis seu civica iura respondere paras seu condis amabile carmen, prima feres hederae victricis praemia. Quod si frigida curarum fomenta relinquere posses, quo te caelestis sapientia duceret, ires. Hoc opus, hoc studium parvi properemus et ampli, si patriae volumus, si nobis vivere cari. (Ep. 1.3.20–9)

And you? Tell me about your exciting projects: what beds of thyme are you fluttering around? Your intelligence is neither small, nor uneducated or unsightly rough. Whether you are sharpening your tongue in lawsuits, or preparing to formulate 56

Horace’s epistle was itself a corrective rewriting of a poetic and political situation. Its subject-matter closely reflected that of Catullus’ Memmius cycle (Catul. 10 and 28): a cohors traveling to the East in the train of a proconsul. See Feeney 2002: 176–7 and Freudenburg 2002.

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opinions on civil law, or even drafting a lovely song, you will bring home the first prize, the ivy of victory. If you could only lay aside the daily cares, those cold compresses, you would be able to go wherever heavenly wisdom leads. Let us work on this task, let us push forward this endeavor, small and great alike, if we want our country and ourselves to prize the life we lead.

At first sight, the situation is idyllic, with Horace endowing Florus with a perfect balance of all the intellectual endeavors suitable to a young Roman. The result of his (and of Horace’s own) efforts will be the well-adjusted and productive wisdom of a man who lives actively in his society without being engulfed by it. This is the task at hand, the poem remarks, if he wants to be at once dear to himself and to his country. In Horace’s text, the image the poem constructs of sender and addressee comes to resemble the effects of a double vision. The force of the verbs properemus and volumus in lines 28 and 29 progressively brings them together, almost to the point of identification. The image of the poet-cum-agent in society thus created is, however, complex, if not even ambiguous. As a man of culture, Florus, the active lawyer and jurisconsult, should not forgo the activities afforded by non-otiose leisure: they are, the poem suggests, precisely what makes him what he is – a freeborn member of the upper class, and a candidate for a position of power in society. He has to become, the letter insists, a poet. As men who are an active part of their social milieu, however, both this poet and the one authoring the epistle cannot afford to disregard their duty to prove useful to society: poetry is, in fact, a component of its fabric. The balance Horace’s poem constructs is apparently perfect: Florus has available three fully parallel options (seu . . . seu . . . seu, 23–4). This equivalence, however, might be no less optimistic than it is precarious. In his illuminating comparative reading of these lines as setting up Horace’s Ep. 2.2, Kirk Freudenburg has insisted on the legal language and concerns that seep into the text and suspend it between a discussion of poetic matters and one on the necessity of civil engagement. He might, however, not have been the first to pick up on the lexical signals: the Horace–Pliny connection might help us to read Horace’s epistle in its fully problematic light. As Pliny does when reflecting on similar issues, Horace also seems to imply that of the three options available to Florus, one, namely poetry, belongs to a different sphere than the other two. It has been observed that Horace’s promise of an ivy crown for Florus is appropriate only for the poet’s fame to the detriment of other more practical activities.57 Similarly 57

See Mayer 1994: 129, ad loc.

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poetic and highly allusive is the metaphor of the flower-nipping bee with which the direct address starts: if this image serves to characterize the ingenium of the addressee, it defines it in eminently poetic terms.58 The ivy is the first indication that the third of Florus’ gifts deserves greater and more exclusive care, just as it is likely to yield greater and longer-lasting honor. Pliny’s explicit opposition of studia and negotia reflects back on Horace’s allusive equation of pleading cases and giving advice on civil law with the cares (the “cold compresses”) that Florus should leave behind in order to achieve that divine wisdom which will lift him above daily cares. Pliny addresses Caninius Rufus with the same recommendations as Horace does Florus – philosophy and poetry being replaced in Pliny by generic literary pursuits. Moreover, in what now appears as a potentially significant numerological parallel, both Pliny 1.3 and Horace 1.3 go back to Virgil’s words and read them as applying to the addressee’s no less than to the writer’s undertaking.59 The allusion to Virgil divided between 1.2 and 1.3 functions, in sum, on multiple levels. First, it is the bridge between Pliny’s new text and its poetic antecedents; second, it inscribes the new text into a series of poetic utterances that share a precise interpretation of the oldest text; and finally, it enables a deeper reading of its immediate precursor. By incorporating into his double exhortation to literary activity a Virgilian line that had already appeared suitable as a vehicle of literary commentary, Pliny inserts himself into a tradition of a “metaliterary” and protreptic (if not even pedagogical) use of Virgil’s passage. What is more, the two complementary Virgilian allusions shape the first three letters as a closely joined metaliterary triptych. The combined weight of 1.2 and 1.3 balances the programmatic declaration of 1.1 that the collection Pliny is publishing contains letters that he has both written paulo curatius and collected ut quaeque in manus venerat. The modesty of the initial claim is qualified in the following two texts: not only has Pliny carefully planned and organized the disposition of his texts, he also considers his work as self-editor an arduous and serious enterprise. But there is perhaps more. The Virgilian quotation and allusion, with which the collection opened, find a responsive echo at its other end. In this respect (and, we shall see, in several others), Books 1 and 9 enter into a close dialogue with each other, thus constructing a set of correspondences that binds the collection together.60 In Ep. 9.13, the topic is once again literary 58 59

60

See West 1967: 31–4 and Freudenburg 2002. For a discussion of the second epistle that Horace addresses to Florus (Ep. 2.2) and another numerological parallel with Pliny’s letters, see below, Chapter 2. On the dialogue established between Books 1 and 9, see Hoffer 1999: 9–10 and 67.

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and Pliny returns to a Virgilian quotation. The letter is allegedly a companion piece to the now lost speech de Helvidi ultione, a small chapter in the post-Domitian purges in which Pliny played a central role by accusing Certus, a prot´eg´e of the former Emperor, in front of the Senate.61 Pliny considered his behavior in the affair as glorious, since he cares enough to include a summary of the whole libel in the epistle. What is more interesting here, however, is his re-use of a clear literary model. In responding to the warning of a friend against the dangers of his conduct during the tumultuous senate meeting in which he attacked Certus, Pliny reports having appropriated a particularly memorable Virgilian line: Omnia praecepi atque animo mecum ante peregi (“I have foreseen it all and run it through in my mind,” Aen. 6.105).62 The redeployment of the sententious line helps construct a parallel between the epic and the historical context.63 The courageous (Stoic) words Aeneas utters in reply to the Sibyl who warns him that the descent into the kingdom of Death will entail great dangers are part of the selfaggrandizing project Pliny pursues in the epistles that more strictly address his political and oratorical career. But they are also a reminder of the same Virgilian context with which the collection opened: they have, thus, an additional metaliterary valence, in keeping with the recapitulative quality of Virgil’s line. By suggesting the harking back to the past of Aeneas’ mind to embrace the totality of his experience, they invite the reader to reflect back on the beginning of the corpus and consider the collection as a whole. The quotation is subtly performative: at the moment when reflection is needed, it describes the reflection of its protagonist. The impression of d´ej`a vu one has from noticing the Virgilian tag in 9.13 is immediately reinforced by the presence of a fourth and final tessera in the mosaic. Just as the common provenance of an explicitly Virgilian quotation and a subtler allusion had paired epistles 1.2 and 1.3, so too an awareness-raising quotation from Virgil in 9.13 now introduces a less perceptible allusion in 9.14. The context and content of this epistle will be discussed in detail in Chapter 3; for now it will suffice to note that the letter contains a reformulation of the Virgilian context from which Pliny 61 62

63

See Sherwin-White 1966, ad loc. In the heightened pathos of sections 10 through 12 this is not the only Virgilian (or even poetic) fragment. In section 11, the combination of Pliny’s Quid audes? Quo ruis? recalls Aen. 10.811 Quo moriture ruis maioraque viribus audes?, a line Statius had recently recast in a context of failed divination that might be pertinent for Pliny (Theb. 8.84–5: “At tibi quos,” inquit, “manes, qui limite praeceps / non licito per inane ruis?” ). For Quid audes, see Hor. Ep. 1.3.20, a text Pliny has already exploited in his own Ep. 1.3 (see above). The nexus apparently occurs only in Horace and Pliny, and may be a further indication of an intratextual connection for Pliny’s Books 1 and 9. For sententiae in declamations, see Winterbottom 1974: 11–12 and 23–4. For a register and select commentary of Pliny’s sententious style, see Vielberg 2003.

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began. At the outset of his collection, the task of the writer was equated with the descent into the darkness of Hades; at the other end of the project, Pliny’s language is now saturated with the light-imagery of a return to the world above. Although the tonal quality has changed, the subtext allusively evoked is the same. In the letter, Pliny is probably responding to Tacitus’ anticipated skepticism that posterity will have any interest in their literary work. For Pliny their common effort always to work with a future audience in mind cannot fail to have a positive effect. Their constancy, hard work and attention will guarantee, if not fully fledged fame, at least some relief from obscurity. This notion takes as its vehicle the underlying metaphor connecting fame and light (and their opposites, silence and darkness) with the imagerie of Virgil’s underworld: Nos certe meremur, ut sit aliqua, non dico ingenio (id enim superbum), sed studio et labore et reverentia posterorum. Pergamus modo itinere instituto, quod ut paucos in lucem famamque provexit, ita multos e tenebris et silentio protulit. (Ep. 9.14) We certainly deserve some attention, I wouldn’t say for our intelligence (I agree: that would be boasting), but at least for our constancy, our hard work, and our incessant preoccupation with posterity. So, let’s stay the course. If it brought only few into the spotlight of fame, it rescued many from the silence of obscurity.

When Pliny encourages his friend to stay the course and continue moving on the established path, his letter comes close, in rhythm and in diction, to an introductory passage of the long-winded narrative of Aeneas’ katabasis. Pliny’s exhortation pergamus modo itinere instituto may be a redeployment of Aen. 6.384, ergo iter inceptum peragunt (“and so they proceed on the path on which they set off”). The connection is per se barely audible, the two sentences sharing only the alliterative nexus itinere in-/iter in- and the etymological proximity of pergere (pergamus) and peragere (peragunt). The Virgilian echo would be too feeble to call an allusion, were it not for two contextual reasons: first, the contiguity of the present letter with 9.13 – an epistle that culminated in a full-fledged recitation of a Virgilian line – and, second, the presence in the original context of the same theme and imagery that recur in Pliny’s note to Tacitus. Virgil’s text addressed precisely the issue of the endurance of one’s name after death by introducing a consolatory note in the sad episode of Palinurus. The last glimpse Virgil’s readers catch of the shade of the fleet’s pilot is of his joy in having left a trace on the geography of Italy: gaudet cognomine terrae (“he rejoices in his name being given to that land,” Aen. 6.383). In Pliny, the allusion to the following narrative line, only apparently poetically lifeless, is perhaps meant to reactivate this context. Virgil’s centrality in 9.13 ushers in his elusive presence

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in 9.14. Similarly, Pliny’s own discussion of fame in terms of light and shadow/sound and silence evokes the relevant Virgilian antecedent. In the original context, Virgil’s half-line was a short diegetic juncture connecting the mimetic episode of Palinurus with the Sybil’s lively exchange of lines with Charon. What in Virgil was an inert note of stage direction becomes in Pliny the central metaphor of his answer to the question opened a few lines before in his model. Responding to Pliny’s invitation to read 9.14 with a Virgilian context in mind illuminates further elements in the epistle. The notion of being rescued from the eroding action that time necessarily will have on one’s memory in future generations may be what triggers in Pliny, his first addressee, and his final readers the allusive memory of Virgil’s pertinent texts. The link is no less thematic than it is tonal. The double endyad on which Pliny’s letter comes to a close provides the text with more than just an elegant rhetorical conclusion. The dominating imagerie to be associated with literary success is chosen from the start of the collection: its correlative is Aeneas’ descent into the realm of the silent shades (umbrae silentes at Aen. 6.264 – but the synesthesia is all-pervasive between 264 and 72) and his successful return to light. Even if few, the same few who were loved by the just Jupiter in 1.2, have been able to reach light and fame, the possibility of escaping oblivion is still open. The road out of the silence and darkness of the underworld passes through the same literal studia and metaphoric labor that Pliny had singled out in Book 1 and on which several of his letters have insisted. The Virgilian reminiscence invites us to connect the first and the last book in his collection. With the closure of the work now impending, however, Pliny reinterprets the tone of his incipit. He replaces with an expression of hope and trust in the success of his efforts the topos of inadequacy with which he started. Having reached this point, he can say that the iter inceptum, the course on which he started out, was correct from the beginning. curbing lex ical enthusiasm: t he pairing through catullus Virgil is not the only target of allusions that structure the first book in Pliny’s collection. Catullus is the object of two coordinated allusions in the first phases of Book 1 that likewise connect two seemingly unrelated epistles. As was the case for the Virgilian connections explored above, the double allusion has a primary compositional value (it indissolubly binds the two epistles in which Catullan fragments appear) and a secondary, though no less important, semantic value. By reciting his poetic “source,” Pliny

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also negotiates his model’s value and position in the canon. Ep. 1.12 is the passionate account of the suicide of Corellius Rufus. Consul suffectus in 78 and legate of Upper Germany in 82, Corellius survived by only a few months Pliny’s imperial bˆete noire, Domitian. Having inherited from his father a progressively grave form of podagra, in old age Corellius lives with the pain of his ailment. He might be justified in choosing death over life, as he eventually will, but not yet. He has a duty to stay alive. Pliny’s text makes a point of stressing how it was Corellius’ strong determination that first kept him alive and then was instrumental in his suicide. The narrative part of the epistle relates two mirroring encounters between Pliny and his friend, each illuminating one complementary facet of Corellius’ will power. The first, actual meeting is a visit Pliny paid his friend in the dark days of Domitian; the second, probably aborted, encounter (the letter does not say whether Pliny had been able to see his friend this time) is the occasion for Pliny’s eulogy of the man.64 C. PLINIUS CALESTRIO TIRONI SUO S. Iacturam gravissimam feci, si iactura dicenda est tanti viri amissio. Decessit Corellius Rufus et quidem sponte, quod dolorem meum exulcerat. Est enim luctuosissimum genus mortis, quae non ex natura nec fatalis videtur. Nam utcumque in illis qui morbo finiuntur, magnum ex ipsa necessitate solacium est; in iis vero quos accersita mors aufert, hic insanabilis dolor est, quod creduntur potuisse diu vivere. Corellium quidem summa ratio, quae sapientibus pro necessitate est, ad hoc consilium compulit, quamquam plurimas vivendi causas habentem, optimam conscientiam optimam famam, maximam auctoritatem, praeterea filiam uxorem nepotem sorores, interque tot pignora veros amicos. Sed tam longa, tam iniqua valetudine conflictabatur, ut haec tanta pretia vivendi mortis rationibus vincerentur. Tertio et tricensimo anno, ut ipsum audiebam, pedum dolore correptus est. Patrius hic illi; nam plerumque morbi quoque per successiones quasdam ut alia traduntur. Hunc abstinentia sanctitate, quoad viridis aetas, vicit et fregit; novissime cum senectute ingravescentem viribus animi sustinebat, cum quidem incredibiles cruciatus et indignissima tormenta pateretur. Iam enim dolor non pedibus solis ut prius insidebat, sed omnia membra pervagabatur. Veni ad eum Domitiani temporibus in suburbano iacentem. Servi e cubiculo recesserunt (habebat hoc moris, quotiens intrasset fidelior amicus); quin etiam uxor quamquam omnis secreti capacissima digrediebatur. Circumtulit oculos et “Cur” inquit “me putas hos tantos dolores tam diu sustinere? ut scilicet isti latroni vel uno die supersim.” Dedisses huic animo par corpus, fecisset quod optabat. Adfuit tamen deus voto, cuius ille compos ut iam securus liberque moriturus, multa illa vitae sed minora retinacula abrupit. Increverat valetudo, quam temperantia mitigare temptavit; perseverantem constantia fugit. Iam dies alter tertius quartus: abstinebat cibo. Misit ad me uxor eius 64

For the political resonances embedded in the letter’s fictional chronology, see Hoffer 1999: 141–52.

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Hispulla communem amicum C. Geminium cum tristissimo nuntio, destinasse Corellium mori nec aut suis aut filiae precibus inflecti; solum superesse me, a quo revocari posset ad vitam. Cucurri. Perveneram in proximum, cum mihi ab eadem Hispulla Iulius Atticus nuntiat nihil iam ne me quidem impetraturum: tam obstinate magis ac magis induruisse. Dixerat sane medico admoventi cibum:   , quae vox quantum admirationis in animo meo tantum desiderii reliquit. Cogito quo amico, quo viro caream. Implevit quidem annum septimum et sexagensimum, quae aetas etiam robustissimis satis longa est; scio. Evasit perpetuam valetudinem; scio. Decessit superstitibus suis, florente re publica, quae illi omnibus carior erat; et hoc scio. Ego tamen tamquam et iuvenis et firmissimi mortem doleo, doleo autem (licet me imbecillum putes) meo nomine. Amisi enim, amisi vitae meae testem rectorem magistrum. In summa dicam, quod recenti dolore contubernali meo Calvisio dixi: “Vereor ne neglegentius vivam.” Proinde adhibe solacia mihi, non haec: “Senex erat, infirmus erat” (haec enim novi), sed nova aliqua, sed magna, quae audierim numquam, legerim numquam. Nam quae audivi quae legi sponte succurrunt, sed tanto dolore superantur. Vale. (Ep. 1.12) Dear Tiro, I have been hit by a terrible misfortune, if misfortune is actually an adequate word to describe the loss of such a great man. Corellius Rufus is gone – to make my pain even harsher, he went voluntarily. For those who are left behind there is no worse kind of death than this one: you cannot blame either nature or fate. When someone ends their life in sickness, necessity itself is a consolation of some sort. When a hastened death steals them from us, then nothing can assuage the pain, because we think they might have lived longer. In the case of Corellius it was a most compelling reason (something that for the wise is no less binding than necessity itself ) that brought him to make this decision. He had many reasons to live: the cleanest possible conscience, the best reputation, the greatest respect. Most of all he had his daughter, his wife, his nephew, his sisters, and his true friends – all affectionate to him. His health had been so bad, however, and for so long, that all these entreaties to life were outweighed by the reasons to die. At thirty-two, he once told me, he had started suffering in his feet. Just like his father. You know how it is; the greatest part of ailments is handed down, as if it were an inheritance, along the family tree. While he was young, he kept it in check and under control with healthy diet and regular exercise. In his old age, he had only his willpower to resist the aggravated form of his ailment, with all the terrible suffering and humiliating torments he had to endure. The pain was no longer in his feet alone, like before; now it seemed to move aimlessly throughout his body. I visited him once in his villa when Domitian was in power. All the slaves left us alone in the room – this was his habit every time a specially trusted friend came by. Even his wife, who was fully able to keep any secret, used to leave. He looked around and then said: “Why do you think I have been enduring all this pain for so long? I’ll tell you: so that I may be able to survive this thug even if it were for one single day.” Had he had a body as strong as his spirit, he would have himself accomplished what he desired. Instead, it was a god that granted his wish. And so, being at this point sure that

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he was dying a free and secure man, he broke all the many (but now weaker) ties with life. His condition had worsened: he tried to alleviate it with a strict regimen; when he could not beat it, he fled from it with courage. Two, three, four days had elapsed and he had eaten nothing. His wife Hispulla sent our common friend Geminius with the saddest of messages for me: Corellius had resolved to die, and neither her prayers nor those of their daughter could dissuade him; there was only me who could call him back to life. I hurried there. I was almost there when Iulius Atticus, also sent out by Hispulla, told me that not even I could talk him out of dying: for he had now grown fully obstinate in his conviction. To the doctor who was presenting him food he had said: “My mind is made up,” words that leave me with as much admiration as I have desire for him. They make me think how much I’ll miss him, as a friend and as a man. I know; he died in his sixty-sixth year, which is a considerable age even for someone with a perfect bill of health. I know; he escaped from an incurable condition. He died before any of his family, and with his country at peace, which to him was dearer than anything else: I know this too. And yet his death hurts as if it were that of a young and healthy man. I hurt – it doesn’t matter if you think I am weak – because I too have lost something in him; I have lost the witness of my life, my mentor and my teacher. In sum, I will say what I told my friend Calvisius when the pain had just started: “I am afraid I will now pay less attention to how I lead my life.” This is why I need your consolation now. But no words like: “Wasn’t he old? Wasn’t he sick?” – these I know. Some other new and grand argument for consolation, rather; something I have never heard or read before. All I have heard and read has already come to my aid, but it is powerless against this pain. Be well.

The concerns and tone of the first part of the letter are essentially political. An atmosphere of ominous secrecy and perpetual resistance dominates Pliny’s account of his first visit to Corellius. When Pliny is admitted into his room, both servants and wife leave the two men alone. Corellius has a secret for Pliny. He is sick, as he has been for a long time, but has resolved to do what he can to continue living until he will have the pleasure of seeing the tyrant dead. In Pliny’s portrait, Corellius’ resistance to the tyrant is the sign of his moral character; his weak body is the sole reason why he has not become one of the viri fortes so familiar from the school declamations and has not rid Rome of Domitian’s presence. Since direct initiative is not an option for his weak body, he endures the sight of the tyrant, anxiously awaiting the time in which he will see the world rid of such disease. If courage and determination keep Corellius alive, they are also instrumental in his death. Once the last tie with earthly life has been severed by the emperor’s death, and the rebirth of the res publica under the new ruler is secured, Corellius’ politically motivated resistance to the disease gives way to his resolve to free himself of pain and life together. The second section of the letter is devoted to the attempts that Corellius’ friends and family make to dissuade him from dying. Corellius’ wife

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summons Pliny to her husband’s deathbed – he being the only one to whom Corellius would listen. Pliny rushes to his house, but an emissary of the wife meets him along the way: by now, he tells Pliny, even affectionate pleas would be in vain. The aged man is completely resolved to die, and the language of Pliny’s letter underlines his commitment: destinasse Corellium mori nec . . . inflecti . . . tam obstinate magis ac magis induruisse (1.12.9–10). Faced with his mentor’s decision, Pliny is quick to redefine his role in the affair, and he shifts from potential pleading friend to silent (second-hand) witness and admiring recorder of Corellius’ act of perfect courage and of his memorable last words: Dixerat sane medico admoventi cibum:    (1.12.10). The letter displays a vocabulary fitting the heroic and exemplary character of Corellius’ death, but it is hardly original in its choice of philosophical models. Atticus’ death is recounted by Cornelius Nepos in somewhat similar terms (Att. 21–22). Atticus might have been an Epicurean, but Nepos audibly casts his death in terms of a Stoic resoluteness: his unswerving demeanor betrays no passion and the silence with which he answers Agrippa’s pleas not to put an end to his life is consistent with an exemplary moral firmness.65 If we move from noting situational parallels to lexical reverberations in Pliny’s letter, a different text comes to the foreground. It is not a prose text, and it only metaphorically deals with heroic suicide by starvation, but its language appears especially germane to Pliny’s. In Catullus 8 the poetic split personality of the author has resolved to die a metaphoric death, renouncing his love for Lesbia, and he resists (his own) pleas to continue in a life of misery. Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire, et quod vides perisse perditum ducas. Fulsere quondam candidi tibi soles, cum ventitabas quo puella ducebat amata nobis quantum amabitur nulla. Ibi illa multa cum iocosa fiebant, quae tu volebas nec puella nolebat, fulsere vere candidi tibi soles. Nunc iam illa non vult: tu quoque impotens noli, nec quae fugit sectare, nec miser vive, sed obstinata mente perfer, obdura. Vale puella, iam Catullus obdurat, nec te requiret nec rogabit invitam. 65

According to Nepos, Atticus in his death seems to bring the ideal of Epicurean ataraxia particularly close to Stoic eupatheia. See, for instance, 22.1: Hac oratione habita tanta constantia vocis atque vultus, and 22.3: Preces eius [scil. Agrippa] taciturna sua obstinatione depressit. Horsfall 1989: 110 notes that Atticus’ Epicureanism was not at all intense and that Nepos even tones it down.

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The Art of Pliny’s Letters at tu dolebis, cum rogaberis nulla. Scelesta, vae te, quae tibi manet vita? Quis nunc te adibit? Cui videberis bella? Quem nunc amabis? Cuius esse diceris? Quem basiabis? Cui labella mordebis? At tu Catulle, destinatus obdura.

Wretched Catullus, your folly should end here. Accept it: what’s gone is gone for good. In the past, you have seen brighter days: then you used to follow your girl everywhere she led you (she whom no one will ever love like us), and there you would play so many loving games – those you desired and she did not refuse. Indeed, in the past, you have seen brighter days. Now it is she who doesn’t desire anymore. And you too, overpowered, learn to refuse. Don’t pursue what is fleeing you; don’t live a life of misery; rather, with determination, endure, grow obstinate. So long, girl, you see how Catullus has grown obstinate: he won’t seek you out, he won’t call you since you don’t want to be sought and called. But you will be sorry that no one will call you. How miserable you will be: what life awaits you? Who will come to you? Whose words will tell you that you are pretty? Whom will you love? Whose will you say you are? Who will you kiss? Whose lips will you bite? And yet you, Catullus, keep obstinate and firm.

In the series of direct allocutions Catullus addresses to himself, the poem constructs a dialogue between two sides of the same split poetic persona.66 The voice of the resolute and forward-looking moralist is pitted against that of the nostalgic and hesitant lover. The poem articulates the split between a happy past and a present of wretchedness via the dialectics of verbal tenses. Framed by two almost identical (but differently accented) lines, the grammatical past coincides with the harmony of the lovers’ intent. It is a preterite past (fulsere) that has, however, not lost its durational quality (fiebant). The strong, adversative nunc on line 9 shatters the idyllic situation by proposing a line of action to the poetic self. It is here that the poem’s diction comes closest to Pliny’s choice of vocabulary. The note conveying the strong determination of the now mature subject is sounded again at the end of the poem, thus bracketing the highly rhetorical pathos of the final section, in which the voice of the converted lover details the bleakest future to the forsaken beloved. The Stoicly sage Corellius and Catullus’ sermonizing poetic “I” share the same determination (destinatus obdura / destinasse mori); their obstinacy is parallel (obstinata mente / obstinate); even the growing self-assurance developed in the two texts functions as the mark of their morals (obdurat / induruisse). Touching upon other Stoic commonplaces, the poem also makes clear that the poetic persona knows now what to follow or avoid (10) and how to harden his own will (11, 12, 19). 66

For Catullus’ different voices in the poem, see Roland 1966; Baron 1970; Adler 1981: 8 and 16–26.

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The text even portrays Catullus as momentarily successful in curing his love madness. The invitations to resist (perfer) and not to give in (obdura) seem to work.67 If the language is similar in both texts, however, its deployments differ widely: while Pliny’s letter seems to use it coherently with its tone and subject-matter, Catullus’ love poem parades it only obliquely. The pertinence of Pliny’s language is beyond suspicion when he applies Stoic terminology to the protagonist of a highly moralizing exitus letter. Catullus’ resistance to love, however, may only appear incongruous when cast in the language of the sage. The alternative to a life of elegiac wretchedness (nec miser vive) is not so much physical death, as for Corellius, but a mere forswearing of love. How is one to treat the discrepancy? The lexical parallels seem to be too neat to be treated as merely coincidental; still, are they enough to postulate a direct allusion? Is Pliny’s letter an improvement upon Catullus’ lexical abuse? In a philological context, if one were called on to adjudicate a similar question of surprising similarities in a situation of unlikely filiation, the most natural reaction would be to hypothesize descent from a common antecedent. As a first step in an argument aimed at demonstrating the philological relevance of Catullus’ poem for Pliny’s letter, the same strategy may be adopted here. The working hypothesis is thus that both texts have inherited and consciously deploy the idiom of moral philosophy. While interpretations of Catullus 8 have mostly focused on the analysis of the different “I’s” in the poem and on the dynamics of Catullus’ love-story, no investigation in the direction suggested by Pliny’s text has been made. A short terminological digression may suffice to establish a possible cultural lineage for the language the poem and Pliny’s letter share. In general, the nerve-and-bone syntax of the passages just quoted might be reminiscent of the sinewy rhetoric of the Stoics, with its marked preference for argumentative reasoning over pathos and dialectical cogency over embellishing ornamentation.68 However, it is primarily its diction that connects 67

68

As has been recognized, a comic antecedent lies behind Catullus’ monologue. See, most recently, Selden 1992, with previous bibliography. The best candidate is Demeas’ monologue at Samia 324– 56. The language and the argument in Menander’s piece are, however, markedly philosophical (and arguably Stoic). For line 326 (“strengthen yourself, endure”), cf. Plato, Smp. 219E and 220B (of Socrates’ endurance); Plut. Rom. 556E, with a reference to Stoic resistance to both pleasure and pain, and Marcus Aurelius 1.16.10, in generalizing terms. For line 349 (Demeas’ manliness), cf. Dyck 1996: 183–5. For Catullus’ loaded terminology (destinatus, obdurat, obstinata mente), cf. Cic. Tim. 2.5 (destinatis . . . sententiis), 3.67 (qui obduruisse . . . contra fortunam arbitrantur), and Off. 2.37 (quibus [vitiis] alii non facile possunt obsistere), all in Greek-related context. The three terms and their families are widespread also in Seneca’s philosophical works. On the distinctive features of Stoic oratory, see Moretti 1990. The absence of enjambements in Catullus 8 was first observed by Fraenkel 1961: 51. The link with the Latin experiments in a Stoic

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the passage of poem 8 to which Pliny may be alluding with the technical vocabulary of Stoic moral philosophy, in particular to the analysis of the virtue of magnitudo animi that shines forth in adverse circumstances. In rendering Panaetius, Cicero privileged the term constantia to indicate the attitude of the moral man who is able to treat as unimportant the gifts of good fortune and to withstand their loss: robusti animi est magnaeque constantiae (Off. 1.67). Moving from the temperate form of virtue adequate for the prokopton (the not-yet-sage) to the exemplary rectitude of Cato and his inimitable suicide, Cicero again introduces the notion of a superior, perfect consistency: Catoni, cum incredibilem tribuisset natura gravitatem, eamque ipse perpetua constantia roboravisset, semperque in proposito susceptoque consilio permansisset, moriendum potius quam tyranni vultus aspiciendus fuit. (Off. 1.112) Since Cato had strengthened his incredible natural austerity with his peculiar willpower all his life, and he had never once changed his mind, he also had the obligation to die rather than ever look upon the face of a tyrant.

Cato’s steadfastness in his Republican ethos and his ceasing to live so that he might live up to his own standards are notions foreign to Cicero’s more pragmatic attitude toward life and death for the res publica. His presence in the treatise thus suggests the “natural” association of the word constantia with the basic tenet of Stoic ethics.69 To indicate the same notion of constancy, Seneca prefers terms linked to the positive side of obstinatio: Paria itaque sunt et gaudium et fortis atque obstinata tormentorum perpessio; in utroque enim eadem est animi magnitudo, in altero remissa et laxa, in altero pugnax et intenta. (Ep. 66.12) Joy and the strong and obstinate endurance of pain are very much alike; the same greatness of spirit is in both. In the former, greatness is quiet and relaxed; in the latter, it is fierce and intense.70

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“de-emphasized” rhetoric is, to my knowledge, still unexplored. A different line of inquiry is in Greene 1998: 2–8. In her view, the terms I propose as bearing Stoic connotations (obstinata mente, perfer, obdura) are, rather, the sign of a dominating masculine voice exhorting Catullus to stop thinking like a woman (i.e., with lack of control over his emotions and desires) and start thinking and acting like a man (7). When one considers the virile root of virtus, the term Stoics used to indicate their moral ideal, the distance between Greene’s reading and mine is considerably reduced. Dyck’s note at Off. 1.69 might be misleading (1996: 199). While it is true that constantia does not have a Greek equivalent before Philo’s eustatheia, its use coincides with the Stoic eupatheia (cf. Cic. Tusc. 4.6.14 = Diog. L. 7.115). See also, for instance, Sen. Dial. 2.9.4–5: Non ut vobis facere non liceat iniuriam agimus, sed ut ille omnes iniurias in altum demittat patientiaque se ac magnitudine animi defendat. Sic in certaminibus sacris plerique vicerunt caedentium manus obstinata patientia fatigando. . . .

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Unlike Cicero’s, Seneca’s Stoic orthodoxy is beyond suspicion. When combined with fortitude, patience forms megalopsychia. As the charged background for both Catullus’ poem and Pliny’s epistle, these philosophical texts may form the plausible common source that would explain their surprisingly similar language. Pliny and Catullus, however, are on opposite sides of the spectrum on one crucial point. Both in Cicero and in Seneca the field of application of Stoic virtues (in particular, of obstinatio) is politics, as in Pliny, not love. In contrast with the prose tradition, Catullus’ voice is isolated. His transfer into the sphere of eroticism of a gesture more fitting that of ethical politics makes his lexical choices impertinent. Could it be that Pliny’s charged language is not designed only to recapitulate a tradition but also to curb a specific deviation from it? Catullus’ translation in a love poem of the vocabulary of Stoic resistance to morally objectionable, probably unlawful, and potentially tyrannical, political power could hardly go unnoticed. Later in his libellus Catullus will indeed provide his readers with a contrasting example, in which he will explore the proper association of political issues and courageous Stoic opposition. With its insistent rhetorical question Quid est, Catulle, quid moraris emori? (“What is it then, Catullus, what are you waiting for to die?”) poem 52 centers on the bid for power of the Caesarian party.71 Death is here the culturally expected answer to a potential loss of libertas. In Catullus 8, by contrast, the language of Stoic resistance conflates the language suitable to the threat of losing one’s political freedom with the erotic predicament of the lyric subject. Political servitude is here equated with the embryo of the elegiac servitium amoris. With its omnivorous force, Catullus’ language anticipates the totalizing lexical bid for cultural dominance that will characterize the elegiac poets of the following generation.72 Could Catullus’ systematic lexical impertinence together with his tendentious displacement of politics through erotics be what is at stake in Pliny’s text? Rather than the traditional background of Stoicizing texts, in other words, could Catullus 8 be the primary target of allusion? If neither text provides any clue to answer this question, Pliny’s positioning of 1.12 in his collection helps restrict the focus on Catullus. Ep. 1.13 contains, in fact, a new fragment from the same poem 8 to which Pliny might have alluded in 1.12. Having already witnessed 71

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The black stars of Catullus’ epigram are Nonius and Vatinius. For Vatinius, see poems 53 and 14. It is interesting that Pliny’s uncle has a comment about the son of this Nonius in Nat. 37.81. The note relies precisely on these lines and confirms their political reading: Ab Antonio proscriptus est Nonius senator, filius strumae Noni eius, quem Catullus poeta in sella curuli visum indigne tulit. The rather strong presence of Catullus’ libellus in the work of Pliny the Elder (see note 3) might have contributed to triggering the interest of his nephew. See Fedeli 1991: 108–11.

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Pliny’s connecting strategy through Virgilian quotations and allusions in the case of 1.2 and 1.3, readers are prepared to hear Catullan echoes as well in the epistle immediately following the heroic portrait of Corellius. One may perceive the second, completing allusion only when the first is detected; moreover, the presence of a further reminiscence from the target text in the later letter retrospectively reinforces the pertinence of that text also for the previous one. C. PLINIUS SOSIO SENECIONI SUO S. Magnum proventum poetarum annus hic attulit: toto mense Aprili nullus fere dies, quo non recitaret aliquis. Iuvat me quod vigent studia, proferunt se ingenia hominum et ostentant, tametsi ad audiendum pigre coitur. Plerique in stationibus sedent tempusque audiendi fabulis conterunt, ac subinde sibi nuntiari iubent, an iam recitator intraverit, an dixerit praefationem, an ex magna parte evoluerit librum; tum demum ac tunc quoque lente cunctanterque veniunt, nec tamen permanent, sed ante finem recedunt, alii dissimulanter et furtim, alii simpliciter et libere. At hercule memoria parentum Claudium Caesarem ferunt, cum in Palatio spatiaretur audissetque clamorem, causam requisisse, cumque dictum esset recitare Nonianum, subitum recitanti inopinatumque venisse. Nunc otiosissimus quisque multo ante rogatus et identidem admonitus aut non venit aut, si venit, queritur se diem (quia non perdidit) perdidisse. Sed tanto magis laudandi probandique sunt, quos a scribendi recitandique studio haec auditorum vel desidia vel superbia non retardat. Equidem prope nemini defui. Erant sane plerique amici; neque enim est fere quisquam, qui studia, ut non simul et nos amet. His ex causis longius quam destinaveram tempus in urbe consumpsi. Possum iam repetere secessum et scribere aliquid, quod non recitem, ne videar, quorum recitationibus adfui, non auditor fuisse sed creditor. Nam ut in ceteris rebus ita in audiendi officio perit gratia si reposcatur. Vale. (Ep. 1.13) Dear Sosius, I am happy to report that this year we have had a good harvest of poets: in the whole month of April, we have hardly had a day on which someone was not giving a recital. I am happy that literature is thriving, and that people’s talents come forward and show their worth, although the audiences tend to assemble rather sluggishly. The majority sit outside the lecture hall and waste their time in chatting rather than listening. They ask to be called in only when the reciter has come in; no, when he has finished the introduction; no, when he has gone over a good deal of the book: only at this point, and oh so slowly and hesitatingly, they come in. And they don’t even stay for the whole event; some sneak out of the back door, some just leave proudly through the front. I’ll never understand it; there are still people around who remember that once the Emperor Claudius, as he was walking in the Palace, heard some commotion and asked what it was about – when he was told it was Nonianus who was giving a recital (they swear), he joined the event: no formalities, no delay. What a difference, now: even the least busy of citizens, even when they have been asked in advance, and often reminded about it, don’t actually

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show up. And if they do, they do so complaining that they have lost a day (because they have not wasted it). Congratulations and encouragements are all the more in order for those who are not put off by the audience’s lazy or proud attitude. As for me, I basically missed none of the events. To tell the truth, they were almost always held by friends: but what can you do? It’s tough to find someone who loves me but does not appreciate literature. So, that’s why I have spent more time in the city than I had planned. Now I can leave for my retreat and write something . . . something which, don’t worry, I will not recite. I don’t want people to think that I went to their recitations only to coerce them to come to mine. You know, attendance to recitals is like every other obligation: all the act’s grace is gone when you treat it like a tit for tat. Take care.

Once again, the principle of thematic variety and constant tonal shift appears to govern Pliny’s arrangement of letters. From the death of Corellius the collection has swiftly passed to a musing on the literary scene in the capital. It is certainly true that the previous epistle had moved through three distinct stages: from politics to ethics and from ethics to consolatory literature. In closing on a potentially metapoetic note, with his request for a new, unheard-of consolation Pliny had already established the epistle’s ultimately literary aim. And yet it is difficult to reconcile the two texts. Ep. 1.13 stays more on target: its tone is generally lighter, its focus on recitals more unique. The potentially jarring effect of their sequence is alleviated, however, by their possible intertextual connection. In the ironical account of what the recitations of poetry have become in his days, Pliny lists all the efforts poets put into recruiting their audience and adds the most common complaints they hear.73 The tag used for the culminating expression of the audience’s recalcitrance is what interests here: Nunc otiosissimus quisque . . . aut non venit aut, si venit, queritur se diem (quia non perdidit) perdidisse. The idle and distracted audience that attends recitations regrets that its time is being wasted. They querulously complain “they have lost a day,” Pliny notes, “because they have not lost it.” Pliny’s epistle recycles (and slightly modifies) a proverbial play on the words perire and perdere which one can trace back to Plautus’ Trinummus 1026 (quin tu quod periit perisse ducis?).74 The pun’s proverbial quality cannot completely distract us from the most likely contextual source. In so many words, the incipit of poem 8 invited Catullus to do the same: to let go of his passion and to accept the fact that what is gone is gone for good: quod vides perisse perditum ducas (2). While it may be that Pliny here elaborates on a commonplace pun, 73

74

On the social dynamics of “reading for more than one person,” see Dupont 1999: 223–36 and Fitzgerald 2007: 110. See Otto 1890: 273.

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the presence in 1.12 of a larger echo of Catullan themes and diction makes Catullus a privileged target of allusion. Not unlike the case of 1.12, in the context of the present letter the allusion to Catullus is contrastive: Pliny attended almost all of the recitations, and he can guarantee that what one may think is lost is actually not lost at all. Pliny’s optimistic assessment of the state of the res publica litterarum in his day evokes Catullus as a darker background.75 Catullus’ relevance may be proved on even stronger grounds. Pliny is not the first one to try to redress Catullus’ lexical impertinence. A previous recitation of Catullus 8 had already brought to the surface the Stoic vocabulary on which Pliny himself will insist, and, not unlike Pliny, had left out of sight Catullus’ programmatic and polemic shift from ethics to erotics. In Satires 1.4 and 2.5, Horace treats obliquely and parodically the two Stoic/Catullan themes I have isolated above: the alternative between fugere and sectari and the correlation of perferre and obdurare. Horace bypasses Catullus’ metaphors of love and brings back to the sphere of ethics the themes embedded in the language. In Satire 1.4 Horace’s (fictional and idealized) father teaches him a workable ethics based on the formative power of practical examples. In so doing, he distances his teaching method from that of the rigid (Stoic) teacher of dogmatic (and abstract) philosophy: Aiebat: “Sapiens vitatu quidque petitu sit melius causas reddet tibi: mi satis est si traditum ab antiquis morem servare tuamque, dum custodis eges, vitam famamque tueri incolumem possum.” (S. 1.4.115–19)

“You have the sage who will explain what is better to seek and avoid,” he used to tell me, “for my part, it is enough if I can observe the custom handed down by our forefathers and safeguard your life and reputation for as long as you need a guardian.”

The theme of knowing what to avoid and what to seek is common stock in Latin literature, and one finds the alternative cast in several different lexical antinomies.76 Yet it appears that the theme Catullus allusively treats 75

76

One may see the same phenomenon in a letter to Tacitus (8.7), in which Catullus 14 provides Pliny with both the lexicon and a loaded cultural metaphor to contrast his correspondent’s critique of the present with the example of a troublesome past. Chapter 3 will treat this last letter in detail. In poetry, one formulation of the philosophic question can be found in Helenus’ prophecy at Aen. 3.459 (et quo quemque modo fugiasque ferasque laborem). The problem of what one should strive for and what one should attempt to escape from is also a commonplace in the rhetorical tradition. See, for instance, the resurfacing of the theme in the discussion of speculative issues in Cicero, de Orat. 3.29.116 and Top. 22.85 or 33.89. But the theme is ubiquitous (see, e.g., Livy’s preface on exemplary history). On Horace’s oblique representation of traditional mores, see Schlegel 2000.

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in poem 8 had a distinct philosophic overtone. The paradoxical situation of seeking what is constantly escaping you, nec quae fugit sectare (line 10), may be a collapsing of the traditional ethical polarity into erotic terms.77 In accordance with his general approach to the recasting of the basic tenet of neoteric poetry into less antisocial terms, Horace disentangles Catullus’ ethical paradox from his poetic innovations.78 Not unlike the poetics embraced in Satire 1.10, 1.4 also advances a morality of mediation: while it brackets, and hence deflates, the excessively stern and abstract ethical instruction of the Stoic philosopher, it also refuses to situate itself in a moral void.79 Pliny’s proposal is not superficial, but in tune with Cicero’s version of tamed Stoicism: one that locates appropriate action inside the realm of civic duties. In de Officiis Cicero had been very careful to distinguish between the equalizing virtues of iustitia and decorum and those of magnitudo animi and scientia. He saw the former pair as the principal agent regulating the place of the individual within society, particularly as they came to curb the potential unsettling charge of the latter pair. Greatness of soul and quest for knowledge must constantly be kept in check, for Cicero, lest they disrupt the delicate fabric of society (cf. Off. 1.18 and 1.63). The second point of contact between Horace’s language and Catullus 8 can be found in the satirical portrait of Ulysses as legacy hunter in Satire 2.5. Imparting a lesson on Stoic hardening of the will in the face of physical discomfort, Tiresias tells his pupil: . . . Ire domum atque pelliculam curare iube; fi cognitor ipse; persta atque obdura, seu rubra Canicula findet infantes statuas, seu pingui tentus amaso Furius hibernas cana nive conspuet Alpes. (S. 2.5.37–41)

Tell him to go home and to take care of himself. Become his agent. Be firm and endure, no matter if “the silent statues are cracked open by the red-hot Dog star” or as Furius, stuffed with greasy tripe, put it “white snow is spewed upon the wintry Alps.”

Horace’s teachings come closest to Catullus’ (and Pliny’s) portrait of the strong man who knows how to withstand hardships and to be constant. The 77

78 79

Claiming Catullus’ fully erotic inheritance and similarly toying with the discarded philosophical option, Ovid will take up both theme and formulation in Am. 2.20.39 (quod sequitur, fugio: quod fugit, ipse sequor) and Rem. 790 (quos fugias, quosque sequare dabo). See La Penna 1963, esp. 166–70. For a similar negotiation of potentially antisocial virtues in a stricter philosophical field, see Ep. 1.10 as read by Hoffer 1999: 126.

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misdirected desire of the legacy hunter should not detract from the validity of the lesson in self-mastery. Furthermore, the Stoic Ulysses is far more advanced than a prokopton in his training. He can rightly claim that life has made him endure worse than what Tiresias now advises him to do. Courting rich men in order to recover his fortune is but a small sacrifice: fortem hoc animum tolerare iubebo; / et quondam maiora tuli (“I will command my spirit to be strong and endure all this; after all, I’ve already suffered worse,” 20–1). Horace’s example ironically fits Ulysses’ mythological profile – the more so, because the pupil had already been the model of an expedient patience in Cicero’s Off. 1.113. In Cicero’s argument, Ajax, like Cato, would have killed himself a thousand times rather than suffer the humiliation of serving someone. On the contrary, Ulysses had swallowed his pride by allowing Circe and Calypso to enslave him during his wanderings and suffered the insults of his servants at home. The common currency of the mythologem Ulysses in association with the Stoic discourse helps us to see Horace’s poem as concerned, however incidentally, with the ethical dimension of his poetic text: if Pliny were in need of a model for his similar rethinking of the ethical dimension of literature, he could certainly find one in him. The death of Corellius in Ep. 1.12 resounds with a vocabulary reminiscent of Stoic discourse. Pliny recovers that language, redefines some of its terms, and applies it to its pertinent object. Unlike the lyric “I” in Catullus 8, Corellius is the righteous, strong, politically engaged suicide. In so doing, however, Pliny also incorporates Catullus into his text. It is a tamed Catullus, to be sure, one whose bid for an erotic hegemony of culture through language Pliny carefully curbs, but his presence is palpable nonetheless. As we shall see in more detail in the next chapter, Pliny’s redeployment of Catullus’ poetry coincides with a critical reading. By reusing his texts, he uncovers the origin of his model’s language and provides an interpretation of his poetics that is also a polemical correction of his extremism. Pliny’s critical play with his model is also a play with the canon.

chap t e r 2

Sed quid ego tam gloriose? Pliny’s poetics of choice

Surely, the proper language of love – that is, of communication to the beloved and to no one else – is prose. T. S. Eliot, The Three Voices of Poetry

Pliny’s nine books of private correspondence document his engagement primarily with one activity, law. Their author is a court advocate, a legitimate player in his political circle, and a busy patron of friends in the centumviral court. Readers are told about the main trials in which he takes an active part, with numerous references to his revising, polishing, honing, and finally publishing his orations.1 But Pliny’s engagement with oratory is not exclusive: it accompanies, and stands out against, a wider background of allusions to different literary activities, the first of which is the composition of poetry. In one of the later epistles of Book 9, he lightheartedly admits that excelling in one thing is better than doing several moderately well, but that moderate skill in several things is better if one lacks the ability to excel in one. Bearing this in mind, he admits, he has tried his hand at various styles of composition, lacking self-confidence in any one: Ut satius unum aliquid insigniter facere quam plurima mediocriter, ita plurima mediocriter, si non possis unum aliquid insigniter. Quod intuens ego variis me studiorum generibus nulli satis confisus experior. (Ep. 9.29.1) Just as you are better off being good at one thing than being mediocre at many, so if you are not good at one thing in particular, be at least mediocre at many. That’s why I experiment with all kinds of literature: I don’t trust myself to be any good at any of them in particular.

The epistle does not specify what these “kinds of literature” are: elsewhere Pliny is much more explicit. Although rarer, and often understated, 1

The preeminence of this activity is well attested in Ep. 2.5.3–7; 7.12; 9.13; 9.28.5. On Pliny’s choice of oratory over poetry, see Syme 1958: 93 taken up by Hoffer 1999: 174. On the same topic, Gamberini 1983 (esp. pp. 93–7), Boccuto 1991, Krasser 1993a, Hershkowitz 1995, Roller 1998, Auhagen 2003 and Sailor 2004: 163–9.

53

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references to Pliny’s composing, revising and publishing poetry intermingle with those concerning oratory. His verses have certainly not found many sympathetic ears among modern critics (Giovan Battista Pighi labeled his hendecasyllables “horrendous”),2 but Pliny himself maintains a far from dismissive attitude when he talks about them, and several of his epistles (4.14, 5.3, 7.4, 7.9, 8.21, 9.10, 9.16 and 9.25) are devoted to promoting his activity as a composer and a publisher of poetry. In these epistles, Pliny’s tone is apologetic and his language understated. There is little doubt, however, that these letters are intended to add a crucial facet to Pliny’s self-portrait as man of culture. Their most prominent feature is the author’s choice of poetic genre in which to specialize: neoteric poetry. In the series of epistles that will be discussed here, Pliny unambiguously associates his experiments outside the realm of prose with the production of short, refined, polymetric compositions modeled on Catullus. While reviewing Pliny’s pronouncements on his own poetry, my argument attempts to indicate the rationale behind Pliny’s surprising, though not unmotivated, choice of model. His profile as practitioner of neo-neoteric poetry will serve as the background for a re-evaluation of Ep. 7.4, a text often curiously taken at face value. The study of this letter will in turn lead into the analysis of a letter containing specific allusions to Catullan poetry (Ep. 2.2). Whereas recent critics have focused attention on the figure of Pliny-the-poet and the epistles in which he talks about his and his friends’ Catullan poetry, as yet no study has examined the epistles that clearly allude to that poetry. These, however, provide a further and possibly fruitful area in which neoteric poetry and Pliny’s epistolography intersect. The metapoetic letters are fundamental to begin assessing the valence of Pliny’s strategy of citation: they not only contain the basic tenets of his reflection on poetry, but they also offer examples of his redeployment of that poetry in his epistolary prose. The two operations – the survey of Pliny’s own fragmented but not incoherent treatise “On Poetry,” and the analysis of allusions to that poetry – are two sides of the same coin, and will be treated here separately only for practical reasons. The meaning of an allusion to any text is not separable from the interpretation that the ante-text has received before being redeployed. Before becoming writers, poets are readers, and professional writers often are also professional readers who address a no less educated readership. A remarkable peculiarity of Latin culture is that the audience’s familiarity with “technical” aspects of literature embraced both its active and passive facets: 2

Pighi 1945: 116.

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production and criticism were deeply connected and the same training in the interpretation and drafting of literary texts united their producers and consumers.3 Roman readers of literature always were, at least potentially, literature professionals, who were expected to take an active role in the reception of the texts. As actively involved readers of formalized writings, they were ready at any time to turn into producers of similar works. Correspondingly, writers could count on that active competence: they knew their readers shared all their trade secrets. Criticism, ranging from the least intrusive applause during recitals to the most engaged emulation in new texts, was the expected readers’ response.4 In a way, the relationship between author and readers in the Roman world resembled that between composers and their listeners in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: unlike contemporary music audiences who have grown used to the role of passive listeners either in a concert hall or at home, listeners to Baroque or Romantic music were accustomed to making music themselves and thus brought to the performance an educated (and always potentially active) competence. As we shall see, Pliny defines his poetics through a critical re-reading of Catullus’ poetry. A first possible reason for Pliny’s choice of such a difficult poetic model could be found in the example of his uncle. In the dedicatory epistle of the Naturalis Historia, addressed to the Emperor Vespasian, Pliny the Elder had interwoven his benevolence-seeking phrasing with the language of Catullus’ dedicatory cover letter to Cornelius, and cast the addressee in the role of the benevolent familiaris now risen to power and thus busying himself with more serious matters than literature: Namque tu solebas nugas esse aliquid meas putare, ut obiter emolliam Catullum conterraneum meum (agnoscis et hoc castrense verbum): ille enim, ut scis, permutatis prioribus syllabis duriusculum se fecit quam volebat existimari a Veraniolis suis et Fabullis. (Nat. Praef. 1) “After all, you too used to think something of my poetic exercises,” to pay passing homage to my fellow-countryman Catullus (if you remember this word from our days in the barracks), when he inverted the order of the syllables I just quoted, and became a little more harsh than he wanted to sound to his friends Veranius and Fabullus.

The Elder Pliny’s example is influential on several levels. First, the passage phrases its play with the model in the language of memory: scis and agnoscis 3 4

For a discussion of interpretive communities, see Barchiesi 2001b: 158–63. The role of the audience’s reception in shaping poetic texts is explored by Citroni 1995. On recitations, see especially 9–13, and, on post-Ovidian situations, 475–82.

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are technical terms that specifically evoke the recollection mechanisms essential to intertextuality. Second, Pliny’s uncle deploys a charged lexicon, clearly (if paradoxically) associating his monumental scientific work with the topically modest attitude of the primary representative, and progenitor (or capostipite) of a poetic current: nugas, the diminutive duriusculum, the opposition of mollis (contained in emolliam) and durus are all lexical signals referring the reader to the specific location that Catullus occupied on the cultural map of Pliny’s day. Third, in its phrasing, the preface of the Naturalis Historia conforms to the rhetoric of understatement typical of Pliny’s approach to literary glory. The Elder’s domestication of Catullus’ model passes through an explicit correction of his diction. It creates both the conditions for redeploying his technical language and the necessary distance to do so.5 Building upon indications from my earlier reading of the first Catullan echoes in 1.12 and 1.13, and anticipating the conclusions of the upcoming survey, one may say that the Younger’s involvement with Catullan poetry is also essentially contrastive in nature. For Pliny and his contemporary co-practitioners, neoteric poetry is both a model open to imitation and a cultural polemical target to be confronted. To be sure, Pliny’s process of re-evaluation does not take place in a cultural void. What enters into his texts is not Catullus (his poems) in any supposedly original form and ideal purity. Catullus’ poetry makes its way into Pliny’s letters only through the literary culture in which he operates. It is this culture that defines and conditions Pliny’s re-use of the poetic past. The Catullan poetry to which Pliny devotes a significant portion of his collection is a complex cultural and social artifact. It is the product of the interaction among the transmitted poetry, the critical discourse that surrounds and penetrates it in Pliny’s age, and the social practices that condition its reception. In this light, Pliny’s position is both symptomatic of and coherent with a larger trend in post-Republican culture that aimed at defusing the most provocative aspects of neoteric poetry – in particular its radical antisocial quality – while preserving its potential as stylistic model. When Pliny carefully delimits the extent to which his poetry may be considered Catullan he proves himself to be “organic” to his culture – at once its product and one of its active promoters.6 5

6

Howe 1985 presents Pliny the Elder’s attitude towards Catullus in the preface to the Natural History in even more aggressive terms. On the Younger’s concern with his uncle’s evaluation of Catullus, evidenced by their isolated use of the diminutive duriusculus (1.16.5), see Gaisser 1993: 10, in passing, and more in depth Gibson 2007. For a definition of the term “organic,” see Gramsci 1971: 5–23.

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If it is not in a position to illuminate all of these contextual factors, my work nevertheless proposes to take them into consideration, by highlighting how Pliny’s re-readings of Catullus are caught in the same tripolar dialogue as all allusive acts. The meaning of an allusion is conditioned by the specific portions of original texts that are being re-used, their reception into the current culture, and their specific re-use in a new body of writing (itself part of that culture). The kind of Catullus Pliny’s culture was actively reading determined what kind of Catullus he re-used, with what aims and with what results for his own text. None of these factors may be understood in either purely philological or purely semiological terms. On the one hand, even the first variable in the equation, Catullus’ text, is not a pure datum exhaustible by archeological considerations. Just by undergoing a selection process that determines what portions of the original text may be redeployed and what must be left out, even “Catullan poetry” only exists in and for the present of its reception. On the other hand, even the most semiological effect of allusion, its value for the eventual audience, may be evaluated in philological terms: the audience may in fact be understood in terms of a coherent set of expectations which can be recovered (or at least reconstructed) with some degree of philological approximation. In sum, if the “original” is conditioned by the culture that redeploys it, this culture is defined by the retrospective parameters it adopts in order to construct itself. pliny th e critic: on reading (his own) poetry In an illuminating article on Pliny’s composition and recitation of verse, Matthew Roller notes that Pliny attaches negative connotations to his poetry. In his words, “Pliny associates the production, consumption, and content of this poetry with the devalorized members in a series of ethically structured oppositions related to times, places, and activities.”7 Poetry is the lusus against which seria are arrayed; it is an activity to which one could legitimately devote otium only insofar as it leaves unchallenged and intact the sphere of negotium and its associated duties. From Roller’s semiological perspective, the secondary quality of poetry is quite natural: Pliny’s statements are in tune with the social practices of his contemporaries. To poetry, all seem to agree, should go the time in which no other more weighty activity can be carried out: the bath, travel, and leisure time in the countryside. Devoting the third chapter of his book to a speculative analysis of Pliny’s 7

Roller 1998: 275.

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collections of verses, Federico Gamberini reviews all the occasions in which the epistles make reference to Pliny as the author of poems.8 Though moving from more strictly philological premises, and insisting on the poetry that is produced rather than on the circumstances of its production and fruition, Gamberini reached conclusions similar to Roller’s. While Pliny recommends to his friends the practice of poetry as either a leisure activity to be enjoyed during recessus (such as temporary or final retirement)9 or as a progymnasmatic exercise beneficial to the wider pursuit of studia (Ep. 7.9.9), he stresses that poetry always comes second in his life (Ep. 4.14.2, 5.3.2, 7.4.4, 8.21.3).10 What is it about poetry that makes it deserve Pliny’s ostensibly dismissive treatment? It certainly has something to do with the contextual parameters of its reception – which Roller’s article helps to establish. It may also depend, however, on its actual textual content – and it is here that Gamberini’s hypothetical reconstruction of Pliny’s poetic output comes into play. In addition to how it was received, in other words, it is important to keep in mind what this poetry actually was, what were the values associated with its subject-matter and style. Pliny’s ambiguous treatment of his poetic experiments, suspended as it is between dismissive criticism and understated (self-)promotion, may depend in fact on the nexus of stylistic and social practices embedded in the poetry itself. Social and political concerns may seep into his argument, but it is on the field of aesthetic choices that Pliny most effectively articulates them. Gamberini identifies two (or possibly three) collections of poetry that Pliny admits to having composed and published in his lifetime: a first book of hendecasyllables, about which Ep. 4.14 and 5.3 talk at length; a second collection, consisting of a booklet et opusculis varius et metris (“comprising different items in different meters,” Ep. 8.21.4), which is mentioned and discussed in Ep. 7.9 and 8.21; and a possible third collection mentioned in his correspondence with Tacitus (9.10) and Pomponius Mamilianus (9.16 and 9.25). In all the instances in which Pliny refers to his own poetry, Gamberini continues, he directly or allusively claims a connection with neoteric poetry. Most explicitly, for instance, in Ep. 4.14, addressed to Plinius Paternus, he defines his hendecasyllables as written under the aegis of the neoteric principle of varietas: 8

9

10

Gamberini 1983, to date still the most comprehensive and detailed study of Pliny’s experiments with poetry. Cf. Ep. 1.3, 3.7, 4.3. Gamberini sees Caninius Rufus, the addressee of Ep. 1.3, as particularly connected with poetry because in Ep. 8.4 he is about to attempt an epic on the Dacian Wars and in 9.33 Pliny suggests to him the dolphin story as a possible topic for a poem (1983: 96). Gamberini 1983: 103–10.

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His iocamur ludimus amamus dolemus querimur irascimur, describimus aliquid modo pressius modo elatius, atque ipsa varietate temptamus efficere, ut alia aliis quaedam fortasse omnibus placeant. (Ep. 4.14.3) In those, I amuse myself, play, and love no less than I suffer, complain, and get angry; on some subjects I write in a crispier style, on others in a more relaxed one. Through this variety I try to give to different readers what they like and, perhaps, also something all of them might enjoy.

I will look closer at the entire text of this crucial epistle below; for now, I would just highlight the most prominent feature of its vocabulary. Pliny’s poetic output is marked by stylistic and thematic varietas. Variety is not chaotic assemblage, however. In an elegant pair of a tripartite series of terms, Pliny lays out his book’s varied table of contents: in his poetry “he plays, jokes, and loves” just as he “suffers, complains, and gets angry,” his inventio governed at times by a desire for brevity, at others by an impulse to amplify. The strictly emotive nature of the verbs neatly arranged in this list indicates that his poetry is of a personal and erotic nature and that it is probably marked by contrast. It is to no one’s surprise, therefore, that in the same letter the authority Pliny cites for his poetry is Catullus.11 The identification with Catullus’ poetry which Pliny fosters in 4.14 was prepared already in the first book of the epistles. We have seen, in Chapter 1, how the connection of letters 1.12 and 1.13 may be based on a potential common Catullan antecedent; Catullus had also been evoked, together with Calvus, in a nearby epistle, when Pliny lavished praise on the poetry of Pompeius Saturninus, in terms similar to those he uses to define his own verse: Praeterea facit versus, quales Catullus meus aut Calvus, re vera quales Catullus aut Calvus. Quantum illis leporis dulcedinis amaritudinis amoris! Inserit sane, sed data opera, mollibus levibusque duriusculos quosdam; et hoc quasi Catullus aut Calvus. (Ep. 1.16.5) Add to that that he writes poetry which could belong to my dear Catullus or Calvus. Indeed, his verses could be mistaken for Catullus’ or Calvus’, so much humor, sweetness, bitterness, and passion are in them! True, he does throw in, not randomly to be sure, a few somewhat harsher lines among the sweet and lighthearted ones – but this too is in the manner of Catullus and Calvus.12

11 12

Cf. Gunderson 1997. I translate levibus as “lighthearted” (short e in levis). An alternative rendering as “polished” may be viable as well (long e in levis). For the diminutive duriusculus as a distinctive Catullan indicator (in opposition to mollis), see note 5.

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Pliny insists on the poet’s activity (facit, inserit) and the Catullan quality of the poetry thus produced. In Ep. 5.3 he does the same. The subject here is Pliny himself and his “making” (as opposed to “reading”) of poetry. The letter traces the same line of argument as in 4.14, though its tone is more defensive. Pliny argues here for the legitimacy of writing “verse which is far from serious,” following the examples of those respected Roman citizens (including senators) who wrote lusus before him: Facio non numquam versiculos severos parum, facio; . . . Nec vero moleste fero hanc esse de moribus meis existimationem, ut qui nesciunt talia doctissimos gravissimos sanctissimos homines scriptitasse, me scribere mirentur. Ab illis autem quibus notum est, quos quantosque auctores sequar, facile impetrari posse confido, ut errare me sed cum illis sinant, quorum non seria modo verum etiam lusus exprimere laudabile est. (Ep. 5.3.2–4) Sometimes I also write some poemettes that are not for sanctimonious ears. Yes, I do . . . I don’t really mind (actually, I take it as a compliment) when people are shocked that I write such poetry: they must be thinking so highly of me that they find it beneath me. Some don’t know that the most learned, the most serious, and the most unimpeachable persons you can imagine also had a thing for such writing. Those, however, who know in whose footsteps I am walking, I am sure, will let me make my own mistakes – actually, not mine alone. The company I keep is such that it is well worth imitating in both their lighter and more serious moments.

The tone is unchanged in Pliny’s comments on his second collection of verse. In Ep. 7.9, in which he suggests to Fuscus that practicing poetry will help hone his style, lusus reoccurs to indicate short, lighthearted poetry. Again, the subject of this poetry matter is marked by a variety of psychological states (love and hatred, indignation, compassion and wit) that Pliny now lists under the comprehensive and pedagogically sound category of poems comprising every phase of life, even of our public and professional activities: Fas est carmine remitti, non dico continuo et longo (id enim perfici nisi in otio non potest), sed hoc arguto et brevi, quod apte quantas libet occupationes curasque distinguit. Lusus vocantur; sed hi lusus non minorem interdum gloriam quam seria consequuntur . . . Recipiunt enim amores odia iras misericordiam urbanitatem, omnia denique quae in vita atque etiam in foro causisque versantur. (Ep. 7.9.9–13) We have the right to seek recreation through poetry. I am not saying one should write long poems on one subject alone: those can be composed only by someone who is at full leisure. Write short and witty ones, rather, which are good for relieving the pressure of all those daily worries. They are called divertimentos, but these trifles can sometimes be worth no less than the serious ones . . . What is more, in them you find the declarations of love, expressions of hate, outbursts of anger, displays

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of compassion, and well-mannered humor – in sum, all those aspects of private life you will have to handle when in the forum or in the court of law.

As busy players in the public sphere, readers are invited to think, Pliny and Fuscus only have time to write short epigrammatic verse. They simply don’t have those extended blocks of writing-time, ideal for drafting a carmen continuum.13 The language is unexpectedly technical. Albeit reduced to a common-sense alternative between brief recreation and full leisure, the letter addresses the crucial opposition between short (lyric, elegiac, epigrammatic) compositions and epic poetry that had characterized the literary debates of previous generations of poets – and surprisingly resolves it in favor of the former: traditionally, in fact, forms of political disengagement were associated with non-epic poetry, not the other way around. In neoteric poetry the forms of collective identification lost ground to the vindication of subjective personal poetry. If Fuscus should now discard the option of epic for reasons diametrically opposed to those motivating the traditional recusationes expected from practitioners of neoteric poetics, the choice Pliny invites his correspondent to make is the same as theirs. The way Pliny frames the question is particularly noteworthy. His positing the alternative between epic and neoteric poetry as one between otium and negotium, leisure and activity, is not without consequences. Once reduced to the matter-of-fact issue of physically having time rather than making time to write epic poetry, the Alexandrian choice of poetics typical of the neoteric generation is voided of all its polemical content. Paradoxically, in Pliny the refusal to write epic is motivated by the need to remain an active part of the community whose identity that poetry should promote: for him and his peers epic is out of the question, but not because it embodies a collective rather than an individual ethos, as was true for the Neoterics.14 Quite the contrary: the epic genre remains out of reach because of the preeminence that collective concerns should take over those of individuals. For Pliny’s culture, epic is the genre of choice for those who have already served their term of active duty – they have earned release from service to the State. But for those not yet discharged, short epigrammatic poetry is an ideal, because unthreatening, diversion from the cares and duties of active life. It affords a much-needed break away from daily chores – a diversion, however, which leaves the poet-politician’s priorities intact. Short poetry is not a distraction insofar as it is less absorbing; it leaves to its practitioners 13

14

For the opposition of carmen perpetuum and deductum, see Steiner 1958, Hofmann 1985 and the discussion of Gilbert 1976 and Kenney 1976 in Barchiesi 2005: 145. Cf. Wheeler 1934: 76–9, an old but still valid assessment of the question.

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the time to play their (more important) roles in society. Pliny’s argumentative strategy is as subtle as it is successful. Once the reasons that originally brought late-Republican poets to opt against writing national epics are bracketed, writers who are called upon to practice an opposing ethic may embrace their style. Once legitimized, Neotericism may become part of the canon. In sum, by neutralizing the original anti-social potential of the poetic model, Pliny also makes its imitation possible. Taken together, the epistles just surveyed create a well-defined image. Even if no specimen is yet reproduced in the meta-discourse of the letters, readers have a clear picture of the poetry Pliny both admits he has practiced and advises his friends to practice: it is composed of short units, carefully polished and honed, markedly varied in tone, and devoted to an exploration of the poetic self. In a genealogical perspective, its linkage to neoteric poetry is almost impossible to miss. The only way to make it clearer would be to cite the title of the book that most directly embodied that tradition.15 This is precisely what Pliny does in the close of his collection. in the eye of the beholders: pliny-the-poet and catullus’ l i b e r In the last book of personal correspondence, several letters refer to Pliny composing poetry. Leaving aside the rather unspecific mention Pliny makes to Tacitus in 9.10 of some poems written while vacationing and destined to be deleted, there is one example of paired letters devoted to the issue of writing poetry. Ep. 9.16 and 9.25 contain a rapid exchange of notes between Pliny and Mamilianus which may give insight into the nature of the verses that Pliny circulated. Once again, their unmistakable model is Catullus: C. PLINIUS MAMILIANO SUO S. Summam te voluptatem percepisse ex isto copiosissimo genere venandi non miror, cum historicorum more scribas numerum iniri non potuisse. Nobis venari nec vacat nec libet: non vacat quia vindemiae in manibus, non libet quia exiguae. Devehimus tamen pro novo musto novos versiculos tibique iucundissime exigenti ut primum videbuntur defervisse mittemus. Vale. (Ep. 9.16) 15

The fact that Pliny’s epistles can treat Catullus as metonymy for Neotericism may suggest that by Pliny’s time he had reached canonical status as neoteric poet par excellence (perhaps in tandem with Calvus, as already in Hor. S. 1.10.19). Pliny might have contributed to the promotion of his conterraneus to this role, but the metonymic exchange seems to rest more on a culturally accepted datum than on any particular campaigning on Pliny’s part. On the other hand, Catullus may have been for some more a signpost for a poetic style than an actual coherent textual corpus: see Goold 1983: 8–10 and, in less dire terms, Gaisser 1993: 7–15 for the decline of Catullus’ fortune after the Augustan era. On Martial’s reverse engineering of Catullus’ language, see Fitzgerald 2007: 167–77.

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Dear Mamilianus, It’s no surprise to me that you have enjoyed the abundance of that kind of hunting, since you write, sounding much like a historian, that you cannot give figures for its casualties. I have neither the time nor the inclination to go hunting at the moment: all my time goes into the harvesting of grapes; then, since the vintage is meager, so is my inspiration. But I will bring home some new poemettes, consider them a taste of my novello, that since you ask so kindly, I’ll send you as soon as they stop fizzling. Take care. C. PLINIUS MAMILIANO SUO S. Quereris de turba castrensium negotiorum et, tamquam summo otio perfruare, lusus et ineptias nostras legis amas flagitas, meque ad similia condenda non mediocriter incitas. Incipio enim ex hoc genere studiorum non solum oblectationem verum etiam gloriam petere, post iudicium tuum viri eruditissimi gravissimi ac super ista verissimi. Nunc me rerum actus modice sed tamen distringit; quo finito aliquid earundem Camenarum in istum benignissimum sinum mittam. Tu passerculis et columbulis nostris inter aquilas vestras dabis pennas, si tamen et tibi placebunt; si tantum sibi, continendos cavea nidove curabis. Vale. (Ep. 9.25) Dear Mamilianus, First you complain about the host of your military chores and then, as if you were at total leisure, you read my trifling divertimentos – actually, you say you love them, crave for more, and insist that I write more of the same. By reading your comments (and you are a person of great erudition, great poise, and extreme competence in these matters), I am starting to believe that this kind of literature may give me not only amusement but also fame. There are a couple of lawsuits that keep me busy at the moment; nothing much, but I’ll have to wait to be free from them to send to your kind attention any more of the same musings. Then you’ll set my sparrows and dovelettes free in the midst of your eagles; provided, of course, you like them too. In case they are pleasing only to themselves, you’ll make sure they won’t leave their cage or nest. Take care.

With all their difference in setting, both letters share the focus on Pliny’s poetry, which is characterized in remarkably consistent terms. In their author’s eyes, the poems Mamilianus requests bear a neoteric imprint. They are, from the start, little verses (versiculos, in 9.16.2); in content they are bits of nonsense (lusus et ineptias, 9.25.1). The neoteric language is not neutral, especially since it sets the stage for the deployment of two charged Catullan diminutives, “little sparrows and little doves.”16 Pliny’s mention of passerculi in association with his own poetry is particularly meaningful, since the first word of Catullus 2 had acquired in the literary discourse of his time the status of a title for the whole book of his nugae. As Clausen 16

For the technical value of the diminutives as a “Catullan marker,” see Ronconi 1953: 107–50. For Pliny’s use of diminutives, see D’Agostino 1931 and Guerrini 1997 (as elements typical of the sermo quotidianus).

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pointed out,17 Martial 4.14 refers to Catullus’ liber by quoting, after the fashion of antiquity, the first word of the first poem, passer, in lieu of a title: Sic forsan tener ausus est Catullus / magno mittere Passerem Maroni (“Just as much Catullus must have steeled his gentle soul when he sent his Sparrow to the great Virgil,” 13–14).18 What we now have as the first poem, Cui dono lepidum, apparently was considered the dedicatory preface of the collection. As a matter of fact, with its charged deployment of an epistolary second person singular, Catullus 1 has all the features of a cover letter: the named dedicatee, the poet’s wish to intervene in the preservation and dissemination of the poetic gift, and the invocation of a deity sponsoring the book’s eventual success. The proemial poem functions as a Genettian threshold, containing a precise set of preliminary indications to guide the reading of the whole collection while remaining heterogeneous to it. The true incipit of Catullus’ collection is, thus, his poem for Lesbia’s sparrow. Pliny’s use of a diminutive form of passer reinforces – indeed overdetermines – the allusion to Catullus’ book. On a lexical level, then, Pliny’s choice of antecedent for his own collection casts him in the role of a more strictly Catullan poet than Catullus himself. Martial’s allusive game with Catullus in epigram 4.14 offers more than a contextualizing signal to Pliny’s readers. Another explicitly metaliterary and peculiarly Catullan epigram from Martial’s first book left distinct textual traces in Pliny’s epistles. The presence of “little doves” alongside “little sparrows” in Ep. 9.16 tells his readers that the epistolary allusion reaches Catullus only after having touched Martial’s epigram 1.7.19 Playing perhaps with the metaphorical reading of Catullus’ passer as the poet’s phallus, and engaging in a success-measuring poetry contest in the presence of Catullus’ most fervent audience, his conterranei, Martial wrote: Stellae delicium mei columba, Verona licet audiente dicam, vicit, Maxime, passerem Catulli. Tanto Stella meus tuo Catullo quanto passere maior est columba.20 17 19

20

18 Mart. 4.14.13–14. Clausen 1976, on the structure of Catullus’ liber. Guerrini 1997: 61 adopts a literal interpretation and disregards the Catullan parallel for passerculi. For the association of columbae and aquilae, however, he provides a suggestive source: quantum / Chaonias dicunt aquila veniente columbas (Virg. Ecl. 9.12–13). Cf. also Ov. Met. 1.506 and Tib. 1.10.11–13. For a resolution of the metaphor involving sparrows and doves, see Giangrande 1975, esp. 139–40, and, on stricter and more solid philological grounds, Thomas 1993.

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The dove delighting my Stella (I’ll say this even if Verona hears it), has overcome, dear Maximus, the sparrow of Catullus. My Stella is bigger now than your Catullus – by as much as a dove is bigger than a sparrow.

Stella’s columba is the equivalent of Lesbia’s passer. The meter is the same, and the syntax of Martial 1.7.1 inverts Catullus 2.1: the masculine/feminine nexus of passer and deliciae is reversed into the recherch´e neuter/feminine coupling of delicium and columba. The two poems are mirror images of one another. Pliny refers to both. Pliny’s Neotericism is thus indirect, not only because it juxtaposes the language of the new epigrammatist to his primary model; but also because through this juxtaposition it projects the latter as a critical response to the former. Pliny’s allusion casts Martial in the role of the critical reader of Catullus 2 and of the poetic corpus it came to symbolize. As the third poet-critic in the series, Pliny is in a position to qualify his allegiances. The poetry he sends to his friend is Catullan poetry only insofar as it is not fully so. The allusion to Martial balances Catullus’ example and the necessary role his corpus played in founding the Latin erotic tradition. Like Martial’s, Pliny’s poetry cannot exist but as a qualified reflection of Catullus’, its dissimilarity in the political implications of its poetics resting on dependence of themes and style. In the epistles, Martial features as more than an object of allusion through whose voice Pliny accomplished an initial re-evaluation of Catullus’ exemplar. Martial is also, albeit fleetingly, a character in Pliny’s collection. In the last epistle of Book 3, while discussing Martial’s poetry in a rather (perhaps deceptively) condescending tone, Pliny quotes a poem (10.20) that the recently deceased epigrammatist wrote in his honor: Sed ne tempore non tuo disertam pulses ebria ianuam, videto. Totos dat tetricae dies Minervae, dum centum studet auribus virorum hoc, quod saecula posterique possint Arpinis quoque comparare chartis. Sera tutior ibis ad lucernas: haec hora est tua, cum furit Lyaeus, cum regnat rosa, cum madent capilli. Tunc me vel rigidi legant Catones. (Ep. 3.21.5)

Make sure you don’t show up, drunk, at the wrong time and knock on the door of that eloquent man. His days are all for the austere Minerva: he is busy preparing

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for centumviral ears something that future generations may compare to Cicero’s pages. Go, rather, more safely at night: this is the time that becomes you, when wine is raging, the rose is ruling, the hair is drenched. Then I may be read even by the sternest of Catos.

Modern readers may be put off by the shameless citational strategy Pliny adopts here. As he is wont, Pliny quotes Martial only to talk about himself in mediated, yet unambiguously positive terms. All the elements to pass judgment on Pliny’s self-absorption are here in place: anticipating posterity’s need of a gloss for the apparently unspecific poem in Martial’s collection, Pliny makes sure that we associate with his name the “eloquent door,” the allusion to the “centumviral court,” the “austere Minerva” and even the challenge to the “Ciceronian works.” Yet, when we disentangle Pliny’s most strictly literary concerns from his indirect self-portraiture, when we read his text more as aimed at producing a prescriptive recipe for the practice of neoneoteric poetry rather than a descriptive exercise in self-indulgence, its value as metapoetic statement becomes apparent. Martial’s epigram characterizes Pliny as someone able to alternate the gravitas expected of him in his role as patron in the centumviral court with a relaxation of its norms that allows the enjoyment of a book admittedly parum severus.21 Although in the first section of his collection of letters Pliny appears as a consumer of poetry who is about to admit that he is also a producer of neo-neoteric verse, Martial’s hint surely suggests that Pliny enjoys the anti-Catonian poetry par excellence. The signal is more than circumstantial: the ethically charged division of roles between the days that Pliny devotes to his oratorical exercises in Ciceronian emulation and his poetically indulgent nights affects also the quality of the opposed literary enterprises. In autobiographical terms, Pliny’s behavior appears quite natural. However, his allotting of daytime to oratorical and yet literary negotium and of night-time to the enjoyment of neo-neoteric, politically disengaged, poetry is far from a literarily neutral gesture. The effect of such a neat distinction between two incompatible cultural practices is jarring. Pliny’s ethically felicitous partitioning of time barely hides a crucial paradox in his poetics: either activity, whether oratorical or poetic, requires a hundred-percent dedication – at least in theory. One cannot serve two such exclusively demanding masters as neoteric poetry and oratorical activity, for no other reason than the promoters of each had constantly 21

A secondary allusion to Martial’s 10.20.1–4, the epigram mentioning him: nec doctum satis et parum severum / sed non rusticulum tamen libellum / facundo mea Plinio Thalia / i perfer. These lines open the half of the poem Pliny chose not to report: for an insightful account of cross-allusions, see Henderson 2001: 63–8.

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waged a vetoing war against one another. On the one side, Neoteric poetry had defined itself in mainly anti-rhetorical (Callimachean) and anti-social (individualist) terms. On the other side, in his rhetoric-oriented political philosophizing, Cicero had adopted the Stoic notions of service to the State and individual dedication to the common good as the basis of his ethics. He had produced a set of principles and practical advice that blurred all distinctions between the task of the orator and the statesman. Of the cultural battle that had been fought on the level of ethics as well as poetics Pliny’s (perhaps more than Martial’s) text preserves little trace: all is at peace on the home front. Or so the text tries to suggest. While the discussion of Martial’s epigram and his attempt to create a “possibly eternal” poetic monument to Pliny-the-reader rounds off the first three books of Pliny’s work with a suggestive Horatian signal (the same attempt to create a cultural artifact aere perennius in the closing poem of the third book of the Carmina), Book 4 develops this hint in a new direction.22 A significant watershed divides the first third of Pliny’s collection from the rest. Whereas in the first three books Pliny never intimates his active involvement in writing poetry, Book 4 reveals a new facet of his literary activity. Pliny’s evaluation of his own poetry as being coherent with the stylistic teachings of Neotericism is still indirectly, but perhaps more unequivocally, confirmed by what another poet writes about him. In Ep. 4.27, Pliny quotes a poem by Sentius Augurinus that develops Martial’s allusion one step further: Canto carmina versibus minutis, his olim quibus et meus Catullus et Calvus veteresque. Sed quid ad me? Unus Plinius est mihi priores: mavolt versiculos foro relicto et quaerit quod amet, putatque amari. Ille o Plinius, ille quot Catones! I nunc, quisquis amas, amare noli. (Ep. 4.27.4)

I sing short-lined songs; the same did my Catullus and Calvus in the good old days. But why should I care about them, when I have Pliny? He is enough to make 22

For Sherwin-White, “the total absence of any reference to his versification in i-iii is in striking contrast to his parade of it from iv onwards” (1966: 289). Pliny’s “new” concern with poetry after the first collection of three books had been completed (and published as a unit?) can perhaps be read in relationship with the presentation of Martial’s eulogy. For the idea that the first published nucleus was Books 1–3, see Peter 1901, who acknowledges his antecedent in Asbach 1881. See also Sherwin-White 1966: 20–41. For the notion that Ep. 3.21 contains a sphragis, see Lef`evre 1989: 125. For Pliny’s halfhearted belief in Martial’s ability to confer poetic immortality, see Adamik 1976: 67–8, Ludolph 1997: 78–9 and Pitcher 1999: 555–6.

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a whole tradition. In private, he likes to write his poemettes: he looks for love and thinks he is being loved too. Yes, that Pliny: that one-man host of Catos. Now if you are in love, whoever you are, try and learn how not to love!

Sentius’ verses divulge that Pliny is not only a consumer but also a producer of polymetric, erotic and personal poetry. In Sentius’ flattering verses, Pliny is aligned with Calvus and Catullus as a practitioner – to be sure foro relicto – of light neoteric poetry. As in Martial’s poem, Sentius associates Pliny with a local and momentary transgression of his public role as a stern Catonian figure. But Sentius is more explicit than Martial in linking Pliny’s second nature with his active involvement in poetry: if for Martial Pliny’s identity oscillated between diurnal association with the figure of Cato and nocturnal fellowship with erotic poets, for Sentius Pliny’s Catonian “I” is overcome by his poetic self. The penultimate line identifies Pliny with Cato, both paradoxically as examples of lovers. Sentius’ poem is based on an a fortiori argument: if even the combination of Pliny and Cato (the poetic construct of Pliny-the-Cato) can be said to love and want to be loved, this can only mean that there is no escape from love itself.23 With an Ovidian gesture, Sentius bids farewell to the irremediable lover, stressing the futility of his attempt: “whoever you are who are in love, go now: try and quit!”24 Martial’s and Sentius’ poetic vignettes portray Pliny as an almost bipolar personality. Both poets insist on his ability to divide his time into two distinct and morally charged areas. For them, Pliny is not a poet at the same time as he is a public figure, but he manages his activities so well that he fully partakes of both worlds. For his part, Pliny does nothing to challenge or even to qualify this portrait; indeed he propagates it in his epistles, and modern readers duly note his ability to balance his role in society with his sorties into the territory of poetry. The coherence of Pliny’s pronouncements with those of his poet friends apparently undermines their collective allegiance to neoteric poetics. But their insistence on the frivolous, secondary nature of the poetry they produce actually takes us closer to the definition of the cultural construct to which they affix the label “Catullus.” To judge from their repeated metapoetic statements, their engagement with neoteric poetry is what one might call, in modern terms, 23

24

For a discussion of the tag “Cato” as probably referring both to the Censor and to the Uticensis in erotic poetry after Catullus, see Buchheit 1961 and Scott 1969. Cato appears in several of Martial’s epigrams as the excessively stern reader (1.1; 10.20; 11.2; 11.5), but Citroni always identifies him with the Uticensis (1975: 11). The interpretation of the last problematic line is supported by the parallel in Ov. Tr. 3.3.75–6: at tibi qui transis ne sit grave quisquis amasti / dicere Nasonis molliter ossa cubent (“if you have ever been in love, whoever you are, pray, wish that Naso may rest in peace when you pass by”).

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belletristic. By carefully limiting to the sphere of leisure the interconnected production and consumption of poetry and by stressing the constant presence, alongside poetry, of a socially more acceptable role in public life, the circle of poets of which Pliny imagines himself the center gives a precise, albeit selective, interpretation of neoteric models. The hermeneutics practiced by this poetic sodality and their redeployment of neoteric poets are at once literal and subversive. Echoing neoteric language, they betray the intentions of their originals. If neoteric poetry (with its self-diminishing metapoetic language polemically insisting on the Callimachean smallness of its products) could rightly be placed under the rubric of otium, Catullus had turned this proclaimed social marginality and poetic modesty into an assertive claim to cultural power. In Catullan poetry otium is all there is: whatever other socially useful duty he and his fellow poets might have performed, it remains outside the scope of poetry.25 This most revolutionary and politically subversive feature of Catullus’ poetry is systematically erased in Pliny’s neo-neoteric experiment: leisure and duty exist side by side, their spheres of influence carefully delimited. Modern readers of Catullus have recognized the nexus of poetics and politics that lies at the core of his poetry. By now it is a commonplace that the Roman neoteric wave of cantores Euphorionis aimed, through its deceptively understated language, at a trans-valuation (in Nietzschean terms) of traditional Roman ethics. If Catullus labeled his poetry as trifles (nugae), it was only to associate them with the new Callimachean poetics of brevity, polemically pitted against a traditional evaluation of poetry according to its (epic) proportions and its “patriotic” appeal.26 When Catullus associated his poetry with leisure and play (otium and lusus), he did so only to “allocate positive moral value” to these activities.27 If he redeployed in the context of erotics the ethically loaded terms of faith, contract and friendship (fides, foedus, amicitia), he did so only to break their cultural association with the ethics of the senatorial order and to claim for the love poet an ambiguous status as voluntarily marginal.28 In sum, if Catullus fostered 25

26 27 28

See, for instance, Catullus 50: whereas the poetic games that the poem attributes to both Catullus and Calvus have taken place on a shared day of leisure (externo . . . die otiosi), the poetic “I” prolongs his leisure into the next day. Calvus may already be in court, but Catullus’ poetry is programmatically blind to it. See Buchheit 1976. A wider discussion in Citroni 1995: 57–63. For Pliny, see Hershkowitz 1995. See Buchheit 1976: 164–8, in Roller’s wording (1998: 277). See Ross, 1969: 80–95, Minyard 1986: 24–7 and Fitzgerald 1995: 117–20. In this operation Catullus will be a model for the following generation of elegists: see La Penna 1977: 221–2 and, more recently, Fantham on “un-Augustan activities” (1996: 102–11). On the limited impact that poetic attitudes had on actual political choices of the Neoteric circle, see Farrell 2002, who singles out Catullus (and perhaps only Cinna with him) as adverse to political engagement (42–4).

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poetic disengagement from politics, he did so from a distinctively aggressive stance. The poet’s alienation from politics, his attempt to replace the traditional commitment of a Roman aristocrat to an active political and military life with the antithetical commitment to a “career” in love, his appropriating the very language of politics for his impertinent (and non-pertinent) poetry, resulted in a devaluation of the overall importance of political life. Refusing the traditional ethical scale on mere poetic grounds was in essence a political gesture. The careful reaction of the following generations confirms its radical character. The rhetoric of respectful separation of the two spheres practiced by the neo-neoteric circles portrayed in Pliny’s letters is an antidote to the Catullan conflation and reordering of the priorities of poetics and politics. This appropriation of Catullus was far from being uncritical or unproblematic; it was a calibrated response to a loaded cultural past. Pliny faced the paradox of a poetry that had no reason to exist in the social and political conditions of the post-Neronian age, and Roller rightly isolates Pliny’s problem of reconciling a neoteric mode of writing with a nonneoteric scale of values and an anti-neoteric mode of living. When he reads into Pliny’s letters on poetry an attempt to repoliticize the allegedly unpolitical practice of composing and reciting nugae, however, Roller frames Pliny’s deliberate attempt to erase the political import of neoteric poetics as a political gesture. By redefining its placement in society and reinterpreting Neotericism as a mere matter of style, Pliny does more than inherit a poetic paradigm; he is modifying it from the inside, and his action is as much literary as political. Roller, who develops his argument in a Foucauldian frame, is particularly interested in how a cultural activity becomes political and thus insists on Pliny’s performance of his poetry in public. In his analysis, however, concern with the social negotiation of power overshadows the role that social interactions play in defining precisely those stylistic features that are usually considered purely literary aspects of the text. Roller’s illuminating reading of Pliny’s involvement with the Catullan model investigates his letters as symptomatic of social practices and political behavior. But the same texts might also be seen as an indicator that a radical shift in literary history had taken place in the generation immediately preceding Pliny’s, a shift that made the neoteric texts available for socially acceptable consumption. When we focus on the literary dimension of Pliny’s pronouncements on poetry, it appears that contemporary discourse on Catullus inherited from Augustan poetry and criticism the strategy of depoliticizing a poetic model altogether. Pliny’s insistence on the formal aspects of his Catullan poetry – a focus that brackets the specific social and political dimensions

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of his antecedent’s texts – is developed under the aegis of Horace, the most authoritative and engaged poet-critic of the Augustan age. As we shall see in the reading of 7.4, if Pliny joins a party, this is initially not a political party, but a literary one. As Roller aptly suggests, by critically separating what in Catullus’ experiment had been an indissoluble fusion of politics and poetics, Pliny tailored his poetic model to fit a social paradigm antithetical to its implied politics. He stressed the limiting set of parameters in which his (and his peers’) production and enjoyment of polymetric forms of poetry was deemed acceptable. If he insists on his poetry as the product only of otium (pastime) and if he is careful to separate his parum pudici versiculi and his ineptiae from his own public profile as pudicus and non ineptus, he does so in order to depoliticize what in Catullus had been a poetic gesture with weighty political implications. from consumption to production: pliny’s catull an poetry in e p i s t l e 4.14 As we have seen thus far, the lineage Pliny established via his repeated professions of allegiance to Neotericism is far from unproblematic. His careful redeployment of Catullus’ poetic example systematically redefines it; and allusions make clear that this redefinition was aimed at defusing its political and polemical charge. To measure the extent of this depoliticizing gesture, we may turn to Ep. 4.14, in which Pliny most clearly deconstructs Catullus’ politics of poetry. Catullus had linked subject-matter and style on one side, and the personality of the poet and the moral implications of his work on the other. Pliny severs this link and rearranges its elements in a newly balanced system in which contrasts are mediated and oppositions reconciled.29 C. PLINIUS [DECIMO] PATERNO SUO S. Tu fortasse orationem, ut soles, et flagitas et exspectas; at ego quasi ex aliqua peregrina delicataque merce lusus meos tibi prodo. Accipies cum hac epistula hendecasyllabos nostros, quibus nos in vehiculo in balineo inter cenam oblectamus otium temporis. His iocamur ludimus amamus dolemus querimur irascimur, describimus aliquid modo pressius modo elatius, atque ipsa varietate temptamus efficere, ut alia aliis quaedam fortasse omnibus placeant. Ex quibus tamen si non nulla tibi petulantiora paulo videbuntur, erit eruditionis tuae cogitare summos illos et gravissimos viros qui talia scripserunt non modo lascivia rerum, sed ne verbis 29

The balanced rhetoric of modesty is the object of Rudd 1992, esp. 28–30. For Catullus’ polemical construction of a poetic persona, see Selden 1992: 476–82 and 490–8.

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quidem nudis abstinuisse; quae nos refugimus, non quia severiores (unde enim?), sed quia timidiores sumus. Scimus alioqui huius opusculi illam esse verissimam legem, quam Catullus expressit: Nam castum esse decet pium poetam ipsum, versiculos nihil necesse est, qui tunc denique habent salem et leporem si sunt molliculi et parum pudici. Ego quanti faciam iudicium tuum, vel ex hoc potes aestimare, quod malui omnia a te pensitari quam electa laudari. Et sane quae sunt commodissima desinunt videri, cum paria esse coeperunt. Praeterea sapiens subtilisque lector debet non diversis conferre diversa, sed singula expendere, nec deterius alio putare quod est in suo genere perfectum. Sed quid ego plura? Nam longa praefatione vel excusare vel commendare ineptias ineptissimum est. Unum illud praedicendum videtur, cogitare me has meas nugas ita inscribere “hendecasyllabi”, qui titulus sola metri lege constringitur. Proinde, sive epigrammata sive idyllia sive eclogas sive, ut multi, poematia seu quod aliud vocare malueris, licebit voces; ego tantum hendecasyllabos praesto. A simplicitate tua peto, quod de libello meo dicturus es alii, mihi dicas; neque est difficile quod postulo. Nam si hoc opusculum nostrum aut potissimum esset aut solum, fortasse posset durum videri dicere: “Quaere quod agas”; molle et humanum est: “Habes quod agas.” Vale. (Ep. 4.14) Dear Decimus, Perhaps, as usual, you now expect me to send you the text of a speech, since you have asked for one. This time, however, I am submitting my divertimentos – as if they were, so to speak, imported articles and novel goods. Enclosed you will find my hendecasyllables: those with which I beguile the free time I have while I am on the road, in the baths, over dinner. In them, I amuse myself, play, and love, no less than I suffer, complain, and get angry; on some subjects I write crispier lines, on others more relaxed. Through this variety I try to give to different readers what they like and, perhaps, also something all of them might enjoy. If among them you find some that will sound a little too frank, well, you know perfectly well that in the history of our literature there have been great men, and very serious ones at that, who have written stuff like that. What is more, they refrained neither from treating touchy subjects nor from dealing with them with explicit language – from the latter, at least, I refrain. It’s not that I am more sober than they: how could I be? I am shyer, that’s all. I am confident that to my little work the very same rule applies as Catullus put forth, when he wrote: “To be pious, the poet should himself be chaste; his poetry must not necessarily be. His verses may well have flavor and grace even if they are a bit soft and quite unashamed as well.” From my submission you can understand how much I value your opinion. I preferred that you weigh all of them rather than pay compliments to just a selected sample: even if the good poems end up sounding trivial when you find them among their peers. What is more, a connoisseur knows that he should not compare different things with one another, but weigh each item, and avoid judging comparatively inferior

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what is perfect on its own terms. Ok, that’s enough: nothing is more trifling than to promote trifles with a long introduction. I should add only one thing: I think the title of these diversions of mine should be Hendecasyllables – a title dictated only by their meter. So, if you want to call them epigrams, idylls, eclogues or (as many do) poems, you are free to do so. As for me, I vouch only for hendecasyllables. Now, I am not asking anything difficult; just that you’d be candid about my book and tell me what you would tell others. If this booklet were my only work or the most important one, you might find it hard to say: “Look for something better to do.” Instead, it is easy and totally fine to say: “You do have something better to do.” All the best.

The game between expectations and frustration dominates the letter, the rhetoric of surprise beginning immediately. Pliny starts the epistle by saying what his text will not do: Paternus might be expecting an oration from him, but the epistle accompanies a different work. The goods Pliny surprisingly delivers to his friend’s doorstep are not what he demanded: they are foreign to Pliny himself, imported and delicate cultural objects, hardly in keeping with the cultural expectations one can normally have of Pliny. The defying of his first reader’s expectations is, however, immediately undone. If poetry occupies center stage and displaces what should be central, it does so only momentarily. Its disruptive charge is defused, and poetry is reabsorbed and re-inscribed on the margins of public life. Its mode of production is linked to a devalorized topography and the lightness of its destination reinforces the marginality of poetry. Pliny constructs an ambiguous cultural compromise. The kind of poetry that should not be coming from him, and that, more importantly, should not be allowed to displace the central object of his concerns, is allowed to do so. Subversion is possible, however, only because poetry, by trespassing the boundaries society imposes on its existence, is not claiming any cultural centrality. Reduced to an addition and an ornament, poetry poses no permanent threat to the integrity of Pliny’s public persona, only a momentary and controlled diversion from it. The same dialectic is at work in the following paragraph (4.14.3). The passage most directly connecting Pliny’s poetry with its neoteric model loses its metapoetic force by being presented as a mere tool to satisfy Pliny’s aim to please a varied audience. The charged, recognizable language of neoteric poetics (iocamur ludimus amamus dolemus querimur irascimur) is once again returned to the fore.30 Pliny’s poetry is characterized by the simultaneous presence of opposing psychological tendencies: love is opposed to rage, and coexists with it, just as playfulness and lament, play and pain feature 30

As it was deployed in Ep. 1.16 to establish a relationship between Saturninus’ (and Pliny’s) diction and the poetics of their antecedents. See above.

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side by side. It is a poetry of ethical unbalance and of improper stylistic variety; rather than alternatively, the low(er) or high(er) level of style appear alternately (modo pressius modo elatius). Variety in tone and subject-matter is indeed the dominant note sounded in the letter. But if he describes his hendecasyllabic poetry in ways that recall the neoteric experience, however, the varietas with which he invests his poetry is not here invoked as a claim to a poetic heritage, a vindication of a literary identity as it was in 1.16. Pliny’s rhetoric frames his choice of models in terms of a mere audience-pleasing strategy. The game of continuous reversal does not end with the downplaying of his poetry. If it is true that for Pliny what modern readers recognize as Catullan variety is only an expedient to capture the benevolence of his readers, this observation is balanced by the notion that “perhaps” (fortasse), in pursuing it, Pliny has produced something of which all can approve. The final gesture, perhaps by no coincidence, brings Pliny’s text in contact with a Horatian antecedent. In Ep. 2.2 Horace playfully claimed to have given up writing poetry on account of the diversity of tastes and contradictory demands of his public. In the same terms, but with a different emphasis, Pliny represents his poetry’s varietas as merely a tactic on his part to satisfy the varied taste of his varied audience.31 The approval of his public is reinforced by the group of highest and most serious men who had preceded him on this path. Defending his poetry, Pliny reminds his readers that he is not the first to combine light, erotic and leisure poetry with an active commitment to political life. The unspecified group of gravissimi, here left to Paternus’ erudition, will soon become, in Ep. 5.3, a detailed fasti of poetic and political precursors from which Catullus, the principal forebear in the neoteric style (and Pliny’s main object of allusion), is conspicuously absent.32 These predecessors are called upon to authorize Pliny’s versifying not because they exercised restraint but rather because 31

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Denique non omnes eadem mirantur amantque; / carmine tu gaudes, his delectabitur iambis, / ille Bioneis sermonibus et sale nigro (“At the end of the day, not everybody praises and loves the same things: you enjoy the lyric of my odes, some are delighted by the iambic poetry of my epodes, another one by diatribic satire a` la Bion with its black humor,” Hor. Ep. 2.2.58–60). For the recapitulative quality of the series as marking the steps in Horace’s own poetic career, see Rudd 1989: 129–30. The parallel diction directly unites Pliny’s versiculos parum severos with Catullus’ versiculi . . . parum pudici (Catullus 16.6 and 8). For the catalogue of exemplary characters that Pliny names, see the extensive prosopographic account by Sherwin-White 1966: 317–18. At Tr. 2.2, developing a similar argument, Ovid insists on the difference between life and literary works: Crede mihi, distant mores a carmine nostro: / vita verecunda est, Musa iocosa mea (“Trust me, my poems are not who I am; my life is modest, it is my Muse who jokes,” 353–4). The organizing principle of the two catalogues is different, because Ovid surveys any instance of teneros amores in the Latin canon, whereas Pliny is interested in “the versification of his gentry” (Sherwin-White 1966: 317). Pliny’s focus accounts for his parenthetical mention of Virgil, Nepos, Accius and Ennius: non quidem hi senatores, sed sanctitas

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they went further in bluntness than Pliny does. The example set by the serious men of state who indulged in the same kind of poetry as Pliny could authorize a more subversive and indecent transgression of decorum than his own. In eschewing the naked words of his models Pliny exercises more restraint than they did. Notably, however, he claims to do so not from any deeper sense of decency but because he is more shy: quae nos refugimus, non quia severiores (unde enim?), sed quia timidiores sumus (4.14.4). In a tasteful paradox, Pliny turns his examples of morality into an example of excess from which he shies away. The Catullan echo contained in the term severiores dissociates Pliny from the old-time moral critics of Catullan poetry and in the same breath recasts his boldly lascivious antecedents in that role. Pliny’s one-word allusion to Catullus is hard to miss. The hortatory incipit of Catullus 5 reads: Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus, rumoresque senum severiorum omnes unius aestimemus assis. (Catul. 5.1–3)

Let’s enjoy our life, dear Lesbia, and give ourselves to love: with all their severity, the mumblings of old farts aren’t worth a dime.

Pliny’s allusion is made the more intriguing by the different grammatical value the comparative severior takes on in the two texts: in Catullus it is an absolute comparative, bearing the meaning “too severe”; in Pliny it can function both as a true comparative (the second term of comparison could be “my forebears”) and with the Catullan value of excess. While importing Catullus’ language into his discourse, Pliny also censors it as outdated. The political situation reflected in the polemical language of the neoteric poet cannot (and should not) be replicated in the present. The continuous reversal of roles undermines the possibility of transferring to Pliny’s situation the moral criticism leveled against Catullus’ poetry, and a complex strategy of self-presentation advances through the articulation of a paradox. The clear-cut, black and white, morality–debauchery polemic set out in the Catullan example is replaced in Pliny’s letter by the fluid exchange of antithetical features between the two parties. Moralists and poets are allied in a common camp, in which stern opposition to poetry is no more possible than a poetic opposition to morality. The unceasing ebb and flow between center and margin, authorization and violation, transgressive exemplars and restrained use of license prepares the way for a final morum non distat ordinibus (“these were not, to be sure, senators, but moral soundness does not vary with rank,” Ep. 5.3.6).

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reversal of roles and a frustration of expectations in the letter. Pliny has so far courted the paradox of authority without fully committing to it. Ep. 4.14 has been respectfully promoting Pliny’s marginal poetry to the center of a (marginal) stage. It has based its claim to legitimacy on the example of people who (unlike its author) have gone beyond the boundaries of linguistic decorum, and yet have in no way renounced their behavioral decorum. Though oscillating between the poles of authorization and transgression and ultimately blurring the distinction between the two, Pliny’s writing has kept its potential contradictions under control. Each of its statements has aimed more at qualifying than at negating the others. The compromise thus reached is potentially a paradox. And it becomes one when Pliny claims that his poetry (thematically surprising but not as linguistically indecent as it might be) is authorized by Catullus’ example of separating his life and work. There is no necessary connection between the poetry one produces and the life one leads. This most troublesome law of poetry derives from that Catullus whom Pliny will be most careful to leave out of his authorial canon in 5.3. Catullus’ absence is paradoxically due to his lack of the appropriate moral and social qualities. Catullus is not a model of the distinctive integration of light poetry and serious life that Pliny deems suitable only for himself and his aristocratic friends. Furthermore, if the authorizing poet is far from authoritative, the text quoted in the letter (Nam castum . . . pudici, Catullus 16.5–8, at Ep. 4.14.5) is only remotely pertinent to the question Pliny has at hand. Pliny’s ultimate authority for his poetry is not only not pertinent, but is also deployed in an utterly inept way. The poem from which Pliny selectively cites to argue for the legitimacy of practicing stylistically restrained erotic poetry is an absurd choice for two reasons. First, when read in toto, Catullus 16 is evidently an example of poetry that does not refrain from using nuda verba. Second, the defense that Catullus originally entrusted to poem 16 did not concern the discrepancy between morality and poetry but a much more specific one. Catullus’ point was that even if his poetry was anything but manly or chaste, this did not necessarily mean that the life of its author was unmanly or unchaste.33 By forcing his detractors into the pathic role of cinaedi, Catullus argued against a biographic, literalizing reading of poetry that would identify the poetic persona of the book with its author. Catullus’ counter-argument to Furius’ and Aurelius’ literal reading consists of a performative reversal of roles.34 If his critics believed in the exact correspondence of life and works, 33 34

I use “manly” and “chaste” with the lexical caveat advanced by Wiseman 1987: 223. Catullus’ response is phrased, according to Della Corte, in perfect observance of the rhetorical rules of defense via an extenuatio causae: cf. Della Corte 1989, ad loc. Pointing in a different direction, see

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Catullus proved the absurdity of their claim by simply writing a poem that portrayed them as cinaedi. Their own convictions would force them into taking a passive pathic role. The use Pliny makes of his exemplar distorts its original impact. What for Catullus had been a question of taking poetry as a perfect mirror of life becomes in Pliny one of the decency of practicing a literary game. In his citation of Catullus 16 Pliny not only eliminates all the contexts (nearly three-quarters of the poem) that would have imparted to the elegant litotes parum pudici its full original value of gross understatement. He also reinterprets the text as a precept on style. Catullus 16 indicated that the subject-matter of poetry was not to be taken as a clue to construct the extra-textual figure of the author, even in the borderline case of the highly personal poetry of Catullus. Pliny uses the poem as if it contained a recipe for distinguishing the style of poetry from the social dignity of its author. Although he is a respectable man of his class, Pliny claims, he can produce a poetry that does not become him. The hermeneutic law of Catullus is turned into a rule of decorum; his lesson on how not to read poetry is reduced to an authoritative recipe for how to write. Pliny’s reductionist reading of Catullus is consistent with his attempt to justify his own practice of Catullan poetry by delimiting its sphere of influence. The closing of the epistle takes us back full circle to the same marginality of poetic experience with which it opened. Asking from his friend and reader a candid judgment of his own verses, Pliny resorts to the same cautionary and limitative language. Poetry might be an important component of his cultural activity, but, to be sure, it is not the main part of it, nor can it be mistaken for the whole. The tone with which he rounds off his request to be read and evaluated with care makes clear that the centrality poetry might have acquired in the letter is only relative and momentary. The last two sentences engage in a final contrastive dialogue with Catullus’ model. Unlike Catullus, Pliny is not a one-book man, and the booklet he submits to his friend is not the most important to come out of his workshop (4.14.10).35 The letter leaves readers with one final conviction – soon to be qualified: in spite of the variety of literary enterprises he embarks upon, there is little doubt about Pliny’s priorities.

35

also Barchiesi 2001a: 98–100, whose suggestions I follow here. In the same vein see also Kinsey 1966 and Rankin 1970. If one is so inclined, a sexual reading of agas is possible; see Adams’ comments on Juvenal 9.43 and 6.58 (1982: 116 and 205). The Catullan couple durum and molle (16.4 and 8) with its erotic undertones might be evoked here, but the innuendo with its charge of effeminacy is immediately defused by the coupling of molle and humanum (the latter indicating a key concept in Pliny’s ethical arsenal, appearing 27 times in Books 1–9, and 5 times in Book 8 alone).

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Pliny’s recasting of Catullus involves, in conclusion, a process of incorporation. The survey of the evidence has helped delineate the modalities of this appropriation. While professing a formal allegiance to neoteric poetry, Pliny’s cultural milieu selectively constructed its own Catullus, defusing the political radicalism of its model to fit new cultural needs. In their attempts to censure and repress all political implications in Catullus’ poetry, Pliny’s contemporaries were neither unprecedented nor alone. If they could claim any success in redefining Neotericism, it is because they inherited from the generations that preceded them an example of precisely how to engage in such an active rereading. In Pliny (’s time), Catullan poetry was reproduced along lines first drawn in the Augustan age. A prudent ideologically and stylistically motivated departure from the neoteric poetic mode had already taken place in the first years of the principate, and it has been detected in the poetic trajectories of Virgil, Propertius and Horace. Pliny’s necessarily multifaceted operation was based on the example that Augustan writers, Horace in particular, had set when they negotiated the inheritance of and departure from the same neoteric models.36 Horace was perhaps the first to define Catullus as a stylistically unavoidable but politically impracticable model, and it is indeed through a Horatian lens that Pliny as neo-neoteric poet reduces and recycles Catullan modes.37 Coherently with Horace’s model, only certain aspects of Catullus’ style (brevitas, varietas, cura in style and composition) are appropriated.38 A close reading of a crucial epistle may help follow Pliny’s negotiation of his poetry’s neoteric past in Horatian terms. catullus in the margins: the horatian pretex t of e p i s t l e 7.4 The clarity with which Pliny delimits and qualifies his commitment to poetry in 4.14 appears to clash with the different portrait of himself as full-time poet he gives in 7.4. Although unique within the collection for 36

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On the need felt by the new generation of poets to overcome the Neoterics’ foremost limitation (a poetry addressed to, and dealing with, private rituals of a small social and intellectual community) without renouncing their stylistic conquest (an inalienable right to Callimacheanism), see La Penna 1963 and 1977, and Citroni 1995: 208–13. One of the most recent sociologically oriented contributions to the matter comes from White 1993. See also Zetzel 2002: 38–45. For discussion of Horace’s positive but mediated redeployment of the language of neoteric poetry in his literary criticism, see Rudd 1982: 118–19 and Freudenburg 1992: 163–73. See also (with a different approach and relying heavily on Harold Bloom’s notion of poetic anxiety) Hubbard 2000, with updated bibliography. On thematic varietas, care in style and brevity as the sole neoteric features to which both Pliny and Horace laid claim, see Guillemin 1929: 119–24.

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its assertive tone, the epistle Pliny addressed to Pontius Allifanus concerning his book of hendecasyllables contains claims which in their radicalism contradict the balanced and nuanced image of Pliny-the-poet carefully constructed in the rest of his corpus. Ep. 7.4 presents a “new” Pliny heavily concerned with his own success in the field of poetry; he claims a longstanding allegiance to writing verse and he boasts an expertise in all the genres of poetic writing. The thematic isolation in which the letter stands, coupled with the overconfident tone of some of its claims, has not deterred modern readers from taking its message at face value. But when read in context and with attention to its rhetoric, 7.4 invites an opposite reading: rather than an earnest document of Pliny’s concern with success in the present and poetic fame in posterity, the epistle is an enjoyable virtuoso piece on the inessential nature of poetry. Although not immune to flattery when it comes to his poetry (Ep. 3.21 and 4.27), Pliny is always careful to understate the admittedly numerous instances of self-praise he records in his letters.39 Ep. 7.4 appears to take the opposite course, allowing a self-inflating language to surface for the first time, its overblown claims becoming, as the text progresses, increasingly hard to believe. However, if we follow the letter in detail, it is possible to align it with the rest of Pliny’s pronouncements on his own poetry. The paradoxical quality of some of its claims and the presence of a probable intertext suggest a reading of 7.4 that might help to restore to the text the lighthearted, almost parodic tone it was probably intended to have when first drafted and received. C. PLINIUS PONTIO SUO S. Ais legisse te hendecasyllabos meos; requiris etiam quemadmodum coeperim scribere, homo ut tibi videor severus, ut ipse fateor non ineptus. Numquam a poetice (altius enim repetam) alienus fui; quin etiam quattuordecim natus annos Graecam tragoediam scripsi. “Qualem?” inquis. Nescio; tragoedia vocabatur. Mox, cum e militia rediens in Icaria insula ventis detinerer, Latinos elegos in illud ipsum mare ipsamque insulam feci. Expertus sum me aliquando et heroo, hendecasyllabis nunc primum, quorum hic natalis haec causa est. (Ep. 7.4.1–3) Dear Pontius, You write that you have finished reading my hendecasyllables and you wonder how I actually did start writing such poetry, since I seem to you an austere person and – I admit – hardly a newbie. To start from the beginning, I was never a stranger to poetry; when I was fourteen, I wrote a Greek tragedy. If you ask me how it was, I don’t know: let’s say it wasn’t called a tragedy for nothing. Shortly after, when I was coming back from the military I got stuck on Icaria, the island, and wrote some 39

For the language of understatement, and in general Pliny’s balanced self-presentation, see Ludolph 1997: 60–88 and 194–208.

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elegiac verses in Latin against both the sea and that island. I have also tried my hand from time to time at writing hexameters; this is my first attempt at writing hendecasyllables. And here is how they were born.

The opening of the text reflects the same question Pliny had addressed in the letter to Paternus (4.14), recycling some of its charged language. Pontius has read Pliny’s hendecasyllables and now wants to know how someone with such a stern personality as his could have written such poetry. To the question about the discrepancy between his public authoritative persona and his ludic poetic persona, Pliny replies by following the strategy already used in 4.14. First, he deflects the compliment – as he had done earlier by offering timidity instead of severity as the source of his linguistic restraint – and thus reshapes Pontius’ definition of severus in the litotes non ineptus. Then, in answering the question “how is it that (quemadmodum) you started to write hendecasyllables,” Pliny embarks on a historical survey of his own engagement with poetry. Rather than availing himself of external examples, he now offers his case as paradigm. The matter-of-fact and commentarii-like tone in which he casts the brief outline of his literary career is suggestive. In Numquam a poetice (altius enim repetam) alienus fui (Ep. 7.4.2), the parenthetic “indeed I will start from the beginning” alludes to a comprehensive treatment of the origins of a given phenomenon.40 But Pliny’s autobiographic aition fails to connect his past experience with his present practice. Historical perspective is lost as soon as Pliny introduces the comic (Terentian) tag numquam a poetice alienus fui. The proverbial line from Heauton Timorumenos, homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto (Ter. Hau. 77), surely familiar to Pliny’s readers, is not extraneous to the context of a Plinian defense of poetry. In Ep. 5.3.3 he has already based on the shortened dictum homo sum the defense of his free practice of poetry. The return of the allusion could be a further instance of Pliny’s strategy of connecting two or more reciprocally illuminating letters by quoting (or alluding to) sections of a highly recognizable line in each of them.41 In contrast to the strategy adopted in 4.14, here Pliny does not couch his argument 40

41

The gesture is in the direction of a systematic treatment – either in terms of historiography (cf. Tac. Ann. 3.25.2, Hist. 4.12.1) or of constitutional law (Cic. Leg. 1.18, probably the target of Tacitus’ allusion in the Annales). See Woodman and Martin 1996: 236–9. In poetry, the nexus is used by Virgil to open the Aristaeus myth at G. 4.285–6: altius omnem / expediam prima repetens ab origine famam. Here, however, Thomas sees altius as belonging more to expediam than to repetens, and thinks that it should therefore be taken as meaning “in a higher mode” (Thomas 1988, ad loc.). Compare Chapter 1. Pliny’s citation of homo sum has been addressed in general as a mere recitation of a line so famous that it had acquired the power of a proverb (cf., for example, Traina 1969: 124). Whereas the entire verse is popular (in a serious context, Sen. Ep. 95.53.3), its concise form homo sum is present only in Juvenal 6.284 and Petronius 130.1.3, in both cases in a sexually charged

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in defensive language. “I was never a stranger to poetry,” he writes, “so little so that I composed a tragedy when I was fourteen.” Constructing Paternus as a curious reader, Pliny has him ask a question which has sometimes been misunderstood.42 Pliny’s fictional interlocutor asks him about the quality of such a work: Qualis? Pliny’s answer borders on absurdity: “I do not know, it was called tragedy.” While it bespeaks his aristocratic early training in studia, Pliny’s mention of an anonymous tragedy might hint ironically at a tragic (unsuccessful) reception of that work.43 But his versatility stretches beyond the confines of tragedy. He prides himself on having also composed elegiacs and hexameters. The historic (chronological) catalogue of Pliny’s early poetic achievements does not include his hendecasyllables.44 While the epistle is supposedly about their origin, and Pliny sets up his text to suggest that his biography is at least tangentially that of a poet, the epistle stops to mark the birth and origin of his involvement with his last poetic genre: Legebantur in Laurentino mihi libri Asini Galli de comparatione patris et Ciceronis. Incidit epigramma Ciceronis in Tironem suum. Dein cum meridie (erat enim aestas) dormiturus me recepissem, nec obreperet somnus, coepi reputare maximos oratores hoc studii genus et in oblectationibus habuisse et in laude posuisse. Intendi animum contraque opinionem meam post longam desuetudinem perquam exiguo temporis momento id ipsum, quod me ad scribendum sollicitaverat, his versibus exaravi: Cum libros Galli legerem, quibus ille parenti ausus de Cicerone dare est palmamque decusque, lascivum inveni lusum Ciceronis et illo spectandum ingenio, quo seria condidit et quo humanis salibus multo varioque lepore magnorum ostendit mentes gaudere virorum.

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context. Rather than a vindication of classical humanism, the line seems to be used in Pliny’s age as a rhetorical and playful tag, not very far from “boys will be boys.” Both Trisoglio 1973 and Lenaz 1994 translate it as “What was its title,” perhaps misled by the Italian derivation of quale (which one?) from qualis. Pliny seems to like playing with the connotations of the term. See, for example, his calling tragoedia and comoedia his villae on lake Larius (Ep. 9.7). Thompson surveys examples of jocular letters from the collection: 1.6, 1.20, 7.4, 8.7, 9.8, 9.34 (1942). For a typical turn of phrase that Pliny shares with Suetonius, see the latter’s Life of Virgil 75 (I follow the line numbering of Rostagni 1944): Mox . . . offensus materia ad Bucolicam transiit (see 7.4.3 for mox and 7 for transire ad + poetic genre). To the same text by Suetonius one could relate also Pliny’s argument in 5.3.7, when he defends his habit of giving public recitations of poetry: Recitavit et pluribus, sed neque frequenter, et ea fere de quibus ambigebat, quo magis iudicium hominum experiretur (Life of Virgil 130). More generally, Pliny’s autobiography as poet may be more or less contemporary with (and maybe inspired by) Suetonius, though the question of the chronological relationship between Pliny’s letters and Suetonius’ De Viris Illustribus remains uncertain (cf. Kaster 1995: xxi–xxix, esp. xxi–xxii).

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The Art of Pliny’s Letters Nam queritur quod fraude mala frustratus amantem paucula cenato sibi debita savia Tiro tempore nocturno subtraxerit. His ego lectis “cur post haec” inquam “nostros celamus amores nullumque in medium timidi damus atque fatemur Tironisque dolos, Tironis nosse fugaces blanditias et furta novas addentia flammas?” (Ep. 7.4.3–6)

I was in my villa in the Laurentine and I was perusing that book by Asinius Gallus, in which he compares his father to Cicero. I stumbled upon an epigram by Cicero to his Tiro. It was in the summer, and when I retired to take an afternoon nap, I couldn’t fall asleep. I started to consider the fact that very famous orators had both gotten a kick from practicing this kind of literature and considered it a title of merit. I kept following this train of thought and, to my surprise, I discovered that I wasn’t fully out of shape. In a short time, I was able to capture in these lines what had impelled me to write in the first place: I was reading a work by Gallus, in which he dares extol his father over Cicero’s worth and fame. And lo, here is a poemette by Cicero – a good one, worthy of the spirit in which he wrote his serious works: further proof that the minds of great men too enjoy elegance in humor no less than many and varied jokes. It was about Tiro: with a trick, he had deprived the lover of kisses he promised him for after the dinner. I finish reading and think: “Now why should I keep hiding my affairs? Why should they all stay in the dark? Am I afraid to confess that I too know how Tiro deceives, how brief his favors are, and how what he steals only rekindles my fires?”

Whereas in 4.14 the reader was left with the task of supplying a canon of serious and reputable public figures who had produced such poetry in their leisure time, Pliny reveals here whom he considers at the head of the list, Cicero. It was after reading an epigram attributed to Cicero and quoted in the anti-Ciceronian pamphlet by Asinius Gallus that Pliny records his first, performative, and perhaps programmatic engagement with erotic poetry. It is at least curious that in order to provide a history of his hendecasyllables, Pliny resorts to a non-hendecasyllabic poem. The hendecasyllables emerged (how exactly we are not told) from the self-reflexive hexametric attempt that he now quotes in full in the text.45 With no apparent transition, the cited hexameters give way to elegiacs, and to the telegraphic account of the first successful public reading of Pliny’s poetry. The unanimous approval of friends stimulated him to write in a variety of other meters. As was the case with the first hexameters, the new 45

According to Hershkowitz 1995: 173, the situation is modeled, with a slight correction, on Catullus 50. The same sleeplessness (nec obreperet somnus / nec somnus tegeret quiete ocellos, 10) produces poetry (his versibus exaravi / hoc, iucunde, tibi poema feci, 16). Catullus’ sexual innuendo is downplayed in Pliny’s letter, but the genesis of the epigrammatic text is couched in the same circumstances. For sleeplessness and production of poetry as a long-lasting topos, see Woodman 1974.

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compositions also are poems born of leisure, products of the empty time of recreation and travel: Transii ad elegos; hos quoque non minus celeriter explicui, addidi alios facilitate corruptus. Deinde in urbem reversus sodalibus legi; probaverunt. Inde plura metra si quid otii, ac maxime in itinere temptavi. Postremo placuit exemplo multorum unum separatim hendecasyllaborum volumen absolvere, nec paenitet. (Ep. 7.4.7–8) I then moved to elegiac verses, and these too I handled swiftly. They came too easy for me to resist writing more. I returned to Rome, read them to my friends; actually, they liked them. I have also doodled in other metres when I had a free moment, and particularly while traveling. In the end, I decided to complete a full volume of pure hendecasyllables, as many before me have done. Now I don’t regret it.

At this point, one might expect a statement that would link this second series of poetic attempts to the hendecasyllables. The origin of his published poems is, after all, the apparent theme of the epistle. But Pliny does not give his readers anything to that effect. Finally, he writes, I decided to follow the example of many and to publish a single book of hendecasyllables. The history of his published book of poetry is exhausted by its pre-history. In a twice-repeated and twice-interrupted movement through time, Pliny recounts the origin of the book marking a discontinuity. In the sequence here constructed it is difficult to see any principle of consequentiality at work beyond the insisted chronological arrangement of the narrative: the reader is left with a detailed account of the various stages in a career that implicitly promotes the post-hoc/propter-hoc fallacy to the role of explanation. So far in 7.4 Pliny’s poetic career appears to be divided into two clearly marked phases, neither of which, however, bears any apparent relationship with his latest production. While asserting his dedication to poetry, Pliny avoids connecting the poems he has put into circulation with either his early or his later poetic experiments. His first phase as a poet, which one may see as his “juvenile” commitment to poetry, embraces experiments with: (a) an unspecified tragic “tragedy,” (b) elegiacs, (c) hexameters. A long pause follows this period. During this time, we know that poetry was marginal. The fact that it surfaces again in Pliny’s autobiographic sketch as included in, and surrounded by, prose proves that it does not play a central role in his studia. Indeed, it is the reading of a book of prose, as the letter duly notes, that brought Pliny back to his old ways. Following a reverse order, Pliny gives a catalogue of his second phase of poetic activity: (c) hexameters (those he cites in the body of the letter), (b) elegiacs, (a) polymetric poetry. The chronological structure of Pliny’s account of his engagement with poetry evades the central question that prompted it.

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Two elements in the letter’s rhetoric emerge from a comparison of the two mirroring lists. First, phases 1 and 2 of Pliny’s poetic career are organized in a progression. Pliny appears to have emancipated his poetry from the early correspondence between meter and genre. The hexameters of his youth are heroic verses, hence most probably of an epic subject-matter; the Greek tragedy so perfectly fits the paradigm that it may be ironically labeled precisely “a tragedy”; his elegy is so perfectly held in balance between the invective and the lament of a stranded love hero (reminiscent of an Ovidian forsaken heroine?) that it evokes both precise Roman antecedents and the debates about its Greek translational origin. The poems of the second phase seem, on the contrary, to breach this code. Even if Pliny says nothing about the themes of his new elegiacs, he makes clear that his hexameters are of an erotic, not a heroic nature. The letter engages its readers in a disorienting game of mirrors, the ascending order of cultural importance sketched out in the first cycle being reversed in the second. Second, if the first series was supposed to function as an explication of the origin of Pliny’s hendecasyllables (and did not actually explain much), the second series does so even less. If there is a causal connection between Pliny’s mature poetry and the poems Pontius has read, this is certainly not made clear. The letter keeps avoiding the issue of providing a direct answer to its central question. The avoidance behavior that characterizes 7.4 should have made its readers suspicious about its intended tone. The final, retrospectively illuminating section of the epistle contributes to resolving the cunning ambiguity. To be sure, Pliny’s evasiveness is not enough to determine how one should read the letter, and his inconsistencies could be part of a clumsy attempt to promote his own poetic autobiography. And yet, the last paragraph of 7.4 contains a clue that makes any straight reading of the whole epistle unlikely. Legitur describitur cantatur etiam, et a Graecis quoque, quos Latine huius libelli amor docuit, nunc cithara nunc lyra personatur. (Ep. 7.4.9) It has found its audience: they copy it and even sing it. There are even some Greeks who love it so much that they have learned Latin in order to play it, sometimes on the lyre and sometimes on the zither.

In the spirit of Trisoglio’s comment that this paragraph represents “the greatest na¨ıvet´e of all extant Pliny,” the closing statements of the letter have been interpreted as an earnest, if overstated, claim to poetic fame.46 Pliny reaches the pinnacle of self-praise with the outrageous claim that his poetry has reversed the mainstream cultural metaphor of Rome’s poetic 46

Trisoglio 1973, ad loc.

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subservience to Greece, when he writes, in a climactic sequence, that his book is widely read, copied and sung, and that even Greeks (who have grown to learn Latin for the love of his booklet) now sing his poetry. Topping even this last claim, he hints that his poetry is sung in both private and public settings.47 If the letter were to end here, Trisoglio’s comments on Pliny’s na¨ıvet´e would seem right on the mark. Aside from its cultural implausibility, nothing in 7.4 conclusively indicates that its readers should take it any other way than straightforwardly. The situation changes, however, in the close. Not only does Pliny finally appear aware that his claim is tasteless and selfaggrandizing, but his text suggests that some adjustment to this reading is in order. In the playful tone of its final reference to the traditional furor of the poets the text contains an allusion to a neglected intertext, Horace’s Ep. 2.2, which invites readers to understand the letter in precisely the opposite way. In a move that preempts his critics’ anticipated objections, Pliny invokes the principle that poets are allowed to have fits of creative frenzy: Sed quid ego tam gloriose? Quamquam poetis furere concessum est. Et tamen non de meo sed de aliorum iudicio loquor; qui sive iudicant sive errant, me delectat. Unum precor, ut posteri quoque aut errent similiter aut iudicent. Vale. (Ep. 7.4.10) But what’s all this boasting about? And yet, poets are allowed a measure of madness, aren’t they? At any rate, I am not waxing praise of myself here, but relating that of others. Whether they are right or deluded, I still like what I hear. I only hope that posterity will be either just as right or similarly deluded. Be well.

Pliny’s excuse for his boastful attitude is apparently on solid ground. The principle he adheres to has a good pedigree of thematic antecedents that resonate in his lexical choices. Traditionally, poets had been granted the privilege of receiving an inspiration close to madness. Cicero, for instance, twice refers to Plato’s and Democritus’ shared opinion that “no good poet could be without a touch of madness”: Atque etiam illa concitatio declarat vim in animis esse divinam. Negat enim sine furore Democritus quemquam poetam magnum esse posse, quod idem dicit Plato. Quem, si placet, appellet furorem, dum modo si furor ita laudetur ut in Phaedro laudatus est. (Div. 1.80) Even that peculiar frenzy reveals that their souls are replete with divine power. Democritus clearly states that no poet can be great without madness. The same says Plato also. Thus, one may call it madness, if so inclined, as long as the word is intended, as it was by Plato, as a compliment. 47

Sherwin-White remarks that cithara is an indication of the public setting, the zither being a concert lyre (1966, ad loc.).

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In a different work, but yet again stressing the same authorities, Cicero also noted: Saepe enim audivi poetam bonum neminem – id quod a Democrito et Platone in scriptis relictum esse dicunt – sine inflammatione animorum existere posse et sine quodam adflatu quasi furoris. (de Orat. 2.194) I have often heard people saying that Democritus and Plato once wrote that no good poet can exist without an inner fire and a certain spark, as if of madness.

Pliny invokes this tradition when he intimates that as a poet he is allowed to be mad. These texts, however, do not really grant the permission he asks. The pertinence to the context of Ep. 7.4 of the Ciceronian passages commonly used to gloss Pliny’s furor is slight. If it were offered as precedent, a good lawyer could easily strike down the traditional association of poetic vocation and vatic frenzy as irrelevant to Pliny’s situation. With all his insistence on having practiced all kinds of poetry throughout his life, Pliny hardly qualifies as either an inspired or a committed poet. The facility with which he moves from one genre to the next, his flirtations with the complete gamut of styles, in short his superficial engagement with verse writing prevents any reader from accepting his claim to vatic inspiration as serious. The straightforward inflection of the principle one finds in Cicero (and, in general, in the philosophical tradition) is all the more irrelevant to support Pliny’s point because it is possible to propose a different text closer to the context constructed in the letter. As Trisoglio noted, Horace too refers to the commonplace in discussing the excess to which people who pose as inspired poets are drawn (Ars 295–8), and it is possible to detect a trace of Horace’s irony intruding into Pliny’s allusion. Horace had collapsed Cicero’s careful distinction between divine inspiration and clinical madness, and had transferred to the poets the paradox of those who think they are philosophers only because they grow beards and dress casually, when noting that: Ingenium misera quia fortunatius arte credit et excludit sanos Helicone poetas Democritus, bona pars non unguis ponere curat, non barbam, secreta petit loca, balnea vitat. (Ars 295–8)

Since Democritus thought that it was the spirit rather than a niggardly craft that should be held more fortunate, and thus shut off the poets who are in their right mind from Helicon, most of them now don’t care for any manicure or haircut, seek the great outdoors, and keep away from the baths.

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But Horace’s playful treatment of the question of poetic madness is marked by avoidance of the Ciceronian term furor. Pliny’s central use of it suggests that one can look further for a more terminologically and contextually fitting antecedent to his claim that poets are allowed to act so unseemly that they appear mad. As a matter of fact, the term is present at the center of Horace’s Ep. 2.2, in a context now perfectly parallel to Pliny’s. Engaging in a lively conversation at a distance with Florus, Ep. 2.2 discusses the poets’ habit of excessive self- or mutual praise. Horace provides an example of reciprocal blindness in brotherly love, and asks if there is any difference between their fraternal madness and that of the mutually blandishing poets: Frater erat Romae consulti rhetor, ut alter alterius sermone meros audiret honores Gracchus ut hic illi foret, huic ut Mucius ille. Qui minus argutos vexat furor iste poetas? (Ep. 2.2.87–90)

There were once two brothers in Rome: one was a rhetorician, the other a jurisconsult. Each would hear from the other only perfect praise, as if they were a Gracchus or a Mucius for each other. Isn’t this the same madness that holds sway over our melodious poets?

Line 90 parallels Pliny’s situation and language: both texts mock the poets’ awkward habit of praising one another; both play on the double meaning of the word furere.48 Horace’s intertext undermines the letter’s integrity and prevents us taking 7.4 as a serious exercise in self-praise. Poets might be allowed to open their breasts to divine inspiration (and this is hardly the case for Pliny), but they should resist the other kind of madness manifested in their blind pursuit of praise at all costs. It matters little that Pliny here makes a rhetorical appeal to the exculpating category of iudicium alienum; Horace’s antecedent had already preempted this move: the mutual flattery of the two exemplary poets was absurd not in spite of but precisely because it was reciprocal.49 By collapsing the careful distinction between true poets and mere aspirants who revel in mutual approbation, and their different (albeit lexically identical) types of furor, Pliny deconstructs the seriousness of his own claim to fame. While he alludes to a positive side of poetic frenzy he also defuses its 48

49

Hershkowitz (170) is again helpful in signaling that Pliny was aware of, and might have picked up on, the precise value of Horace’s tag argutos . . . poetas as a “Callimachean signpost” suitable to his characterization of a specific group of poets. See his re-use of the term in a specifically metapoetic context in Ep. 4.3.3. On the category of iudicium alienum as part of Pliny’s strategy of understatement in self-promotion, see Ludolph 1997: 195.

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authorizing power. Pliny invites his readers to tolerate his self-aggrandizing operation, but he also reminds them that this kind of self-advertisement is the main folly affecting poets, qua poets. In praising his poetic efforts excessively, he marks himself as belonging to the second category of “mad” poets; he too risks being caught in an all too easy self-congratulatory game. Far from being na¨ıve, Pliny is here playfully candid. He appropriates a detached Horatian poetic persona and provides his first reader with a reference to Horace that, once detected and enjoyed, is meant to work as an inside joke. Pliny’s incomplete aetiology of his published poetry and his overstated hopes for poetic fame appear nothing short of ironic. Retrospectively, even his scansion of the various obligatory stages in his model poetic career appears so supinely derivative and actually unsubstantiated that it ends up being deconstructed from the inside. Once 7.4 is restored to its probable original value as a playful declaration of modesty, we are left with a coherent picture of Pliny as a self-conscious dilettante poet. However deeply indebted their stylistics might be to neoteric models, Pliny’s and his contemporaries’ engagement with neoteric poetry no longer collides with their shared commitment to public life. The neotericism commented upon in the letters as a social practice is freed from its aggressive claim to ideological primacy in the political sphere as well. Once freed from its political implications, imitating Catullus becomes a socially acceptable practice that rewrites and neutralizes any social and political criticism associated with its antecedents. The mere fact that he is practicing Catullan poetry, in conclusion, is not enough to make of Pliny “a Catullan poet.” Once the possibility of reading 7.4 as a declaration of allegiance has been ruled out, it remains to establish the value of Pliny’s insistence on poetry. After all, his letters only contain two brief examples of his verses. In the following pages, I provide a reading of one of Pliny’s letters in which the presence of allusions to the charged lexicon of Catullus forms a practical reinterpretation of his poetry. The necessary ideological toning down of Catullus explored so far on the level of Pliny’s metapoetic discourse is mirrored (and actually achieved) on the level of his letters’ diction. the rhetoric of at tenuat ion: pliny’s o d i e t a m o ( e p . 2.2) When we look at Pliny’s letters as more than just cover material for his published collections of poetry or even as a simple running commentary to them, an answer to the final question may begin to emerge. They are

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the texts onto which – in an experimental move unprecedented in the genre of prose epistolography – Pliny exports the poetic techniques of arrangement and allusion he found fully developed in the Callimachean poetry to which he alludes. When, from letters which function as prose prefaces and biographic profiles, we move to other areas of his collection, we can see that Pliny draws from poetic examples not only the attention to a semantically charged arrangement but also the technique of local allusion. In the epistles, his focus on poetry and poetics is neither innocent nor directed to an external object: his interest is instrumental to the formation of the epistolary collection itself. Were we in need of proof, there is one specific epistle that apparently has nothing to do with poetry, and everything to do with epistolarity, that is involved in the same metapoetic negotiation of Pliny’s poetic heritage we have witnessed thus far. Having seen so many Catullan questions in the letters helps in picking up on the subtle lexical signals this text contains. Ep. 2.2 is one of many short occasional notes Pliny included in his correspondence. Apparently, it consists of a mere semi-serious epistolary flagitatio to Valerius Paulinus, a friend who is accused of being only an intermittent correspondent. First of all, the letter is significant on account of a numerological detail: in Chapter 1 we have noticed how Pliny’s Ep. 1.3 established a clear connection with Horace’s Ep. 1.3 to Florus. The connection was based both on the evocation of a common Virgilian antecedent (Aen. 6.129: hoc opus, hic labor) and on similarities in message: Pliny’s hoc sit negotium tuum, hoc otium, hic labor, haec quies recalled the poignant Horatian dictum hoc opus, hoc studium (line 28). It may not be a coincidence that the next item Florus had received from Horace (Ep. 2.2) began by touching on the same point of epistolary etiquette of Pliny’s Ep. 2.2: as an opening gambit leading into a discussion of the artist’s trade, Horace candidly admits to Florus that he is not an ideal correspondent, and adds that he had warned his young friend about his fault: ne mea saevus / iurgares ad te quid epistula nulla rediret (“[I warned you] that you should not complain if no letter from me were to reach you,” 2.2.21–2). With reverse roles of sender and addressee, the situation of Pliny’s Ep. 2.2 is the same. The evocation of Catullus’ diction and theme is again filtered through Horace’s lens. In spite of its brevity and light tone, the letter well exemplifies Pliny’s re-use of the charged language of poetry. Beyond the numerological correspondence with Horace’s text, the epistle displays a dense web of allusions to at least three poetic texts from Catullus’ corpus and illustrates Pliny’s careful dialogue with his poetic model. Pliny’s allusive witticism, in particular, relies on Paulinus’ knowledge of Catullus’ texts and proposes an

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interpretation of them. Its rhetoric asks to be measured against theirs. When its intertextual dimension is illuminated, this letter comes close to being a literary pastiche. It opens with a rhetorical gesture strongly reminiscent of the similar opening of Catullus 85; its occasion and tone parallel Catullus 38, another text dealing with an unresponsive epistolary or poetic correspondent and it contains a concluding meditation on the idea of otium (leisure) and its cultural ambiguity, which is perhaps intended as a response to the famous Catullan treatment of leisure’s pernicious effects at the end of poem 51. In all these cases Pliny awakes a distinct Catullan echo only to measure the cultural distance existing between the target text and his own. Each evocation of a Catullan antecedent is both a reshaping of the original (with the strident contrast in its language systematically downplayed) and its displacement (with its social and political connotations being erased or redefined). C. PLINIUS PAULINO SUO S. Irascor, nec liquet mihi an debeam, sed irascor. Scis, quam sit amor iniquus interdum, impotens saepe,  semper. Haec tamen causa magna est, nescio an iusta; sed ego, tamquam non minus iusta quam magna sit, graviter irascor, quod a te tam diu litterae nullae. Exorare me potes uno modo, si nunc saltem plurimas et longissimas miseris. Haec mihi sola excusatio vera, ceterae falsae videbuntur. Non sum auditurus “non eram Romae” vel “occupatior eram”; illud enim nec di sinant, ut “infirmior.” Ipse ad villam partim studiis partim desidia fruor, quorum utrumque ex otio nascitur. Vale. (Ep. 2.2) I am upset. I don’t know if I should be, but I am upset. You know how love is at times unbalanced, often powerless, and always susceptible to the smallest of causes. But this is a great cause! Granted, I don’t know if this is also a just cause – and yet, I’ll behave as if it were no less just than it is great. I am deeply upset because for such a long time I got no letters from you. You may appease me in only one way: if you have already sent many letters, and of the longest kind. This is to me the only true excuse; I will find false all others. I won’t hear “I was out of town” or “I have been so busy” – as for the “I’ve-been-sick” excuse, may the gods never allow me to hear it. Me, I am in the countryside, dividing my time between study and indolence – both children of leisure. Be well.

The first Catullan reminiscence is contained in the abrupt opening of the letter. When Pliny writes Irascor, nec liquet mihi an debeam, sed irascor, he echoes the structure and syntax of Catullus 85: Odi et amo. Quare id faciam fortasse requiris. Nescio, sed fieri sentio. Et excrucior. I hate as I love. You may ask why I do this: I don’t know, but I feel that it happens. And it is my torture.

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Both texts contain, in order, a short statement indicating the feeling of the writer, a rhetorical question, and an assertion of the feeling initially expressed. The structure of the reasoning is the same: “I feel X. Should I? / Why do I? (I don’t know), but I feel X.”50 Pliny’s whole text continues to mimic Catullus by deploying a broken, almost dialogue-like, syntax: it incorporates the addressee’s point of view (scis), formulates his doubts (nescio an iusta), and finally anticipates his excuses (non eram Romae . . . occupatior eram . . . infirmior). Just as in Catullus the hypothetical fortasse requiris was functional to a trenchant epigrammatic series of first person indicatives (nescio . . . sentio . . . excrucior), so also in Pliny a neatly arranged but fully lyrical, climactic tricolon follows the first Catullan gesture. The sentence is elegantly allusive: love is sometimes unjust (iniquus, as in Propertius 1.19.22), often overwhelming (impotens, as in Catullus 35.12), always affected by the smallest of causes. The second paragraph continues the simultaneous display and reshaping of Catullan and elegiac diction. When it is made clear that his friend’s fault consisted in his prolonged absence from Pliny’s mailbox (a magna causa for a  love), the situation opens a second intertext in the letter, Catullus 38. Lexical borrowing reinforces the thematic connection. Like Pliny, Catullus complains about his addressee’s silence and requests a single – even the smallest – consolatory poem for his (presumably erotic) sufferings: Malest, Cornifici, tuo Catullo, malest, me hercule, et laboriose, et magis magis in dies et horas. Quem tu – quod minimum facillimumque est – qua solatus es allocutione? Irascor tibi. Sic meos amores? Paulum quid lubet allocutionis, maestius lacrimis Simonideis. All is not well, Cornificius, with your Catullus. All is not well, damn it, and this is hard to bear; and it is getting worse as days – no, hours – go by. And you – what would be the smallest and easiest thing to do – offer perhaps some word of comfort? I am upset with you: this is how you love me? Just a few words would do, but sadder than all of Simonides’ tears.

Pliny recasts the situation on his own terms. While he takes up the key term irascor from Catullus 38, he clarifies that for him no little poem will 50

Ross cites Ennius’ own epitaph as example to show that this way of expressing oneself (initial statement, rhetorical question and final answer) is traditional (1969: 139). Beyond the antecedent of Ennius, however, he provides no further instances of the construction.

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do. From Paulinus he wants many and extremely long letters to quell his rage. No apologies will be accepted, he claims, unless they come in writing, and in the form of epistles. He will be satisfied only with letters that by their sheer size and number will prove that if smaller letters had not been sent to Pliny this was because bigger ones were being composed. Catullus’ Callimachean request is necessary for us to appreciate the exaggerated pose Pliny takes in the epistle. What is at stake here is the measurable distance separating Pliny’s from Catullus’ situation. Whereas it is not clear what is not well (malest) with Catullus in 38 (so that some irony has been detected in the poem),51 it is instead clear that Pliny is in no predicament at all. He is in the countryside, enjoying his usual holiday regimen of idleness and studies.52 The letters he seeks from Paulinus are not, therefore, of a consolatory nature: they can, and should be longer and in greater number because Pliny has more time at hand. If something is wrong with him, it is certainly not for lack of otium. Otium, one may argue, is what Pliny suggests was wrong with Catullus. The language of Pliny’s last paragraph is only vaguely reminiscent of a further poem, Catullus 51. However, the cluster of Catullan references in the rest of the letter, and the placement of otium at the end of both compositions, make the allusion, if not probable, at least plausible: Otium, Catulle, tibi molestumst: otio exultas nimiumque gestis. Otium et reges prius et beatas perdidit urbes. (51.13–16)

It is leisure, Catullus, that’s your problem: at leisure you get all revved up and can’t stand still. It’s been leisure that, in the old days, ruined both kings and happy cities too.

These lines have led a particularly difficult life in the history of Catullan criticism. They appear at the close of a translation poem, but they translate nothing in their original. They are an independent, self-enclosed, first-person meditation on a theme foreign to the matter at hand. They apparently relate so little to what precedes them that they have been considered extraneous to Catullus’ rendering of Sappho’s poem 31.53 I believe 51 52

53

See Baker 1960: 37–63. For Pliny’s scholarly activities in the countryside, see Ep. 1.6, 4.6, 5.6, 7.9, 9.10, 9.15, 9.40; a survey of the otium theme in B¨utler 1970: 43–51 and, in general, the observations in Gamberini 1983: 104–7. See Fredericksmeyer 1968, Kinsey 1974 and Itzkowitz 1983. For further bibliography, see Della Corte 1989, ad loc. For more recent interpretations of the stanza, see Fowler 2000: 273–4 and Harrison

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that lines 13–16 belong with Catullus 51, and am inclined to follow Kinsey in seeing them as the poet’s commentary on the danger entailed by the act (and the art) of translating. When seen in this light, Catullus’ reworking of Sappho may have suggested to Pliny the place for a reworking of Catullus on his part, and the possibility of a heightened intertextuality. What is more, the fragment contained a strong Catullan statement on otium, which we have seen as a key term in Pliny’s cultural ethics.54 By connecting the situation of Catullus 38 with the meditation on otium entrusted to poem 51, in the central and final paragraphs of Ep. 2.2 Pliny comments on the right use of one’s free time. In their different degree of pointedness, Pliny’s allusions both evoke Catullus and distance him. They rely and comment upon their poetic model. Pliny’s double reference to Catullus 38 and 51 (or, better yet, to Catullus 51 through 38) is of import for both the tone and the message of the letter. Catullus’ discussion of the destructive potential of ill-spent leisure finds a counter-argument in the letter’s prescription for productive time away from the office. As Woodman suggested, in Latin culture, “otium is . . . a neutral word, and can be either ‘good’ or ‘bad’.”55 Of the two possible connotations of the term, Catullus chose to emphasize the second. For him, otium is, on a personal level, a freedom from social commitments tending towards license – its excessive quality marked by the adverb nimium. In general, license also produces decay in both monarchies and democracies, history teaching its usual a fortiori lesson that individuals cannot escape what applies to social bodies at large. By evoking Catullus’ models, Pliny counteracts them on both levels. On the personal level, he proposes a different kind of leisure, one that is marked by a balanced regimen of social and political commitments and recess and recreation from them. On the level of the organized body of society, he opposes Catullus’ cultural diagnosis that the very leisure that makes cities “blessed” – which is to say socially and politically prosperous and at peace – is also the cause of their political and social collapse. Pliny reads into Catullus’ statement the notion that the greatest danger for a body politic lies in its being beatus, at peace with itself. There is hardly a notion more foreign to Pliny’s political and cultural thought. What in Catullus’ historical paradigm appears as

54 55

2001a. Woodman 2006 proposes a medical reading of the whole poem, and interprets the last four lines as denouncing the paradoxical unsuitability of rest as treatment; the clinically lovesick Catullus denounces the commonly recommended cure as worse than the disease in his case. But see also Cicero’s moral usage of the nexus voluptate nimia gestiunt at Off. 1.102. See Leach 2003: 147–50 and Myers 2005: 104–6. Woodman 1966: 224. For a more general discussion of the connotations of otium in Roman literature, see Andr´e 1966 and Andr´e, Dangel and Demont (1996).

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a healthy dialectic between the various components of society is exactly what Pliny considers wrong with that society. As will be the case in his dialogue with Tacitus in Ep. 1.6 (see below, Chapter 3) on the causes of the decline of eloquence, Pliny projects onto the historical construct of the Republic the ideology of the mature Principate. Peace is not idleness, and the social dialectics of the past were the sickness that the princeps cured. In Pliny’s reflection on the Republican past (as in Maternus’ view in the Dialogus) the age of Catullus (and Cicero) is made to represent a period of internecine wars to which the emergence of the Principate puts an end. In Ep. 2.2, when he implies that a negative kind of otium may exist and associates it with the negative term desidia, Pliny replies to Catullus that the negative view of poem 51 is not the only possible one. A different kind of otium can be found and enjoyed responsibly when it is freed from idleness, that is, when it becomes receptive to the principles regulating negotium. On the personal level, otium can be productive instead of destructive, the locus of studia instead of desidia. Similarly, on the larger scale of a community, peace is not inert time in which studia languish, but the ideal setting for their pursuit. Insofar as it is a positive and not a threatening element, Pliny’s otium is similar to the peace that dominates the first stanza of Horace’s Carmen 2.16: Otium divos rogat in patenti prensus Aegaeo, simul atra nubes condidit lunam neque certa fulgent sidera nautis; otium bello furiosa Thrace, otium Medi pharetra decori, Grosphe, non gemmis neque purpura venale neque auro. (Carm. 2.16.1–8)

Peace is what one seeks from heaven, when caught ashore in mid-Aegean, dark clouds hide the moon, and no star is in the sailors’ sight. Peace is what Thracians crave in war; what Medians yearn for donning their quiver, Grosphus: peace, that neither gems nor silk, nor even gold can buy.

With a less moralistic emphasis and on a larger, lyrical and cosmic, scale than Pliny, Horace had produced a text that, by its prominent opening alliteration, both recalled Catullus 51 and responded to it. Pliny could regard it as an authoritative Augustan precedent to his own response. In conclusion, once perceived against the background of its poetic antecedents, Pliny’s complex reference to Catullus’ poetry in 2.2 suggests that more than a simple redefinition and correction of a poetic model is at

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stake. Pliny’s re-evaluation (and devaluation) of his cultural past is so radical that it affects the deepest, linguistic level of his writing. Like Horace before him, Pliny is involved in renegotiating and redefining the cultural import of his late republican literary model. Catullus’ virulent “I hate” becomes in Pliny a meeker and milder “I am angry at you.” Catullus’ absolute “I love” is turned into a friendship that can be labeled “unjust and excessive” in a context of a lighthearted parody. The key notion of leisure is emptied of its cultural associations, its original polemical content redefined on the basis of a new social order. As Mikhail Bakhtin first theorized, in the lexicon it deploys any linguistic utterance embodies a specific set of socio-political concerns. While speakers can only take a limited part in the plurilinguistic power negotiations (a part proportional to the relative weight of the social sphere they inhabit), literary texts have a hegemonic cultural position from which to contribute more actively to the shaping of the lexical determinations that a society is allowed to form. Texts are more effective than speakers in setting the tone of the cultural dialogue. This is exactly what Pliny attempts in his letters. Pliny’s contemporaries were used to this sort of radical reinterpretation of cultural artifacts. Their active rereading of Catullus relied on the same process of cultural neutralization that controlled the progymnasmata in vogue in the rhetorical schools. Following the example set by Republican orators (and accepting the Ciceronian anti-tyrannical tenet of Republican morality), students and teachers of rhetoric turned the politics of their models into a poetics of their style. In the schools of oratory the rhetorical exercises of declamation and debate relied (to the dismay of critics like Petronius and Tacitus, who saw their impracticality) on a historically outdated set of principles and a vast array of outlandish situations. The commonplace opposition, for instance, of vir fortis and tyrannus, an extremely popular one to judge from Seneca’s and Quintilian’s declamations, did not seem to adumbrate in any way the real political conflicts of the time. In what today might appear as a mirror of the historical clash between the autocratic and oligarchic principle, as embodied in an increasingly centralizing succession of emperors and a progressively marginalized senate, contemporaries saw nothing more than fictive examples and school exercises. Similarly, in Pliny’s circle of friends the depoliticized practice of a politically outdated poetry was authorized and controlled by a focus on its stylistic merits. An aristocrat formed in the schools of oratory, Pliny received with Ciceronian rhetoric the tools also to reinterpret the poetry of his past. This conditioned acceptance of the politically unacceptable and yet stylistically exemplary Republican past may be seen as the controlling principle for Pliny’s deployment of a tight web of allusions to Catullan poetry in his letters.

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Pliny’s epistles may function thus as a partial lens through which a further facet of the so-called “return to order” of the Flavian age may be illustrated. The contemporary cultural debates might have left a more visible trace in the areas of historiography, and oratory – all fields much closer to Pliny’s central concerns, as we shall see – but even on the issue of poetic tradition the intellectuals of his generation were coherently involved in renegotiating their literary past. The active canon reconfiguration taking place in his time was a process in which Pliny intended to take part. At a moment in which the intelligentsia of post-Augustan society was busying itself with the reconstruction and recuperation of classical (that is, imitable) models, Pliny joined the discussion through his letters. Albeit coming from the margins, his voice was not merely part of the chorus.

chap t e r 3

The importance of being Secundus: Tacitus’ voice in Pliny’s letters

Quod spatium temporis si ad infirmitatem corporum nostrorum referas, fortasse longum videatur, si ad naturam saeculorum ac respectum immensi huius aevi, perquam breve et in proximo est. Tac. Dial. 16.6

If Pliny’s involvement in the composition and publication of light, neoneoteric, Catullan poetry may have come as a surprise to modern readers, as it certainly did to some of his contemporaries, all the more so should the apparent absence of his voice from the vibrant debates on oratory that were taking place in his day. While it is due to the sometimes capricious (and sometimes judicious) accidents of philology that but a handful of fragments witnessing Pliny’s poetry has come down to us, the reason why we have no contribution by him on oratory is simply because he never published anything specifically on the subject. The unexpected absence from Pliny’s r´esum´e of any discussion, either as systematic as Quintilian’s Institutio or as idiosyncratic as Tacitus’ Dialogus de oratoribus, does not mean, however, that he did not partake in the debates. It only means that he did so through the heterogeneous and indirect medium of his letters, a corpus at which we have perhaps not looked closely enough.1 Pliny’s correspondence contains, in fact, a small but crucial sample of letters that are allusively devoted to a discussion of oratory: they are predominantly addressed to Tacitus and engage in a stringent dialogue with his texts, in particular his Dialogus. Pliny’s epistolary exchange of ideas with Tacitus is not, it should be noted, a surrogate, a remedial substitute for a larger, absent treatise or tract by Pliny. As is the case for Pliny’s never-composed historical work (about which see Chapter 4), his treatise on oratory, too, is conceived and brought to fruition through an epistolary dialogue with his most favorite correspondent. 1

My argument focuses on Pliny’s understanding of the art rather than on specific issues of style addressed in epistles 1.20 (on brevity) and 9.26 (on the grand style). For the latter, see Guillemin 1929: 86–7, Leeman 1963, Picone 1978, Gamberini 1983, and Cugusi 2003.

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Once again, the vehicle of the literary exchange, the idiom in which the two correspondents converse between themselves and with their educated audience, is allusion. In the case of Pliny’s correspondence with Tacitus, two different kinds of allusions are present. On the one hand, Pliny treats his addressee just as he does his other educated interlocutors: in letters addressed to him he redeploys, with various degrees of transparency, poetic fragments that originate in their common literary background. On the other hand, Tacitus is a singular correspondent because Pliny addresses him with allusions that may be labeled in praesentia – consisting, that is, of recognizable fragments of Tacitus’ own texts. In this case, Pliny addresses to him fragments deriving both from texts that Tacitus was in the process of publishing or had recently published (the Dialogus) and (apparently) from parts of his private correspondence. Pliny’s allusions in praesentia differ from the more common in absentia kind of intertextuality because Tacitus is both the author of the target text and the primary addressee of his own re-used text. Allusions in praesentia are of particular interest because they possess a prominently epistolary quality: they depend on the open-dialogue form, which is crucial to the generic set-up of correspondences, and on the double audience of any semi-private epistle. That one should expect to find them in epistolography is a consequence of a standard feature of epistolary correspondence, which Pliny deftly appropriates and redeploys in a charged and meaningful way. It is not uncommon for letters (mainly, but not only Gebrauchsbriefe) to include a standard formula – “as in your letter of . . .” or slight variations thereof – through which the sender isolates the points in the addressee’s first message to which the present letter responds. An epistolary text is always one link in an open-ended dialogic chain of communication. An example of the habit of communicating through partial quotation and response may be found in the first epistle from Cicero to Quintus Metellus in Fam. 5.2, a letter which consists of a detailed, pointby-point recitation and refutation of the addressee’s initial arguments. At several points in the epistle, Cicero takes up the language of the exemplar and deconstructs it, his text constantly returning to the formula (ut) scribis (Fam. 5.2.1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10). Seneca is even more explicit: four of the first seven epistles to Lucilius uphold the epistolary convention by referring to Lucilius’ letter and rephrasing it.2 In poetic correspondences, it is probably only in Ovid’s paired Heroides that one may find a text comparably insisting 2

Sen. Ep. 2.1: Ex iis quae mihi scribis . . . bonam spem de te concipio; 3.1: Epistulas ad me perferendas tradidisti, ut scribis, amico tuo; more implicitly, 5.1: Quod pertinaciter studes et omnibus omissis hoc unum agis . . . et probo et gaudeo; 7.1: Quid tibi vitandum praecipue existimes quaeris? Turbam.

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on the recitation of its counterpart: in the rhetorically coy reply that Helen addresses to Paris, for instance, several lines mirror the seduction note that she has received from him (Her. 17). On a smaller scale and in a certainly less self-aware mode than in Ovid, Catullus 68A offers an earlier instance of the same phenomenon (68A.1–4 and 27–9). Yet again, the recitation of the original takes place in a text that is from the start explicitly packaged as an epistolary exchange. In Pliny, the double nature of his allusions in praesentia, simultaneously special and normal, corresponds to the double addressees, immediate and ultimate, of his published epistles. These are at once the author’s reply in a lively epistolary dialogue and the written record of a distant (and, in Pliny’s text, one-sided) conversation, from which the general readership is excluded. Citations in praesentia set up a game of active reinterpretation and rewriting for two players: the primary addressee, who is faced with an oblique recitation of his original text, and the ultimate, cultivated and actively involved readership. Allusions to Tacitus’ works in messages directly addressed to him obviously differ from the standard mode of allusion in that the re-use of a text in a composition is normally addressed to a readership that does not include the author of the quoted text. This mode of citation in praesentia, however, also conforms to the standard model of allusion in that it refers the general, chronologically secondary readership back to texts with which it does not have any special relationship. For posterity these texts are simply part of a common, highly recognizable and quotable – in short, canonical – textual reservoir, and the role of the reader is to recognize the allusive game the citing and canonizing text plays with the canonical and cited text. In the case of Tacitus, Pliny addresses to him fragments deriving both from “public” texts and parts of his private correspondence. Although the editorial status of these texts is different, Pliny’s allusion to published and unpublished works of Tacitus grants them entry into the canon: when Pliny notes that he is reproducing Tacitus’ diction (sic enim scribis), he also “publishes” Tacitus’ correspondence, thus granting the general readership access to a portion of that text as well. Pliny is well aware of the main issue haunting this kind of epistolary allusion, namely the canonical status of the texts involved. It is not by chance that precisely in the letters addressed to Tacitus he insists on the attention that his and Tacitus’ writings will receive from those very same readers of the epistles whom he generically labels posteritas.3 The intertextual relationship built by Pliny’s letters between two almost coetaneous, often 3

Ep. 3.18.3; 5.8.2 and 7; 5.21.5; 6.16.1; 7.4.10; 7.20.2; 7.29.3; 9.3.1; 9.14.1.

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corresponding (Ep. 6.16 and 6.20) and mutually editing friends (Ep. 7.20 and 8.7) thus acquires an element of distinction. It is not merely on account of a “touch of emulation,” as Ronald Syme put it, that Pliny engages in such an intense dialogic exchange with Tacitus.4 His predilection for Tacitus is, rather, an indication that his texts represented for Pliny a necessary point of reference, a location on the cultural map in relation to which Pliny needed to situate his own. Oratorical theory and historiography were the genres in which Pliny had ambitions (and expected) to make his voice heard. In these fields Tacitus’ contributions were unavoidable. Instead of matching them with counter-texts in the same genres, Pliny chose to respond in a subtler but perhaps no less efficient way: he alluded to them in the course of his correspondence with their author. The particular prominence that Tacitus assumed in Pliny’s mapping of their common cultural landscape may explain his role as privileged addressee in the collection: Pliny includes eleven letters addressed to Tacitus, the highest number for a single addressee, and distributes them across six of the nine books of his private correspondence: two in Book 1 (6 and 20), one in 4 (13), three in 6 (9, 16, and 20), two in 7 (20 and 33), one in 8 (7) and two in 9 (10 and 14). In the second half of the epistolary corpus, Tacitus is an almost continuous presence. On the surface, Pliny’s collection is concerned with preserving a friendly dialogue about the common pursuit of studia in the letters addressed to him, while indirectly constructing the character of Tacitus in the letters addressed to others about him.5 The picture Pliny’s text paints is idyllic: Syme devotes a section in his Tacitus to reviewing the parallel careers of the two personalities and to reconstructing the literary and political environment in which they lived.6 His focus is mostly on Pliny’s writings as the richest and most accurate source of information on Tacitus; the literary component of their friendship remains underdeveloped.7 When examined in detail, however, the scattered traces that Tacitus’ texts left in Pliny’s epistles form a web of interconnections through which the contours of a critical cultural and textual dialogue transpire. Rather than a conversation between two political personalities and 4

5

6 7

“It would be of some interest to know at what date the consular orator decided to enhance his fame by putting on the market a selection of his correspondence [. . .] Some touch of emulation may have prompted him to publish. The year 105 brought rumors, and perhaps more than rumors, of his friend’s Historiae” (Syme 1958: 98). Tacitus is mentioned in 2.1.6, 2.11.2, 2.17, 2.19, 4.15.1, and 9.23.2–3. Birley 2000: 53 suggests that Tacitus may also be the unnamed historian of 9.27. Syme 1958, 1: 59–131. The literary component of Pliny’s and Tacitus’ relationship has received in general little emphasis. Even Guillemin 1929 treats Tacitus only in passing.

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men of state, who shared common social roles as viri consulares, Pliny’s letters preserve the traces of a dialogue between texts that, while openly collaborating with one another to set its cultural standards, subtly vie for prominence in establishing the dominant cultural metaphors of their age. In this chapter, my argument will progressively approach the first of the two cultural issues at the core of Pliny’s correspondence with Tacitus, the current status of eloquence, reserving for the next one a treatment of the historiographical questions emerging from a different (but not fully unrelated) set of letters of which Tacitus is the recipient. I start with a discussion of the purest, most essential example of the ironic dynamics set in motion by a citation in praesentia. This preliminary analysis provides readers with an example of the strategies of incorporation and oblique representation that Pliny applies to Tacitus’ text when broaching with him the topic of oratory. By unpacking the complicated exchange between Tacitus and Pliny that has left unmistakable traces in Ep. 8.7 (and, to a lesser degree, 9.14), one can delineate the ground rules of the epistolary bon ton that was tacitly enforced in the literary and cultivated Roman society of Pliny’s age when it came to the exchange of editorial judgments on publishable works. The model of citation in praesentia is a privileged tool for analyzing from a different point of view Ep. 1.6 – which Murgia has regarded as proving an early (97 ce) composition of Tacitus’ Dialogus – and its counterpart 9.10.8 In addition to illuminating issues of dating, Pliny’s continuous re-citation of charged language from Tacitus’ Dialogus proves to be a case of cross-fertilization. In his mini-cycle on hunting and writing, Pliny appears to be indeed answering a delicately ironical “no” to the invitation to abandon the negotium of oratory and to cultivate the different kind of political and literary otium represented in the Dialogus. In particular, in Ep. 1.6, by citing a crucial passage in his antecedent’s text, Tacitus’ simile likening eloquence to a torch that grows brighter when shaken, and rephrasing it in bucolic (mainly, but not only, Virgilian) terms, Pliny succeeds in destabilizing, both for his first addressee and for his final readers, the cultural metaphor on which the argument of the Dialogus relied as well as its political implications. Pliny’s contrastive echoing of fragments by Tacitus continues in Ep. 9.10, where the text evokes and criticizes the way the Dialogus had framed the peace and seclusion afforded by life (and study) inter nemora et lucos (amidst woods and groves). This second, strictly connected epistle continues 8

Murgia’s contributions move beyond Syme’s magisterial historiographical and prosopographical account to tackle questions of genre. My argument takes them as a methodological guide. See Murgia 1980 and 1985.

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the deconstructive work begun by 1.6 and ultimately suggests the identification of Tacitus’ and Maternus’ point of view. Read in this light, the two epistles to Tacitus appear as Pliny’s embryonic treatise on oratory, drafted in the subtle, profoundly allusive, and semi-private register of epistolary communication. Neither an oppositional counter-text nor a critical running commentary on his work, Pliny’s second installment in his correspondence with Tacitus is an example of post-editorial constructive criticism, an elaborate (but perhaps no less sincere) collaborative response. The correspondents’ mutual collaboration and (almost) perfect equality are at the center of the final epistle analyzed in this chapter, Ep. 7.20. The ambiguities embedded at its core are a key to understanding the kind of literary relationship Pliny weaves throughout his exchange with Tacitus. In the open allusion to the agonistic Virgilian context of the games in Aeneid 5 (tibi “longo sed proximus intervallo” ), Pliny introduces the ambiguous notion of being Tacitus’ Secundus, his “immediate follower though from a great distance.” Exploiting the syntactic ambiguity of Virgil’s text and the no less ambiguous cultural associations of the fragment he explicitly quotes, Pliny manages to leave open for posterity the question of his and Tacitus’ ranking among the foremost literati of their time. While accepting the inevitability of his holding second place in the eyes of their contemporaries, and thus punning on his own cognomen, he suggests that a different verdict might one day be possible – in particular that some day, as the Dialogus itself had polemically proposed, thanks to an illusionary game of perspective, the distance between first and second place will amount to nothing at all. the d econstruction of a metaphor: s c h o l a and s at u r n a l i a in 8.7 The seventh epistle of Book 8 is a short note intended as an acknowledgment of receipt of a manuscript that Tacitus has sent to Pliny to be edited. The letter has received so far only limited attention in critical discourse. SherwinWhite merely notes that it “reads like an apology for the bolder tone of VII.20,” and speculates that “perhaps Tacitus had sent Pliny a cool reply.”9 The earlier letter will be examined in more detail shortly; at this stage, it is necessary only to remark how the situation of Ep. 8.7 replicates closely that of Ep. 7.20. In 7.20, too, Tacitus has sent Pliny a book which the latter admits he has diligently read, adding that he has noted what he thought 9

Sherwin-White 1966, ad loc.

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needed to be changed and what he deemed worthy of being suppressed. The only apparent difference, recalled explicitly in Ep. 8.7, is that in 7.20 Pliny awaited from Tacitus the same kind of editing on a manuscript he had sent him, while in 8.7 Tacitus has no manuscript of Pliny’s in his hands. And yet the reduplication of the situation hides a wide range of divergences that have escaped the attention of the commentators, mainly concerned with figuring out whether or not the liber referred to in the letters is the same one, and what it might be.10 The first of these differences lies in the tone of 8.7, which is not at all apologetic, as Sherwin-White implies, but rather politely ironic. Sherwin-White’s misrepresentation of the tone of Pliny’s reply and of the one Tacitus might have used in the letter to which 8.7 responds derives from a misapprehension of the situation. While he may be right that one should make a connection with 7.20 when reading 8.7, his inference that the latter is the reply to a reply of the former is not the only possible explanation for several of its features. In order to provide a better characterization of Pliny’s tone in the letter, the value of the metaphorical language he deploys should first be addressed. C. PLINIUS TACITO SUO S. Neque ut magistro magister neque ut discipulo discipulus (sic enim scribis), sed ut discipulo magister (nam tu magister, ego contra; atque adeo tu in scholam revocas, ego adhuc Saturnalia extendo) librum misisti. Num potui longius hyperbaton facere; atque hoc ipso probare eum esse me qui non modo magister tuus, sed ne discipulus quidem debeam dici? Sumam tamen personam magistri, exseramque in librum tuum ius quod dedisti, eo liberius quod nihil ex me interim missurus sum tibi in quo te ulciscaris. Vale. (Ep. 8.7) Dear Tacitus, No. It is neither as a teacher to a teacher nor as a student to a student (as you yourself write), but as a teacher to a student (for a teacher you are, and I the opposite; in fact you call me back to school, while I prolong the Saturnalia) that you sent me your book. Now, don’t you see how convoluted my word order is? Isn’t it proof enough that I cannot be called your student, let alone your teacher? However, since you ask, I’ll assume the role of teacher and will exercise the right you granted me, all the more freely since I am not going to send you anything I have written on which you can exact your revenge. All the best.

The situation alluded to in Ep. 8.7 may be reconstructed only by unraveling the web of metaphors drawn from the semantic field of schooling with 10

The candidates are either the Dialogus or the Historiae for both letters, or the Dialogus in 7.20 and the Historiae in 8.7, or even two distinct rolls of the Historiae in the two letters. See the discussion in Sherwin-White 1966, ad loc.

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which it opens. On a practical level, the situation is simple: Tacitus has sent Pliny a liber of his, with a note that contained the (polite) metaphor of the two men of letters as (con)discipuli. The metaphor is what concerns Pliny the most. He writes back acknowledging receipt of the roll, but notes that while he will read the book and suggest the emendations it might need, he cannot do it either (as Tacitus’ formulation would imply) as a fellow pupil or (he adds) as a fellow teacher. To accommodate Tacitus’ request, he will play the part of the teacher and relegate Tacitus to that of the pupil (and in so doing, he notes, he will temporarily subvert the natural order of things, wherein Tacitus is the teacher and Pliny the pupil). Furthermore, Pliny continues, he will feel free to exercise this right of emendation both because Tacitus himself granted it to him and because he fears no retaliation: at the moment, Tacitus does not have (and will not soon have) in his hands any manuscript by Pliny to edit. In this context, there seems to be little room for the “apologetic tone” that Sherwin-White hears in the letter. And indeed, there is no trace of apology for Pliny’s editing activity, or of any kind of apology for that matter. What is present, rather, is a refined play on and with Tacitus’ words, together with the incorporation into the body of the letter of some elements that can only derive from Tacitus’ note. It is on these redeployed elements, which constitute the clearest case of citation in praesentia, that a close reading should start. In its negative form, the sentence with which the short note opens sets up the first citation in praesentia. The short aside addressed to his correspondent that modern editors mark with a parenthesis – sic enim scribis – signals with utmost clarity that Pliny is explicitly rewriting Tacitus:11 it is not true, as he writes, that the book to be edited was sent as from colleague to colleague or fellow student to fellow student. How much of the first sentence, containing the two similarly extreme and discarded options, is originally Tacitean is debatable. In my view, the tag sic enim scribis only refers to the expression discipulo discipulus. The first sentence (neque ut magistro magister) is Pliny’s initial exploration of the metaphor’s potential. If Tacitus had labeled their relationship as one between two “teachers,” he would have broken the rhetorical rule that forbids laudatio sui even when it is indirect, i.e., when it conforms to the model of excellence through association (“I am like you, and you are great”). A parenthetical sentence in Ep. 7.20.3 suggests that such an (un-)written law exists, at least in his epistolary bon ton. Pliny writes: cogor enim de te quoque parcius dicere, quia de me simul dico (“you see, I am forced to tone down your accomplishments 11

See, e.g., Schuster 1952 and Mynors 1963.

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because I am speaking of mine in the same breath”). This rhetorical principle becomes a writing norm (cogor), especially in the correspondence with Tacitus, the theme of which is often emulation through association (“I am almost like you, but you are superior”). Of course, it could also be the case that Tacitus has broken Pliny’s self-imposed rule and corrected it in the letter to which 8.7 responds. The dynamics at work in Pliny’s 8.7 would then be somewhat different from those explored here, but not fully incompatible: the core process of re-elaboration would still be based on a complex, albeit spurious, citation in praesentia. At any rate, the letter recovers and negates (neque . . . neque . . . sed . . . nam) the enunciation of Tacitus’ text, bending it to convey a meaning opposed to, but not independent from, its original context. Pliny pinpoints the part of Tacitus’ text he is reusing, the metaphor of the (con)discipuli, and builds the epistle as a systematic exhaustion of the possibilities offered by that text (“neither as . . . nor as . . . but not even as . . .”). The end result is a correction of Tacitus’ statement, a witty and polite exploitation and negation of its basic metaphor. The aside mentioned above betrays the mechanism of ironic subversion at the heart of Pliny’s short note. It lays bare the presuppositions of the quoted text only to systematically alter them. We will witness the same process of subversive re-use of Tacitus’ texts in the case of the letters on the “wild boars” (1.6 and 9.10): here Pliny represents and recontextualizes snippets of the Dialogus only to negate the implications they had in their original contexts. The consequences for the interpretation of Pliny’s relationship with Tacitus are greater there, but in 8.7 the phenomenon may be seen in its purest state. It is here that Pliny’s marked use (and silent abuse) of Tacitus’ metaphor freely deconstructs the formulaic civility of the original text by isolating, reframing, and readdressing one of its formulas. Pliny notes that even if Tacitus had written that he sent his book as a pupil would to a pupil, this was not the real state of affairs: the two fellow literati are not to be considered fellow students. The book has been sent neither from a pupil to a pupil, nor from a teacher to a teacher, but from a teacher to a pupil. It could not be otherwise, since Tacitus is the teacher and Pliny his pupil. That this is the case, Pliny immediately adds, is clear from the very form of his own letter. The hyperbaton he has composed is so extreme that it can work as sufficient proof of Pliny’s literary ineptitude. Now, if this is the truth on the level of reality, on the level of the epistolary formulas Tacitus used a metaphor belonging to the semantic field of the schola, insisting on Pliny’s and his own common schooling in the field of liberal studies. Pliny wittily replies that the metaphor Tacitus had used

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cannot work, either as it is (both are (con)discipuli) or when rephrased to cover the second possibility (both are magistri). Indirect as it may be, the formulation could contain a distancing statement: Pliny instills difference in the homogeneous background he shares with Tacitus. Readers understand that they may have had the best available teachers, the best education money could buy, but their stylistic differences set them apart. The letter suggests that the correspondents are at once equal and distinct.12 Beyond illuminating historical and biographical circumstances, however, Pliny’s rephrasing of Tacitus’ chosen metaphor suggests its inadequacy. Even when its first literal layer is removed and translated into reality, Tacitus’ polite scholastic metaphor cannot work: the letter Pliny has received from him asked for a counterfactual action. Pliny has been asked to be the teacher for Tacitus, while it should be (because it is so) the other way around. Pliny shows how Tacitus’ metaphor is doomed to fail, both in its present form discipulo discipulus and in the alternative possibilities magistro magister or discipulo magister, because it contradicts the actual state of affairs. The only open possibility is the one the letter left implicit, namely that Tacitus paradoxically submits his work to Pliny’s editing as a teacher would do with his pupil. And yet, even this absurd possibility is only open for an instant. As we have seen, the long hyperbaton is for Pliny sufficient evidence to rule out this possibility as well. It is absurd that he could be thought of as a pupil of Tacitus: Num potui longius hyperbaton facere, atque hoc ipso probare eum esse me qui non modo magister tuus, sed ne discipulus quidem debeam dici? The sentence is double-edged. On the one hand, it is a modest profession of incompetence-in-action: indirectly, Pliny asks Tacitus if he wouldn’t be embarrassed to have people think such a poor writer was his student at any point. Looking at the monster-sentence Pliny has just clumsily penned, Tacitus (and the eventual readership of their correspondence) might recoil in disgust.13 On the other hand, Pliny’s modest denial contains a vindication 12

13

The points of fracture between Pliny’s and Tacitus’ taste in oratory identified by Syme (1958: 115) might point to a difference in schooling between the two correspondents. For Pliny’s studies with Quintilian, see Ep. 2.14.9 (ita certe ex Quintiliano praeceptore meo audisse memini) and 6.6.3 (quos tunc ego frequentabam, Quintilianum Niceten Sacerdotem . . .). That Pliny and Tacitus did not share, for instance, the same opinion of Nicetes Sacerdos is clear from a contrastive reading of Dialogus 15.3 and Ep. 6.6.3. In commenting on hyperbata and simultaneously providing an example of them, Pliny might be striking a pose typical of the teachers of grammar and rhetoric: teaching through example (Longin. 22). On hyperbaton and its associated risks, see Quint. Inst. 8.6.62–7. The phenomenon of teaching through example is not isolated in the collection; Pliny makes the same gesture in the context of promoting poetry through hendecasyllables, a poetic product intended to spur the addressee to involve himself in drafting similarly poetic exercises: cur enim te ad versus non versibus adhorter? (Ep. 7.9.10).

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of independence. Readers may have substantial objections to raise against Pliny’s style, but they also may not. His style, however awkward it might be in the present articulation, is his, developed independently of any influence his (older) fellow litteratus might have exerted on him.14 Once resolved from the metaphor in which it is couched, Tacitus’ request creates an impasse from which Pliny has to disentangle himself and his reply. He must escape the dead end of Tacitus’ metaphor while accepting the role his correspondent has asked him to play. He elegantly solves the predicament by forcing the epistolary dialogue onto a new track and shifting the metaphor. A different metaphor needs to be grafted onto Tacitus’ elegant rhetoric of shared learning, one that may correct the paradoxical request and at the same time legitimate it. Pliny provides exactly such a metaphor in his rejoinder, combining Tacitus’ scholastic metaphor with the tongue-incheek metaphor of Saturnalian license. The central sentence tu in scholam revocas, ego adhuc Saturnalia extendo works as the turning point for the epistle. The new metaphor has all the distinctive features of Bakhtinian “carnivalesque” subversion. It indicates a local and momentary suspension of the social order. Insofar as it is ritualized and authorized, carnivalesque subversion simultaneously negates and reinforces the hierarchies intrinsic to that order.15 The new semantic field that the epistle opens provides Pliny (and as a consequence also Tacitus) with the sole possibility of preserving and simultaneously negating (technically, subverting) Tacitus’ failing metaphor. Pliny’s metaphor of the extended Saturnalia reproduces on a figurative level the same structure of the state of affairs it is called upon to designate. Tacitus clearly requested (and hence “authorized”) a momentary and localized subversion of the natural order of things, but he used the wrong figurative language. Pliny replies by accepting the request, but only after replacing his model’s inadequate metaphor with a new and more appropriate one. He shows that there is a metaphor that better fits the situation, thanks to the isomorphism of its tenor and vehicle. If Pliny’s metaphor is designed to authorize the momentary and localized suspension of the natural order of things, the ritualized context of the Saturnalia is the only figure that can express or, better yet, embody in both form and content the parenthesis of playful revolution in the small world of literary studies that Tacitus is asking Pliny to open. In the epistle two more phenomena are connected with Pliny’s choice of correcting Tacitus’ metaphoric setup. First, by deconstructing Tacitus’ 14

15

On stylistic differences between Pliny’s more florid style and Tacitus’ stringent syntax, see Syme 1958: 112–17. Bakhtin 1968. For Roman culture, see Versnel 1993: 150–63.

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language of literary politeness and replacing his failing metaphor with one that leaves no way out, Pliny intimates that, after all, Tacitus’ implied (and absurd) metaphor was exact. The relative literary reputations of Pliny and Tacitus are, from the point of view of their readership’s cultural expectations, immutably set. However, Pliny feels authorized to challenge this cultural ranking, at least in a local and momentary, i.e. “carnivalesque,” way. Pliny is able to go one step further than Tacitus himself; in the Saturnalian atmosphere his epistle has evoked, he is authorized to put on the mask and play the part of the teacher: sumam tamen personam magistri. The metaphor of the Saturnalia is doubly productive when one considers that magister is also the technical term for “slave-owner.” In Roman culture, the contrastive correlative of magister is thus not only discipulus, but also servus. A significant play on the paradox of the slave who is the magister (“teacher”) of his magister (“master”) may be found in the close of Act I of Plautus’ Bacchides: Pist. Tibi ego an tu mihi servos es? Lyd. Peior magister te istaec docuit, non ego. Nimio es tu ad istas res discipulus docilior, quam ad illa quae te docui, ubi operam perdidi. (162–5) P. Am I your servant or are you at my service? L. A worse teacher has taught you all of this, not I. For sure you are a more patient student in this subject than in those I taught you. What a waste that has been!

Pistocleros’ parrhesia is linked to a small-scale Saturnalian situation, the fundamental component of which, freedom, is soon named: Istactenu’ tibi, Lyde, libertas datast / orationis. Satis est. Sequere hac me ac tace ([Pist.] “So far, Lydus, you have been granted freedom to speak. That’s enough. Now, shut up and follow me,” 168–9). The joke is all in the lexical amphiboly of the term magister: the slave insists on casting the term in a context in which its correlative is discipulus; the young master brings up the other meaning by invoking the alternative contrastive correlative, servus. The double inversion of roles, with the pupil granting his magister Saturnalian license to speak (and thus release from the socially normal situation of freeborn-magister and servus-teacher), is made possible by the grey area in which the soon-to-be-adult pupil and his paedagogus find themselves in the plot of Plautus’ play.16 The chronological issue at the core of the Plautine coming-of-age situation may help explain Pliny’s focus on time in the epistle to Tacitus: his correspondent has asked him to “go 16

The whole scene is pertinent: cf. lines 109–69. For the peculiar relationship between slave pedagogues and free pupils, see Bonner 1977: 34–46.

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back to (the days in which they were in) school” and Pliny accepts the challenge, provided he can “extend (the calendrical time of ) Saturnalian license.” Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the corrective metaphor of the Saturnalia is not inert. It generates further elements of the short note, and is probably responsible for triggering the subtle allusion to a poetic text with which the letter comes to an end. The explicit mentioning of the Saturnalia activates a technical lexicon that extends into the last sentence. The witty metaphor becomes a continued metaphor (an allegoria): ius quod dedisti paraphrases the ius publice datum (“right collectively granted”) of the holidays,17 while the comparative liberius (“freer”) plays on the keyword libertas (“freedom”), the value at the core of the traditional festival.18 But 8.7 also includes a detail that seems to belong only partially to the atmosphere of the Saturnalia. Pliny remarks that he will exercise the right of emendation on Tacitus’ liber “all the more freely” because in the meanwhile he is not going to send him any of his own texts on which Tacitus could exact revenge. The idea of a possible and even inevitable revenge is only hinted at in the closing lines of another Saturnalian text, Horace’s Satire 2.7, with the threat to Davus: ocius hinc te / ni rapis, accedes opera agro nona Sabino (“if you do not beat it right now, you will join the other eight at work in my Sabine estate,” 117–18). Yet the Saturnalia were based on the idea that the freedom issuing from the carnivalesque inversion of social roles was free from consequences.19 Pliny’s joking remark that Tacitus could retaliate for the libertas Decembris he is using while editing his book is apparently out of key with the social context it evokes. A precedent, however, may be found in the literary canon. It is a precise textual antecedent, one that both authorizes Pliny’s allusion to a vindictive freeborn discipulus and locates it in the sensitive area of literary production. No longer merely contextual (as it probably was in the case of Plautus), the textual antecedent for 8.7 comes from the well-trodden corpus of Catullus. Absent from Horace, the notion of revenge is at the center of Catullus 14, a poem that is similarly staged during the Saturnalia. The coincidence is more than calendrical. Catullus’ poem contains both circumstantial and lexical evidence for the literary (rather than social) background discourse with which Pliny’s note resonates: 17

18 19

See, for example, Sen. Ep. 18.1: December est mensis cum maxime civitas sudat. Ius luxuriae publice datum est. Again, only as an example, see Hor. S. 2.7.4–5, to Davus: age, libertate decembri . . . utere. From a social point of view, the eventuality of revenge was incompatible with the function of the holiday. See Bradley 1979, who comments on the tension-defusing purpose of the Saturnalia.

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The Art of Pliny’s Letters Ni te plus oculis meis amarem, iucundissime Calve, munere isto odissem te odio Vatiniano: nam quid feci ego quidve sum locutus, cur me tot male perderes poetis? isti di mala multa dent clienti, qui tantum tibi misit impiorum. Quod si, ut suspicor, hoc novum ac repertum munus dat tibi Sulla litterator, non est mi male, sed bene ac beate, quod non dispereunt tui labores. Di magni, horribilem et sacrum libellum! Quem tu scilicet ad tuum Catullum misti, continuo ut die periret Saturnalibus, optimo dierum! Non non hoc tibi, false, sic abibit; nam, si luxerit, ad librariorum curram scrinia, Caesios, Aquinos, Suffenum, omnia colligam venena, ac te his suppliciis remunerabor. Vos hinc interea valete abite illuc, unde malum pedem attulistis, saecli incommoda, pessimi poetae.

If I didn’t love you more than my own eyes, sweet Calvus, that present of yours would be enough to make me hate you with Vatinian hatred: what did I do to you, what did I say, that you want to kill me with all these bad poets? I wish the gods would curse your client who has sent you such a sacrilegious bunch. If, as I suspect, this new delicacy comes as a gift from Sulla, that literary buff, then no pain for me, but bliss and joy that your hard work has finally paid off. My God! What a terrifying and execrable booklet you have passed on to your Catullus – and right away, of course, so he may die on the very day, the happiest, sacred to the Saturnalia. No. Don’t think, you scoundrel, that I’ll let it go. If I have another day to live, I’ll rush to the booksellers’ chests and I’ll collect all the poisons in the Caesii and Aquini – and in Suffenus too, and by their scourge I’ll be avenged on you. Meanwhile you all, farewell: leave now. Bring back your limping feet to where they came from: you are the disgrace of our times; you, worst of all poets!

Catullus 14 fits the bill as a likely target of Pliny’s allusion not only because its fictional date is made to coincide with the Roman holiday metaphorically evoked in 8.7, but also because its occasion is first the actual and then the threatened exchange of books between Calvus and Catullus. The situation in Catullus 14 – and necessarily some of the language – is the same as in Pliny’s epistle: Calvus’ client sent (misit) a specimen of the worst possible poetry (7), and Calvus has passed it along to Catullus, a booklet (libellum)

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worthy of all deprecations (12). The gift from Calvus came during the days of the Saturnalia (13–15); and, indeed, it is only the holiday that keeps Catullus from retaliating rightaway. The bookshops are closed now, he adds, but as soon as the first working morning comes, if he will be lucky enough to see a new day, he will collect the most venomous and the worst imaginable poetry and exact revenge on Calvus for his gift: ac te his suppliciis remunerabor. The notion of revenge by way of books mirrors that of revenge exacted on books.20 Better yet, Pliny’s ulciscaris plays a game of inversion with Catullus’ remunerabor: Catullus couches revenge in terms of gift-giving, Pliny couches a favor (editing) in the form of revenge. Pliny’s and Catullus’ texts are also drawn together by their shared “tu-form” of epistolary rhetoric and the fact that Catullus’ poem is a letter accompanying the restitution of a book.21 One final pinch: in the line immediately following remunerabor, Catullus 14 addresses with an ironical and paradoxical valete the worst of the poets he has just named and those he has left unnamed: Vos hinc interea, valete, abite / [. . .] pessimi poetae (21–3). In Pliny, the lighthearted ulciscaris is introduced by the adverb interim (Catullus’ interea?), followed by the normal epistolary closing formula vale. To be sure, each of the parallel elements is in itself not decisive, but the analogous contexts, the ironical tone of both texts, and the surfacing of a shared lexicon in unexpected areas open the possibility of an allusion. Of course, Pliny’s allusion to the Catullan context should be read as contrastive in nature. Many essential features of the original situation have been altered in the new context. In Catullus, the exchange of books was more a joke played by the two cultivated friends on Sulla, the tasteless litterator, than a link in the chain of real and serious cultural production as it is in Pliny. Similarly, the quality of the books exchanged could not be more radically opposed, the worst products of Catullus’ age serving as a counterpoint to the best – according to Pliny’s modesty, some of the best 20

21

A further metaphoric sub-plot is at work in Catullus 14, again playing on another, but not unrelated, grey area activated by the Saturnalian context: that of the patronus/cliens relationship, both a social and technically legal dichotomy. Sulla – most likely Cornelius Epicadus (Grilli 1997, ad loc.), a freedman of the dictator Sulla – is the client of Calvus, who has defended him in court. Ironically, Catullus notes, all the work of the patronus (as lawyer) has been well rewarded: the remuneration he has received proves that, unlike Plautus’ paedagogus Lydus, he has not wasted his efforts. Sulla is, however, also a litterator, that is, not only a “cultivated” amateur, a literary buff, but also an elementary teacher of literature (cf. Suet. Gram. 4 for the opposition of litteratus and litterator): lexically, he is himself a paedagogus. With a gift of books (the worst possible ones, testimony of the “old,” non-neoteric taste) he has proved he has learned nothing of (or from) his patrocinator’s taste. Sulla is, in sum, a failed paedagogus of a no-less failed teacher Calvus. Cf. the technical value of munere isto (“that gift there,” away from the speaker, close to the addressee) and the direct address to the collected poems contained in lines 21–3. Of course, the pronoun iste also preserves the derogatory valence it has in line 5 (isti . . . clienti: that awful client of yours).

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(7.20.5) – of the present. More precisely, the allusion serves the purpose of reinforcing a key concept in the literary history of Pliny’s time, namely that the dynamics of literary exchange have changed, for the better, in the time between Catullus and Pliny. As we have seen in Chapter 2, Catullus is reinterpreted and used as an example of the extremism characterizing poetry of the old kind. The bridge that connects the allusion (both ways) is thus the association contrasting two instances of the Saturnalia theme (either in full swing, or artificially and metaphorically protracted) linked by the “threat” of remuneration (either by or on books). The civil conversation and friendly collaboration of the two friends is reinforced by what Pliny takes as (and turns into) the darker background, the polemical atmosphere of the Catullan context. The superiority of the present situation is marked by Pliny’s and Tacitus’ shared ability to experience literary production as a socially refined and mutually obliging activity. The harsh polemical thrust of Catullus’ (admittedly Vatinian) invective, like the use of rhetoric as a means of indiscriminate and violent social and political self-promotion, is a thing of the past. Here too Catullus’ poetry is evoked only when the political reality it used to embody has been carefully edited out of the text. To summarize thus far: Ep. 8.7 generates interest as an example of citation in praesentia, a mechanism of textual interrelation that will be taken up again in other letters Pliny addressed to Tacitus (see below). In this responsive kind of citation, the quoted fragment is freed from the original context and subversively re-used. The process of re-use is all the more complex insofar as it takes the author of the original context as first addressee. At the same time, Pliny’s rewriting of Tacitus’ letter in 8.7 can also be seen from the point of view of the ultimate addressee of the work, i.e., the cultivated and distant reader of the epistles. From the modern reader’s perspective, citations in praesentia align with the more widespread class of literary quotations and participate in the dynamics of mutual canonization in which Pliny engaged with his contemporary fellow practitioner of literary studia. The Tacitus cycle appears as a favored space in the collection for the activity of canonization. Pliny’s insistence on incorporating the point of view of the future reader, often with a high degree of self-consciousness, may be read in this light. The letters Pliny addressed to Tacitus have a pronouncedly double audience: while they respond to a single prominent addressee, they also indirectly address posteritas and call into question the role that the judgment of future generations will have in endorsing literary merit.22 In the case of 8.7, what is on the surface and originally a private 22

See especially Ep. 7.20 and the upcoming discussion of 9.14.

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allusion in a literary game played by two friends (the correction of the metaphor) becomes, through the publication of the text and the inscription in its body of the literary marks of intertextuality (the hints at Catullus’ presence), another tessera in the mosaic of voices resonating in the work. However tentative, reading Tacitus through Pliny’s testimony has at least two advantages: first, it reascribes to Tacitus some fragments of his correspondence; second, it suggests how sensitive his epistolary exchanges with Pliny might have been. Ep. 8.7 does not present an isolated instance of allusion in praesentia in the collection. A second example of Pliny’s strategy of citation of and to Tacitus may be found in letter 9.14. It is again a citation from a text that we do not have, a letter that Tacitus wrote to Pliny.23 Ep. 8.7 explicitly points to (or postulates) the existence of a text penned by Tacitus; Ep. 9.14 takes up the same model, opening with a similar negation (neque . . . et ego nihil) and structuring itself as an even closer contrastive recitation of Tacitus’ alleged text. The stylistic intention of Pliny’s text is clear; it wants readers to consider both 8.7 and 9.14 as rejoinders to letters that the collection does not care to include. Even if, paradoxically, in 9.14 the citation in praesentia is a citation in the absence of the quoted text, there are other elements in Pliny’s letter that render an attempt at divining what Tacitus wrote not completely speculative. By using what we have learned about Pliny’s technique in rewriting his correspondent’s texts from 8.7, it is in fact possible to make informed guesses about some details in Tacitus’ presumed reply. The only caveat is that the more speculative this operation will be on Tacitus’ side, the closer should be the focus we keep on Pliny’s text. C. PLINIUS TACITO SUO S. Nec ipse tibi plaudis, et ego nihil magis ex fide quam de te scribo. Posteris an aliqua cura nostri, nescio; nos certe meremur, ut sit aliqua, non dico ingenio (id enim superbum), sed studio et labore et reverentia posterorum. Pergamus modo itinere instituto, quod ut paucos in lucem famamque provexit, ita multos e tenebris et silentio protulit. Vale. (Ep. 9.14) Dear Tacitus, No, don’t worry, you are not too kind with yourself. As for me, I never write with more respect for truth than when I write about you. Whether posterity will care 23

It might be possible, though improbable in a text with some circulation during his lifetime, that Tacitus never wrote to Pliny. In this case, Pliny’s allusive signals would be pointing in the direction of a void. Even if this were the case, however, the situation for the modern reader would not change: Pliny constructs Tacitus’ (actual or hypothetical) voice in and through his own texts. For the logic of the internal mechanism of these letters, it matters little if these originals actually existed. What matters is having an actual or constructed voice of the model to play with. Without this, rewriting and allusion would make little sense.

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about us, I can’t say. We certainly deserve some attention, I wouldn’t say for our intelligence (I agree: that would be boasting), but at least for our effort, our hard work, and our constant preoccupation with posterity. So, let’s stay the course. If it has brought only few into the spotlight of fame, it has rescued many from the silence of obscurity. Be well.

An argument can be made for reading the epistle as containing fragments originating with Tacitus, although there is no positive indication that this is the case (i.e., there is no aside comparable to the sic enim scribis of 8.7). The opening of Pliny’s note recalls the neque . . . neque structure of the explicitly Tacitean epistle, and the first sentence is built on a similar – and probably similarly responsive – reiterated negative structure: Nec ipse tibi plaudis, et ego nihil [a variation for the second neque] magis ex fide quam de te scribo. This structure is not limited to the opening remarks. Indeed, the whole letter is organized as a series of short bipartite sentences, each marked by a strong pause and a radical reversal at its center: if the syntactic analogy with 8.7 is anything more than a superficial resemblance, one could interpret the first part of each phrase as belonging to, or being written in, the voice of Tacitus. He plays the role of a friend who dissents, at times radically, from some of Pliny’s most cherished (and often recalled) statements about the nature and the purpose of literary work and to whose critique the new epistle responds by adjusting its diction. In this light, 9.14 offers itself as a continually winding text, one that moves between representing in Pliny’s voice the point of view (and probably the phraseology) of Tacitus and opposing it. A detailed reading suggests that to Tacitus belongs first of all the initial sentence nec ipse tibi plaudis, which, in the form mihi ipse non plaudo, has already been suggested to be Tacitus’.24 Probably no less Tacitean in origin is the expression posteris an aliqua cura nostri that Pliny corrects by adding a dubitative nescio. This claim, based on the structure of the letter, may seem to clash with the clear verbal echo of Pliny’s expression si qua posteris cura nostri (“if posterity will ever pay any attention to us”) in Ep. 7.20.2.25 The 24

25

Sherwin-White 1966, ad loc. If it is true, however, that Ep. 9.14 shares with 7.20 Stimmung and diction, it is also true that it is hard to motivate Pliny’s nec ipse tibi plaudis as a rephrasing of Tacitus’ answer to 7.20. What, in 7.20, could have brought Tacitus to “take the line” mihi non plaudo? The epistle from Tacitus to which 9.14 is a reply did not respond to Pliny’s 7.20, but, on account of the common Virgilian intertext, to 1.2 (see below). The parallel resolves a potential ambiguity contained in nostri (9.14) as an equivalent of mei. In 7.20.1 the careful distinction between ego and tu guarantees the inclusive nature of nostri in section 7.20.2. In 9.14, the contrast of ingenium and the triad labor, studium, reverentia posterorum dwells on similar terms as Tacitus’ Annales 4.61 (monimenta ingeni [Q. Haterii] haud perinde retinentur . . . utque aliorum meditatio et labor in posterum valescit, sic Haterii canorum illud et profuens cum ipso simul exstinctum est) in order to distinguish between an orator’s fleeting natural talent and a more permanent editorial and stylistic care.

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puzzling resurfacing of a particularly recognizable fragment of 7.20 that 9.14 attributes to Tacitus’ voice could indicate the restating and reshaping of a key concept that has traveled from Pliny’s originating text over to a literal (negative) citation in Tacitus’, only to land again finally in Pliny’s field. The dialogic reworking of the notion that “someone will / won’t / might be interested in our work in the future” seems to suggest that Pliny did not have a monopoly on rewriting. We have seen how responding to specific points by recycling specific language is a trademark of epistolary exchange. Another philosophical and literary genre naturally shares the same technique: the (fictional) dialogue. The text of Tacitus’ Dialogus offers, for instance, both a similar strategy and theme as Pliny’s 9.14, which is swiftly and polemically developed by Aper in chapters 9 and 10. He discusses the “empty and sterile glory” (laus inanis et infructuosa) that derives from poetry (Dial. 9.1). Maternus replies that oratorical fame is but a fleeting glimpse, whereas true, perpetual fame issues only from poetry (Dial. 13.3). They take up each other’s language and reach a final balance. Similarly, the final clause of 9.14 is close in nature to the dialogic reshaping of the conversants’ opinions observed in 8.7 and at the beginning of 9.14. The conjunction ut acquires almost concessive force: “if it is true [as you say], that (ut) the culture (iter institutum) has brought out into light and fame only few individuals, it is no less true that (ita) many have been taken up from darkness and silence.”26 Pliny’s responsive strategy consists in acknowledging his correspondent’s skepticism, but only to advance his favorite arguments from a new point of view, one that might suggest that there are elements for counteracting that skepticism. By rephrasing the original letter, Pliny produces a text that corrects some of its antecedent’s statements and reshapes its general tone. The mechanism of silent quotation established by the explicit paradigm of 8.7 in the dialogue with Tacitus allows the reader to evaluate what belongs to whom in the text of 9.14 and hence to perform the text as a two-voice exchange. The last two sentences of the letter deserve a final note that might account for the tonal integration proposed above, i.e., the rendering of Pliny’s aside id enim superbum as a concession to an earlier remark by Tacitus rather than a matter-of-fact statement. The presence of a Virgilian intertext suggests 26

In Pliny’s dyad e tenebris et silentio one might see an allusion to the context of Sal. Cat. 1.1 (ne vitam silentio transeant); see Woodman 1973: 310, and 1988: 120–2. With tenebris et silentio Pliny might be conveying that same ambiguity; the more so because in Ep. 5.8 (see below, Chapter 4) Pliny conflates the reputation one earns from the writing of history with that derived from being recorded in it. Indirect support of Woodman’s hypothesis comes from Baker’s observation that Sallust himself “provides a striking parallel illustration of the ambiguity” of silentio also at Cat. 53.6 (1982: 802). Cf. also Tac. Ag. 3.2, for a parallel use of the term silentium, probably looking back at Sallust: quid si [. . .] senes prope ad ipsos exactae aetatis terminos per silentium venimus?

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that the dialogue between Pliny and Tacitus was not limited to the rewriting of each other’s epistles, but passed through a re-evaluation of their respective allusive techniques. In the closing of the letter Pliny goes back twice to an intertext that he had already used at the other end of his collection. Adding another element of ring-composition, which more strictly binds together Books 1 and 9, he repeats a gesture already made in 1.2. He rephrases and completes the allusion to Virgil (Aen. 6.129) that we have analyzed in Chapter 1 with its ending: Noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis; sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras, hoc opus, hic labor est. Pauci, quos aequus amavit Iuppiter aut ardens evexit ad aethera virtus, dis geniti potuere. (Aen. 6.127–31)

Day and night the doors to the dark kingdom of Dis are wide open, but to retrace one’s steps and escape into the light of this world, this is the task, there lies the difficulty. So few have been able to do it, those whom the just Jupiter favored or whom a blaze of virtue raised to the stars, the progeny of gods.

The two contexts are closely linked: in both Pliny reasserts that fame and glory go to few, either to those whom Jupiter chose, or to those whom virtue was able to lift into the realm of light. The verb he uses in 9.14, provexit, is a slight variation of Virgil’s evexit, and in both instances the movement is towards light. This subtle citation completes the one located at the other end of the work, providing the reader with an exploration of the second possibility in the Sybil’s either–or taxonomy. One can see the first possibility, “either those whom Jupiter chose,” taken up by Pliny in the juxtaposition of ingenium and the three aspects of virtus: namely studio et labore et reverentia posterorum. If ingenium is the natural endowment of those who descend into the underworld and come back to light, it amounts to the (natural) selection on the part of Jupiter. Not coincidentally, Aeneas had just summed up his peroration with the statement et mi genus ab Iove summo (“and my lineage starts off from Jupiter on high,” Aen. 6.123). Complementarily, the emphasis here falls on the notion of virtus and its specifications. The allusion in Ep. 9.14 to the same intertext as in 1.2 connects these two letters through a new Virgilian tessera that corrects the aim of the first one.27 In particular, it readdresses what might have 27

Ep. 1.2 is in turn connected to 1.3 by the presence in the latter of an allusion to the first half of the Virgilian hexameter (see Chapter 1). Retrospectively Ep. 9.14 is referring the reader back to the block of 1.2–1.3.

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been perceived and perhaps noted (by Tacitus) as self-congratulation in Pliny’s confidence in future recognition. The aid for reading inserted above should be understood as if between square brackets, “[I agree:] that would be boasting.” It marks the possibility that Pliny is conceding a point not only in Tacitus’ reply to a particular letter addressed to him but also in his reaction to a more usual pose of Pliny’s. Tacitus might be the one who noted the sleight of hand contained in the Virgilian allusion of 1.2 (and 1.3), revealing the presuppositions of Pliny’s allusion and forcing him to now assume a defensive position: mihi ipse non plaudo; non ingenio (id enim superbum). If this is the case, the sophistication of the literary game between sender and addressee in the epistolary exchange would lie in the vehicle by which the existing divergences are, politely but firmly, made. Pliny’s statement in Ep. 1.2 was couched in a literal allusion to Virgil (pauci quos aequus amavit / Iuppiter); Tacitus’ answer to this statement could have pointed out the moral ambiguity (and rhetorical inappropriateness) of alluding to that line in the Aeneid in which, after all, success depended merely on natural qualities; Pliny grants the point in Ep. 9.14 (id enim superbum) but holds on to the core of his argument – if it is not on Virgil’s Jupiter that one can rely, then maybe Tacitus will grant some merit to the other no less Virgilian option left open by the Sybil (aut ardens evexit ad aethera virtus). The result is that the final sentence of 9.14 reads, tonally, in this way: “[I now admit that it is not true that, as I said in the past,] it is not because of a natural talent, but on account of application, toil and mindfulness of posterity that fame is granted.” If this reconstruction has validity, Pliny was not alone in playing allusive games and, what is more important, he shared the same attention as his correspondent to the privileged vehicle of allusive communication: the fragments of the poetic canon.28 What we have seen Pliny doing to Tacitus’ text in epistles 8.7 and 9.14 on an inconsequential micro-level happens again, this time with much more than the choice of a metaphor at stake, in other letters addressed to the author of Dialogus, Agricola and Historiae.29 The text that Tacitus sees Pliny send back to him is much more serious than a short item in his personal correspondence, and the questions that this re-use raises are much weightier. In these letters, Pliny’s citations in praesentia do more than rely on the readership’s common cultural and textual heritage: they actually challenge Tacitus on his own ground, by recuperating his canonizable texts as those of a strong author, reusing and reinterpreting them. 28

29

For a further example of Pliny’s responsive rewriting of a Tacitean allusion, see below, Chapter 4, on Ep. 6.20. For a dialogue with the Historiae, see the discussion of Ep. 6.16 and 6.20 (Chapter 4).

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Two more letters that Pliny addressed to Tacitus are squarely placed in the realm of metaliterary commentary: 1.6 and 9.10, which open with two puzzling remarks about wild boars and hinging on the no less puzzling connection between literary activity and hunting.30 Several scholars have explored the textual and chronological relationship between these letters and Tacitus’ Dialogus.31 None, however, has examined Pliny’s letters as part of a close and immediate exchange between Tacitus and Pliny. Together with their omitted replies, they may constitute Pliny’s briefest but most incisive experiment with the dialogic form in response to Tacitus’ larger engagement with the genre. In 1.6 one even encounters a fragment of hypothetical dialogue when Pliny anticipates, by putting words into Tacitus’ mouth, the bewildered comments he will make in learning that Pliny has caught three wild boars (Ipse?).32 In addition to toying with the mimetic formulas of the dialogue, both letters offer passages that closely resemble sensitive areas of the Dialogus: the expression motuque corporis excitetur that we read in Pliny’s 1.6.2 recalls motibus excitatur at Dialogus 36.1, while in 9.10 one finds the famous quotation inter nemora et lucos echoing Dialogus 9.6 and 12.1 (a quotation that has played a fundamental role in the debate on Tacitus’ authorship of the text).33 More than issues of paternity or chronology, however, what most interests us here is Pliny’s re-use of Tacitus’ text. By observing the cross-pollination of their shared lexicon, Pliny’s epistles may be seen as taking a clear, albeit polemically allusive, position on some key statements in the Dialogus. 30

31

32

33

Ludolph 1997: 170 treats hunting and writing as intertwined musical motives, developing Albrecht 1971. Their interlacement may, however, hide a deeper equivalence. Poetic compositions may be concealed in the humorous note regarding the three boars: a Catullan echo at the beginning of Ep. 1.6 (ille quem nosti = iste . . . quem . . . nosti of Catullus 22.1) may recall, in fact, the context of (clumsy) poetic efforts. For the tag quem nosti in epistolary prose, see also Cic. Att. 7.1 and Q.f. 2.13.1. An association of literature and hunting can be found in Catullus 116.1, in his allusion to the hunting for words (studioso animo venante) which was part of the literary training called 

introduced by the Alexandrian poets and grammarians (cf. Ellis 1889: 501). See, at least, Lef`evre 1978 and Posch 1983, H¨aussler 1986 and 1987, together with Murgia’s articles cited above. Though tonal more than literal, even the opening of the epistle has an antecedent in Dialogus. Maternus introduces his excursus about the new restrictions on judicial practice with the words: “You will find what I am about to say of no consequence and laughable; I’ll say it anyway, if only to make you laugh” (39.1). For the arguments, in my view conclusive, about the paternity of Ep. 9.10 and the chronological precedence of the Dialogus over Pliny’s epistle, see Murgia 1985. For a discussion of the quotation inter nemora et lucos, see, below, my analysis of Ep. 9.10.

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C. PLINIUS CORNELIO TACITO SUO S. Ridebis, et licet rideas. Ego, ille quem nosti, apros tres et quidem pulcherrimos cepi. “Ipse?” inquis. Ipse; non tamen ut omnino ab inertia mea et quiete discederem. Ad retia sedebam; erat in proximo non venabulum aut lancea, sed stilus et pugillares; meditabar aliquid enotabamque, ut si manus vacuas, plenas tamen ceras reportarem. Non est quod contemnas hoc studendi genus; mirum est ut animus agitatione motuque corporis excitetur; iam undique silvae et solitudo ipsumque illud silentium quod venationi datur, magna cogitationis incitamenta sunt. Proinde cum venabere, licebit auctore me ut panarium et lagunculam sic etiam pugillares feras: experieris non Dianam magis montibus quam Minervam inerrare. Vale. Dear Tacitus, You will laugh now: and you do have every right to. I, the Pliny you know, have just caught three boars, and of the finest brand. “You did?” I can hear you say. Indeed: but not in a way contrary to my usual lazy holiday habits. I was sitting by the nets, and by my side I had not the spear to hunt, but pen and paper. I was ruminating on something and jotting it down: if I were to come back empty-handed from the hunt, I thought, at least I should bring back something written. You shouldn’t dismiss this kind of intellectual pursuit beforehand; it’s incredible what a little exercise and body motion can do to “oxygenate” your mind. Moreover, the woods all around, solitude, and that silence that is typical of a hunting trip are all great stimulants for thought. Henceforth, trust me, when you’ll be out hunting, pack with you not only your lunch basket and little flask, but also your notebooks. You’ll see for yourself that Minerva treads these mountains no less than Diana does. All the best.

Pliny opens the epistle with a statement that needs further commentary, based as it is on a cultural assumption (and maybe a specific text) that goes beyond the anecdotal explanations usually provided. Addressing Tacitus from the countryside, Pliny writes that his correspondent will laugh because he has caught three wild boars. What is so strange about Pliny’s hunting success that it elicits a laugh from Tacitus? Hunting was a respectable sport for a Roman, and there appears to be no cultural bias against it,34 unless, and here lies the nub of Pliny’s joke, one had painted a portrait of oneself like Pliny’s, i.e., as being solely devoted to studia and litterae. Hunting was the leisure activity most remote from a life of studies. At Ben. 1.11.6

34

Cf., e.g., Cic. Off. 1.29: Suppeditant autem et campus noster et studia venandi honesta exempla ludendi. See Aymard 1951: 465–558, especially the section “L’anatroph´e de Trajan et le th`eme de l’honnˆete distraction,” 492–8, and Green 1996, who surveys all the references to Roman hunting and concludes that “hunting was indeed a Romanis sollemne viris opus” (258). Pliny himself in the Panegyric lists hunting as one of Trajan’s virtues (Pan. 81). See, most recently, Woolf 2003: 212–15, who argues that Pliny is presenting literary activity as an alternative to the newly fashionable passion for hunting.

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Seneca proverbially declares that when giving gifts, we should mind who the receiver is: Utique cavebimus, ne munera supervacua mittamus, ut feminae aut seni arma venatoria, ut rustico libros, ut studiis ac litteris dedito retia. And let’s pay attention that we don’t send meaningless gifts, such would be hunting implements to a female or to an old man, or books to a peasant, or nets to someone devoted to intellectual pursuits and literature.

The strangeness of the opening, which contrasts the hunting and cultural implements mentioned in the letter (arma venatoria, retia), continues in the body of the text. The inappropriate objects that Pliny insists on bringing together (stilus, pugillares and cerae with or, rather, instead of retia, venabulum and lancea) define a metaphoric field of tensions within which the witty note moves with great ease. Pliny does not stop at the paradox of his recipe for “hunting with studia”: he advertises his hunting trip as fruitful both on the literary and the “venatory” level, and he goes so far as to recommend that Tacitus try it himself. If in his hunting trips Tacitus would take along not only knapsack and flask but also stilus and wax tablets, he would realize that Diana and Minerva alike wander the woods. The apparent facility with which Pliny’s paradoxical argument pairs hunting and writing hides, however, a fundamental misrepresentation of the first of these activities, and hardly an innocent one. In order for these two forms of leisure to go together well, Pliny has to radically modify the normal cultural associations of one of them. Addressing Tacitus, Pliny emphasizes only rather unexpected features of hunting, the first of which is quies. The text of 1.6 insists on the peaceful quality of Pliny’s special brand of hunting: the keywords are inertia, quies, sedebam, meditabar. The unexpected association of hunting and quies makes of Pliny a peculiar hunter;35 one, however, who is not unprecedented in his hunting style. In Virgil, during the poetic contest with Damoetas, Menalcas says: Quin prodest, quod me ipse animo non spernis, Amynta si, dum tu sectaris apros, ego retia servo? (Ecl. 3.74–5)

What good is it that you don’t spurn me in your soul, Amynta, if, while you chase wild boars, I guard the nets? 35

He is able to court the paradox of enjoying quiet during the hunt, rather than after it, as would be more typical (cf. the ill-fated rest that brings together two hunters, Diana and Acteon, in Ov. Met. 3.154–74, or the no less ruinous intermission from hunting Cephalus enjoys at Ars 3.695).

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The Virgilian situation provides Pliny with both a thematic antecedent and a linguistic model that places the letter in the bucolic realm of leisure hunting. This form of sport does exist in poetry: one can hunt by sitting quietly near the nets, in spite of the usual association of hunting with toil, sweat and noise that is represented, for example, in Martial’s dedicatory epigram of Book 12: Retia dum cessant latratoresque Molossi, et non invento silva quiescit apro, otia, Prisce, brevi poteris donare libello. Hora nec aestiva est nec tibi tota perit. When the nets are dropped, the barking of the dogs falls silent, and the boar you have not found has left the wood in peace, then you’ll have time at hand, Priscus, to give to my short book. The day is not long as in the summer; still, you won’t waste it all.

Martial makes clear that reading, and a fortiori an editing-oriented reading, cannot be pursued at the same time as hunting, precisely for the reasons that Pliny seems to believe make them compatible: it is only when nets, noisy dogs and wild boars are absent that Priscus can, and should, engage in actively reading Martial’s book.36 After all, Servius’ comment on Eclogue 3.75 also showed that Damoetas’ (and Pliny’s) restful hunting style is all but the rule. If hunting is supposed to be a pleasure, he writes, “guarding the nets is a thing that in the hunt affords minimal pleasure” (“retia servo” quae res in venatione minus possidet voluptatis). Hunting is about chasing prey out of the woods, and it is a group-activity that involves barking packs of dogs and hunters who run through the woods disturbing their peace. And yet Pliny insists on systematically associating it with a bucolic ambience of groves, silence and solitude (iam undique silvae et solitudo ipsumque illud silentium . . .).37 Tacitus, or any educated Roman, might have objected to Pliny’s bucolic picture on the grounds that this is not what hunting is 36

37

That in the exordium Martial is not simply asking for a passive, leisurely reading is suggested in the prose cover-letter to the book, still addressed to Priscus: Tu velim ista . . . diligenter aestimare et excutere non graveris; et . . . de nugis nostris iudices nitore seposito. The move is commonplace in dedicatory proems (Janson 1964: 106–12), but the language still has some literal import in constructing the image of the addressee reading pen-in-hand. It is perhaps worth noting that the expression undique siluae probably bears a mark of origin. The syntagm is found in the bucolic poet Calpurnius Siculus in the form: qualiter haec patulum concedit vallis in orbem / et sinuata latus resupinis undique silvis / inter continuos curvatur concava montes (Ecl. 7.30–2). Although the dating problems connected with this poet – is he Neronian or much later? (see Armstrong 1986 and Champlin 1986) – might interfere with my argument, they also might receive some light from it. If Calpurnius is actually of the Neronian age, Pliny would be alluding to a text fresh in the mind of his readers. A different antecedent can be found, outside of the bucolic genre in Lucretius 1.256ff.; see the discussion below.

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about. It might be true that Diana and Minerva inhabit the same woods, but while they live there, they surely engage in different activities. But what does the constellation of motifs briefly explored above have to do with Tacitus? Why address him directly with this paradoxical image of a fellow litteratus who quietly hunts and leisurely writes at the same time? The evaluation of Pliny’s quotation in praesentia from the Dialogus might provide an answer. When Pliny writes to Tacitus that he should not despise this kind of intellectual work (hoc studendi genus) and notes that it’s incredible what a little exercise and bodily motion can do for the mind (mirum est ut animus agitatione motuque corporis excitetur), he not only shifts the emphasis from hunting to the associated pastime of learning, turning a text allegedly about sports into one about writing, he also readdresses to its author a significant fragment of the Dialogus.38 As has long been recognized, here Pliny alludes to the expression motibus excitetur of Dialogus 36.1, a passage (most likely in the voice of Maternus) that hinges on the famous simile of great eloquence as an ignited torch: magna eloquentia, sicut flamma, materia alitur et motibus excitatur et urendo clarescit (grand eloquence is just like a flame: its subject-matter sustains it, agitation propels it, and it is in burning that it shines brighter).39 Since it comes right after a lacuna in Tacitus’ text, some debate has arisen concerning the character in the Dialogus to which one should ascribe the long tirade against the political ills on which the healthy Republican oratory relied.40 Yet its importance has never been underestimated. The passage that has attracted the critics’ (and, as we shall see, Pliny’s) attention contains, in fact, Tacitus’ most striking paradox in his cultural diagnosis of the decline of oratory. In the same breath as he acknowledges that Republican oratory was indeed healthy compared to today’s poor performances, he connects the art’s splendor with the political strife that was dilacerating the state. In Maternus’ assessment of the situation, brilliance is not always a good thing: Magna eloquentia, sicut flamma, materia alitur et motibus excitatur et urendo clarescit. Eadem ratio in nostra quoque civitate antiquorum eloquentiam provexit. Nam etsi horum quoque temporum oratores ea consecuti sunt quae composita et quieta et beata re publica tribui fas erat, tamen illa perturbatione ac licentia 38

39 40

That 1.6 is devoted to matters of eloquence should not come as a surprise, when one considers that 1.5 had already set up the tone for a discussion of oratory and thus opened a metaliterary dimension for the allusive explorations of 1.6. In 1.5 Pliny treats the intermingling of political strife and oratorical activity, and he muses on his emulation of Cicero. Ep. 1.5 is not only about the setting star of Regulus after Domitian’s death, but also about the healthy status of eloquentiae saeculi nostri. Bru`ere 1954: 166–8. But the parallel had already been noted by Gudeman 1894 and Schuster 1952. For a historical survey of the discussions on the lacunae in the archetype of the Dialogus, see Bo 1993: 163–202.

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plura sibi adsequi videbantur, cum mixtis omnibus et moderatore uno carentibus tantum quisque orator saperet quantum erranti populo persuaderi poterat. Hinc leges assiduae et populare nomen, hinc contiones magistratuum paene pernoctantium in rostris, hinc accusationes potentium reorum et adsignatae etiam domibus inimicitiae, hinc procerum factiones et adsidua senatus adversus plebem certamina. Quae singula etsi distrahebant rem publicam, exercebant tamen illorum temporum eloquentiam et magnis cumulare praemiis videbantur, quia quanto quisque plus dicendo poterat, tanto facilius honores adsequebatur, tanto magis in ipsis honoribus collegas suos anteibat, tanto plus apud principes gratiae, plus auctoritatis apud patres, plus notitiae ac nominis apud plebem parabat. (Dial. 36.1–4) Grand eloquence is just like a flame: its subject-matter sustains it, agitation propels it, and it is in its burning that it shines brighter. The same causes propelled the eloquence of yore in our society. Although they were already reaping all the benefits that could come from times in which civil society is well organized, sedate, and at peace, orators appeared to be reaping even more in the midst of all that turmoil and license. When chaos and conflict reigned among the powers in the absence of an individual who could lead, the more orators were able to sway the erring people, the more they were valued. Thence came the short-lived laws and fickle popularity; thence the speeches of magistrates who seemed to spend the night on their podium; thence the frivolous lawsuits targeting prominent figures and the feuds passed on as if to legatees; thence the factions dividing the ruling class and the constant struggle between the senate and the plebs. Each item on the list, taken singularly, was contributing to the ruin of civil society; and yet, taken together, they all contributed to stir eloquence in those days and to make it seem capable of piling great rewards on its practitioners. The better one performed in his speeches, the more easily he could get into office, the more efficiently he could steal the spotlight from his colleagues, be rewarded by the powers that be, have influence on the senate, and win renown and praise from the plebs.

Maternus’ language is deadly in its precision and his argument loses none of its cogency even when the rhetorical tone is raised in the final double tricolon of the passage (quanto / tanto magis / tanto plus; plus apud principes / plus . . . apud patres / plus . . . apud plebem). The healthy state of oratory was a by-product of the malaise afflicting civil society in all its orders. Indeed, oratory might have been more than a mere symptom: it might have contributed to producing some of the ills of that society. In the passage, a twice-repeated syntactic choice carefully depersonalizes the situation: conjugated in the passive (with impersonal value), the verb videri prevents readers from pinpointing who is evaluating the circumstances in which the late Republican orators moved. To whom do those orators appear favored by troubled circumstances? Who looks at eloquence in time of civil strife and sees it as an efficient means of self-promotion? If it doesn’t name any names, the indictment is nonetheless precise in involving the practitioners

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of the art of oratory in its eventually suicidal use: it is the orators themselves (or those around them who are all too eager and ready to join their ranks) who feel that they are going to reap greater benefits from a seditious society, perennially at war with itself, than they would in times of peace. Oratory feeds on strife, but it is also instrumental in creating more of the same, its light a dangerous, self-feeding and all-consuming fire. This is the point of the central simile in the Dialogus: eloquence feeds its own flame and consumes what gives it strength, eloquentia . . . materia alitur. In addition to all the advantages that eloquence always grants when a community is at peace, Republican orators also gained the (greater) advantages that derived from political and social turmoil. Although it might appear otherwise to the sensibility of modern readers, the Dialogus insists that the end of political strife and social dialectics brought about by the Principate has proved salutary; if not for “grand oratory,” at least for the “measured” daily practice of the art.41 In his diagnosis of oratory’s great past (and implicitly its present decadence), Tacitus’ text was reversing Cicero’s point of view on the healthy relationship between order and oratory: Pacis est comes otique socia et iam bene constitutae civitatis quasi alumna quaedam eloquentia. (Cic. Brut. 45) Eloquence enjoys the company of peace and it partners up with leisure; it is the offspring, so speak, of a well-ordered community.

Insisting on the sociopolitical dangers inherent in having all the conditions for great eloquence in place, the Dialogus polemically recycles Cicero’s language. Through the voice of Maternus, Tacitus makes the same diagnosis considered above, now from an ethical rather than historical and political point of view. Most likely to again defend his choice of peaceful poetic muses over the agonistic engagement with civil and political oratory, Maternus remarks: Non de otiosa et quieta re loquimur et quae probitate et modestia gaudeat, sed est magna illa et notabilis eloquentia alumna licentiae, quam stulti libertatem vocant, comes seditionum, effrenati populi incitamentum, sine obsequio sine severitate, contumax temeraria adrogans, quae in bene constitutis civitatibus non oritur. (Dial. 40.2) Look, we are not talking of something leisurely and quiet here; something that enjoys upright behavior and moderation. An eloquence that wants to be grand and not go unnoticed is the offspring of license, that thing that fools call freedom. It goes hand in hand with sedition and the unleashing of a stirred-up mob; it has no 41

Goldberg 1999; contra, Winterbottom 1964.

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room for respect and none for dignity, either. Shameless, brazen, impudent: you will never find it in any well-ordered community.

Of course, the “modernist” (in Goldberg’s terms) position that the Dialogus takes here has some noticeable corollaries that might be important for evaluating Tacitus’ own intellectual history. If, as some have argued, the Dialogus is to be placed at the dawn of his activity as a historian, it might be read as Tacitus’ own polemical farewell to the arms of oratory.42 Indeed the dialogue foregrounds the utter “untimeliness” of oratory by presenting the decay of oratorical practice as a fait accompli and defending the poetic alternative. This line of argument forms an ideal platform to justify its author’s eventual shift from oratorical engagement to historiographical activity. Beyond its role as a stepping stone for the new orientation that Tacitus might have intended to give his career, the Dialogus sheds light on a wider cultural picture. Its comments on the status of eloquence and the language deployed in its diagnosis thinly veil the keywords that articulate the cultural and political debates of the time. In the text, the movement away from the Ciceronian perfection of contemporary oratory is not offered ipso facto as a sign of social and political decadence. After all, the libertas feeding “old” oratory was dangerously close to licentia and the flame-feeding motus amounted to no less a dangerous perturbatio of the social body. The new political climate of restored order, achieved under the harmonious guidance of the single princeps and the senate, might have restricted contemporary orators within the narrow confines of pleading civil cases in front of mere centumviral courts (Dial. 38.2); and yet what has been gained in terms of social cohesion outweighs the loss of larger, if more troubled, arenas for public speaking. Eloquence is, in sum, a thing of the past because its inflammatory quality is out of place in the new world order achieved in the Flavian age.43 Reversing the commonly negative association of the maxim, the Dialogus offers as its underlying principle that every age has the eloquence it deserves. Our (better) age, Maternus implicitly suggests, has its own (worse) kind of eloquence. In proposing this paradox, Tacitus’ speaker comes closest to appearing as his most direct mouthpiece. The argument may be advanced only in a comparative, and hence limiting, way: since he appears to be voicing the least traditional of views, and only insofar as he does so, Maternus may 42 43

For the proposed dating and connection with historiography, see Syme 1958: 670–3. Cf. the interplay of several passages: Dial. 36.3, 37.5–6 (balanced by 38.2), 40.4 and 41.4. Pliny’s Ep. 9.26 on Atticist brevity and Ciceronian long-winded amplitude interacts with the latter. On the new political circumstances calling for oratorical brevity, see Riggsby 1995.

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be seen as expressing Tacitus’ point of view. If it is necessarily based only on partial evidence, the argument has some merit. The position Maternus takes in the dialogue is comparatively distinct. In Tacitus’ day, the mainstream assessment of oratory’s decadence insisted on educational rather than sociopolitical factors. Despite all their individual differences, the voices of Quintilian, Seneca Rhetor, and even of Petronius’ characters all sounded the same note. Following the iron rule of any golden age, writers as diverse as the ones just listed all concurred that the good old days of oratory were gone. In the present, they argued, eloquence was at a loss because the schooling system of the past had been abandoned. Training no longer embraced that variety of disciplines which used to lead, quite naturally, to the crowning achievements of oratory; students were immediately entrusted to the care of professional teachers, who had little or no experience in the craft they were passing on, rather than to experienced practitioners of real-life oratory; modern training consisted merely of empty school exercises, the topics of which were so removed from what students were most likely to encounter in their eventual practice that they bordered on absurdity.44 This threepronged indictment of modern oratorical pedagogy is familiar to readers of Tacitus’ Dialogus: in his long tirade against “modernity,” Messalla follows precisely the same schema in reviewing the causes for the corruption of contemporary eloquence. By first contrasting Messalla to Aper (on matters of canon-formation) and then to Maternus (on the more crucial sociopolitical issue), Tacitus’ text balances the (ultimately optimistic) point of view of the schoolmaster with that of the politician-turned-poet. For the former, a classicist reform in the curriculum of studies was going to cure all of oratory’s current ills. For the latter, more pessimistically, the eloquentia saeculi nostri was doomed (but for a good cause) never to recover from what idealists, nostalgic for the Republican past, insisted on calling loss of freedom, but which was, more exactly, the curbing of anarchic licentia. To those who, while reading Robert Pinsky, complain that our time has produced no poets of Vladimir Mayakovski’s force, the Dialogus politely asks if they perhaps also regret that no Red October is on the horizon either. 44

The loci deputati for this discussion are common knowledge. After the inaugural chime sounded by Velleius Paterculus (at 1.16–17, though in a larger scheme in which world-senescence and epochal change are interwoven), they range from the lost, but often-alluded-to, De causis corruptae eloquentiae by Quintilian (Inst. 5.12.23 and 6.praef.3; particular insistence on declamations at 2.10), to his pedagogical program as laid out in the first two books of the Institutio (the cure there proposed culminates in the discussion at 12.1.21); from what is today the first extant fragment of Petronius’ Satyrica (1–4) to the prefaces to Seneca’s Controversiae (especially 1.praef.6–7 and 3.praef.12–13). For Greek sources, see Longinus, Subl. 44. For a similar line of argument developed in poetry, cf. Juv. 7.105–49. Cf. Kennedy 1972: 515–26, Fairweather 1981: 132–48 and Fantham 1978a: 15–16 and 1978b: 112–15. For a rehabilitation of declamatory pleading, see Bloomer 1997: 111–53.

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The discussions about the impending or accomplished decline of oratory acted out in the Dialogus form the necessary background for understanding the epistles Pliny addresses to Tacitus. Activated by Pliny’s singular intertext, the cultural context resonates in his letter. It might only be an accident of philology that the voice of Pliny’s potentially homonymous speaker is absent from what of Tacitus’ Dialogus has come down to us.45 Given the lacuna affecting the crucial section between chapters 35 and 36, we may never know if in his letter Pliny was alluding in any way to what might have been Julius Secundus’ speech. What we can assess, however, is the clear intention on Pliny’s part to react to Tacitus’ work in a text over which he could maintain full control. Pliny’s focus in responding to Tacitus is not on politics, but strictly (albeit allusively) on the ground rules of the oratorial art. Unlike Maternus, who insisted on agitation as a paradoxically positive stimulus for an intellectual activity on the demise for which he is not ready to shed any tears, Pliny associates hunting and its intellectual advantages with quies rather than motus. Given the paradoxical context in which it is couched, Pliny’s literal allusion is rather out of place, and the dialogue in which it engages with Tacitus’ text may only be responsive in nature. Pliny’s epistolary rejoinder focuses on the advantages that quies affords in the realm of intellectual production. The agitation that appeared so central to Tacitus’ simile is ironically recalled, only to be diluted in the characterization of hunting as a quiet activity. By citing it in praesentia, Pliny subverts Tacitus’ simile and insists that the unmoving, solitary and silent intellectual is able to produce good results in spite of the metaphoric setup of his original text. Murgia’s commentary is very helpful in illumining this point: he contends that Pliny’s formulation depends completely on the “recognition of some antecedent to gain full meaning,” and identifies this antecedent in Tacitus. Murgia’s argument rightly insists that “in Tacitus, the argument is explicit.” No element of the simile is missing: “just as a flame can be excited by real motion, so we may deduce that eloquence may be stimulated by metaphorical motions, the disturbance of a troubled state.” On the contrary, in Pliny, the argument skips one passage and immediately connects material motion with spiritual excitement. Murgia is right in observing that “unless the reader already knows the Dialogus,” Pliny’s argument is not very convincing.46 Even if Tacitus is Pliny’s antecedent, it need not be the case that Pliny’s point is exactly the same as Tacitus’. Indeed, it is the opposite. It is not true that the soul is put to work productively only “by activity and movement” (agitatione motuque); quiet and static hunting, a 45

Cf. the discussion in Bo 1993: 203–12.

46

Murgia 1985: 175.

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situation of almost absolute immobility, is no less productive for the work of the animus than chasing after wild boars. In Pliny, intellectual cogitatio is opposed to physical agitatio and the paradoxical quies of hunters like him is opposed to motus: the best thoughts are produced by the mind of someone who sits beside the nets, surrounded by woods, solitude and silence. The winning cultural formula for Pliny is otium cum studiis, and it is only when the Republic’s disorder has waned that this otium is possible. Developing Tacitus’ point in a new direction, Pliny’s text insists that rhetoric does not need, even as a premise to be negated, the political dissensions of old times. When he recuperates the key metaphor of the Dialogus in Ep. 1.6 and readdresses it to its author, Pliny plays a refined and polite joke on his correspondent’s text. The rewriting strategy he deploys may be meant as an inside joke; however, the issues upon which his letter reflects are larger. Actually, as we have seen, they are some of the most pressing in their day. In spite of their common pursuit of studia, their basically equal literary and social rankings, and the politeness of their exchanges, Pliny and Tacitus find themselves on opposite sides when it comes to adjudicating the status, and, more crucially, the role of eloquence in their time. The tense discussions looming large beneath the playful epistolary conversation have left further traces in Ep. 1.6. That the letter is about oratory may be suggested not only because, by re-using one of its catchphrases, the letter responds to a work by Tacitus on the subject. Pliny’s text also contains another culturally loaded expression, drawn again from the discussions about the state of eloquence in his day. The split model of hunting epitomized in Eclogue 3.74–5 deploys a technical term for Amyntas’ chase drawn from the lexica of hunting, love and rhetoric. This term might have appealed to Pliny precisely for its cultural polysemy. If indeed Pliny’s own strange hunting style alludes to Menalcas sitting beside the nets, Amyntas’ opposite method, apros sectari, comes in close semantic contact with one of the most widespread and central principles of the orator’s program of education advertised in the classical and classicizing tradition from Cicero to Quintilian, and leaving a clear trace in Tacitus’ Dialogus. As we have just seen, it was a commonplace that one of the causes of eloquence’s crisis (for Cicero, only potential; for Quintilian, regrettably actual) was the abandonment of the old-fashioned custom of entrusting the education of young orators-to-be to renowned men involved in politics, actual practitioners, rather than simple teachers of the art. The argument in favor of hands-on experience and against abstract rules or empty declamatory school-exercises passes almost unaltered from the first century bce to the

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first century ce.47 Among the words of longue dur´ee associated with the argument one finds the term sectari. Tacitus uses it twice in its technical sense of “assiduously following in order to gain knowledge”: first, at Dial. 2.1, he applies it to his own experience as sectator of Aper and Secundus (and hence a not-unlikely spectator of their conversations with Maternus and Messalla); then again at 34.2 and 6 (with a slight variation, sequere, in section 4) for the common experience of other students of oratory. Pliny’s airing of the Virgilian fragment from Eclogue 3 might therefore include a play not only on a situation central to the Dialogus but also on one of its technical terms: sectari apros would then be something that Pliny distances from himself on two different levels. His intellectual activity is fostered by quies; his meditations (meditabar aliquid, 1.6.2) do not end up as the assiduous trailing of a teacher. A last minimal gloss might be added at this point, concerning an additional allusive element of Ep. 1.6. It is a detail that, though marginal, confirms the general line of interpretation for Pliny’s text as a responsive redefinition of Tacitus’ Dialogus. We have seen how, singled out by its metric structure from the bucolic features of Pliny’s unusual hunting ground, the letter contains the syntagm undique silvae (an Adonius, dactyl + spondee, suitable for the close of a hexameter). As noted above, the expression is present only in two other extant texts, an eclogue by Calpurnius Siculus and a passage in Book 1 of Lucretius’ De rerum natura. While Calpurnius’ eclogue does not seem to resonate anywhere else either in Pliny’s or in Tacitus’ text, the Lucretian context from which Pliny might have drawn his undique silvae echoes in Tacitus’ Dialogus at two particular points. If we read Lucretius’ passage in its entirety, we realize that both some of its key terms and the peculiar syntactic movement of its central section can also be found in the Dialogus section relevant for Pliny’s Ep. 1.6. Lucretius anticipates both the naturalistic simile of the burning torch, and the list of typically Republican maladies introduced by the fourfold repetition of the adverb hinc: haud igitur redit ad nihilum res ulla, sed omnes discidio redeunt in corpora materiai. Postremo pereunt imbres, ubi eos pater aether in gremium matris terrai precipitavit; at nitidae surgunt fruges ramique virescunt arboribus, crescent ipsae fetuque gravantur; 47

Located at chronological extremes, cf. Cic. de Orat. 2.1–2 and Quint. Inst. 12.11.5. For Pliny’s view on tirocinium, cf., most explicitly, Ep. 8.14.5.

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The Art of Pliny’s Letters hinc alitur porro nostrum genus atque ferarum, hinc laetas urbes pueris florere videmus frondiferasque novis avibus canere undique silvas, hinc fessae pecudes pinguis per pabula laeta corpora deponunt et candens lacteus umor uberibus manat distentis, hinc nova proles artubus infirmis teneras lasciva per herbas ludit lacte mero mentes perculsa novellas. haud igitur penitus pereunt quaecumque videntur, quando alit ex alio reficit natura nec ullam rem gigni patitur nisi morte adiuta aliena. (Lucr. 1.248–64)

Thus, no thing goes back to nothingness; they all go back, once dissociated, to the elements of prime matter. You see the rain disappear into the womb of mother earth, where father sky had cast it: and now the harvest shines on the field, on trees branches grow leaves, and grow themselves, and they bear fruit. Thence draw their nourishment the families of men and animals alike; thence we see happy cities bustle with children, and the dense woods all around sing with the call of new birds; thence the flock, once fed, recline their tired bodies on the grass of the rich pasture, their udders tense with white, oozing milk; thence new kids play on the fresh grass – their limbs unsteady yet, their fresh minds inebriated with pure milk. Of all things seen the final destiny is not just death, since nature is always building something from all things; no thing can come to life unless the death of another is there to help.

Once compared with the language of the Lucretian passage, Tacitus’ simile appears less and less neutral. It might be the case that in the Dialogus the example of the torch was actually supposed to be read in a scientific tone: to Lucretius belong at least materia and alitur, while the expression eadem ratio or even the vexed motibus excitetur could be part of the materialistic diction of Lucretius’ physics. The impression that Pliny might be referring his readers (in particular, his immediate reader Tacitus) to Lucretius via his almost isolated use of the tag undique silvas is reinforced by the series of four parallel instances of hinc, a construction that Lucretius’ passage shares with Dialogus 36.3. If we return to Tacitus’ diagnosis of the strictly sociopolitical side effects of the turbulent conditions that had brought about the “healthy” oratory in the last years of the Republic, we find the same fourfold set of adverbs as in Lucretius: hinc leges . . . hinc contiones . . . hinc accusationes . . . hinc procerum factiones. By reusing the poetic fragment undique silvae immediately after quoting Tacitus’ torch simile, Pliny is perhaps re-constructing the bridge between Tacitus’ and Lucretius’ texts. In so doing, he might signal to his readers that he has something to say about both the literary/philosophic origin and the essence of Tacitus’ argument in Dialogus 36. In the Tacitean passage, the

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silent re-use of Lucretius’ language risked overemphasizing the second term in the Epicurean balanced image of order (and growth) issuing from dissension (and death). Tacitus’ perturbatio and licentia work in the political realm as do in nature the disrupting forces which dissolve the connections between bodies (quorum contextum vis deberet dissolvere). But while in Lucretius disruption and recombination, death and generation are finally balanced, the argument of the Dialogus appeared to leave no room for the generative chain of life-from-death that Lucretius had introduced with the fourfold hinc. Recovering Lucretius’ original while commenting on Tacitus’ re-use, Pliny might be readdressing this organic and peaceful balance. Once again, in his responsive use of a fragment of (indirect) Tacitean origin, Pliny recasts Tacitus’ antecedent by subtly attacking its intertextual strategies and ultimately deconstructing its very language. A reading of Pliny’s Ep. 1.6 cannot do without considering its counterpart in the collection, Ep. 9.10. In this text, located at the opposite end of the work, Pliny continues and refines his conversation with Tacitus’ Dialogus. The two texts have always been read in close connection with each other; indeed, they respond to one another so well that the latter has sometimes been considered Tacitus’ answer to Pliny’s first note.48 The text of 9.10 invites us to make the connection: its diction reproduces the lighthearted and elegant tone of 1.6; the theme of the interweaving of hunting and writing recalls the earlier note; and 9.10 recycles both the mythological paradigm of Diana and Minerva and the (metaphoric) element of the wild boars. The two letters mirror one another. C. PLINIUS TACITO SUO S. Cupio praeceptis tui parere; sed aprorum tanta penuria est, ut Minervae et Dianae, quas ais pariter colendas, convenire non possit. Itaque Minervae tantum serviendum est, delicate tamen ut in secessu et aestate. In via plane non nulla leviora statimque delenda ea garrulitate qua sermones in vehiculo seruntur extendi. His quaedam addidi in villa, cum aliud non liberet. Itaque poemata quiescunt, quae tu inter nemora et lucos commodissime perfici putas. Oratiunculam unam alteram retractavi; quamquam id genus operis inamabile inamoenum, magisque laboribus ruris quam voluptatibus simile. Vale. Dear Tacitus, I really would like to heed your advice, but there is such a shortage of boars that it’s impossible to make both Minerva and Diana happy, those you say one should worship to the same degree. And so, for now I’ll have to serve only Minerva, but 48

Lef`evre (1978: 37–8) reviews the debate, arguing against B¨utler and Hermann that 9.10 does not “mirror” 1.6, and hence is not to be ascribed to a different author. B¨utler deems “unlikely” that Pliny is the author of both letters and notes that, if both by Pliny, the two epistles are strategically placed as far apart as possible (1970: 45–6); Hermann categorically ascribes Ep. 1.6 to Tacitus (1965: 352).

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lightly, as I am away from the city and it’s summer time. I’ve been writing some little things: nothing serious, of the kind that lasts one day, like the small talk one has while traveling. Once at home, I’ve added something to these, since I wasn’t in the mood for anything else. And so, nothing new on the poems’ front, those you think would come most natural “amidst woods and groves.” I’ve edited a couple of my orationettes, meanwhile, even if it is a kind of work with nothing to be loved or even liked about it. You may say I’ve been toiling rather than enjoying myself in the fields. Be well.

The similarities one can detect between 1.6 and 9.10 are reinforced by the common target of their allusions. Ep. 9.10 returns to Tacitus’ Dialogus and enters in immediate contact with its text. Pliny’s technique is the same witnessed above, citation in praesentia; also similar is the attitude that his citational strategy conveys. While at first glance the epistle is only an elegant responsive note, it contains elements of strong disagreement with the texts with which it converses. Pliny’s allusions point again to the central question of the Dialogus, the alleged (or assumed) decline of oratory, and tackle it from a new, complementary point of view. When Pliny addresses Tacitus by reciting his words about the necessity of worshiping Diana and Minerva in the same manner (but not at the same time), he sets up his response as a literal redeployment of his correspondent’s lexicon and metaphors. As Lef`evre showed, Pliny’s words quas ais pariter colendas are a subtle representation with variation of the language Pliny received from Tacitus in his answer to 1.6.49 Pliny confers upon Tacitus the same level of authorial commitment to his words when he quotes him from the Dialogus a few lines below: itaque poemata quiescunt, quae tu inter nemora et lucos commodissime perfici putas.50 The allusion is pointed and targets two relevant loci of the Dialogus.51 At Dialogus 9.6, Maternus notes that one ought to retreat into the quiet of the countryside to write poetry: Deserenda cetera officia, utque ipsi dicunt in nemora et lucos, id est in solitudinem, recedendum est. 49

50 51

“Die taciteischen praecepta m¨ussen also ein nicht u¨ berliefertes ‘Zwischenglied’ sein” (1978: 41). In 1.6 Pliny had invited Tacitus to a simultaneous cult of Diana and Minerva; in his answer to 1.6 Tacitus must have insisted on the equality in allegiance, which is what Pliny recites to him in 9.10 (pariter). On the value of commode in this context, see Cova 1966: 124, n. 158. On the specificity of the allusion targeting Tacitus’ text, see Lef`evre 1978: 43 and Luce 1993: 14–15. Against it, see Sherwin-White 1966: 487–9. The only poetic text in which I was able to locate the two terms nemora and lucos as a pair is Verg. Ecl. 8.86. Hor. Ep. 2.2.77–8 speaks of nemus and umbra and of nemus and silvae in S. 2.6.90–2. In prose, several texts offer different versions of the pair: Curt. 7.5.34, Plin. Nat. 4.89 and 35.116, Tac. G. 9.2 and 45.5. Quint. Inst. 10.3.22 uses nemora silvasque. The presence of the nexus in a poet’s text provides a genealogical basis for Maternus’ remark ut ipsi aiunt.

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All other duties need to be abandoned and one has to retire into solitude, or, as the poets say, “into the woods and groves.”

He comes back to this point at 12.1, when he claims that he finds unsurpassed pleasure in the solitude of the countryside: Nemora vero et luci et secretum ipsum, quod Aper increpabat, tantam mihi adferunt voluptatem ut inter praecipuos carminum fructus numerem. But the woods and groves and the solitude itself, the same Aper attacked earlier on, give me so much pleasure that I consider them among the foremost advantages of poetry.

Pliny apparently responds to Tacitus by accepting his premise and negating his conclusions: “It is true, as you say, that the country is the place to compose poetry, but my poetry is not coming out right.” The text of 9.10 is not ambiguous on this point: along the way, Pliny was able to draft some short texts, but they were statim delenda, and he added some others once he arrived, but only for lack of a better occupation. The situation Pliny sets up is the same one with which he opens the letter: “I really would like to follow your advice to hunt and write at the same time, but this is not really the right season.” Tacitus is right in what he prescribes but Pliny cannot live up to his friend’s expectations. The schema is so neat that a recent editor of Tacitus’ Dialogus has glossed Maternus’ words at 9.6 as follows: “the expression was recalled flatteringly in a letter to Tacitus from Pliny.”52 But is this idyllic picture really accurate? Is Pliny backing away from the criticism he leveled at the Dialogus in 1.6? As has been noted, Pliny never frontally deals with the bleak picture of the present condition of oratory that Tacitus paints in the Dialogus, nor does he engage in polemical exchange with the author of a text that, after all, called into question the value of his work as an advocate in the second-tier “centumviral courts” Maternus had evoked at 40.2.53 It is a strange circumstance, since his hope of becoming a modern classic risks being preempted by the argument that Tacitus has Maternus advance in the work, albeit in a general sense and without naming names. Maternus postulated the decline of modern oratory with such an authoritative and apodictic voice that he did not even feel the need to prove his point. On one occasion, he simply steered the discussion towards an inquiry into the causes of oratory’s decline as if the fact that it had declined had been established (Dial. 27.1–3).54 This line of argument is not very complimentary to Pliny 52 54

53 Syme 1958: 112–15; Murgia 1980: 121–2, and most recently, Luce 1993: 19. Mayer 2001: 116. His position is endorsed, in an indicative aside, by no lesser authority than the authorial voice in the outermost frame of the dialogue: at Dial. 1.2, Tacitus notes that his text will report, rather than

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and hardly in tune with his position on the problem.55 If, as Maternus maintains, the ranks of the oratorical classics were to be considered full and nothing worth being preserved could be produced in the present, all the care Pliny put into publishing his oratorical exploits was a waste. The principle that an age without conflicts is sic et simpliciter an age without great writing makes Pliny’s bid to fame mere wishful thinking. He had invested great energy and great hope in the potential of oratory to confer immediate renown and possibly long-lasting fame. As we have seen, Ep. 9.10 is not isolated in giving an account of Pliny’s commitment to the publication of his speeches;56 nor was Pliny completely wrong in his endeavor. Even without the Epistles, the Panegyricus to Trajan has survived through time and has rescued Pliny’s name from oblivion. One might argue that Pliny need not have broached such a delicate subject with his friend, because Tacitus had never made disparaging remarks about oratory in his own voice. What Maternus said in the Dialogus was not (and is not) to be confused with Tacitus’ own point of view. As Luce noted, “Maternus is not Tacitus, because of the obvious fact that he is not, and also because of Tacitus’ obligation to present Maternus with at least some of the trappings of the man’s milieu and temperament.”57 One might even grant the additional point that Tacitus’ strategy in the Dialogus is based on authorial “self-effacement” and rhetorical detachment from the speeches of the interlocutors.58 Yet, the language in which Pliny’s allusion to the Dialogus is phrased may suggest otherwise. It might be true, in sum, that ancient and modern readers alike have neither the inclination nor the competence to ascribe the voice of the author to one of his characters. Yet, at least one ancient reader of the text felt that he had the right and the tools to do so.

55

56

57

58

his own opinion, that “of the most eloquent men he was able to find in his day” (disertissimorum, ut nostris temporibus, hominum). For “a partial riposte” to the bleak assessment in the Dialogus, see Tac. Ann. 3.55.5 and the discussion in Woodman and Martin 1996: 407–11. In spite of his own limiting statements on the potential glory available to centumviral lawyers voiced in 2.14.1 (causae pleraque parvae et exiles), Pliny insisted that oratory was indeed the main arena in which his success could and should be measured (cf. Ep. 6.11). Mayer 2003 offers further material focusing on how the letters promote Pliny’s oratory. Not by chance two epistles immediately following Pliny’s response to Tacitus deal with Pliny as a published author. The first presents Pliny as a success at the bookstore in the provinces (9.11); the second, under the pretense of adding some background information, refers the addressee back to the published speech De Helvidi ultione (9.13). The skeptical thesis is championed by Luce 1986: 143–58, and is taken up again in 1993: 33–8. Here Luce remarks that Tacitus pointedly avoids Cicero’s admission that Crassus is his spokesman in the proem of the De oratore (27). Luce 1993: 37.

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The allusive metaphoric language that Pliny deploys in the letter may shed some light on the issue. Of course, Pliny does in fact hunt at his country estates, and he alternates hunting and writing (as he boasts in 9.36.6 to Fuscus, thus linking this letter to 1.6 and 9.10, as well as to 9.40), but nowhere else in his correspondence does he specify that he is hunting wild boars. The repeated presence of precisely that game in both texts is suspect and invites commentary. Within the Tacitus cycle, 1.6 and 9.10 stand out as two letters devoted to a response to the Dialogus and form a smaller boar-hunting pair. Pliny’s mentioning of apri in both could be an act of allusive self-reference. Judging from his passionate modernist stance on the debate on oratory, Pliny the wild boar hunter would not make a bad Aper. But the later letter does not seem concerned with Pliny’s endorsement of any one of the voices in the Dialogus. On the page of ancient and modern editions the words that Maternus uttered and Pliny quotes in 9.10 belong to the character and to him alone. The responsibility for indicting the present and advocating a final dismissal of oratory is his. Pliny does nothing to undermine this textual truth; but he brings the thought behind it back to Tacitus. From a distance, Pliny rounds off his allusive critique of Tacitus’ work. In Ep. 1.6 he had politely contradicted Maternus’ main argument concerning the direct, necessary relationship between political strife and oratorical excellence; now he reasserts his modernism by resolving Tacitus’ ambiguity. In Ep. 9.10 Pliny responds to Tacitus’ game of hide and seek by agreeing to play the active role of the seeker. By citing in an unflattering tone Maternus’ words, Pliny the hunter seeks the author of the Dialogus hiding in the woods and groves of the poetic tradition, lightly touches him on the shoulder, and calls out a final, and ironic “got you.”

l o n g o s e d p r ox i m u s i n t e rva l l o : self-consciousness and ambiguit y in 7.20 In addition to the scattered epistles obliquely dealing with local issues of his relationship with Tacitus’ texts, Pliny includes in his collection a letter completely devoted to a direct consideration of his relationship with Tacitus as a fellow intellectual. For its summative quality it may be best used to conclude the present discussion of Pliny’s engagement with Tacitus’ stance in the fields of rhetorical theory and oratorical practice. Unlike the epistles we have seen so far, 7.20 focuses on no particular text; it exposes, rather, the model Pliny envisages for this rapport. It is a blocked relationship, allusively modeled on the similarly blocked relationship between Statius and Virgil, in which elements of ambiguity nevertheless enter to complicate the

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picture. The general model to which Pliny’s rapport with Tacitus conforms is emulation, and Pliny chooses an intertextual paradigm to epitomize and represent it. The letter contains an explicitly quoted fragment from Aeneid 5, the book of the contests celebrated for Anchises on the shores of Sicily. Pliny probably chose the fragment that features in the title of this chapter both for its content (it describes a contest the winner of which is undisputed) and for the syntactic ambiguity it contains (the adversative sed could modify two different elements of the sentence, giving in each case a different value to the already established ranking). The Virgilian passage creates a situation that may work as a perfect equivalent of a static, undisputed situation, in which the only question left open is one of a shade of meanings. Pliny and Tacitus, or rather the macrotexts that stand in for each of them, feature in Ep. 7.20 as elements in a problem set with predetermined solution (the relative values of its components being fixed); yet the process to reach it may be subjected to radical and meaningful changes. C. PLINIUS TACITO SUO S. Librum tuum legi et, quam diligentissime potui, adnotavi quae commutanda, quae eximenda arbitrarer. Nam et ego verum dicere adsuevi, et tu libenter audire. Neque enim ulli patientius reprehenduntur, quam qui maxime laudari merentur. Nunc a te librum meum cum adnotationibus tuis exspecto. O iucundas, o pulchras vices! Quam me delectat quod, si qua posteris cura nostri, usquequaque narrabitur, qua concordia simplicitate fide vixerimus! Erit rarum et insigne, duos homines aetate dignitate propemodum aequales, non nullius in litteris nominis (cogor enim de te quoque parcius dicere, quia de me simul dico), alterum alterius studia fovisse. Equidem adulescentulus, cum iam tu fama gloriaque floreres, te sequi, tibi “longo sed proximus intervallo” et esse et haberi concupiscebam. Et erant multa clarissima ingenia; sed tu mihi (ita similitudo naturae ferebat) maxime imitabilis, maxime imitandus videbaris. Quo magis gaudeo, quod si quis de studiis sermo, una nominamur, quod de te loquentibus statim occurro. Nec desunt qui utrique nostrum praeferantur. Sed nos, nihil interest mei quo loco, iungimur; nam mihi primus, qui a te proximus. Quin etiam in testamentis debes adnotasse: nisi quis forte alterutri nostrum amicissimus, eadem legata et quidem pariter accipimus. Quae omnia huc spectant, ut invicem ardentius diligamus, cum tot vinculis nos studia mores fama, suprema denique hominum iudicia constringant. Vale. Dear Tacitus, I have read your book with the greatest possible attention. I have marked some passages that should be edited, and some I feel should be deleted. You know I have the habit of telling the truth, and I know you have that of not minding when you hear it. In fact, no one is more patient in receiving constructive criticism than he who deserves the highest praise. Now I expect that you return the favor on one of my books. Such reciprocity feels so good; not to speak of how good it also looks! What a wonderful feeling it is to know that, if posterity will ever pay any attention

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to us, everywhere they will talk about how peacefully, frankly, and honestly we lived! It is going to be an exceptional and noteworthy fact that two persons of equal age, basically of the same rank, and with some reputation for literary studies (you know, I have to downplay your success here, since I am talking about myself in the same breath) have supported each other’s work. From my youth on, when you were already famous (and for good reasons), I followed you. I wanted to be, and to be considered, the one “immediately after you, even if from a long distance.” There surely was no lack of great minds around, but you seemed to me, because of how alike we are at the core, the one I could best imitate, the one I should best imitate. That’s why I am so happy that we are mentioned together every time the subject is literature, that when people talk about you, they immediately think of me. And there are even some who prefer one of us to the other. Now, don’t think I care in what order they put us; what matters is that we are together. To me it’s like being the first, if after you I come second. You must have noticed, I am sure, that the same happens with legacies: unless the deceased is one of the closest friends of either of us, we end up with legacies of the same genre and value. All of the above conspires to have us esteem one another more and more passionately, since our culture, our customs, our reputation, and, last but not least, public opinion bind us together with so many ties. Be well.

Ep. 7.20 is the letter in which Pliny comments most clearly on his fellowship with Tacitus as a practitioner of studia and his reputation on this account. The occasion for the writing of 7.20 is an exchange of manuscripts, not unlike in the short note of 8.7. The theme, however, is immediately complicated by the insertion of a third party’s point of view (that of posterity) and the letter overflows into an examination of Pliny’s perception of his relationship with Tacitus. When Pliny exclaims O iucundas, o pulchras vices!, the private subject-matter changes, and the perspective of posterity intrudes to complicate it: the correspondents’ relationship is in itself a source of delight, but its aesthetic quality may be appreciated mainly from the outside. The book-exchange (which Pliny presents as emblematic of a larger commerce of ideas and cultural experiences) is forcefully presented as an exchange between peers, or, better yet, between almost equals. From section 3 on, the letter’s rhetoric moves between two poles. On the one hand, Pliny insists that a hierarchy does exist, and Tacitus is naturally in the superior position; on the other hand, he insinuates that this priority is so slight that from the point of view of posterity it may shift into the background, leaving essential parity as the most prominent feature. This initial ambiguity is not resolved, and the epistle proceeds through a series of contrasting claims. If the letter bears as its seal the notion of its protagonists as propemodum aequales (7.20.3), it remains deliberately undecided whether “equality” is the essential feature, politely attenuated

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in its expression, or rather Pliny’s inferiority, the emphasis placed on the degree-modifier “almost.” The impression one gathers from this interpretive oscillation is that of a wavering between two rhetorics, two points of view, and two addressees. The general dichotomy between immediate and ultimate addressee of the epistle(s) is once again meaningful. From the perspective of the present, Tacitus and Pliny, though in consecutive positions, are separated by a notable distance. From the point of view of posterity, the ultimate addressee of the epistolary collection, their proximity will appear as equality, the distance reduced and moved into the background. Pliny systematically embeds this double vision in the text of his letter, taking the rhetorical ambiguity of understatement as the guiding principle of his writing to and about Tacitus.59 Pliny suggests that a peculiar optical illusion will affect posterity’s outlook on their relationship: tibi “longo sed proximus intervallo” et esse et haberi concupiscebam. His allusive play with the laws of perspective is not new. The same phenomenon is described in a text penned by Tacitus himself. In the Dialogus, arguing about what makes something “old” (antiquus), Aper notes that the three hundred years that separate his time from the oratorical Greek Golden Age are nothing when compared to the expanse of the astronomical magnus annus. Playing on the notion of relativity, he states: Quod spatium temporis si ad infirmitatem corporum nostrorum referas, fortasse longum videatur, si ad naturam saeculorum ac respectum immensi huius aevi, perquam breve et in proximo est. (Dial. 16.6) If you look at that time interval from the point of view of our frail bodies, it may well appear long. If, however, you consider it bearing in mind the succession of generations and measure it by the great expanse of this age, it will appear to be brief and close-by.

From this perspective not only Cicero, he continues, but also Demosthenes begin to appear as modern, even contemporary orators: Demosthenes . . ., quem vos veterem et antiquum fingitis, non solum eodem anno quo nos, sed +fama+ eodem mense extitisse (“Demosthenes even, whom you cast as one of the ancients, may be said to have lived not only in the same year as we, but in the same month,” 16.7). However weak the argument and albeit related to an aspect of time rather than space as in Pliny, the point Tacitus has Aper make resonates in Pliny’s text. Perhaps meant to sound like mere sophistry in its original context, it is now retorted against its author: in the eventual literary taxonomy, Pliny insinuates, there will be very little difference between gold and silver medalists. 59

See Ludolph’s summary of Pliny’s strategy of understatement (1997: 197 and 200–1).

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The ambiguous tone of the letter does not rest only on its optical metaphor. Rather, it extends to the whole text, structuring it and making itself perceptible in several sentences. On the side indirectly advocating equality, one finds first of all the notion of an exchange between peers contained in the term vices; on this follows the attenuating parenthesis cogor enim de te quoque parcius dicere, quia de me simul dico, which ends up equating Tacitus’ fame with Pliny’s. Similarly, the verbal parallel alterum alterius implies equality, a notion that is finally reinforced by the assertion, once again parenthetical, of a “natural” similarity to one another (similitudo naturae), due to their mutual association in other people’s discourse (una nominamur), their sharing the same rank in the pursuit of studia (nos . . . iungimur), and the recognition of their equal worth in the wills of others (pariter eadem legata accipimus). The final sentence sums up the argument: opening with an invicem that recalls the previous pulchras vices, it insists on the connection between Pliny and Tacitus in the field of studia, mores, fama and iudicia hominum. To be sure, the final statement does not properly imply the idea of equality but only that of being strictly bound together. And yet, coming as a summary of the elements suggesting equality detailed above, it appears to reinforce them. The letter balances the pervasive atmosphere of equality with enunciations that point in the opposite direction, or rather, attenuate it. One thus finds, on the side of expressions indicating a disparity in their relationship, the qualifying adverbial phrase prope modum that modifies the aequalitas of age and sociopolitical rank, the idea that Pliny is following Tacitus (reinforced by the Virgilian quotation), the disadvantaged ranking implied by the notion that, for Pliny, “he is the first, who is next to you (scil. Tacitus)” (mihi primus, qui a te proximus). The existence of a gap is reinforced by the explicit characterization of their relationship as one of imitatio, a point the letter rhetorically reinforces with the anaphora sed tu mihi . . . maxime imitabilis, maxime imitandus videbaris. A hint of asymmetry is contained also in the non-reciprocity of their association in other people’s conversations: Pliny claims de te loquentibus statim occurro, but not vice versa. If the letter’s rhetoric appears clear at first reading, a reading oriented by the actual state of affairs, and Pliny is perceived naturally to be following in Tacitus’ footsteps, the text of the epistle allows an alternative interpretation. The relative placement of Pliny and Tacitus on a ranking scale depends ultimately on the choice of privileging either the rhetoric of modesty or that of parity, and whether to read the qualification of equality as essential or as merely accessory. The epistle is consistent in interweaving elements

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that stress relative ranking or near equality with others suggesting an essential parity. The overall interpretation of the text will thus depend on the reader’s preference for one side or the other. The ambiguity of the epistle is subsumed and reframed in the syntactical ambiguity of the Virgilian quotation Pliny inserts at its core: tibi “longo sed proximus intervallo.” Here the adversative sed is ambiguous, modifying either the idea of proximity (“next, but at a great distance”) or that of distance (“at a great distance, but next”). Commenting on the original context of the fragment, Servius wrote: Secundum hunc locum proximum [autem] dicimus etiam longe positum nullo interveniente. (ad A. 5.320) We call “second” who gets the next place, when, even if at a considerable distance, no one is coming between them.

The phrase is for him, as probably for Pliny, semantically ambivalent. When Pliny writes tibi “longo sed proximus intervallo” et esse et haberi concupiscebam (7.20.4), his relationship with Tacitus is associated immediately with a contest between peers, the result of which is pre-ordained. And yet, the openness of the sentence’s syntactic interpretation cannot but cast a shadow, if not ironic doubt, on the emulative nature of the friendship of the two litterati. Is the relationship between the first and the second runner in the Virgilian context one of contiguity, modified only in a limited way by the conjunction sed indicating distance? Or does the notion of distance prevail, making the detail that no one comes between them merely secondary? Pliny takes advantage of the Virgilian ambiguity, deploys it at the core of the epistle, and allows it to permeate the whole rhetorical setup of his text. The final value of the text requires an act of interpretation on the part of the reader. The letter, however, provides its ultimate addressee only with data that can be interpreted both ways. Like the solution of a quadratic equation, the result of Pliny’s text is not one number but two that bear opposite signs.60 The fragment Pliny chose to bear the weight of the ambiguity had already been deemed suitable to convey an ambiguous metaliterary meaning. As is often the case with poetic fragments, Virgil’s line had already become part of a metapoetic discourse and was thus suitable to be quoted in Pliny’s prose. Two possibly connected phenomena suggest that Virgil’s passage 60

In margine, the protagonists of the Virgilian passage to which Pliny alludes are not Euryalus and Nisus, as one might expect, but Nisus and his opponent Salius. Is the reader supposed to understand this detail as undermining the protestations of unqualified, even ideal, friendship between Pliny and Tacitus with which the letter is interspersed? Are we to see them as being on the same side, to be sure, but as each interested in pursuing a personal agenda?

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had already acquired a surplus of meaning in Pliny’s age: one finds echoes both in Statius’ final envoi for his Thebaid and, later, at the very beginning of Servius’ commentary on the Georgics.61 The clearest trace is in Servius, where one reads that [Virgilius] diversos secutus est poetas: Homerum in Aeneide, quem licet longo intervallo, secutus est tamen; Theocritum in Bucolicis, a quo non longe abest; Hesiodum in his libris, quem penitus reliquit. Virgil followed different poets: Homer in the Aeneid (whom, albeit from a long distance, still he followed), Theocritus in the Bucolics (from whom he is not all that far), and, in the present work, Hesiod (whom he left far behind).

The idea that the negotiation of an antecedent’s authority and the process of emulation of the new text can be figured as a metaphoric (running) contest is the same one witnessed in Pliny. Both Servius and Pliny resort to the same figurative language, drawing on the same Virgilian passage. However, the schoolmasterly mindset of Servius strives to settle once and for all the question that Pliny intentionally leaves open: Virgil is almost Theocritus’ peer (non longe abest), has positively overcome Hesiod (penitus reliquit), and has not been able to equal Homer. Still, in spite of Servius’ neatly organized taxonomy, something seems to resist his linear progression, and the relationship between Virgil and Homer ends up being more complicated than in the case of the other two poets. The resistance Servius evidently strives to overcome could be located in the very material he uses. Though redeployed in the least ambiguous of contexts, the Virgilian metaphor preserves a trace of its original complexity. Servius claims that in the Aeneid Virgil has followed Homer – although (licet) from a distance, yet (tamen) he followed him. Servius emphasizes the emulation rather than the distance between the two epic poets by positioning the adverb tamen at the end of the sentence. The rhetorical structure of the sentence should assign to Virgil (in his relationship with Homer) the role of the contestant who almost never left the starting line – in order to balance the case of Virgil and Hesiod, “whom Virgil left far behind.” But the sentence ascribes some merit to the mere fact that Virgil followed in the footsteps of Homer, suggesting a potential 61

The topos is pervasive (see Quint. Inst. 10.1.86). Of particular importance could be the presence of the expression in Cic. Brut. 173: Duobus igitur summis, Crasso et Antonio, L. Philippus proximus accedebat, sed longo intervallo tamen proximus. Itaque eum, etsi nemo intercedebat qui se illis anteferret, neque secundum tamen neque tertium dixerim. If, as Skutsch suggests (1985: 778), both Virgil and Cicero drew the line from Ennius, they stressed the same different result on which Pliny plays in the letter. On the one hand, in the Virgilian context, everybody gets a prize; on the other, Cicero stresses the huge difference that separates Lucius Marcius Philippus from the unattainable models. Cf. also Neuhausen 1968: 333–40 and 349–52, with extensive documentation.

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equality that the specification “though from a great distance” immediately attenuates and qualifies. In the end one finds the same ambiguity, if not the same ambivalence, as in Pliny’s Virgilian relationship with Tacitus. Of course, Pliny’s attention has not been drawn to Virgil’s context by Servius. Before reaching Servius, the passage had already acquired metaliterary import thanks to a subtle echo at the end of Statius’ Thebaid. The envoi of the poem once again takes up the figure of the follower from a great distance, though it denies the possibility of a contest: Vive, precor; nec tu divinam Aeneida tempta, sed longe sequere et vestigia semper adora. Mox, tibi si quis adhuc praetendit nubila livor, occidet, et meriti post me referuntur honores. (Theb. 12.816–19)

I pray you survive. But do not challenge the divine Aeneid. Follow, rather, from afar and worship its footsteps. Soon Envy’s clouds, that now still veil you, will clear out. And when I am gone, you’ll receive the praise you deserve.

In Pliny’s age, it was Statius who codified the idea that two examples of literary writing may enter into a relationship of imitation from a distance, with a decidedly non-competitive formula which alludes, however, to a context of competition (ne . . . tempta).62 The Virgilian locus reaches Pliny (and probably also Servius) as a standardized tag for that peculiar kind of emulation which is only possible when the relative values of the challenger and the challenged are established beforehand and fixed. Thanks to the ambiguous nature of that very passage, however, the allegedly immutable relationship between authoritative and emulating texts is fraught with tensions.63 Not unlike Statius, Pliny pays a clear homage but at the same time leaves open the possibility that the distancing value between himself and Tacitus might appear minimal when their relationship is observed from the distant point of view of posterity. Ep. 7.20 appraises the relative market value of Pliny and Tacitus. It makes clear what these values are, but it says nothing about, or rather coherently leaves open, the question of the intrinsic worth of their work. For Pliny, posterity, the third party insistently invoked in his letters to Tacitus, will (he hopes) pay more attention to the association between the two than to their respective placement on a scale of value, the long interval between 62

63

See, for instance, Pliny’s redeployment of the charged formula in the context of oratorical emulation in Ep. 6.11.2: me aemulari, meis instare vestigiis videbantur (cf. Syme 1958: 669–70). For the topos of envy (livor) in oratory as well as poetry, see Feeney 2002: 174–5. Cf. Hinds 1998: 91–8.

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them having been reduced to an essential equality by the illusory work of a prospectiva avant la lettre. His letters, in their complicated relationship with Tacitus’ texts, strive to provide future readers with all the elements to do so. As we will see in the following chapter, the same image of a collaborative competition between the two friends will also dominate Pliny’s sally into the field of historiography. Although the landscape is different, the couple traversing it will still be in the same knight-and-squire formation that Pliny first constructed in his discourse on oratory.

chap t e r 4

Storming historiography: Pliny’s voice in Tacitus’ text

Aliud est enim epistulam, aliud historiam, aliud amico aliud omnibus scribere. Pliny, Ep. 6.16.22

When Pliny ventures out to publish a selection of his correspondence, he makes sure he has dispelled any doubt about the nature of his literary enterprise. “My letters,” he notes in the dedicatory preface of Book 1, “are not collected according to their chronology – after all, I am not writing history – rather, they appear as each had come to my hands” (Ep. 1.1.1).1 In Chapter 1 we have observed that this initial disclaimer made available to Pliny alternative models of arrangement, particularly poetic ones. The prominence he assigns to his dismissal of history, however, is significant in itself and bears further examination. Pliny’s contrastive association of his collection of letters with historical writing is hardly neutral. Modern editors print the aside neque enim historiam componebam between parentheses.2 The graphic convention isolates the comment, at the same time downplaying its import and emphasizing its importance. In discussing the interplay of linguistic foundations of psychoanalytical thought, Emil Benveniste has posited that a peculiar feature of any negation in language is its being first and foremost an affirmation: what needs to be undone must be first explicitly said, and a statement of non-existence has the same form as a statement of existence.3 In declaring that his epistles are programmatically “not-history,” Pliny thus allows the notion of history to surface as he discards it.4 A claim to historical writing manifests itself in spite of Pliny’s disclaimer, and actually thanks to it. As symptoms or Witz do for Freud, Pliny’s denial preserves its

1

2 3 4

The signal is unmistakable: as Woodman observed, chronological ordering was recognized as above all a historiographical technique (1989: 135). Cf. his list of canonical statements ranging from Cicero to Livy on pages 133–4. See, e.g., Schuster 1952 and Mynors 1963. Benveniste 1971: 67–75. See Tarrant 1998, esp. 141–2 and 157.

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content while repressing it. For Pliny historiography is the subconscious of epistolography. As a Roman senator with a taste for the humanities, Pliny must have been tempted on numerous occasions to write a historical work. He had a familial example inciting him to do so in the booklets his uncle had composed. As Ep. 5.8 reminds readers, Pliny the Elder had devoted notable attention to the genre (Avunculus meus [. . .] historias et quidem religiosissime scripsit: “my uncle . . . wrote histories, and with the utmost care,” 5.8.5). Pliny does not specify here which books those were, but we can assume that they are the same he mentions in Ep. 3.5, where he describes for Baebius Macer the catalogue of his uncle’s writings: thirty-one books continuing Aufidius Bassus’ history, and twenty books on Germanic wars.5 Reinforcing the stimulus provided by the model of his ancestor, peer pressure must have been strong. In the same epistle, Pliny records an explicit invitation to embark on historical writing from a member of his circle of friends (5.8.14). Yet, as far as we know, Pliny did not make any attempt at writing history per se. No work of history has come down to us under his name, and none is mentioned in either direct or indirect testimony relating to his career as a writer. When scholars talk about Pliny as an historian, they refer either to his epistles 8.14.4–10 (an historical excursus on education through examples); 6.16 (the death of Pliny the Elder), 2.7.3 (Vestricius Cottius) and 3.10 (Vestricius Spurinna); or to the lost oration De Helvidi ultione (mentioned in 7.30.4 and 9.13.1).6 Pliny’s interest in historiography appears prima facie to be at best indirect. Pliny’s avoidance behavior is all the more surprising when it is measured against the deeply felt concern that Roman men of letters and of action shared regarding their role in the making of history. A peculiar system of collaborative exchange between the political protagonists and the recorders of their deeds seems to have been in place: without political (including military) action historiography had nothing to record, just as no political (or military) action could acquire stable meaning without being recorded by historiography. On the side of those who were written about, the writing of history responded to a double call. Not only did it take care of the long-term concern with immortality, shared by subjects and writer of history alike, it was also a militant political stand taken by the writer, which could work for 5

6

On the historical works of Pliny the Elder, see Nissen 1871, who argues that Pliny the Younger was the editor of the thirty-one books (544), and Lehnerdt 1913. See also Henderson 2002a: 97–102 (and the alternative version of the same argument in 2002b). Cf., e.g., Ussani 1970: 339, who refers, for further historical texts, to Traub’s analysis of 3.16, 4.11, 6.16, 7.33 (1955). See also Hennig 1978, for 7.33.

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the subject as a short-term insurance against any adversarial interpretation of his political action. Pliny acknowledges this double vocation of history when he describes Verginius Rufus as one who triginta annis gloriae suae supervixit; legit scripta de se carmina, legit historias et posteritati suae interfuit (“outlived his moment of glory by thirty good years: he read poems and histories about himself and became a member of his own posterity,” Ep. 2.1.2).7 If, in his posthumous eulogy, Pliny introduces Verginius’ fate as representing a case of exceptional personal and political longevity, he also gives further indications that Roman public figures were admitted to the ranks of their own posterity more often than one may think.8 Posterity began very soon in Pliny’s day, at a stage in which immediate political concerns still determined what was to be recorded and in what light.9 In the third epistle completing the Verginian triptych that frames his collection (2.1, 6.10 and 9.19), Pliny reports a brief exchange between his tutor and the historian Cluvius. In this eulogizing vignette, the writer alerts the subject of his history about the potential surprises the work may contain. Most likely in reference to the still unclear role Verginius might have played in the quelling of Vindex’s rebellion against Nero in 68, Cluvius warns him: “Scis, Vergini, quae historiae fides debeatur; proinde si quid in historiis meis legis aliter ac velis rogo ignoscas.” Ad hoc ille: “Tune ignoras, Cluvi, ideo me fecisse quod feci, ut esset liberum vobis scribere quae libuisset?” (Ep. 9.19.5) “You know, Verginius, how binding is objectivity in writing history; thus, if in my Histories you happen to read something not to your liking, I ask that you forgive me.” And he to him: “Why, don’t you know, Cluvius, that what I did I did only so that you may be free to write what you deem right?”10

Pliny’s epistolary rendition of the episode is crafted to record Verginius’ reply in magnanimous terms. Beyond the exemplary tone of Pliny’s account, the epistle suggests that the question at hand was not merely academic for 7

8

9

10

Verginius was a leading man of his age, who had been consul three times and was famous for having twice turned down his legions’ acclamation as emperor, first after Nero’s death and then again following Otho’s suicide. The connection with Pliny was strong: he had been chosen as his tutor after the death of Pliny’s father. Cf. infra. In a negative light, the same applies to members of the audience portrayed in Ep. 9.27. See Giua 2003: 253–4. For Cicero’s desire to enjoy contemporary reputation through the service of history, see Fam. 5.12: alacres animo sumus, ut et ceteri viventibus nobis ex libris tuis nos cognoscant et nosmet ipsi vivi gloriola nostra perfruamur (“my soul is eager that people, while we are still alive, may know me through your books and that we may enjoy some pre-posthumous little glory”). For censorship enforced on immediate political grounds, cf. Plin. Ep. 9.27, as commented on by Ash 2003: 217. On Cluvius, cf. Syme 1958: 178–80 and 289–94. On the historical circumstances and a list of parallel sources substituting for Cluvius’ lost account, cf. Sherwin-White 1966: 143–4, 366 and 503–4.

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all the parties involved: if the received prosopography of the participants is accurate, the exchange between the historian and his subject did not take place long after the facts.11 While in Pliny’s familial historiography Verginius generously insists that his actions only served the higher cause of liberty, his answer also betrays the impatience of the misunderstood patriot. His words amount to a vindication of his actions, regardless of the judgment Cluvius’ militant historiography may pass on them. By subverting the common notion that it is history that legitimates action after the fact, Verginius claims that his actions actually made historiography possible, his brief retort a proleptic echo of another famous, if ultimately failed, self-defense: “I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it!”12 At a point in time when the historical account was still very much a tool for “partisan” interpretation of the recent past, Verginius reacts to Cluvius’ historiography in political terms. Outside of Pliny’s corpus, but perhaps not irrelevant to his concerns, a particularly telling example may be found in Cicero. Writing to Lucceius in Fam. 5.12, he asks the historian to compose a monograph about the events in which Cicero had been a protagonist. Were Lucceius to answer with a polite “not now,” Cicero hinted that he himself would write a modestly eulogizing history.13 Based on these cultural premises all of which are voiced or evoked in his letters, Pliny’s historiographic silence may appear like an admission that he had no investment in either the recapitulative or the interpretive aspect of historiography. Nothing, however, is farther from the truth. Although he did not compose a work of history, Pliny actually left us a meditation on the making and writing of history in the form of a recusatio and a series of three epistles – significantly all addressed to Tacitus – which tangentially deal with the work of his friend the historian (6.16, 6.20 and 7.33). As has often been recognized, these texts highlight the potential for history contained in Pliny’s collection of letters.14 After all, the letters record and preserve Pliny’s deeds and those of his relatives for future memory. In so doing, they carry 11

12

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14

On a Cluvius who was consul in 41 ce according to the indirect testimony of Josephus (Ant. Jud. 19.1.13), cf. Syme 1958: 675. So goes the climactic monologue A. Sorkin entrusted to Jack Nicholson’s voice in the 1992 feature film A few good men. On Cicero’s self-praise, cf. Marincola 1997: 175–82. On Cicero as model for Pliny’s Ep. 7.33, see Cugusi 1983: 221, and especially Rudd 1992: 30–2. Pliny outdoes his avowed model. Not only does he ask Tacitus to enroll him in the annals of history; he also actually inscribes himself into an ambiguously historical dimension through the different medium of his published epistles. See, at least, Traub 1955, Ussani 1970, Hutchinson 1993: 12–13, Beutel 2000: 165–74 and, most recently, Ash 2003.

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out the principal duty of history. Pliny’s investment in the problem of historiography, however, goes deeper than mere potentiality. Not only do some of his letters incorporate a historical dimension, either in discussing points of historiographic theory or in inviting a more strictly historical rewriting of their contents, some are also intended as works of history in their own right. More precisely, they offer themselves as a viable, though subsidiary, alternative to them. If providing an epistolary supplement to history was actually Pliny’s goal, the hazards of textual transmission have proved the wisdom of his plan. It is ironic, as Ash has reiterated, that the two episodes in his familial history that Pliny deems worthiest of Tacitus’ pen have come down to us only in Pliny’s own style and account.15 In Ep. 6.16 Pliny relies on Tacitus’ celebration of his uncle’s death to immortalize it, but it is only through Pliny’s own epistle that the glorious passing (gloriosus exitus) of the Elder Pliny has reached us.16 Similarly, in Ep. 7.33 it is to Tacitus’ Historiae that Pliny entrusts the officium of recording in a longer-lasting form (one more stable and widespread than the acta diurna) his small-scale heroism during the prosecution of Baebius Massa, but it is only in the form of Pliny’s miniature-cameo that we read it today. Pliny’s attempt to make his fame eternal by forcibly inscribing himself into Tacitus’ text failed and the history of texts and their transmission has condemned his exploits to being lost to us. Yet his back-up plan of recording in pseudo-historiographical form personal and familial achievements did indeed succeed. As was the case for the controversies surrounding the status of oratory explored in the previous chapter, Pliny did not resist the temptation to become, if not an active participant in the making of historiography, at least a “material witness” to the problems historical writing raised. As we shall see, what he has to say about historiography goes beyond its factual contents or political implications to target a different but no less crucial aspect: when writing about history or in its guise, Pliny is mostly concerned with historiography as a canonical form of writing. His epistolary essays in historiography continue the dialogue with Tacitus by following his correspondent’s cultural shift away from the politically superseded oratory into the field of historiography. In his exchange with one of its most engaged practitioners, Pliny’s focus is still set on exploring the literary aspects of the genre: in particular, historiography’s complex relationship with its necessary correlative and constant challenger, the not yet burnt-out flame of oratory. 15 16

Ash 2003: 224. This does not mean that Pliny passed to Tacitus only “the facts” of his uncle’s death. For the work of Pliny’s pre-orienting strategies in 6.16, see Eco 1990: 123–36.

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The body of this chapter tracks the various forms taken by Pliny’s engagement with historiography, starting from his assessment of the specific difference between what Cicero labeled opus . . . oratorium maxime (“a work primarily pertaining to the orator,” Leg. 1.5.20) and the actual work of the orator Pliny develops in Ep. 5.8. Pliny’s approach to the theory of historiography is fraught with ambiguities. The first ambivalence concerns the ideal chronology of the author’s intellectual history. While the letter is unambiguous in positing a temporal split between time present and time future, the alternative thus posited does not rule out alternation just as clearly. If all of Pliny’s care goes now into the publishing of his oratory, he also reserves for the future the possibility of writing history. In the same breath as he states “not now,” Pliny leaves open the alternative “maybe one day.” Yet concerns over precedence in his career are only the first element of the letter to contain a palpable ambiguity. Pliny also confounds the differences between historical writing and oratory, by deploying for each genre a critical terminology that would better fit the other one. When projected against the backdrop of Thucydides’ canonical assessment of history’s formal requisites, Pliny’s synkrisis is, at best, surprising. Still in the same letter, he ambiguously conflates the profile of the historical author and actor, by exploring indifferently the advantages that one’s fame derives from the writing of history with those that come from being recorded in it.17 At first reading, in sum, the letter produces an image of indecision: Pliny apparently makes excuses for not writing history only to insinuate that he does not need to make them after all: he juxtaposes historiography and oratory only to mix and match the traditional vocabulary pertaining to either one; finally, he presents himself as a suitable author of history only to suggest that he may not be an irrelevant actor in it. The puzzling theory advanced in Ep. 5.8 sets the stage for an exploration of the problems raised in two famous epistles of which Pliny is both supporting actor and leading author. The initial blurring of the generic boundaries of historiography and oratory in 5.8, in other words, previews Pliny’s inclusion of material concerning historical writing (Ep. 6.16) and an actual fragment of history (Ep. 6.20). These fit his new historical paradigm so well that, if transmitted in isolation, they could be taken as part of a historiographical account. In the two letters addressed to Tacitus about the tragic end of Pliny’s uncle and his own behavior during the cataclysmic events of 79 ce, the difficulties explored in theory are encountered again, this time refracted on the epistles’ stylistic practices. With a subject-matter 17

The terminology is borrowed from Winkler 1985.

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worthy of history (6.16) Pliny associates a plain narrative style, informed by the principle of writing inter historiam et sermonem (Ep. 5.5.3). For the oratorical tour de force of 6.20, which allegedly contains a subject-matter barely worth the epistolary papyrus it is written on, Pliny displays the flourishing of a pathetic (poetic, distinctively epic) register. Moving between the poles of open deference and subtle assertion, Pliny’s dialogue with Tacitus as an official and successful historiographer produces an example of alternative historiography. And, with it, Pliny’s peculiar, redefined historic-rhetorical style. Having observed how Pliny’s ancillary theorization of historiography and oratory developed into a collaborative exchange with the author of the Historiae, we are in a better position to re-evaluate the final confrontation with him on his own ground, that of historiography itself. In the collection, the final confrontation takes place, if only allusively, in an earlier letter and targets most likely an earlier work by Tacitus. An intertextual analysis of Ep. 2.1 shows the traces left by Pliny’s direct rewriting of Tacitus. In this early epistle, oratory not only challenges historiography from outside, it actually substitutes for it. Appearing as Pliny’s epistolary version of the “funeral oration” for Verginius Rufus, which Tacitus had delivered in 97 ce, Pliny’s letter contains a meditation on the nature of eulogies. By confronting Tacitus’ Agricola from an eccentric standpoint, Pliny also resists the official appropriation of Verginius’ persona that was embedded in that text. The epistolary obituary Pliny constructs for him recovers, through an oblique (and poetic) historiography, his tutor’s non-public persona. The parallel meditation of Pliny and Tacitus on the necessity of exemplary images for historiography demonstrates their shared concern in the production of enduring, because imitable, cultural artifacts. By highlighting a specifically historiographical dimension to the epistle, my reading complements and at the same time refines the notion of Pliny’s rhetorical “emulation” of Tacitus (as perceptively but cursorily proposed by Syme). In particular, it invites one to look in the direction of another form of historiography to which the epistolary corpus unmistakably, if only indirectly, alludes: the rhetorical tour de force of Pliny’s Panegyric. By first offering his oratorical masterpiece for the enjoyment of a friend, Vibius Severus, and then completing his correspondence with him with a meditation on the mimetic power of images, Pliny also presents his readers with an alternative to the work of the historian. Endowed with the same power of producing and preserving exemplary portraits offered for imitation, oratory emerges in the end as Pliny’s chosen means of inscribing himself into the permanent record of history.

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chasin g wild geese: pliny’s theory of historiography ( e p . 5.8 ) Roman historiography is obsessed with one idea, the attainment of immortality. Eternal fame, general wisdom agrees, may be achieved in two ways: either by doing something that is worthy of being remembered, or by writing about it. The principle is perhaps best expressed in Sallust’s statement: vel pace vel bello clarum fieri licet; et qui fecere, et qui facta aliorum scripsere, multi laudantur (“both peace and war can give you a spotlight: there is an equal multitude of people famous for having done something, and for having written about what others have done,” Cat. 3.2). Yet the peaceful cohabitation in the praise of many that Sallust initially grants to authors of both deeds and texts soon evolves into a sharp dichotomy opposing material and spiritual achievements, with the marginalized politician being forced to bow to the latter. In reality, the vel–vel situation turns out to be an aut–aut.18 In his own reflections on historical writing, Pliny echoes both the topic and the language of Sallust’s assessment while remaining decidedly more neutral.19 If one approached the issue with a more optimistic outlook than Sallust did, historiography might in fact have appeared capable of combining the two components of personal memorability in one. In theory, the medium designed to preserve one’s deeds may be just as memorable as the deeds themselves. History is the best means for achieving the ultimate prize because it allows one to move from the Sallustan either/or blocked alternative to a both/and felicitous collaboration between memorable actions and their reflection in words. When the author of the writing is no less worthy of remembrance than the doer of the action, their claims to immortality not only become interdependent, they actually approach the point of coincidence. The first place in which Pliny directly addresses the theme of felicitous double memorialization is Ep. 6.16: C. PLINIUS TACITO SUO S. Petis ut tibi avunculi mei exitum scribam, quo verius tradere posteris possis. Gratias ago; nam video morti eius si celebretur a te immortalem gloriam esse propositam. 18 19

See Syme 1964: 43–59 and La Penna 1968: 68–84. Two more texts are pertinent to the discussion: the opening of Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae, in which both the motivations for writing history and a statement on the difficulty of historiography are paired: Quo mihi rectius videtur ingeni quam virium opibus gloriam quaerere et, quoniam vita ipsa qua fruimur brevis est, memoriam nostri quam maxume longam efficere (Cat. 1.3), to be combined with Ac mihi quidem, tametsi haudquaquam par gloria sequitur scriptorem et auctorem rerum, tamen in primis arduum videtur res gestas scribere (Cat. 2.2). For the role of Sallust’s proems in Pliny’s text, see Guillemin 1946: 82 and Ussani 1970: 285–7 and 300–1.

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Quamvis enim pulcherrimarum clade terrarum, ut populi ut urbes memorabili casu, quasi semper victurus occiderit, quamvis ipse plurima opera et mansura condiderit, multum tamen perpetuitati eius scriptorum tuorum aeternitas addet. Equidem beatos puto, quibus deorum munere datum est aut facere scribenda aut scribere legenda, beatissimos vero quibus utrumque. Horum in numero avunculus meus et suis libris et tuis erit. Quo libentius suscipio, deposco etiam quod iniungis. (Ep. 6.16.1–3) Dear Tacitus, I am very grateful for your request that I provide you with a written account of my uncle’s passing, so that you may more accurately pass it on to posterity. Indeed, I see that his death will achieve undying fame if you will be the one who reports it. Of course, having taken place in coincidence with a tragedy (a memorable cataclysm engulfing peoples and cities) that struck the most beautiful of regions, his death is almost already enough to make him survive forever. Add to that the many lasting contributions he made in his own books. Still, the immortality of your works will improve upon the lastingness of his life. I hold in very high esteem those who have received from the gods the gift of having accomplished something worth recording or having written something worth reading: in the highest esteem, however, I hold those who did both. Thanks to his and your books, my uncle will rank among them. All the more eagerly I thus accept (actually I demand) the task you assign me.

On first reading, Pliny appears to agree with Sallust’s principle that it is almost impossible for one person to unite accomplishments in literature and history. Yet if this is the rule, Pliny immediately introduces his uncle as an exception, on account of his having left behind an unimpeachable record of achievements, a heroic death, and a considerable body of writing. When asked to write about the death of his adoptive father, Pliny enthusiastically grants Tacitus’ request because doing so will enhance the fame that the publication of the Elder’s works has already granted him. In Pliny’s view, the immortality his uncle deserves is double. His death in conjunction with a historically important catastrophe affords an occasion for fame, just as the writing of works destined to last is a guarantee of the author’s future memory. In the perfect balance his uncle achieved, his actions (quasi semper victurus occiderit) and words (plurima opera et mansura condiderit) reinforce each other in their author’s bid to fame. By making Pliny the Elder the subject of history, Tacitus contributes to his fame as well. His writings complete the portrait for posterity that the naturalist had sketched with his works. To be sure, Pliny deferentially refers to Tacitus’ works as granting eternity, while his uncle’s writings can obtain mere longevity (aeternitas is an improvement upon perpetuitas),20 but the close of 20

See Lef`evre 1996a: 195.

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the sentence again addresses the issue and redefines it. Pliny’s uncle is blessed in the highest degree because he is equally a writer and a subject of history. The parataxis of the final sentence et suis libris et tuis suggests that fame derives equally from producing long-lasting writings and being recorded in them. As beatissimus, Pliny the Elder is an exceptionally fortunate case. The clear split between facere scribenda and scribere legenda outlined above may be used to read Pliny’s theory of historiography, as he conveys it in Ep. 5.8, in a new light. If measured by the rule of 6.16, the text is fraught with latent incongruities, beginning with the ambiguous statement that Pliny will not write history, at least not in the present. In 5.8, Pliny agrees with his correspondent’s point of view: history still has the power to render eternal fame unto those whose deeds it records and to preserve the fame of its writers. Whereas in the case of Pliny’s uncle these aspects were presented as distinct but complementary and fully integrated, here they appear as two alternatives between which the text irresolutely oscillates. The incipit of the letter sets up the reader for a declaration of modesty, but the language Pliny uses throughout breaks down the neat system of oppositions between writing and being written about and opens an unspoken third option. Naturally, in an epistle on the writing of history, the Younger Pliny has limited options. He does not have an exitus to match that of his uncle, and as a man of letters he leads a slothful life compared to the active and intense existence of the Elder.21 Modesty is in order, and it is out of the question that he be the writer of history he claims he cannot yet be. In the language of Ep. 6.16, Pliny could rank himself only among the beati in belonging to one of the two disjunctive categories. The problem is that 5.8 does not make clear to which group Pliny thinks he belongs. Actually, in its crucial indecision, it hints at the possibility that the stature of beatissimus may run in the family. Here is Pliny’s initial excuse for being unwilling and unable to engage in the writing of a historical work: C. PLINIUS TITINIO CAPITONI SUO S. Suades ut historiam scribam, et suades non solus: multi hoc me saepe monuerunt et ego volo, non quia commode facturum esse confidam (id enim temere credas nisi expertus), sed quia mihi pulchrum in primis videtur non pati occidere, quibus aeternitas debeatur, aliorumque famam cum sua extendere. (Ep. 5.8.1) Dear Titinius, You invite me to write history, and you are not alone. Others have given me the same advice, and I’d be glad to abide by it. Not that I think it would be easy to 21

See Ep. 3.5.19.

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accomplish (unless you have tried it yourself, beware of believing as much). I feel, rather, that one who has a rightful claim to eternity should not resign himself to death, but extend the reputation of others together with his own.

From section 1 it seems clear that history is a source of fame both for those who write it and for those about whom it is written. For the moment, let us accept Pliny’s optimism and not trouble with the peculiar twist of syntax in the final clause of the sentence, which subordinates the reputation of history’s subjects to that of its author. Writing history is a rewarding activity because it is balanced. It rescues from oblivion those who deserve eternity and prolongs, together with the writer’s fame, also that of his subjects. The apparently unproblematic way in which Pliny combines the reward awaiting active historical authors and their passive actors in history invites one obvious question that Pliny refuses to answer: to which of the two categories does he want us to think he belongs? Both the syntax and the allusive web deployed in the letter contribute to making the question unanswerable, their mixed signals ambiguously casting Pliny as undecidedly author and actor. A pointed allusion to Virgil in the nexus famam . . . extendere indicates from the start that Pliny’s conceptual move is taking place on non-neutral ground. Whereas Pliny addresses the problem of historiography as a potential writer, and he deals with aeternitas, so to speak, in dictis, Virgil was explicitly concerned with the potential of heroic actions to break the barrier of time. In the fragment from Aeneid 10.467–9 to which Pliny alludes here, Jupiter comforts Hercules for the impending death of Pallas: life is short for all human beings, and nothing can be done about that, the duty (and the work) of virtue is to prolong one’s fame with deeds worth recording. The argument is a topos,22 but Pliny’s sententious language can be found only in Virgil: Stat sua cuique dies, breve et inreparabile tempus omnibus est vitae: sed famam extendere factis, hoc virtutis opus. (Aen. 10.467–9)

A final day is appointed to all; and mortals only receive a short, unamendable time. And yet, valor is there to prolong fame through one’s deeds.

If the first paragraph invites readers to understand that Pliny’s only interest lies in being associated with the category of the writers, Pliny-the-auctor of 22

See Ussani 1970: 293–300. Harrison cites also Aen. 6.806: virtutem extendere factis (1991, ad loc.). The nexus is taken up in Pliny’s time by Statius, Theb. 1.607: qui robore primi famam posthabita faciles extendere vita.

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history aims for something that the letter, through the allusion to Virgil, connects with a potential role as Pliny-the-actor in history. He regretfully declines an invitation to become the author of a work of history, but his language suggests that he imagines himself as possibly playing a different role in it. Similarly, the argument of the second section, with its insistence on the purity of Pliny’s life, fits oddly with the context of his literary disclaimer: Me autem nihil aeque ac diuturnitatis amor et cupido sollicitat, res homine dignissima, eo praesertim qui nullius sibi conscius culpae posteritatis memoriam non reformidet. (Ep. 5.8.2) Nothing, I assure you, attracts me more than the love and desire to achieve permanence in time. Not that there is anything wrong with it: especially for someone who, knowing he has done no evil, has nothing to fear from posterity’s scrutiny.

What does the absence of flaws from Pliny’s reputation have to do with his fitness as a historiographer? The observation would be more pertinent for someone who is expecting to have his life reviewed and recorded in history. The duty of the historian, as Tacitus put it, is to write “without resentment or an agenda” (sine ira et studio, Ann. 1.1) or, as Sallust claimed, from above factional bias (mihi a spe, metu, partibus rei publicae animus liber erat: “my mind was free from hope, fear, and party politics,” Cat. 4.2).23 Pliny might well claim to meet these criteria, but instead of declaring his impartiality, he suggests how comfortable he would feel as a subject of history. His record is clean, and he has nothing to worry about if readers of history will receive an account of his life.24 Is then Pliny suggesting that he wants to be recorded in history? It certainly seems so. And yet the third section of the epistle reverses the strategy of argumentation once more. Pliny alludes again to his role as a writer by citing Ennius’ self-dictated epitaph and combining it with a series of Virgilian loci, all of which are endowed with metaliterary connotations. The passage has been recognized by commentators as almost a collage of Virgilian memories, and editors have signaled it with a crowd of single inverted commas, but it has not yet received a close contextual commentary.25 The texts to which Pliny alludes are not merely commonplaces used to reinforce a topical declaration of modesty, rather they unequivocally 23

24 25

Pliny knew the difference: see the unresolved issue of what really happened when Vindex’s army was defeated, as alluded to in Ep. 9.17. Cluvius’ record, or his motivation for writing, is never the issue. Cf. Marincola 1997: 158–74. See, e.g., the notes ad loc. in Lenaz 1994 and Trisoglio 1973, and the critical apparatus in Schuster 1952 and Mynors 1963. Only Sherwin-White 1966 mentions no intertext. Recently, Krasser 1993b argues

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indicate that one of the poles between which his self-presentation oscillates is authorial authority: Itaque diebus ac noctibus cogito, si “qua me quoque possim tollere humo”; id enim voto meo sufficit, illud supra votum “victorque virum volitare per ora”; “quamquam o – ”: sed hoc satis est, quod prope sola historia polliceri videtur. (Ep. 5.8.3) And so, nights and days I spend thinking how I too could learn how to “Leave the Ground (this day and age).” That, you know, is all I ask: the other option, “Learn How To Soar To Towering Heights of Success,” is beyond my wildest hopes; “Yet, Who Am I to Tell . . .” However, it is enough for me what history alone, or almost, seems able to confer.

Thus, the situation has apparently changed again, and Pliny has turned the tables on his readers. The references he makes here, by explicitly quoting Georgica 3.8–9 and then Aeneid 5.195, are two loci in which intertextuality joins forces with metapoetic meditation. We are fully back on the side of the writing of history. Neither Ennius nor Virgil hopes for immortality through his deeds. Pliny’s allusion to the bid for fame made by the author of the Annales in his epitaph (Nemo me lacrumis decoret nec funera fletu / faxit. Cur? Volito vivos per ora virum)26 and to its redeployment in Virgil’s announcement of the Aeneid27 is particularly apt for expressing the similar bid to fame that Pliny makes as a potential writer of history. The second fragment quoted reinforces the impression that we are moving inside the strict perimeter of literary questions, as it qualifies the model of competition that Pliny envisions for his work. In order to advance the immodest hope of winning in the race with his fellow writers of history, Pliny summons the same literary paradigm he used to represent his relationship with Tacitus in the common pursuit of studia. The words quamquam o are the famous aposiopesis Mnestheus uttered during the boat race in Aeneid 5, the same book from which Pliny had drawn in the model of his competitive collaboration with Tacitus in Ep. 7.20.28 The Virgilian context presented a parallel situation in both the foot and ship races. In both events, there appears to be no real contest for first place, and the pathos of the competition is all in the struggles of those who trail from a long

26 28

for the relevance of the allusion to Pliny’s relationship to Cicero (esp. Ep. 4.8.4–6). A compelling reading of the interplay between Virgil’s initial and Thucydides’ concluding agonistic language is in Morello 2003: 203–6. Though independently developed, my reading of 5.8 resonates with Morello’s on several points. 27 See Thomas’ comment ad loc. (1988, 2: 39). Ennius, Epigr. 2 (p. 215 Vahlen, 2nd edn). See the discussion of the allusion to Aeneid 5.320 (longo sed proximus intervallo) in Ep. 7.20.4 (above, Chapter 3).

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distance. The fragment Pliny redeploys comes from Mnestheus’ ambiguous invocation, addressing either the sea gods or his crew. The Trojan chief begins by claiming that he is competing only in order not to finish the race last; the aposiopesis balances that impression by leaving open the possibility of a victory, too wished-for to be even articulated in language: “Non iam prima peto Mnestheus, neque vincere certo; quamquam O! – sed superent, quibus hoc, Neptune, dedisti; extremos pudeat rediisse; hoc vincite, cives, et prohibete nefas.” (Aen. 5.194–7)

“I, Mnestheus, am not after the first prize; I am not competing for victory, although . . . but let those you have chosen, Neptune, outstrip us. Just think how shameful it would be for us to finish last: win this at least, my fellows, and avert this sacrilege.”

The profession of modesty that Mnestheus mixes in with his almost unexpressed hope for victory must have been a powerful recipe. So, at least, the poem’s plot presents it: the pious Trojan will eventually snatch the second place away from the more daring and ultimately shipwrecking Sergestus and even, in the end, challenge Gyas, the winner, in a neck-to-neck finish. While no metapoetic allegorical reading should be taken too far, it is difficult not to see at work in this context the same intertextual dynamics that transpired through the thin veil of the Virgilian allusion in Ep. 7.20. The contest between Tacitus and Pliny in the field of oratory was certainly articulated more explicitly around the audible Virgilian tag, and yet, its echo (however faint) may still be perceived here. If allegory is indeed possible, the explicit reference to Aeneid 5 should be read as typical of Pliny’s careful strategy of combining similarity with differentiation and blurring distinctions.29 The purely literary quality of Pliny’s allusive evocation may, however, be only apparent after all. For a writer of history and in a densely historiographic context, epitaphs are far from neutral inscriptions, particularly because they may contain an attempt at self-memorialization on the part of the historical actors. As Seneca noted in his Suasoriae, epitaphs have a markedly summative quality.30 Like a historiographic exitus-narrative, an epitaph is supposed to contain in condensed form the outline of the life of 29

30

To my knowledge, Pliny’s letter is the only extant text that gives prominence to Virgil’s sentence fragment. Quamquam o recurs in Cic. Sen. 69, Verg. Aen. 11.415 and Sil. 1.653, but not as aposiopesis. Cf. Woodman 1998: 155–7.

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the deceased and at the same time be an integral part of his bid to eternal fame: Quotiens magni alicuius (viri) mors ab historicis narrata est, totiens fere consummatio totius vitae et quasi funebris laudatio redditur. Hoc, semel aut iterum a Thucydide factum, item in paucissimis personis usurpatum a Sallustio, T. Livius benignus omnibus magnis viris praestitit. Sequentes historici multo id effusius fecerunt. Ciceroni hoc, ut Graeco verbo utar, EPITAFION Livius reddit . . . (Suas. 6.21) Every time historians recount the death of some great man one gets almost a condensation of this person’s whole life and basically an obituary. This kind of eulogy, which Thucydides had used only in a couple of cases and Sallust replicated in the case of only a few individuals, Livy more generously deployed for all great men. For instance, the following epitaph, to use a Greek term, he gives to Cicero.

In the case of Livy’s summative eulogy of Cicero, the deceased had no part in drafting his own obituary, and the historian is solely responsible for his memorialization. With Pliny, on the other hand, two related epistles (6.10 and 9.19) deal with the double function of the self-dictated epitaph of Verginius Rufus. In both instances, the stakes connected to this posthumous type of memorialization are high and of a clear historiographic nature. A brief reading of Pliny’s intratextual diptych confirms the essential equivalence uniting epitaphs and historiographic accounts advanced by Seneca. It also helps to bring into a sharper focus the allusive evocation of Virgil’s fragment and Ennius’ epitaph.31 The first letter is occasioned by a visit to one of Verginius’ former estates, which has been inherited by Pliny’s mother-in-law. While he is surveying the property and engaging in a sentimental journey avant la lettre, Pliny checks on the tomb of his tutor. To the visitor’s dismay, ten years after his death the monument of such a great and famous man still lies half-built. The heir’s neglect of such pious duty is all the more lamentable, Pliny notes, considering that Verginius had not asked for a memorial of monumental proportions. More than relying on an imposing building, he had explicitly mandated that his most glorious action be inscribed on his tomb in an elegiac distich. Substituting for the delinquent heir, Pliny uses his letter to 31

As noted above, there are actually three letters devoted to Pliny’s tutor in the collection (2.1, 6.10 and 9.19). The first epistle in the Verginius triptych had already touched upon the question of poetic epitaphs. In 2.1.10 Pliny noted that “in truth, one should neither weep for it (si tamen fas est . . . flere) nor call death that by which the mortality more than the life of such a man has been terminated.” He alluded to Naevius’ self-dictated epitaph immortales mortales si foret fas flere / flerent divae Camenae Naevium poetam (Var. Carm. 1.3.1–2). On modesty in self-dictation, see Gel. 1.24.2 (epigramma Naevi plenum superbiae Campanae quod testimonium iustum esse potuisset, nisi ab ipso dictum esset).

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fulfill Verginius’ mandate and complete the monument in the epistolary medium. The epitaph reads: Hic situs est Rufus, pulso qui Vindice quondam imperium asseruit non sibi sed patriae. (Ep. 6.10.4)

Here lies Rufus, who, once Vindex had been repelled, seized power not for himself but for his homeland.

Consigning Verginius’ last words to the safer and more permanent medium of writing does not, however, settle the question once and for all. Pliny is in fact taken to task about it in a subsequent letter. This time, the issue being raised is not the neglect the epitaph suffered but its opposite: the excessive attention that both Verginius and Pliny appeared to have devoted to this alternative means of memorialization. In Ep. 9.19, Pliny comes back to Verginius’ epitaph and is forced to defend not only his tutor’s choice of words but also his own choice of reproducing them in writing. Ruso, the new correspondent, has read, so Pliny remarks, the previous item in the correspondence (significantly not addressed to him directly).32 He now objects to what is apparently Verginius’ (minor) breach in the honor code that commands that one should not actively pursue fame, but rather accept it nonchalantly once it has been bestowed upon him. In dictating his epitaph, which Pliny again transcribes in full, Verginius has shown that he was trying too hard.33 Frontinus, the alternative model whom Ruso proposes, had behaved more seemly, professing disinterest in any physical memorial to the point of expressly forbidding that any tomb be erected for him. Pliny’s reaction is the one we could expect: he argues that Verginius has actually not breached the code of ethical modesty, at least no more than Frontinus did. Quoting verbatim Frontinus’ dictum, Pliny invites his reader to measure it against his own tutor’s less pretentious (because less conspicuously displayed) epitaph: Age dum, hunc ipsum Frontinum in hoc ipso, in quo tibi parcior videtur et pressior, comparemus. Vetuit exstrui monumentum, sed quibus verbis? “Impensa monumenti supervacua est; memoria nostri durabit, si vita meruimus.” An restrictius arbitraris per orbem terrarum legendum dare duraturam memoriam suam quam uno in loco duobus versiculis signare quod feceris? (Ep. 9.19.6) 32

33

Pliny’s language clearly indicates the responsive quality of the letter: cf. the series of verbs significas . . . reprehendis . . . addis . . . consulis. The fact that Ruso responds to a letter not addressed to him is significant. As will be the case for Ep. 9.2 to Sabinus, the triangulation thus constructed is witness to the circulation of the first books of Pliny’s letters as published texts (most likely in the collected form). Cf. below, Chapter 5. Cf. Gibson 2003: 241.

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Come on, now: let’s compare your Frontinus on this point, in which it seems to you he has been more sparing and humbler. Granted, he did forbid a monument to be built for him, but with what words? “The expense for a tomb is superfluous: my memory will continue if I will have deserved it with my life.” Now, do you think this is “more sparing”? To state in writing, for all the world to read, that your memory will endure rather than to mark with a couple of little verses in only one place what you have accomplished?

For Pliny the problem with Frontinus’ sententious statement is that it makes precisely the same claim to endurance as Verginius’ epitaph. Instead of what now is presented as the more modest medium of sepulchral inscription, however, Frontinus chose the self-promoting medium of historical record. For all his ostentatious disregard of sepulchral memorialization and his apparent sprezzatura, Frontinus actually sought fame even more eagerly than Verginius ever did. By assigning “something to read” to the widest possible posterity, he aspired to a higher form of monumental preservation than the comparatively “modest” epitaph that Verginius dictated. In the end, it matters little whether we privilege Verginius’ epigraphic or Frontinus’ historiographic solution to the problem of memorialization. Whatever outcome we may prefer for the compare-and-contrast exercise of Ep. 9.19, one thing is clear: epitaphs and historiography are caught in a system of equivalence and mutual exchange. Pliny’s recitation of the two poetic epitaphs in Ep. 5.8 appears increasingly steeped in cultural ambiguities. It shifts the balance towards the pole of writerly and literary fame, but not unambiguously. Just as in the Georgics Virgil anticipated his major enterprise of writing an epic poem by evoking and deferentially challenging the specter of Ennius’ own self-promotion, Pliny anticipates here his own writing of history, a genre in which he will deferentially compete with a well-established, authoritative tradition. Yet, by resonating with the muchdebated questions on the limits to be imposed on one’s own self-promotion, the allusive epitaphs grafted onto the text also bring the letter back on the side of history’s actors. No matter how posthumously they may have sought fame, subjects and writers of history alike are doomed to incur their audience’s criticism if they appear to have violated the rules governing the art of self-promotion, even if only in their fine print. Pliny’s oscillation between favoring the writing of history and being recorded in it continues in section 4. From a consideration of the eternal fame that awaits the writer of stylistically excellent works (Ennius and Virgil), Pliny falls back on history’s power to win fame for those who are recorded in it. He does so by suggesting that history, even as bare narrative, is a sufficient cause for one to go down in time as the object of someone’s

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writing. Regardless of the stylistic prowess it might display, history elicits the curiosity of readers: Orationi enim et carmini parva gratia, nisi eloquentia est summa: historia quoquo modo scripta delectat. Sunt enim homines natura curiosi, et quamlibet nuda rerum cognitione capiuntur, ut qui sermunculis etiam fabellisque ducantur. (Ep. 5.8.4) Speeches and poems are ultimately unsuccessful if they don’t get an injection of high-powered eloquence. History, on the contrary, is well-liked no matter how (poorly) it may be written. People, you know, are naturally curious and they are captivated by the simple facts they learn; you might as well serve them gossipy chit-chats and fairy tales.

Pliny’s assessment of the force of history seems to leave little room for the writer. No matter how poorly written and unadorned, he affirms, history will never lack readers. The natural curiosity of human beings will lead them to read the accounts of things that happened in the past and will keep the fame of their actors alive. Curiosity about the past exercises such a strong attraction that readers will swallow whatever anecdotal fables historians feed them. Pliny’s stance is radical and novel. His language goes against the grain of every theory of historiography from antiquity, even one that he himself professes in the second part of the epistle. In particular, his notion that the careful ornatus and an attention to method are not important clashes with the most common pronouncements on history interspersed in Cicero’s works.34 Pliny’s pronouncements also go against his favorite example of a historiographer, his uncle and adoptive father, who is evoked in the following sentence: Me vero ad hoc studium impellit domesticum quoque exemplum. Avunculus meus idemque per adoptionem pater historias et quidem religiosissime scripsit. Invenio autem apud sapientes honestissimum esse maiorum vestigia sequi, si modo recto itinere praecesserint. (Ep. 5.8.5)

And I don’t even lack a familial example to spur me on this path. My uncle (actually, my father through adoption) wrote histories, and with the utmost care. And I well know the adage that says that one should follow in the footsteps of one’s forebears, as long as they have moved on the right path.

34

Contra, Cic. Leg. 1.5.20 (Abest enim historia litteris nostris, ut et ipse intellego et ex te persaepe audio. Potes autem tu profecto satis facere in ea, quippe cum sit opus, ut tibi quidem videri solet, unum hoc oratorium maxime) and Quint. Inst. 10.1.31 ([Historia] est enim proxima poetis et quodam modo carmen solutum est et scribitur ad narrandum, non ad probandum . . . ideoque et verbis remotioribus et liberioribus figuris narrandi taedium evitat). Cf. Ussani 1970: 292–5.

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Pliny has again switched track. He is back, now for the third time, to considering his role as a potential writer of history, one who is most careful in his method (religiosissime) and who will be able to produce literature worth reading.35 Even in the Elder’s case, however, the two polarities that should be kept apart are irresistibly attracted to each other. The final metaphor does little, in fact, to distinguish between the two, since it has an equally prominent ethical and literary pedigree.36 As we have seen, in Ep. 6.16 Pliny’s uncle is deemed beatissimus because he has both accomplished deeds worth writing about and has written works worth reading. Now that he is following in his footsteps, Pliny hints that he may possess this ability as well. Why does so much confusion between the authority of the author and that of its subject dominate the first part of the letter? The answer may be found in a fundamental ambivalence at the core of Pliny’s conception of history. In his treatment of the issue, it does not really matter whether history will eventually rescue the author or the actor from oblivion. The dilemma is essentially false. What matters is that history protect and promote its own text. It is neither heroic nor authorial endurance, but textual canonization that concerns Pliny. Ontologically, the person authoring the text or acting in the world comes before the writing, but in Pliny’s meditation the primary author/actor ambiguity evolves into, and is overshadowed by, an exploration of the stylistic questions inherent in his texts. In this light, it is not surprising that the remainder of the letter is devoted to metaliterary issues. Once the (auto)biographical questions have been exhaustively addressed and strategically left unresolved, Pliny shifts gears, and moves to a discussion of style. Taking advantage of the dialogic option always available to an epistolary text, Pliny opens up his text to his correspondent’s voice and anticipates (rather than records) Capito’s potential objections. Indeed, the internalized echo of Capito’s voice structures the letter. After providing a motivation for the initial biographical paragraphs, the addressee’s questions also mark the two logical turning points of the epistle. First, it isolates sections 1–6 (Pliny’s general analysis of historiography in bono) from sections 7–12 (detailed analysis of the specific difference between history and oratory). The second rhetorical question (potes simul . . .?) then marks off sections 13 and 14 from the rest of the epistle, reviewing in a tight series 35

36

On the adverb as relating to method and style, cf. Cic. Brut. 44: et ego cautius posthac historiam attingam te audiente, quem rerum Romanarum auctorem laudare possum religiosissumum. See also Gel. 1.3.29: haec taliaque Theophrastus satis caute et sollicite et religiose cum discernendi magis disceptandique diligentia quam cum decernendi sententia atque fiducia scripsit. For poetry, cf. Stat. Theb. 12.817; for ethics, Cic. Off. 1.121.

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of alternatives the options a writer of history has in choosing his subjectmatter. It is finally with a direct address to Capito that the epistle ends, with Pliny asking for both a topic to write about and a little more time before starting to do so. Breaking it into two almost equivalent parts, the recapitulating question “why, then, do I hesitate?” (cur ergo cunctor?) in section 6 functions as the turning-point of the text. To the question Pliny answers with a neat, but not completely straightforward, argument. First, he claims, I have other texts to revise and publish: Egi magnas et graves causas. Has, etiamsi mihi tenuis ex iis spes, destino retractare, ne tantus ille labor meus, nisi hoc quod reliquum est studii addidero, mecum pariter intercidat. Nam si rationem posteritatis habeas, quidquid non est peractum, pro non incohato est. (Ep. 5.8.6–7) I’ve argued big cases, news-making ones. I have to work on them, it doesn’t matter if their chances of survival are slim. I don’t want all the effort I put into them to die at once with me just because I haven’t put in this little extra work. From posterity’s point of view, anything unfinished is as good as not even begun.

The final note gives the impression that the ambiguity perceived in the earlier passages and the oscillation between being the writer or the subject of a historical work were only apparent. Pliny is squarely and solely interested in defining himself as a potential historian, someone who might acquire fame by producing a work worth reading, and only the composition of other texts delays him in this honorable pursuit. And yet, the language in which the argument is conveyed suggests that the same mixture of different aspects of history marks this last paragraph as it had dominated the text preceding it. The first word that should define him as a writer alludes to his active role in history: Egi magnas et graves causas.37 On the one hand Pliny does not want these actiones (his speeches, but also his “actions”) to die with him: his death should not mark the death of his deeds. He is revising and publishing his speeches, he writes, ne ille labor meus . . . mecum pariter intercidat (Ep. 5.8.6). Pliny had used the same argument in almost the same language at the outset to explain why he wanted to become a historian and to preserve the memory of others. In the first section he had established his role as a writer, claiming that it seemed to him pulchrum . . . non pati occidere quibus aeternitas debeatur. On the other hand, the letter makes clear that the only hope of perpetuity for Pliny’s deeds comes in their inscription as texts; stylistic care is what will ensure their survival. Pliny’s 37

In this pose, Pliny might be echoing Cicero (Orat. 129.7), who defines one of his causae as magna and gravis.

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completion of the revision and ensuing publication will be their hope of reaching posterity. It is a hope that he deems “slim” (tenuis) but that he thinks worth pursuing nonetheless. His speeches, the stylistically refined record of his actions in history, well substitute for any history written about him; likewise, writing them occupies the time he might otherwise devote to writing history. Are, then, his speeches the equivalent of his potential historiography? Wouldn’t it be possible for him to work in both genres at the same time? Dices: “Potes simul et rescribere actiones et componere historiam.” Utinam! Sed utrumque tam magnum est, ut abunde sit alterum efficere. Unodevicensimo aetatis anno dicere in foro coepi, et nunc demum quid praestare debeat orator, adhuc tamen per caliginem video. Quid si huic oneri novum accesserit? Habet quidem oratio et historia multa communia, sed plura diversa in his ipsis, quae communia videntur. (Ep. 5.8.7–9) Now you will say: “Why can’t you rework your speeches and write history at the same time?” I wish! Both are such time-consuming tasks that it is plenty if one can do either. I made my debut in the forum when I was nineteen, and only now I begin to see (and darkly, still) what the task of the orator is all about. What would happen if I now were to add a second career, more weight, to the first one? Oratory and history do have many things in common, that’s true, but they also widely differ in the very features they appear to have in common.

Pliny’s answer is as ambiguous as his strategy is tantalizing. Historiography and oratory share many features, indeed. In particular, they are both narratives. Yet they diverge precisely because of this similarity. Pliny’s contrastive theory of oratory and historiography raises the same problems we encountered while trying to disentangle his intricate web of references to writing and being written about. The next paragraph brings further dissection, regrettably adding no more clarity, to the point. The contrastive similarity Pliny has set up for history and oratory only reveals new assimilating elements of contrast: Narrat illa narrat haec, sed aliter: huic pleraque humilia et sordida et ex medio petita, illi omnia recondita splendida excelsa conveniunt; hanc saepius ossa musculi nervi, illam tori quidam et quasi iubae decent; haec vel maxime vi amaritudine instantia, illa tractu et suavitate atque etiam dulcedine placet; postremo alia verba alius sonus alia constructio. Nam plurimum refert, ut Thucydides ait,  sit an   ; quorum alterum oratio, alterum historia est. (Ep. 5.8.9–11) That one narrates, and so does this other, but they do it differently. In this one, as a rule, one finds daily, trite, and all-too-common facts; in that one, there are only majestic, extraordinary, and spectacular events. Of this one you generally see the

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bones, muscles, and nerves; of that one you first see the flesh and, metaphorically speaking, its mane. This one you like mostly because it is forceful, harsh, and pressing; that one is pleasing because it proceeds with calm, grace, and even sweetness. In sum, they have different words, a different tone, and a different structure. It’s not the same, as Thucydides put it, if something is “forever” or “up for grabs,” not at all. And to one of these categories belongs oratory, history to the other.

Just as in his stylistic assessment of historiography, here Pliny takes a particularly radical but not unambiguous stance. Quintilian had compared and contrasted oratory, poetry and history only to reconcile them in the omnivorous vocation of his profession. Despite their differences, he had invited the orator-to-be to imitate what was common among the three (Inst. 10.2.21). This is precisely what Pliny considers the pitfall of their false similarity. While history and oratory share the essential feature of narrative, they present narrative according to different stylistic principles.38 Pliny’s synkrisis of history and oratory has recurrently elicited remarkable exegetical attention and produced detailed critical discussion of these lines. While they suggest informed readings of the passage, however, these contributions are often not without problems. Essential for understanding Pliny’s view, they use familiarizing commentaries to underplay Pliny’s unorthodox and often surprising choice of vocabulary. A case in point is Ussani’s study of the dichotomy oratio-historia. By bringing an impressive series of parallel texts that illustrate Pliny’s option to bear on his reading, Ussani strives to construct a series of clear-cut dichotomies between these two types of writing.39 In so doing, however, Ussani’s article imposes regimentation where Pliny intended nuance. In order to produce a single interpretation of Pliny’s complex diction, several elements of Pliny’s syntax need to be explained away. Ussani starts by downplaying the counter-intuitive choice of demonstrative pronouns so distinctive of the passage. He acknowledges different opinions among scholars on the referents of haec and illa,40 but swiftly resolves the problem citing Pliny’s usus scribendi in Ep. 1.20.21.41 Pliny may have intended “conceptually closer” with haec and “conceptually more remote” with illa, apparently distinguishing between his current 38

39 40

41

On Cicero’s theory on narration and on a common critical vocabulary for oratory and historiography, see Woodman 1988: 83–95. Ussani 1974–5. For haec=oratio and illa=historia in Pliny’s elegant polyptoton have spoken: Durry 1959, Ussani 1971, Traub 1955, Leeman 1963, Sherwin-White 1966, Oliva 1993 and, most recently, Baier 2003. For the opposite view: Mazzarino and Cova. To the summary by Ussani (1974–5: 189–92) add Oliva 1993: 279–80. Ussani 1974–5: 190.

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oratorical interests and activities and the potential commitment to history. If so, however, he causes the reader, who sees the usual syntactical order reversed, to waver momentarily between the two options. The confusion is particularly likely, considering that, in the close of this same epistle, Pliny’s usus scribendi is exactly the opposite: there illud is the syntactically farther laudare, and hoc the syntactically closer culpare, as it should be. Similar considerations can be made for Pliny’s choice of terms to define the subject fitting for historical treatment. Ussani acknowledges that Pliny uses a terminology more fitting a discussion of oratory than of historiography: recondita, excelsa and splendida are virtues usually associated with oratory.42 One might also note a curious detail that Ussani overlooked, namely that the verbs Pliny uses in the three opposing cola (conveniunt, decent, placet) refer more to the convenientia of expressions of subject-matter than, as he claims, to the process of accommodating subjectmatter to a genre. More notably, Pliny organizes a balanced discussion of the relative merits of historiography and oratory around the tripartite distinction among inventio, dispositio and elocutio typical of the discussion of oratory. The text presents the three levels on which the two kinds of writing oppose one another in an orderly progression from the choice of arguments suitable to each (inventio), to the different structures on which the texts rest (dispositio), and finally to the quality of the words used in the ornatus (elocutio). While Pliny pretends to appraise, impartially and from a station above the mˆel´ee, the distinctive “rhetorics” of history and oratory, he is describing the former according to the categories of the latter. His synkrisis dangerously approaches syncretism. Even the sentence in which Pliny advances his belabored oppositional scheme is designed to confound rather than distinguish its subject (an extreme example of the artful use of chiasmus). Of the four statements that make up the paragraph, the first and the third are constructed on a scheme of triadic oppositions according to the progression History: a/b/c vs. Oratory: c/b/a. Similarly, in the final sentence the opposition becomes a chiastic proportion: Oratory:    = : History. The chiasmus on the level of the micro-structure is thus complicated by the larger chiasmus existing between the treatment of history and oratory in the tricolon and the treatment in reverse order of oratory and history in the Thucydidean comparison. Laid out in a table, Pliny’s system of oppositions appears as follows:

42

Ussani 1974–5: 194–5.

Pliny’s voice in Tacitus’ text

History

Oratory

Inventio

a) humilia b) sordida c) ex medio petita

Dispositio

a) ossa b) musculi c) nervi

Elocutio

a) vis b) amaritudo c) instantia   

Oratory

History

167

Inventio

c) recondita b) splendida a) excelsa

Dispositio

c) tori b) [. . .] a) iubae

Elocutio

c) tractus b) suavitas a) dulcedo 

Even the final allusion to the traditional Greek terminology, one that according to the rhetoric of the epistle should neatly sum up the preceding distinctions and supersede them, does little to help readers to distinguish the two fields. Rather, it forces them again to adjust their categories and again to shift perspective. The reference to Thucydides is not complicated in itself. We readers, like Capito, are referred back to Thucydides 1.22 (ut Thucydides ait, 11), a passage in which the two terms,  and   , are opposed:

               !   "# $   #%   &  %' ( )  #, * %(  +$ %&  ,-. .  / 0 1 2    /  %3% & -&. (Th. 1.22.4) But those who will want to look into the truth of things past and future (since, as in all human matters, those will be the same or similar to these), they will judge my work useful. Indeed, it is more an enduring possession than the entry into a contest, something to be enjoyed in passing.

The use that Pliny makes of the terms, however, is by no means straightforward. First of all, as we have noted, he constructs a chiasmus from the text to which he alludes. He lists, in the same order as Thucydides,  and   , but associates them with the concepts he lists in the opposite order. Second, Pliny adduces as the differentia speciei between history and oratory a comparison originally advanced as a distinction between two modes of writing history. With the terms that Pliny recycles, Thucydides intended to contrast his predecessors’ flourished and fabulous history to his own essential historiography. Vindicating a rigorous methodology, Thucydides claimed that he did not enter into a contest with his forerunners. His writing, he disparagingly insisted, was built to last and was in a different

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league from their ephemeral and rhetorical exercises. Whether Thucydides refers in this passage to Herodotus’ omnivorous and unscrupulous narrative or to the unscientific chronologies of, say, Hellanicus is a matter open to speculation. What is clear is that he uses  and    to refer to different kinds of historiography.43 Pliny, on the other hand, does not. Pliny modifies his source by a further recontextualization of the dichotomy. In linking    with the genus deliberativum of rhetoric and  with history’s rhetoric of praise and blame, he departs from Thucydides in a significant way. As Sherwin-White notes, Thucydides held the opposite point of view. The historian had stressed that his writings, as , were interested only in the data and not in the stylistic conceits. Stylistic preoccupations, on the contrary, are what Pliny suggests should distinguish history from oratory. In its original context, the    that Pliny associates with oratory (more than the  he equates with history) was aimed at pleasing an audience. Ussani and Oliva, following Sherwin-White, suggest that Pliny read and cited the text of the historian through the lens of his teacher Quintilian:44 Historia scribitur ad narrandum, non ad probandum, totumque opus non ad actum rei pugnamque praesentem, sed ad memoriam posteritatis et ingenii famam componitur. (Inst. 10.1.31) One writes history in order to narrate, not to argue a point. As a whole, a historical work is not designed with an immediate action [scil.   ], and contest in mind; rather, it should foster posterity’s remembrance [scil. ] and the reputation of the writer.

If Pliny has indeed used Quintilian as an interpretive filter to read Thucydides, and the shift in the meaning of the terms he deploys in Ep. 5.8 suggests that this is the case, then he has added a final twist to his strategy of bringing together what he is ostensibly distinguishing. The primary allusion to a distinction of two types of historiography set up in an historical work appears only as the foil for a secondary allusion to a work of rhetoric that distinguishes the relative merits of oratory and historiography from the point of view of the rhetorician. The conclusion of Pliny’s argument is inconsequential and even witty: His ex causis non adducor ut duo dissimilia et hoc ipso diversa, quo maxima, confundam misceamque, ne tanta quasi colluvione turbatus ibi faciam quod hic debeo; ideoque interim veniam, ut ne a meis verbis recedam, advocandi peto. (Ep. 5.8.11) 43 44

For chronology, see Finley 1963: 107–10. For Herodotus’ mythoi, see Woodman 1988: 23–4. Ussani 1974–5: 215; Oliva 1993: 283. On Thucydides as often “praised” and not read, cf. Syme 1964: 52–3. See also Plin. Ep. 4.7.3, on Regulus, citing Thucydides.

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For the above reasons I won’t be led to mix and confuse two activities that are so unlike one another, actually, that are so different because both of equally unmatched importance. I won’t get all confused by their flowing together and end up doing there what I should do here. Therefore, to stick to the language I know best, I ask for a court recess.

The real irony of this paragraph is not in the legal metaphor Pliny invokes in the final sentence, asking for a delay in the proceedings, but in the assertion that he will not conflate and confuse two types of writing so different from one another. Pliny claims that he does not want to do exactly what he has been doing all along. His ambiguous language and meandering syntax undo his effort to distinguish history and oratory. The final remark on the dichotomy, like the one that opened the letter, is formulated in terms that suggest the existence of a profound continuity if not identity between the two. Instead of finding a final element of distinction, Pliny gives them the same qualification, one word in the superlative: ea dissimilia et hoc ipso diversa, quod maxima.45 The last three sections of the epistle (12–14) add up to a similarly impossible conclusion. Having argued thus far against the possibility of writing one historical work now, Pliny invites his friend to choose a historical subject for him. About that subject, he notes, he is willing to write in the future. Within a context that assumes that he will indeed write a history some day, Pliny inserts a final reason why he cannot compose a traditional one. The alternatives he proposes to Capito are clear this time, but they form a double bind from which the addressee might have difficulty breaking free: Tu tamen iam nunc cogita quae potissimum tempora adgrediar. Vetera et scripta aliis? Parata inquisitio, sed onerosa collatio. Intacta et nova? Graves offensae levis gratia. Nam praeter id, quod in tantis vitiis hominum plura culpanda sunt quam laudanda, tum si laudaveris parcus, si culpaveris nimius fuisse dicaris, quamvis illud plenissime, hoc restrictissime feceris. Sed haec me non retardant; est enim mihi pro fide satis animi: illud peto praesternas ad quod hortaris, eligasque materiam, ne mihi iam scribere parato alia rursus cunctationis et morae iusta ratio nascatur. Vale. (Ep. 5.8.12–14) In the meanwhile, however, busy yourself with the question of what age I should turn to in my history. Should I address the remote past, about which others have written? Research is all done, but compiling no fun. Or should I address the “virgin” events of the recent past? Risk of offending is high, pleasing impossible, or nigh. Add to it that humans are such a vicious kin that perforce you’ll find more to blame than to praise: if you set yourself to praise, they’ll say you had been stingy, if to 45

The same collusion of unspecific language and exchange of features between the two modes of writing appears to extend also to the practical side of judging historiography and oratory in the making. See his portrait of Pompeius Saturninus as a writer excellent in both genres in Ep. 1.16.4.

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blame, excessive. No matter how generously you did that or how parsimoniously you did this. This is not what is stopping me, however; I have enough guts to call it as I see it. I only ask that you indicate the direction you think I should take. Choose a subject-matter. I wouldn’t want a new good reason to wait and hesitate to come up once I’m ready to write. Be well.

The result of the oppositions Pliny sets up here should be zero. A topic from ancient history would be easier to deal with – the research has been done – but sifting through the material is time-consuming and tedious (onerosa). A topic from the recent past, on the other hand, is a potential source of enmity, the more so because historiography is a peculiar kind of epideixis, focused on material in which one finds more things to blame than to praise.46 If the historian chooses to record only what there is to praise, his writing appears meager; if he chooses to write about what there is to blame, he comes out as excessive, no matter how hard he has tried to be exhaustive in praise and restrained in criticism. To write about either the remote or the recent past is equally difficult. And yet, in a final twist of his argument, Pliny turns the impossibility of historiography into a commitment to write history. Capito should accept Pliny’s challenge and pick a topic anyway. His choice will pave the way for Pliny’s historical writing, lest a rightful reason (iusta ratio) should detain him again (5.8.14). This final profession of optimism may in the end come as a surprise. Based on these premises, no work of history should ever be written; at least, none of the traditional kind. Yet Pliny may be speaking in earnest. The reason for his positive outlook on historiography may perhaps be found in the addressee. When he asks Capito, a writer of exitus, to pick a topic for him, Pliny also invites his correspondent to lead the way. Probably, the choice of addressee indicates what genre Pliny has chosen to practice.47 It might not be by chance that the 46

47

The explanation of why it is difficult to write history can be found in the second Sallustian echo with which Pliny frames his letter: quia plerique, quae delicta reprehenderis, malivolentia et invidia dicta putant; ubi de magna virtute atque gloria bonorum memores, quae sibi quisque facilia factu putat, aequo animo accipit, supra ea veluti ficta pro falsis ducit (Cat. 3.2). The epistle opens and closes with an allusion to Sallust and contains at the center a reminiscence of Thucydides (1.22), not by chance Sallust’s own historiographical model. The model Woodman defines as imitations “to signal the tradition to which a historian belonged” (1998: 82) may apply. Pliny’s sense of belonging to or continuing in a tradition of historical writing is more nuanced, however. Pliny alludes to a mode of writing rather than a specific authorial lineage. His historiography is practiced in a different genre, and his allusions to the tradition distance his text from it as much as they enlist it in its ranks. He singles him out on that account. For Capito as writer of exitus, see Gigante 1979: 334–5 and Lef`evre 1996a: 195, both referring to Pliny, Ep. 8.12.4: [Capito] scribit exitus inlustrium virorum (which appears to be our only source for Capito’s activity in this area). No mention of Capito’s activity in Pomeroy 1991; Capito is included in the survey of exitus writers by Ronconi (1996: 1258) and Coleman (1999: 21–5). Guillemin’s argument that Pliny addresses Capito as imperial secretary (1929: 132) is misleading (cf. below, Appendix). For exitus letters in Pliny, cf. Sherwin-White 1966:

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“most historical” letters in Pliny’s collection will be devoted to the heroic deaths of illustrious characters: Corellius Rufus (Ep. 1.12), Thrasea Paetus and Arria Faelilla (Ep. 3.16) and, naturally, Pliny the Elder (Ep. 6.16). c rossin g g eneric boundaries: pliny’s epistol ary e x i t u s an d miniature troy ( e p . 6.16 and 6.20) Presented as an answer to Tacitus’ request for information about the demise of Pliny the Elder during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, epistles 6.16 and 6.20 have traditionally been read as a unity that Pliny artificially and rhetorically interrupts with his favorite device, aposiopesis.48 After recounting his uncle’s heroic death, Pliny insinuates that what he has written so far is not the whole story: “Meanwhile” (that is, while the destiny of the naturalist was running its course) “at Misenum my mother and I . . .” (Interim Miseni ego et mater . . . , 6.16.22). The ellipsis at the close of Ep. 6.16 is the seed of the next epistle to Tacitus, one that Pliny devotes to chronicling his activity during the three frantic days between August 24 and 26, 79 ce.49 It is also a bridge between two distinct pieces of writing, two retellings of parallel but interdependent stories. The force of the rhetorical figure invites readers to be aware that the text is the result of a strategic choice: the author has decided to narrate these stories independently instead of combining them into an integrated account. The most common explanation readers have offered for Pliny’s decision to compose a diptych rather than a single complex architecture is the principle that each letter should address a single topic. Intertwining and comparing the storyline of his uncle’s death with his own (and his mother’s) survival would have meant violating that self-imposed rule.50 Pliny’s decision to split the story between two texts has, however, a second motive; epistles 6.16 and 6.20 cannot be conflated because they are stylistically incompatible. The difference in style reflects a difference in genre. On the surface, the main distinction Pliny posits between the two writing samples he submits to Tacitus is one of content. When he admits that the account of his own survival in the catastrophe

48

49

50

45, with a convincing integration by Ash 2003: 221–3. For Capito as practicing an alternative form of memorialization in addition to the literary exitus, see Ep. 1.17, with Krasser 1993c and Giua 2003: 260–1. For aposiopesis as a means to achieve brevitas, see Guillemin 1929: 88, citing Quint. Inst. 8.3.83 and 85. On fractured narrative as annalistic, see Ash 2003: 214–16. For the breaking-off formula as suspended between poetry and historiography, see Woodman 2003: 212–13. Pliny signals with a poetic/historiographic device that he is about to move to a second, stylistically different exercise. Cf. Sherwin-White 1966: 3–5.

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(his casus) is not a topic suitable for history, whereas the death of his uncle (his exitus) is, he establishes an ontological division between actions. The technical terminology he uses in the last paragraphs of the two letters, however, indicates that other distinctions need to be made between his texts, in particular, stylistic ones. As we shall see, Ep. 6.20 differs from its prequel in its narrative technique. At the close of Ep. 6.16, Pliny confirms the historical character of his account of the Elder’s death. Tacitus had asked about the exitus of his famous uncle, and Pliny has provided the historian with the most accurate and truthful narrative in his power, and the more so because he knows what a work of history should be based upon. Alluding again, as in Ep. 5.8.11, to Thucydides 1.22, Pliny confirms the reliability of his report. In it, Tacitus will find only facts that Pliny either witnessed directly or collected from eye-witnesses immediately after the events: Unum adiciam, omnia me quibus interfueram quaeque statim, cum maxime vera memorantur, audieram, persecutum. (Ep. 6.16.22) Let me just add that I have related only events of which I was a material witness or that I heard when they were still recent, that is, when their truth is most unadulterated.

The verbal parallels with Thucydides are evident: . . . 4  + %  %$  5    %(6 % 7.  /-# . (Th. 1.22.2)51 [I related the facts] to which I was either present myself or only after having examined with the utmost care all I learnt from others.

But even if it is historically accurate, Pliny’s text is not to be regarded as a history. What Pliny has written is just an epistle to a friend. Tacitus, on the other hand, is invited to select and to recast its essential elements in a historical mode: Tu potissima excerpes; aliud est enim epistulam aliud historiam, aliud amico aliud omnibus scribere. (Ep. 6.16.23) It is up to you to extract its essential elements: writing a letter is not the same thing, you know, as writing history – it’s different if you write to a friend or to everybody.

It is easy to grant Pliny’s first point and its implications. Epistolography and history are indeed two distinct genres. But we must recognize the fallacy of 51

For the background topos of autopsy, see Marincola 1997: 63–86. Complicated by the question of memory, the principle is relevant also for Tacitus; see Woodman and Martin 1996: 168–70.

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the neat system of equivalence that he invites us to construct in his second point. Pliny’s epistles are addressed to a single friend only in a limited and strategic sense. The letters to Tacitus are certainly written to a friend, but this does not mean that they have only one addressee. In their revised and collected form, they address a wider readership. In the words of Lef`evre: “Pliny has written a mere epistula as little as he has had only his amicus in mind.”52 The epistles might be not-a-history, as Pliny claims, but they certainly aspire to history’s longevity and wide circulation. The epilogue of Ep. 6.20 takes up the same point from a complementary perspective. Whereas Ep. 6.16 at least contained a topic worthy of being reworked into history, Pliny’s personal vicissitudes are almost unworthy of a letter. Tacitus can blame only himself if he is receiving such a trivial sample of writing: Haec nequaquam historia digna non scripturus leges et tibi scilicet qui requisisti imputabis, si digna ne epistula quidem videbuntur. (Ep. 6.20.20) You will read, pen behind your ear, these facts: they are, of course, beneath history. But you have only yourself to blame, since it was you who asked for them, if they will seem not even worthy of a letter.

The negative future participle non scripturus suggests the levity of the subject-matter. Tacitus will read these pages without the intention of rewriting them. No action is required on his part. This is a letter destined for the cronaca, as Gigante puts it.53 But if this is the implication of Pliny’s modest declaration, it is hard to reconcile it with the actual experience of reading the text to which it is appended. Pliny’s modesty seems excessive because it purports to extend a negative judgment of the letter beyond the sphere of historiography to that of epistolography. The difficulty invites a supplement of interpretation. Is it possible that Pliny’s words to Tacitus have another meaning? May we read them in such a way as to preserve a positive appreciation for the letter? It is indeed possible to advance a positive reading of the instructions Pliny imparts to his correspondent. While preserving a modest and selfeffacing tone, Pliny instills the notion that his letter may in the end not need more care than it has already received, especially with regard to its style. Modesty and self-promotion are entangled on the levels of content and style in the two epistles. In terms of content, Pliny is able to leave the example of his uncle unchallenged by acknowledging that what is recorded in his text is not history. On the other hand, in 6.20 Pliny produces a 52

Lef`evre 1996a: 194–5.

53

Gigante 1979: 326.

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text that makes a claim to permanence precisely by recording Pliny’s own actions. The strategic choice of style has one crucial consequence: while the content-related historiography of 6.16 and its eventual redeployment in Tacitus are designed to preserve the memory of its actors, the stylistically elaborate epistolography practiced in 6.20 preserves, in theory, the memory of its author. The interplay of 6.16 and 6.20 thus brings us back to the crucial dichotomy of 5.8. We face the same conflation of the writer and the protagonist. The second epistle on Vesuvius turns Pliny auctor into Pliny actor. In 6.20 he has moved from theorizing that ambiguity to practicing it. But what happens when author and object are the same in an experiment with para-historical narrative? When, in other words, historiography turns into autobiography? In autobiography authors and actors are given the highest possible attention. They are the focal point of the narrative. This genre is, however, also the most dangerous to be practiced: as Gibson convincingly argues, attempts at self-memorialization in Pliny’s time are looked upon with some measure of skepticism.54 Historical self-portraiture is open to criticism as self-serving propaganda. In order to avoid being caught up in the double bind of modest self-promotion, Pliny deploys two interrelated techniques. On the level of content, he downplays his own figure by juxtaposing it to the monumental exitus of his uncle (6.16). On the level of style, he practices a self-deflating rhetoric, evoking epic antecedents, and immediately reducing them to un-epic proportions. The result of this balancing act of modest self-promotion through careful selfeffacement has a positive side-effect for all the texts involved. When neither author nor actor is allowed to make any unchecked claim to permanence, only the mediated authority of the text is left intact. Authorial and actorial memorializations are certainly welcomed consequences of stylistic care, but they are secondary. The text takes precedence over author and actor alike. A content-oriented reading of the Vesuvius diptych shows that Pliny holds in a constant and precarious balance his relationship with the ethically monumental model of his adoptive father. He distances himself from the ideal portrait of his uncle at the same time in which he mimics it. Structurally, epistles 6.16 and 6.20 construct a compromise between likeness and difference in the images they produce of their protagonists. If in comparison the nephew is systematically diminished, the differences between the two also recall features that uncle and nephew share. Ep. 6.20, for instance, evokes the death of the Elder Pliny through the non-death of the Younger. 54

Gibson 2003, especially 239–41, with reference to Tac. Ag. 1: ac plerique suam ipsi vitam narrare fiduciam potius morum quam adrogantiam arbitrati sunt.

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Similarly, the courage and firmness of the former are evoked by the youthfully stubborn character of the latter. The praefectus classis rushes towards real danger and death to bring help when all others are fleeing (Ep. 6.16.9– 11), while his adoptive child leads out of harm’s way a fleeing vulgus running for its life. On the other side of the scale, the Younger adopts qualities of the Elder Pliny. Ep. 6.20, for instance, comes to take the place of the naturalist’s unwritten account of the eruption. The notes he dictated to his notarius while sailing towards Pomponianus’ house are lost (Ep. 6.16.10), but in his letter Pliny gives us an addendum to his uncle’s Natural History. Similarly, the epic tone of the letter and its elaborate artistry rest on a series of allusions that separate the pathos of Pliny’s actions from those of his model. From the point of view of style, one simple, quantitative observation reinforces this argument. A surprising difference in number and type separates the many and clear allusions that Pliny deploys in 6.20 (the epistle conceived for the cronaca) from the few and uncertain references to literary antecedents in 6.16 (the epistle conceived for history). In this respect, Marcello Gigante’s essentially correct assessment of the letters’ main Virgilian archetype needs adjustment. According to Gigante, two Virgilian allusions appear in Ep. 6.16. Both are dubious. The first is found in the title Pliny attributes to his uncle as “commander of the Fleet at Misenum” (Ep. 6.16.4). Gigante notes that Pliny does not use the official title, praefectus, or (as Tacitus would have written) praepositus,55 but refers to his uncle’s task in a periphrasis: classemque imperio praesens regebat. He suspects an allusion and identifies the target in the famous tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento (Aen. 6.851). We may acknowledge a possible Virgilian antecedent for the expression. To be sure the sentence has an almost hexametric rhythm: Erat Miseni classemque imperio . . . regebat. Yet Pliny deliberately avoids a hexameter by inserting the word praesens between imperio and regebat, and the lexical parallel Gigante advances as Virgilian, regere imperio, is too common to establish a direct link between the two passages.56 55 56

Hist. 2.100, a` propos of Lucilius Bassus: Ravennati simul ac Misenensi classibus [. . .] praepositus. See, for instance, from historiography, Curt. 5.9.14 (quae nullius regebantur imperio) or 9.8.4 (non regum imperio regebatur); Liv. 1.6.4 (qui conditam imperio regeret), 1.7.8 (auctoritate magis quam imperio regebat loca), 3.15.7 (multitudo regi imperio), 8.23.9 (Samnis Romanusne imperio Italiam regat), 22.13.11 (quia iusto et moderato regebantur imperio), 30.30.27 (Carthaginienses . . . videamus regentes imperio); Sal. Jug. 18.2 (neque moribus neque lege aut imperio quoiusquam regebantur) and, for a potentially technical valens of praesens, Vell. 2.125.1 (praesentisque Germanici imperio regebatur; cf. Woodman 1977, ad loc.); from poetry, Lucr. 5.1128 (quam regere imperio res velle), Seneca (Phoen. 374–5, cuius imperio mare . . . regitur; Med. 216, noster genitor imperio regit; Phaed. 621, cives paterno fortis imperio rege) and Sil. 2.61 (imperio sceptrisque regebat).

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Although misleading, Gigante’s suggestion shows how the powerful Virgilian influence of Ep. 6.20 heightened his sensitivity to epic echoes in its counterpart. Little of the prophetic context of the Aeneid seems pertinent for the portrait of the old man. We should look rather to the model of the Stoic sage, as Gigante invites us to do elsewhere.57 Similarly, the second epic tag Gigante discovers in Ep. 6.16.12 can be read as a reflection of Ep. 6.20 rather than as an allusion to a specific Virgilian context. Like the expression regere imperio, the proverb audaces fortuna iuvat is not specifically Virgilian but common to Roman expression and Roman lore as attested in Ennius, Terence and Cicero. There is no reason to invoke Turnus, who exhorts his companions with the words audentes Fortuna iuvat (Aen. 10.284), in order to gloss Pliny’s proverbial fortes Fortuna iuvat.58 In general, Gigante overrates the importance of Aeneid 10 for the heroic death of Pliny’s uncle. More relevant for the general background of the epistle is Pliny’s modeling of his uncle on the moral type of the Stoic sage, a model that hardly fits Turnus’ profile. The situation radically changes when we turn to Ep. 6.20. The Virgilian model becomes apparent and predominant. The evident subtext of the episode Pliny recounts here is the destruction of Troy, as narrated by one of its protagonists and survivors. Pliny’s own account of the night of terror in Misenum opens with a recitation of Aeneas’ formulaic beginning in Aen. 2.12–13: Ais te adductum litteris quas exigenti tibi de morte avunculi mei scripsi, cupere cognoscere, quos ego Miseni relictus (id enim ingressus abruperam) non solum metus verum etiam casus pertulerim. “Quamquam animus meminisse horret, . . . . incipiam.” (Ep. 6.20.1) You write that the letter you requested from me about my uncle’s death has led you to desire to know what scares (indeed, what adventures) I lived through after I had been left in Misenum. You’re right: I had started to tell you, when I broke it off. Well, “My soul recoils remembering . . . , and yet I shall begin.” 57

58

See Gigante 1979, especially 342–3. Pliny the Elder acts the part of a Stoic sage when he consoles his terrified friend and displays an absolute tranquility bathing, dining, and putting on a smile in the face of danger (Ep. 6.16.12). In Gigante’s view, Pliny is here mindful of Tacitus’ descriptions of several exitus: Ann. 11.3, on Valerius Asiaticus who has his wrist cut after dinner (lauto corpore, hilare epulatus . . . venas exsolvit); Ann. 15.64, on Seneca, who takes a hot bath; Ann. 16.35, on Thrasea Paetus, who faces death but appears laetitiae propior for having received news that his son-in-law had only been banished. Cf. Otto 1890: 144. Gigante acknowledges that the expression is proverbial (from Ennius, in Macr. 6.1.62, to Ter. Ph. 203, to Cic. Tusc. 11.4.11: “fortis . . . fortuna adiuvat” ut est in vetere proverbio), but he insists on seeing a curious parallel between the Elder Pliny and Turnus: “non ho dubbio alcuno che il nostro narratore abbia in mente il luogo virgiliano del X dell’Eneide . . .” (1979: 341).

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The letter reinforces this quotation by introducing earlier in the first sentence an anticipatory allusion to Virgil. Tacitus’ desire to have an account of the night of the eruption is phrased in a language that echoes Aen. 2.10: sed si tantus amor casus cognoscere nostros (“But, if you crave so much to know about my adventures . . .”). The same desire to know (cupido/amor . . . cognoscere) unites Pliny’s Tacitus and Virgil’s Dido; the same accidents (casus) unite Virgil’s Aeneas and Pliny-the-actor.59 The context of Aeneid 2 finds a further parallel later in the epistle, when Pliny’s old and weary mother begs her young son to leave her behind: Tum mater orare hortari iubere, quoquo modo fugerem; posse enim iuvenem, se et annis et corpore gravem bene morituram, si mihi causa mortis non fuisset. Ego contra salvum me nisi una non futurum; dein manum eius amplexus addere gradum cogo. Paret aegre incusatque se, quod me moretur. (Ep. 6.20.12) Then my mother began to pray, urge, command that I take flight however I could. Young, I could. As for her, burdened by an aging body, she was going to die with no regrets, if only she would not be the cause of my death. But I insisted that I wasn’t going to save myself unless her with me. So, I take her by the hand and force her to walk. She obeys, but barely can and blames herself for slowing me down.

The scene recalls Anchises’ plea to Aeneas to leave him at Troy. The parents make the same argument across the texts to convince their sons to abandon them: you who are at an age when you have all your strength should not be slowed by the burden of aging parents. Anchises’ generous and disheartened words to his son resonate in Pliny’s indirect speech: “Vos o, quibus integer aevi sanguis,” ait, “solidaeque suo stant robore vires, vos agitate fugam. Me si caelicolae voluissent ducere vitam, has mihi servassent sedes. Satis una superque vidimus excidia et captae superavimus urbi. Sic o sic positum adfati discedite corpus.” (Aen. 2.638–44)60

You, my son, whose life is still intact, he says, and still retain the full force of your body, you take flight. As for me, if the gods had wanted me to live, they would have saved my home. Once was enough, even too much for me, to see the slaughter and survive the fallen city. Thus, thus, bid your farewell now and let this body rest. 59

60

On an (intermediate) re-use of the formula in Lucan (tum si tantus amor belli tibi, Roma, nefandi, 1.21), see G¨orler 1979: 429–30. A contrast is at work in the allusion: Anchises speaks first about the youth and strength of his son, and then moves to his own situation. Pliny’s mother first introduces her predicament and then contrasts it with her son’s youthful strength.

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Eventually, both sons succeed in convincing their parents to leave the city.61 It is during the flight of Pliny and his mother that other Virgilian allusions surface in his text. Details of the panic seizing the crowd threatened by the eruption are drawn from Aeneid 2. To Aen. 2.450 (agmine denso) one can, for instance, trace the description of the crowd rushing out of the town ingenti . . . agmine, just as the attonitum vulgus that follows Pliny and his mother recalls the ingentem comitum novorum . . . numerum that follows Aeneas, disoriented, out of Troy, a crowd Virgil labels as miserabile vulgus (Aen. 2.796–8).62 More details are worth mentioning: Iam cinis, adhuc tamen rarus. Respicio: densa caligo tergis imminebat, quae nos torrentis modo infusa terrae sequebatur. “Deflectamus” inquam “dum videmus, ne in via strati comitantium turba in tenebris obruamur.” (Ep. 6.20.13) It was ash, now, still falling thin. I look back. A thick cloud was catching up with us, like a flooding torrent, spilling down over the land. “Let us move aside,” I said, “while we still can see. If we fall in the darkness, we will be trampled by the crowd that is escaping with us.”

Gigante notes that Pliny’s advice to leave the road “not to be trampled by the crowd in flight” combines the Virgilian tag comitante caterva (to be found in Aen. 2.40 and 2.370, respectively of Trojans and of Greeks) with the tragic telis nostrorum obruimur in 2.411, or with obruimur numero in 2.424. The Virgilian intertext may contribute to the discussion of an editorial decision: instead of obruamur, Mynors privileges the variant obteramur. Both readings are attested in the manuscript tradition, but the Virgilian parallel may be used to support the reading chosen in the text above.63 Even Pliny’s compact study in crowd psychology owes elements to Virgil’s archetype. When the cloud of ash engulfs the fleeing mass, the epistle distinctly evokes the last night of Troy: Vix consideramus, et nox non qualis inlunis aut nubila, sed qualis in locis clausis lumine exstincto. Audires ululatus feminarum, infantum quiritatus, clamores virorum; alii parentes alii liberos aliis coniuges vocibus requirebant, vocibus noscitabant; hi suum casum, illi suorum miserabantur; erant qui metu mortis mortem precarentur; multi ad deos manus tollere, plures nusquam iam deos ullos 61

62 63

Pliny’s re-use of the thematic model attracts lexical borrowings from contexts close by. According to Gigante, citing Lillge (1918), who was the first to signal the parallels between Aeneas and Pliny, Pliny’s language depends for his mother’s entreaties on Aen. 2.287 (Hector to Aeneas): nec me quaerentem vana moratur, and Aen. 2.619 (Venus to Aeneas): eripe, nate, fugam finemque impone labori (1979: 253). These parallels seem weak. A closer model than Aen. 5.529 (attonitis haesere animis), suggested by Gigante (1979: 351). Cf. Gigante 1979: 354.

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aeternamque illam et novissimam noctem mundo interpretabantur. Nec defuerunt qui fictis mentitisque terroribus vera pericula augerent. (Ep. 6.20.14–15) We had hardly sat down, when the night was upon us. It was dark, not simply like on a moonless or cloudy night, but like indoors when all the lights are out. Women were howling, babies wailing, men shouting. Some were calling out for their parents, others for their children, others for their spouses, their voices the only way to find one another. There were some who, afraid of death, were invoking death. Many were raising their hands in prayer. Many more were concluding that all the gods were gone, and this was the perpetual and final night for the world. There were also some who actually increased the real dangers with their frightening delusions and fabrications.

We will have to come back to the scene and explore the ramifications of the disaster topos. For now it may suffice to note two details in which Pliny’s combinatory art draws directly on Virgil. The careful distinction between male and female voices (and reactions) is not peculiar to Pliny. In the epistle, the strict obligated association of ululatus feminarum and clamores virorum is achieved through a combination of Aen. 2.487–8, penitusque cavae plangoribus aedes / ; ferit aurea sidera clamor, with 2.313: exoritur clamorque virum clangorque tubarum; Virgil’s venit summa dies et ineluctabile tempus / Dardaniae (2.324–5, uttered by Panthus, sacerdos phoebi), combined with Aeneas’ own excessere omnes . . . dii (2.351–2), perhaps anticipates Pliny’s crowd of prophets of doom, who read the signs of the world’s end in the darkness surrounding them. To be sure, in the elaborate texture of sources on which this section of the epistle rests, other textual connections take the reader back further to Lucretius (as Gigante notes),64 but the epistle relies mainly on Virgil’s text and asks to be read in its frame. Once the night of the eruption is cast in a Virgilian mold, it can accommodate also other texts that have re-used Virgil. For example, Pliny’s re-use of Virgil’s narrative enables a learned window-reference to Book 1 of Lucan’s Bellum civile. Pliny’s allusion to an already highly allusive text contributes to defining the ambiguous genre to which the epistle belongs. While Pliny’s crowd scene is mainly and explicitly modeled on Virgil’s Troiae halosis, two later details, one lexical and one structural, evoke through Virgil’s intertext Lucan’s semi-historical account of the panic and portents that accompanied Caesar’s unstoppable march on Rome. Back in Misenum, Pliny, his mother and the terrified population spend the night in between hope and fear: 64

For his learned reconstruction of Pliny’s antecedents, see 1979: 355–7. I will return to this passage below, when I discuss the sub-archetype of Livy that Gigante considers pertinent to the epistle.

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Nam et tremor terrae perseverabat, et plerique lymphati terrificis vaticinationibus et sua et aliena mala ludificabantur. (Ep. 6.20.19) While the earthquakes continued, many, like possessed bodies, made seem ridiculous with their horrific predictions even their own and the collective woes.

The lexical point of tangency between Pliny and Lucan is the adjective lymphatus, a term that Virgil had introduced into epic (Aen. 7.377) and Livy into historiography (Liv. 7.17.3). In Pliny’s time, the two genres shared the term as a poeticism.65 Pliny’s allusion, though, is not to Virgil’s original usage. In the Aeneid, the term lymphatus describes, in the clausula lymphata per urbem, Amata’s wrath as she rages through the city. A closer model for Pliny’s allusion is found in Lucan, who connects the term with the (Virgilian) flight of the crowd from Rome at the rumors of Caesar’s approach under arms: . . . sic turba per urbem praecipiti lymphata gradu, velut unica rebus spes foret adflictis patrios excedere muros, inconsulta ruit. (1.496–8)

So the crowd, possessed, rushed hurrying through the city, as if in such dire circumstances the only hope were to leave the walls of their homeland.

Pliny depends on Lucan’s recasting of the Aeneid scene also for the dispositio of his material. The letter first recounts the flight from town (Ep. 6.20.6) and then reports the miranda, the terrifying natural prodigies that accompanied the eruption: multa ibi miranda, multas formidines patimur (Ep. 6.20.7). Lucan had arranged his material in a similar hysteron–proteron structure, detailing his catalogue of prodigia (2.525) on earth, sea and sky only after he had completed his account of the mass exodus from Rome. The ambiguity of the double reference mirrors the difficulty in choosing which account of the factual (Trojan) or the potential (Roman) urban tragedy one should bear in mind while reading Pliny’s account of the potential destruction in Misenum. Both the Virgilian original and its recasting in Lucan offer themselves as plausible intertexts. A similar difficulty faces the reader in finding an intertext for the character of Pliny the Elder’s Spanish friend, who enters the stage for the second time at 6.20.10: Tum vero idem ille ex Hispania amicus acrius et instantius “Si frater” inquit “tuus, tuus avunculus vivit, volt esse vos salvos; si periit, superstites voluit. Proinde quid cessatis evadere?” 65

For the history of the term, inherited from the Greek ', see Fouchier 2000: 203.

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Then the same friend from Spain as before, but now more insistent and pressing said: “If he who is brother and uncle to you is alive, he wants you to save yourselves: if he perished, he wants you to survive him. So, what is delaying your flight?”

Gigante unconvincingly indicates a possible antecedent in Virgil’s Androgeus, basing his suggestion on a faint thematic echo that might link Ep. 6.20.10, quid cessatis evadere, to Aen. 2.373–4: Festinate viri! Nam quae tam sera moratur / segnities? (Hurry up, comrades! What laziness is delaying you so long?) To his parallel one can offer an alternative, perhaps similarly subtle, but more in tune with the system of correspondences built into the epistle. In constructing the episode, Pliny integrated two Virgilian half lines drawn from a different but not fully surprising context, Aen. 3.311 and 343. In their original context, two details link these lines to one another: the same speaker, Andromache, utters both, and they refer to the same character, Hector. In the pathetic episode of the Trojans’ stop at Buthrotum, Aeneas and his companions find Andromache performing sacrificial rites at Hector’s cenotaph. She mistakes them for shades and asks: “Verane te facies, verus mihi nuntius adfers, nate dea? Vivisne? Aut, si lux alma recessit, Hector ubi est?” (Aen. 3.310–12)

“Is this your true self, son of a goddess? True what you relate to me? Are you alive? For if the light of life has set for you, where is Hector?”

Andromache’s questions set up the same dichotomy between life and death and their consequences as the Spaniard’s syllogism. Is it possible that Aeneas is alive? And, if what she sees is a shade, why doesn’t Hector accompany him? It is significant that a few lines later, in a similar round of questions about Aeneas’ son, Hector’s name comes again to her lips: “Quid puer Ascanius? Superatne et vescitur aura? quem tibi iam Troia – ecqua tamen puero est amissae cura parenti? Ecquid in antiquam virtutem animosque virilis et pater Aeneas et avunculus excitat Hector?” (Aen. 3.338–43)

What about Ascanius, your child? Is he alive and well in this world above, he who to you when Troy . . . Does he miss, your child, his mother? Do the examples of his father Aeneas and his uncle Hector impel him to follow their force and their courage in war?

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Having started his account in Aeneas’ role, Pliny now redefines his position. The age gap separating him from his father and uncle makes of Iulus’ persona a suitable vehicle for his rhetoric of allusion. The role of the Spanish friend, therefore, is to suggest that there is a secondary model at work together with the night of the fall of Troy. No doubt aware of how overstated his epic framing of the casus might appear, Pliny provides his readers with a different paradigm, one similarly epic but of less than epic proportions. A retrospective evaluation of the letter’s first gesture towards Virgil helps to explore this second paradigm. The first Virgilianism we encountered reading the text is not Pliny’s usurpation in his own voice of Aeneas’ proem quamquam animus horret, but rather his allusion to Dido’s curiosity about Aeneas’ travails. Pliny suggests that Tacitus, not he, has framed the question in Virgilian terms when he shows that he desires casus cognoscere. Notably, the first Virgilian allusion in the letter is imputed to a different author, namely Tacitus. It is a small detail, one that readers have so far overlooked, but fully in keeping with Pliny’s practice of citation in praesentia (cf. Chapter 3). Pliny’s Ais te adductum . . . cupere cognoscere . . . casus implies that the key words cognoscere casus were already present in the text he received. Thus it appears that we owe to Tacitus (and not to Pliny’s vanity, as Gigante believes) not only Pliny’s text but also its epic setup. Pliny purports to be writing a responsive text and to be accepting the preliminary rhetorical and intertextual grid his correspondent has laid out. Under these circumstances readers assume that he is faithfully relating the words of his correspondent. In the opening and closing of the epistle Pliny makes clear that the person ultimately responsible for “what” the text narrates is Tacitus. By shifting the responsibility for the first Virgilian allusion to his correspondent, he also insinuates that “how” the text frames its narrative is Tacitus’ responsibility as well. What is more, the words Pliny attributes to Tacitus do not point to a single locus in Virgil. If the opening literally echoes Aeneid 2, with the epistolographer taking up the voice of the hero whose spirit still shivers and shrinks from the memory of his misfortunes, they also allude to the microproem that Aeneas inserts, en abyme, in the narrative of his sea-faring. He has just arrived in Buthrotum when he hears the incredible rumor that the Trojan Helenus is king of the island and is married to Andromache. Aeneas’ reaction is the same as Dido’s in Book 2 (and Tacitus’ in Pliny’s epistle): Obstipui, miroque incensum pectus amore compellare virum et casus cognoscere tantos. (Aen. 3.299–300)

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I marveled and was taken by an incredible desire to interrogate that man and know about such remarkable changes of fortune.

Pliny’s responsive paraphrase of Tacitus’ invitation to narrate in epic terms offers his readers the first of two streams of narrative linked in their Virgilian original, but it also alludes to the second one.66 Pliny’s epic diction in the letter invites its own deconstruction. Not only does it originate with Tacitus rather than with him, it is also unepic and unreal. What Aeneas actually finds at Buthrotum after he has met Andromache on the banks of a fake Simoens can be named only in relation to an absent original: Procedo et parvam Troiam simulataque magnis Pergama et arentem Xanthi cognomine rivum agnosco, Scaeaeque amplector limina portae. (Aen. 3.349–51)

I move on and I make out Troy in front of me, but small, and an imitation of the Pergamon, modeled on the great one, and a dry river having but the name of Xanthus. But the posts of the Scaean doors I embrace.

The pathos of Virgil’s passage rests on the dialectic and unresolved relation between the present objects and the memory of their models, as it is fixed in Aeneas’ mind. As signifiers, these new small-scale replicas evoke the image of their lost antecedents at Troy while marking their absence. Recollection depends on sight, but sight also marks the distance from what is remembered. The two cities can be reconciled only through a process of neurotic over-investment. It is only the desire for the lost original that allows the viewing subject Aeneas, and the planning architect, Andromache, to content themselves with surrogates, taking signs for their meaning. The passage oscillates between the character’s adherence to and detachment from the city he approaches. Though shrunk, the city is still a version of Troy. The realistic reproduction of the main original buildings cannot produce the thing itself: the citadel is small but it is patterned on the original one. The measure of uneasiness intrinsic to the term simulata increases for the Xanthus: the act of forcible nomination imposed on a feature of the landscape that is too small to receive it does little to hide the distance separating the puny river from its namesake. The contrast between sign and irretrievable meaning produces a jarring effect, one that Aeneas’ final empathic embrace 66

The syntagm cognoscere casus is present also in Lucan 9.553 (for the future accidents of war) and Valerius Flaccus 2.2 (retrospectively for the trouble Jason left at home). On the syntax-bending figure cupido + infinitive, see Servius ad Aen. 2.10. Pliny carefully avoids it by establishing a double infinitive (ais . . . cupere cognoscere).

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of the Scaean doorposts barely neutralizes. Aeneas’ (and the readers’) gaze is forced to oscillate between two opposed perspectives, one desiring to see Troy in the new city, the other measuring the distance between them. When compared with the reality they are meant to replace, Andromache’s surrogates prove inadequate. Aeneas is momentarily deceived, and embraces the door posts of the replica. He promotes, at least for a moment, empathy and identification. But Pliny’s readers have seen all this before. As with Andromache, Pliny’s intertextual Troy is a mock Troy, a small-scale model of the epic reality, a second-degree geography which imposes merely symbolic name-tags on a landscape that cannot match its original. Like Aeneas after he has left Buthrotum, readers have gained insight and are not ready to ignore the differences between the original and its reduced copy. Pliny’s language is heroic, but the associations he establishes for his readers deflate and subvert it. Pliny’s text is a balanced act of modesty and self-promotion. On the one hand, just as his heroism in the dangerous (but not dire) circumstances is a diminished reflection of his uncle’s Stoic behavior in a truly cataclysmic crisis, so his literary self-portrait is moderated by the ambiguity of the literary models it evokes. As Gigante wryly notes, even if the language of Ep. 6.20 evokes their ghosts, Pliny is not Aeneas, nor is Tacitus Dido.67 On the other hand, in the refined play with his model that the letter displays (and keeping clear the differences in size and importance between model and copy), Pliny, like Andromache, can have a toy Troy. Like her, he may answer in fully Aeneadic terms to the curiosity of his Aeneas-like friend; like her, in her life in a surrogate Troy, he can pretend not to notice that he is transcribing in a minor key a narrative that does not fit him. After all, Andromache had been candid enough to address Aeneas with words that denied Aeneas’ (and his poem’s) masculine claim to primacy and originality: nos patria incensa diversa per aequora vectae (Aen. 3.325).68 When she appropriates the language that in Aen. 1.376 and 6.692 described the Odysseus-like peregrinations at sea of the Trojan hero, she stakes a claim to an epic dimension for her autobiography. At the same time, she reduces the world of epic to the dimensions of her epyllion and brings the Aeneid face to face with its origin in Catullan elegy. In her sixteen line micro-epic she 67

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“Va da s´e che come Pompei o Ercolano o Stabiae non sono una nuova Ilio, cos´ı Tacito non e` Didone” (1979: 349). Andromache’s clausula echoes both Aeneas’ self-introduction to Venus in Aen. 1.376, when all the Trojans are per aequora vectos, and Anchises’ welcoming at 6.692–3: quas ego te terras et quanta per aequora vectum / accipio.

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evokes the neoteric model haunting Aeneas’ and Virgil’s textual past: multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus / advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias (“so many borders and so many seas I’ve had to cross, my brother, to reach your tomb and weep,” Catul. 101.1–2). In the same condensed format as Andromache, Pliny can allow a small-scale epic history to record his deeds. In his advised use of intertextual parallels, Pliny is not, as G¨orler would put it or as Guillemin proposed, simply so well-read that he recurs to literary sources in order to conceptualize every action he performs on the narrative stage. Rather, he is like Petronius’ hidden author, looking from an ironic self-aware distance at his own first-person character while he is engaging in literary mythomaniacal imitations.69 The irony that distinguishes the two is what rescues his text from any na¨ıve identification with its author. If Pliny appears in 6.16 as a character who performs metaliterary rites, his authorial counterpart is engaged in performing an allusive shadow fight that has collective historical paradigms as well. In adopting a poetic redeployment of historical narrative on the personal scale, Pliny was not alone. He could find inspiration for a poeticized version of a small-scale Iliupersis in a similar intertextual game that Ovid had played in Tristia 1.3. In providing a pathos-filled account of his last night in Rome, Ovid (narrator and character alike) had maintained a similar equilibrium between the self-deflating and un-epic proportions of the actions at hand and the unbridgeable distance of the epic exemplars. Ovid had begun the poem with an epic gesture: the recollection of illius tristissima noctis imago (notably, an image of that gloomiest of nights) brings tears to his eyes (Tr. 1.3.1). Other signals are interspersed in the text.70 With all his epic pathos, however, Ovid duly registers the difference in scale from the Aeneid paradigm, when he notes: Si licet exemplis in parvis grandibus uti, haec facies Troiae, cum caperetur, erat. (Tr. 1.3.25–6) 69 70

See Conte 1996: 1–36. Two high points in the poem, in which the most pathetic manifestations of grief for his relegation are detailed, allude to the literary “fall-of-city” topos. The first comes soon into the letter, in the form of a narrative hexameter: Quocumque aspiceres, luctus gemitusque sonabant (Tr. 1.3.21). The same overwhelming presence of death is in Aeneas’ summation of the first clashes with the invading Greek army: crudelis ubique / luctus, ubique pavor et plurima mortis imago (2.368–9). The second pathos highpoint is in the close of the poem, when the moment of separation is finally reached: Tum vero exoritur clamor gemitusque meorum (Tr. 1.3.77). The same epic line-start may be found in the climactic final battle of the Aeneid: tum vero exoritur clamor ripaeque lacusque / responsant circa et caelum tonat omne tumultu (12.756–7). Perhaps also Ovid’s hesitation to cross his home’s threshold (ter limen tetigi, ter sum reuocatus, Tr. 1.3.21) has an antecedent in the hesitant ascent of the wooden horse to the city: quater ipso in limine portae / substitit (Aen. 2.242–3).

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If it is proper to use great examples for small matters, this was the spectacle at Troy when it was being overtaken.

Admittedly, his text is about the metaphoric fall of a domus as opposed to the literal fall of a city, and his private grief is only described in the exalted terms of a general mourning. Yet the difference is not merely of proportion (parvis vs. grandibus). In his elegiac manipulation of historical paradigms, Ovid might even be so careful as to evoke a different, slightly less dramatic, paradigm for his relegation than the fall of Troy. Marking the lesser degree of misfortune that has befallen him (and thus avoiding casting any shade of cruelty, or epic wrath, on the Princeps who has ordered his relegation), Ovid suggests that the fall of another city, one involving no actual bloodshed and ultimately a felicitous outcome, may be the pertinent historical paradigm for his departure. Livy’s account of the destruction of Alba Longa is the chosen text.71 Livy’s text has a first contextual advantage insofar as it fits Ovid’s present situation better. Ovid’s house is not being stormed, and he, like the inhabitants of Alba, is simply forced to leave it. Yet there is more. In an elegy completely devoid of mythological paradigms, the presence of Mettus’ punishment as the only (historical) example is surprising. The concise simile sic doluit Mettus (Tr. 1.3.75–6) confirms the contextual relevance of Alba Longa. It is a hint that the historical fall of Alba Longa should be juxtaposed to the Virgilian epic account. It is difficult to see the relevance of the example otherwise.72 Stylistically, Livy’s text is peculiarly pertinent because it too presented itself as an explicitly non-epic account that still indulged in an epic coloring. Livy actually presented his diverging account by evoking the expected background topos as conspicuously absent: Inter haec iam praemissi Albam erant equites qui multitudinem traducerent Romam. Legiones deinde ductae ad diruendam urbem. Quae ubi intravere portas, non quidem fuit tumultus ille nec pavor qualis captarum esse urbium solet, cum effractis portis stratisve ariete muris aut arce vi capta clamor hostilis et cursus per urbem armatorum omnia ferro flammaque miscet . . . (Liv. 1.29.1–3) In the meanwhile the cavalry had been sent to Alba in order to escort to Rome the city’s population. Then the legions are brought in to effect the city’s destruction. When these enter the gates, there is neither the commotion nor the fear that is found every time a city is overtaken. In those cases, when the gates are smashed, 71

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Coming very early in Livy’s history of Rome (1.22–9, the reign of Tullus Hostilius), the books relating the early wars with Alba Longa and the final razing of the city were already circulating in Ovid’s times. For Livy’s immediate fortune, see Tac. Dial. 10.2 and Plin. Ep. 2.3.8. For Mett(i)us’ role in the fall of Alba, see Liv. 1.23–8. Mettus’ name is hapax in Ovid. His punishment is periphrastically alluded to also at Ibis 277–8.

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the walls brought down by the ram, and the citadel is stormed in arms, the chaos of arson and slaughter dominates, and the city is filled with threatening shouts and soldiers running everywhere.

All the typical signs of the topos are absent from the actual scene at Alba Longa, but they still find their way into Livy’s account through a deft rhetorical praeteritio. The final assault on Priam’s citadel saw the same progression as Livy’s description of the scene that is not taking place at Alba Longa: labat ariete crebro / ianua, et emoti procumbunt cardine postes. / Fit via vi; . . . Danai . . . late loca milite complent (“the door sways under the frequent blows of the ram, and the posts come tumbling down. Force opens the way and the Greeks . . . fill up the place with troops,” Aen. 2.492–5).73 At the end of the chapter Livy deploys new epic details, this time matching the words to the deeds. Though bloodless, the excidium (destruction, but also slaughter)74 of Alba Longa is narrated in epic tones: Ut vero iam equitum clamor exire iubentium instabat, iam fragor tectorum quae diruebantur ultimis urbis partibus audiebatur pulvisque ex distantibus locis ortus velut nube inducta omnia impleverat, raptim [. . .] exirent, iam continens agmen migrantium impleverat vias, et conspectus aliorum mutua miseratione integrabat lacrimas, vocesque etiam miserabiles exaudiebantur, mulierum praecipue, cum obsessa ab armatis templa augusta praeterirent ac velut captos relinquerent deos. (Liv. 1.29.4–6) But the shouting of the cavalry ordering the evacuation became pressing, the noise of the homes that were being torn down on the city’s outskirts could be heard, and the dust risen from afar had enveloped everything, coming down like a cloud. At that point . . . all left in a hurry. The immense crowd of the evacuees filled the streets. The miserable aspect each offered brought tears to the others’ eyes. Voices filled with pain were heard, especially those of women, when they were forced to pass in front of the lofty temples and saw them occupied by men in arms. They felt they were leaving their gods in captivity.

Intertextual details link the passage to Virgil’s Troiae halosis and guarantee the epic pedigree of the passage. Notably, the series equitum clamor . . . fragor tectorum complicates with a chiasmus Virgil’s exoritur clamorque virum clangorque tubarum (2.313, right after the destruction of houses is mentioned). Several details, however, may be pertinent for Pliny’s letter as well. In particular, the notion that the dust cloud is pressing on the fleeing crowd: Livy has pulvisque ex distantibus locis ortus velut nube inducta 73

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The stock description of the fallen city was available to rhetoricians as well as to historians and poets: cf. Quint. Inst. 8.3.67–9. The most recent contribution on the topos is Rossi 2004: 17–53. The tag excidia (Troiae) features twice in the Aeneid, at 2.643 (Anchises) and 10.45–6 with the semantic force of “massacre and destruction.”

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omnia impleverat; Pliny varies the image, though not beyond recognition: densa caligo tergis imminebat, quae nos torrentis modo infusa terrae sequebatur (followed by the evocation of a nubila . . . nox).75 Once reconstructed in its main lines of influence to include also Livy’s ambiguously epic passages together with Virgil, Lucan and Ovid, the intertextual filigree of Ep. 6.20 tells us something more: it motivates one of the strangest details that appear in the first epistle of the diptych. The detail Pliny adds retrospectively to Ep. 6.16 confirms the significance of the Ab urbe condita for his text. In explaining why he did not follow the great Pliny to his death, he specifies that he was reading and excerpting passages from Livy assigned by his uncle: posco librum Titi Livi, et quasi per otium lego atque etiam ut coeperam excerpo (“I request a book by Livy and, as if at leisure, I read, and I take notes as I had started doing,” Ep. 6.20.5). The connection is not merely contextual. Even the way Pliny characterizes his reading as “almost at leisure” depends on Livy’s 27.2.9: ubi nemo hostium adversus prodit, spolia per otium legere et congestos in unum locum cremavere suos (“since the enemy did not attack, they [i.e., the Romans] collected the spoils at leisure, gathered the corpses of their fallen comrades in one place and burned them”).76 Pliny’s echo mimics in its form the content of Livy’s text: while he is reading and extracting shreds of text from Livy, Pliny alludes via the lexical ambiguity of legere to a despoliation of cadavers. He plunders Livy’s text (excerpo) and arranges its fragments into a trophy. Echoes from the work of the historian intersect with, and force their way into Pliny’s evocations of Virgil’s text, complicating the generic pedigree of his letter. In conclusion, even if Ep. 6.20 is allegedly not historia, it offers itself as such. Rather than 6.16 and 7.33, which are sent to Tacitus as pre-texts for his history, it is 6.20 that embodies Pliny’s version of the work of the historian. The epistle not only pointedly alludes to a work of history (Livy’s); it also reproduces in miniature the close dialogue that writers of Roman history establish with their epic counterparts. In excerpting and redeploying the 75

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Gigante detects a secondary subordinated archetype for the letter in the larger context of Livy’s history. In the passage quoted above (Ep. 6.20.14–15), two elements extraneous to Virgil’s vocabulary go back to the lexicon of the historian. Pliny’s quiritatus depends on Livy’s nulla vox quiritantium . . . exaudiri . . . poterat (39.8.8 – not 2.23.8, as in Gigante) or to his vox quiritantis (in 10.7.5). Similarly, the expression encountered earlier at 6.20.12, manum eius amplexus addere gradum cogo contains the distinctively Livian tag addere gradum, which recurs thrice in his description of military marches (3.27.7, 10.20.10, and 26.9.5). Gigante indicates the parallel but comments only on Pliny’s imitation from a distance of a habit of his uncle. Actually, for Gigante, Pliny only apes the serenity of his model: “scimmiotta un’abitudine del grande zio” (1979: 350). G¨orler (1979: 430) refers to Liv. 25.31.9 (fall of Syracuse) for Pliny’s attention to a book in the midst of a cataclysm.

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building blocks of the fallen-city topos, the letter partakes in the traditional circulation of commonplaces among genres (from epic to history to elegy to epistolography and back).77 Beyond the actual objectivity of his report, Pliny negotiates the historicity of his letter through style. As always, the choice of the addressee is essential: Pliny does not merely speak about the tradition, he addresses someone actively involved in it. However, instead of entrusting his commentary to a monologic treatise on historiography (5.8 can hardly be thought of as such), Pliny chooses to speak to Tacitus via an apparent aside, a dialogic replica in their conversation. The vehicle Pliny uses to convey his meaning to Tacitus, the language of allusion, is certainly subtle. Yet Pliny could count on his initial privileged addressee having the necessary competence to decode it. As a historian who relied on similar techniques of intertextuality, Tacitus was fluent in Pliny’s language of allusion. voicing the dead: public per f ormance and family eulogy for verginius ruf us ( e p . 2.1, 3.18 and 4.28) Moving away from his close conversation with the Historiae developed in 6.16 and 6.20, we find that Pliny re-uses another text by Tacitus, the Agricola. Pliny is no less critically conversant with Tacitus’ debut work as an historian than he is with his later works.78 Though not addressed directly to his favorite correspondent, Ep. 2.1 can be read as part of Pliny’s exchange of views with him, specifically targeting the first historical work. Tacitus, who is about to become the historian par excellence in the collection, makes his appearance in the text as the person who delivers the eulogy for Verginius Rufus. In addition to his presence as a character, in 2.1 Tacitus makes his presence felt also through a pointed textual allusion. By appropriating a recognizable turn of phrase from the Agricola, and applying it to Verginius, Pliny targets his friend’s transition from oratory to historiography. The circumstantial coincidence of the two genres in death is witnessed in a passage by Seneca we have already seen (Suas. 6.21): Quotiens magni alicuius viri mors ab historicis narrata est, totiens fere consummatio totius vitae et quasi funebris laudatio redditur. In the case that Pliny now allusively addresses, the blurring of the line between rhetorical and historiographic accounts returns: Tacitus the historian is cast into the role of an orator, while Pliny the orator produces a text that signals through allusion a historical quality. 77 78

On the topos, see Woodman 1988: 29–30. Cf. Syme’s label “A historian’s first steps,” as commented by Sailor 2004: 139–41.

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From Pliny’s perspective, Agricola represents Tacitus’ first act of defection to the opposite camp. The epistle in which historiography is contrasted to oratorical practice is the first one of Book 2. It is addressed to Voconius Romanus, the equestrian friend from Saguntum to whom Pliny has already written Ep. 1.5 and who, like Tacitus, is one of the favorite addressees of the collection (eight letters).79 The occasion of the epistle is the spectacle offered to the Roman people by the public funeral of Verginius Rufus. After a short biography of Verginius, in which the circumstances of his (studia-related) death receive attention in a typically Plinian gesture,80 Pliny mentions Tacitus, the laudator eloquentissimus who, as consul suffectus, had been granted the honor of delivering the official obituary: Huius viri exsequiae magnum ornamentum principi magnum saeculo magnum etiam foro et rostris attulerunt. Laudatus est a consule Cornelio Tacito; nam hic supremus felicitati eius cumulus accessit, laudator eloquentissimus. (Ep. 2.1.6) This man’s funeral has afforded great luster to the princeps, our generation, the forum, and the rostrum alike. Tacitus, as consul, has delivered his eulogy, thus adding this too to the many happy circumstances of Verginius’ life: a most eloquent panegyricist.

The mention of the role Tacitus played in the funeral of Verginius is the turning point of the letter. Thereafter, Pliny moves to a different tone and subject, re-elaborating the eulogy for Verginius from a new, more personal, point of view. Pliny’s eulogy is not part of the official program of Verginius’ funeral. It is rather a coda to the public celebration of his accomplishments, a final flourish penned by someone who not only longs for Verginius as an example of the virtues of the past, but also admired and loved him as something other than a public figure (qui illum non solum publice, quantum admirabar tantum diligebam). The letter details the many personal ties that linked Pliny and Verginius: their same region of origin (they were from municipia finitima), their neighboring estates, and, most importantly, the fact that Verginius had been chosen as tutor for Pliny after the death of his 79

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In terms of intratextual structural connections, one may note that, in Book 1, to a letter addressing Voconius (1.5 on Regulus’ fear after Domitian’s death, his past evil deeds, and his attempts at a reconciliation with Pliny) there follows one addressed to Tacitus (1.6); in Book 2, a letter addressing Voconius is concerned indirectly with Pliny’s relationship with Tacitus. Two more letters are devoted to Verginius’ post-mortem destiny: 6.10 to Albinus, 9.19 to Ruso (who is attributed knowledge of 6.10). Verginius is mentioned in passing also at 5.3.5 as an example of a public personality who did not disdain writing light poetry. For similar associations of death and studia, see epistles 3.7 (death of Silius Italicus) and 6.16 (death of Pliny the Elder).

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father. The paternal affection Verginius had shown Pliny was manifested by the long series of interventions he had made on Pliny’s behalf and to his advantage throughout the cursus honorum of his pupil. He sponsored Pliny’s candidacy to public posts, rushed back from the countryside for each of his career advancements, mentioned his name as one worthy of being elected to a priestly college, and appointed him as his spokesman when he asked to be excused from membership of the quindecemviri. For all these reasons, Pliny writes, Verginius’ death elicits in him the same reaction as a premature death would do (tamquam immaturam), and he asks to be allowed to weep for it on Voconius’ shoulder (mortem eius in sinu tuo defleam). The line of argument shifts again from the personal eulogistic tone to the language of public recognition, and with that returns to more familiar historiographical ground. The greatest consolation for Pliny’s grief is that Verginius’ passing only has the appearance of death, since he will live forever in the memory of people. It is at this point, when he introduces the theme of fame and survival in the memory of men, that Pliny “echoes and adapts,” as Syme noted, “the peroration of the Agricola on fame and survival.”81 The last three paragraphs in Pliny’s letter read: Quibus ex causis necesse est tamquam immaturam mortem eius in sinu tuo defleam, si tamen fas est aut flere aut omnino mortem vocare, qua tanti viri mortalitas magis finita quam vita est. Vivit enim vivetque semper, atque etiam latius in memoria hominum et sermone versabitur, postquam ab oculis recessit. Volo tibi multa alia scribere, sed totus animus in hac una contemplatione defixus est. Verginium cogito, Verginium video, Verginium iam vanis imaginibus, recentibus tamen, audio adloquor teneo; cui fortasse cives aliquos virtutibus pares et habemus et habebimus, gloria neminem. (Ep. 2.1.10–12) These are the reasons that now compel me to weep for his death as if it were untimely. But, in truth, one should neither weep for it, nor call that death by which the mortality more than the life of such a man has been terminated. He is alive and forever will be. Indeed, he will even be more present in our memory and conversations once he has gone from our sight. I want to write you much more, but my mind is all focused on contemplating one image and one only. All I think about is Verginius, all I see is Verginius, all I hear, speak to, even hold is Verginius: empty ghosts now, and yet vivid ones. We might have had other citizens who matched his virtues, and we may have them again: none, however, will match his glory.

Tacitus’ name has already been mentioned as the most eloquent orator who delivered the laudatio funebris. Now Pliny recalls the very text of a similar, though literary, eulogy. The passage in which Pliny insists that Verginius’ 81

Syme 1958, 1:121.

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memory will not die, that he will be all the more present in the memory and conversations of his friends now that he is gone from their sight (2.1.11), recalls Agr. 46.4: Quidquid ex Agricola amavimus, quidquid mirati sumus, manet mansurumque est in animis hominum in aeternitate temporum, fama rerum; nam multos veterum velut inglorios et ignobiles oblivio obruit: Agricola posteritati narratus et traditus superstes erit. All we loved in Agricola, all we admired remains, and will remain forever in our minds as the reputation of his deeds. The glory and renown of many have succumbed to forgetfulness in the past; Agricola, however, will survive. His story will be told and handed down to posterity.

It is primarily the parallel repetition of the same verb in the present and future tense (vivit . . . vivetque; manet mansurumque est) that draws the two texts together.82 But the notion that personal memory and public discourse are the locus on which Verginius’ life will be inscribed is also linked to the correlation of personal esteem and general fame set up in Tacitus’ text.83 Pliny’s citation of Tacitus’ Agricola at this juncture of the letter is not perhaps a neutral gesture and therefore demands interpretation. Anticipating the conclusions of the argument, one may say that Pliny deconstructs the text of the Agricola, emphasizing its building blocks and most of all identifying Verginius Rufus as the real laudandus of that work. This hypothesis has already been advanced by Syme, who however poses the question in rather unilateral terms: Producing an encomium on Verginius Rufus, Tacitus cannot have failed to see that another great and good man might be honoured in like fashion. Verginius survived the emperors whose suspicion and hatred he incurred: Julius Agricola died before the truth could be told. For virtue wronged by a tyrant the delayed and posthumous oration was available, a pious duty.84 82

83

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For a parallel, similarly emphatic, use of a similar nexus elsewhere in Pliny, see the especially common form manet/manebit in Ep. 9.27.2 (manet manebit) and Pan. 52.4 (manent manebuntque) and 93.1 (manet manebitque). On the verb-shift, cf. Wills 1996: 302–3. To be sure, the game of allusion could have a further layer. Pliny’s text corresponds more closely with Cic. Amic. 102 (Mihi quidem Scipio, quamquam est subito ereptus, vivit tamen semperque vivet; virtutem enim amavi illius viri, quae extincta non est; nec mihi soli versatur ante oculos, qui illam semper in manibus habui, sed etiam posteris erit clara et insignis), which is taken up by Velleius Paterculus, and applied to Cicero himself (Vivit vivetque per omnem saeculorum memoriam, 2.66.5). The whole context in Cicero is relevant, with Scipio functioning as a paradigm for Verginius. Pliny thus balances Tacitus’ Ciceronian allusion to Leg. 1.1 (Heubner 1984, ad loc.): [quercus] manet vero et semper manebit, by indicating that Tacitus had appropriated a poetic metaphor used by Cicero to describe the poets’ ability to bestow fame. Syme 1958: 121.

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It might be true, as Syme continues, that “to discover the link between Verginius and Agricola requires no insight or perspicacity” because of Pliny’s open re-use of the text of the Agricola. It is also true, however, that the issues at stake and the allusive strategies in the epistle go beyond the sole relationship with Tacitus’ text. Syme’s explanation targeting Pliny’s rewriting reveals great insight, but it also stops there, leaving unaccounted for the tone of the letter and its insistence on the privileged relationship of its author with the dead politician. Pliny rewrites Tacitus for reasons that go beyond merely acknowledging and pointing out that the text was praising Verginius together with (or no less than) Agricola. When he engages in a supplementary rewriting of Tacitus’ text, he does so in order to balance Tacitus’ direct involvement in Verginius’ laudatio funebris with his own privileged, personal role in preserving the memory, as well as praising the life, of his tutor. With its insistence on the non-public nature of Pliny’s relationship with Verginius, the tone of the letter amounts to a supplement to Tacitus’ double eulogy. If the consul suffectus had been entrusted with the public duty of recognizing in the laudatio funebris the stature of the statesman, and the historian had taken upon himself the task of propagating the exemplary personality of Verginius under the veil of Agricola, it is up to Pliny the pupil to complete the portrait of his tutor for posterity. To be sure, the three eulogies highlight different features of Verginius’ imago, and they belong to three different rhetorical and literary genres. And indeed Pliny’s non-public eulogy draws on other texts beyond the reference to Tacitus’. Having signaled its privileged relationship with the Agricola as a book unofficially praising Verginius, Ep. 2.1 supplements historiography and the tradition of the excessus virorum illustrium with an utterly poetic (and deeply intertextual) gesture. In the close of the letter Pliny constructs a highly pathetic tricolon that echoes in its structure a famous Virgilian fragment that Ovid had already canonized with the homage of a variation of the theme. Pliny’s text reads: Volui tibi multa alia scribere, sed totus animus in hac una contemplatione defixus est: Verginium cogito, Verginium video, Verginium iam vanis imaginibus, recentibus tamen, audio adloquor teneo. (Ep. 2.1.12) I planned to write you so much more, but my spirit is stuck on this frame: I think about Verginius, I see Verginius, it is Verginius to whom I listen, talk, adhere: his image so close and yet out of focus.

The threefold repetition of the name of the deceased Verginius recalls immediately the passage at Georgica 4.523–7, where Virgil describes the

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dying Orpheus and his longing invocation of Eurydice’s name even beyond the threshold of his own death: Tum quoque marmorea caput a cervice revulsum gurgite cum medio portans Oeagrius Hebrus volveret, Eurydicen vox ipsa et frigida lingua a miseram Eurydicen! anima fugiente vocabat: Eurydicen toto referebant flumine ripae. Even then, his head being severed from the white neck and rolled midstream by Hebrus’ current, his voice alone and cold tongue called out Eurydice’s name, poor Eurydice with his last breath, the banks of the river echoing Eurydice in turn.

The passage had already reached canonical status, as we may judge from Ovid’s acknowledgment of it at the end of the Orpheus section of the Metamorphoses (11.50–3): Membra iacent diversa locis; caput, Hebre, lyramque excipis, et (mirum!), medio dum labitur amne, flebile nescio quid queritur lyra, flebile lingua murmurat exanimis, respondent flebile ripae. His limbs are scattered: on Hebrus falls his lyre and head to be received, and (how incredible!), while floating in its midst, the lyre sounds out a soft lament of sorts, a soft whisper exhales the tongue, a soft echo return the banks.85

The mournful pathos of the two poetic antecedents reverberates in Pliny’s closing statement, reinforced, perhaps, by the gesture of poetic ellipsis volui tibi multa alia scribere, that recalls Georgica 4.500–2: neque illum (scil. Orpheum) prensantem nequiquam umbras et multa volentem dicere praeterea vidit (Euridyces). But she did not see him, as he was grasping at empty shades and still wanted to say more.

The conventional nature of Pliny’s praeteritio might discourage us from seeing in it more than a refined closing formula, but the close association of the nexus “wanting to say, but being unable to” with the Orphic situation supports the idea that the letter gives prominence to a small cluster of poetic texts, all involved in the ritual of mourning.86 85 86

On Ovid’s echo of the Virgilian passage, cf. Wills 1996: 360–1. The Virgilian ellipsis too was topical and canonical: see, for instance, the last exchange between Aeneas and Creusa’s ghost (imago) at Troy (Aen. 2.790–1): haec ubi dicta dedit, lacrimantem et multa volentem / dicere deseruit, tenuisque recessit in auras.

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Through the Virgilian/Ovidian allusion to Orpheus’ situation Pliny engages in a re-evocation of Verginius of a different kind and in a different tone from Tacitus’ consular eulogy. His letter seems to respond to the need to establish a link with the laudandus which might not be severed: something specific to Pliny, which may mark the special quality of his relationship. When we look at the record of service Pliny details in the body of the letter, we realize that what Verginius did for him is public. Yet Pliny explicitly distances himself from the rest of the Roman people who honored him at his funeral, insisting that his esteem and affection were non solum publice. For a modern reader, the semantic opposite of “public” is “private.” It might be possible, however, that this was not the case either for Pliny or for his readers and the notion of “private” is too modern to be inferred from the letter’s ellipsis. If we read another of the three epistles Pliny devotes to the death and commemoration of Verginius, we might be able to find a term that functions as the opposite of “public.” At the core of Ep. 9.19 we read Pliny’s characterization of his relationship with his tutor: Ipse sum testis, familiariter ab eo dilectus probatusque, semel omnino me audiente provectum, ut de rebus suis hoc unum referret, ita secum aliquando Cluvium locutum . . . (Ep. 9.19.5) I can witness, as his beloved and esteemed familiaris, that he only once was compelled in my presence to relate this sole fact of his life, namely that once Cluvius spoke to him and said . . .

Although the relationship presented here is reversed (it is Verginius who loves and esteems Pliny familiariter), the adverb well expresses the nonpublic nature of their connection. But what does familiariter mean after all? What is the difference between Tacitus (and everybody else) and Pliny in their relations to Verginius? The answer might be that it is only a difference of tone.87 Pliny’s letter presents some lexical elements that are so out of place as to receive a pseudo-motivation for their presence (tamquam immaturam mortem). Interestingly, all these elements belong to the same cultural arena: they are essentially linked with the sphere of the body. When Pliny claims that he must weep for Verginius’ death in a special way, he mentions his tears (defleam) and his friend’s bosom (in sinu tuo). The physical nature of his own mourning immediately precedes the allusion to Tacitus and the (contrastive) allusion to the Virgilian Orpheus. Pliny’s tearful eulogy emphasizes the non-public, familiaris dimension of his grief; it defines a space in which 87

The tone is inherent in the epistolary form: cf. Gibson 2003: 242–5.

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his rapport with Verginius can be based on the paradoxical presence of the dead. The same motif, with inverted polarities, could be read also in the closing paragraph of the Agricola. The final prayer to the great soul of his father-in-law culminated in the request to be granted the ability to move away from inconstant desire and womanish weeping: Nosque domum tuam ab infirmo desiderio et muliebribus lamentis ad contemplationem virtutum tuarum voces, quas neque lugeri neque plangi fas est. (Ag. 46.1) To me and your family you now address a summons to leave behind our inconstant desire and womanish tears. You call us to consider your virtuous actions; no crying or weeping for them is allowed.

Without diminishing Verginius’ public recognition, Pliny asks to be granted precisely the opposite of what Tacitus had asked, that is, a space for his language of desire to be expressed and the presence of Verginius to be recovered. The dimension in which this expression and presence become possible is the literary genre Pliny has chosen. As “one side in a dialogue,”88 an epistle is the closest substitute for immediate presence, the very nature of orality being inscribed in its definition. The space it creates between sender and addressee is the one of familiarity. When confronted with Tacitus’ oratorical and historiographical performances, the letter is the only suitable genre to allow the expression of affection to come through. Intended as a written replacement for the presence of the speaker/writer to the addressee, the epistle retains the immediacy of the spoken word in the same breath as it reasserts an intrinsic absence. Pliny’s laudatio funebris preserves the familiaritas of his relationship with the laudandus to a much higher degree than either Tacitus’ performance or his oblique biography of Agricola, because it preserves the reciprocal presence of writer and addressee. It is ironic that Pliny entrusts this basic tenet of the epistle to a poetic allusion to that text in which the very impossibility of recovering a body from the absolute absence of death is mythologized. Orpheus is the pertinent paradigm of the failure to bridge the gap between presence and representation, but he is also the example of the poet’s power to evoke images from death.89 A final element in Pliny’s indirect response to Tacitus’ double appropriation of the character of Verginius should be noted. It has to do with the different role, public and non-public, that the epistle and the text of the Agricola assign precisely to the imagines of the dead man. Epitaphs, funeral 88

89

According to Artemon’s definition ( ,% %  ): cf. Cugusi 1983: 43–5 and Ludolph 1997: 24. See Blanchot 1981: 99–104.

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orations, and exitus narratives all seem to converge in one final point: they construct a portrait of the laudandus. In the close of the Agricola, the monumentalizing nature of the enterprise was asserted in the same passage Pliny alludes to in Ep. 2.1: Id filiae quoque uxorique praeceperim, sic patris, sic mariti memoriam venerari, ut omnia facta dictaque eius secum revolvant, formamque ac figuram animi magis quam corporis complectantur, non quia intercedendum putem imaginibus quae marmore aut aere finguntur, sed, ut vultus hominum, ita simulacra vultus imbecilla ac mortalia sunt, forma mentis aeterna, quam tenere et exprimere non per alienam materiam et artem, sed tuis ipse moribus possis. (Ag. 46.3) This I would tell his daughter and wife: that they should meditate about what he did and said, if they want to truly cultivate the memory of their father and husband. They should embrace the beauty and magnitude of his soul rather than of his body. Not that I believe one should abolish images made of marble or bronze altogether. However, while representations of mortal features (just like those features themselves) are fragile and ultimately perishable, the beauty of a soul, which cannot be captured or reproduced in any artistic medium, may be imitated in one’s own behavior.

This is, to be sure, a peculiar kind of monumentalization, one that is apparently private, limited to the small sphere of the family (nos, domum tuam . . . voces). And yet, by the very fact that what the family should always keep in mind of Agricola (facta dictaque eius) basically coincides with the public and published text of the Agricola, the private dimension of emulation is soon superseded by the traditional ethical posture that turns the laudandus systematically into an imitandus, with history (or biography) behaving as a teacher of morals. Tacitus’ specification that he has no objection to the display of physical representations points in the same direction of public consumption of Agricola’s example, though moral representations are of course much more permanent. The portraits reproducing the physical features of a human being must yield to the reproduction of their moral principles in one’s own morals: exemplary dissemination is the key to the survival of one’s own ethical rather than chromosomal identity. A partly similar but much more radical negotiation of the public and the familiar dimension of the memory of one’s relative appears in Ep. 2.1. Here Verginius’ personality is meant to become exemplary, on a general universal level: nobis (all of us) . . . exemplar aevi prioris. For Pliny, however, his character should not be turned solely into a monumentalized model to be imitated and hence appropriated by other people. His letter resists dispossession, the rhetorical emphasis being placed on the split between public and non-public: mihi vero praecipue. Pliny’s attempt to keep Verginius from

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acquiring abstract and atemporal fame at the expense of his specificity, from becoming, that is, res nullius, goes hand in hand with his own resistance to becoming marginal in the process of memorialization. The imagines about which we read in the letter are not the “moral” imagines, equivalent for Tacitus to physical statues, but exclusive of them. They are, in fact, phantasmatic: when Pliny claims that he listens, talks and holds on to the empty images of Verginius (2.1.12), he is looking at neither physical nor moral portraits. Rather, he attracts into the orbit of familiaritas the images of Verginius that risked being exposed in the semi-public cultural space of exemplarity. His images can be totally exclusive because they are not physical. If the space of history turns images into examples inscribed on a public monument, the interior space is the only realm in which images, though empty, can be experienced poetically.90 Pliny devotes two more epistles to the problems inherent in the mimetic accuracy and proper use of images that he has first approached through Verginius’ letter. Even if Tacitus is not directly addressed in these letters, they contain a meditation that is in many ways germane, if not complementary, to that on the work of the historian which we have followed thus far. Conducted from the orator’s point of view, Pliny’s final meditation on images, whether visual or verbal, goes to the heart of the historian’s question. The same permanence that the historian seeks by offering its subjects (and his writing) to imitation is also the goal of the rhetorician, the panegyrist in particular. Two mutually responding loci in Tacitus’ Dialogus address the role images play in the lives of Roman orators. Aper claims in Dialogus 8.4 that one finds in the city only statues of orators, not of poets. In Dialogus 11.3 Maternus replies that he has chosen poetry because he is tired of aera et imagines breaking into his home. Maternus’ rejection of public fame is, to be sure, not absolute (as his anti-tyrannical poetry is, after all, part of his political action), but the care with which he severs poetry from public consumption of images is telling. In refusing plastic images, he anticipates Pliny’s determination in creating an alternative portrait of Verginius. Pliny is alert to the problems connected with the production and cultural consumption of images. The internal and thematic connections of two epistles, 3.18 and 4.28 to Vibius Severus, suggest that his approach is far 90

The connection of Ag. 46.3 and Ep. 2.1 is reinforced by Pliny’s redeployment of the topos in the public setting of Pan. 55.10–11 (cf. Bru`ere 1954: 163–4). On exemplarity in history, see Livy, Preface 10 (Hoc illud est praecipue in cognitione rerum salubre ac frugiferum, omnis te exempli documenta in inlustri posita monumento intueri; inde tibi tuaeque rei publice quod imitere capias, inde foedum inceptu foedum exitu quod vites), as treated, among others, by Kraus in Kraus and Woodman 1997: 54–6, Chaplin 2000 (esp. 133–6) and, most recently, by Mich`ele Lowrie in her forthcoming book, Writing, Performance, and Authority in Augustan Rome.

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from na¨ıve. In the first case, the mirroring artifact is of a linguistic nature (Pliny’s Panegyric); in the second case, Pliny deals with iconic material (the portraits of illustrious personalities). In both situations, however, the core issues of the letters are the same. Addressed to the same correspondent and thematically linked to one another, they both focus on the relationship between model and copy, an original exemplar and its reproduction in an artistic medium. Nevertheless, they provide readers with two opposed assessments of the process of imitation: the first perfectly felicitous, the second relatively unsuccessful. The issue of reproduction through imitation is paramount in both letters, just as 2.1 concerned the use of Verginius’ public or familial image. The Panegyric (the recitation of which 3.18 is allegedly about and for the delivery of which it might be a cover letter) is presented as itself the artistic reproduction of the prince, which in turn is offered as a model (an exemplar) to be imitated.91 The portrait of a historian, Cornelius Nepos, and the faithfulness to his original features is the occasion of Ep. 4.28. In 3.18 Pliny finds himself in a situation in part similar to that of Tacitus as laudator of Verginius Rufus. The circumstances are initially opposite: Ep. 3.18 deals with the role of Trajan in Pliny’s election to the consulship, while 2.1 portrayed Tacitus as engaged in performing the rituals concluding Verginius’ life. The shared consular role of the speakers, however, connects the two epistles. C. PLINIUS VIBIO SEVERO SUO S. Officium consulatus iniunxit mihi, ut rei publicae nomine principi gratias agerem. Quod ego in senatu cum ad rationem et loci et temporis ex more fecissem, bono civi convenientissimum credidi eadem illa spatiosius et uberius volumine amplecti, primum ut imperatori nostro virtutes suae veris laudibus commendarentur, deinde ut futuri principes non quasi a magistro sed tamen sub exemplo praemonerentur, qua potissimum via possent ad eandem gloriam niti. Nam praecipere qualis esse debeat princeps, pulchrum quidem sed onerosum ac prope superbum est; laudare vero optimum principem ac per hoc posteris velut e specula lumen quod sequantur ostendere, idem utilitatis habet adrogantiae nihil. (Ep. 3.18.1–3) Dear Severus, Since it fell on me, in my capacity as consul, to offer our collective thanks to the emperor, I did that in the senate, with all the restrictions imposed by the time and place. However, I thought that it was my duty as a good citizen to collect what I said then and there in a publication: actually, I needed more space and time both because I wanted to offer adequate praise to the qualities of our commander 91

On the dynamics of imitation and creative epideictic involved in the Panegyric, see Dupont 1999: 236–7.

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in chief, and because our future rulers should receive an example, rather than a lecture, showing them the way toward a glory such as his. You know, lecturing the emperor on how he should behave is certainly a beautiful enterprise, but it is hard and borderline impudent. On the other hand, if you offer praise to the best of emperors you achieve the same results and avoid the risk of sounding condescending: it is as if you are showing to future generations a beacon that they should follow.

The following model may be extracted from the letter. In the beginning there is the emperor Trajan, whose princely virtues Pliny has reproduced in the Panegyric. Pliny has not strayed from the truth: it is a rhetorical given that, in order for the text of the Panegyric to escape being mere adulation, the verbal representation of the princeps created by the panegyrist must be accurate.92 The principle is best expressed by Pliny himself: Trajan’s panegyric (and Pliny’s Panegyricus) has one essential merit, namely that of having turned what used to be an annoying and false activity into a pleasant, because truthful, one. The value of the speech is not limited, however, to the degree of faithfulness the artist has been able to achieve. Mimesis is not confined to the first degree. The rhetorical copy of the emperor that Pliny has produced is in its turn destined to become a model for a different kind of reproduction. Once reproduced in the artistic medium of oratory, the image of the prince is designed to be imitated both by other emperors and other orators. For the primary addressee, the commendation contains an invitation to conform to the ideal portrait that the orator is painting of him; for others, who will be in the same position in the future, the laudatory speech holds up an ideal (but not abstract) behavioral model, a point of reference. For the first audience, however descriptive it may be on the surface, rhetorical epideixis always contains a prescriptive potential.93 In addition to the imperial audience, to which Pliny offers his portrait of Trajan as a model to be imitated in deeds, the Panegyric has a secondary addressee: its readers. If they will necessarily have to limit themselves to an artistic enjoyment of the stylistic features of the portrait, they, too, are included as potentially active parties in the process of artistic representation. For them the text will be, at best, a linguistic artifact imitable in words, but their literary pleasure and rhetorical imitation are made to correspond to the actual mirroring and ethical modeling expected from the addressees. Actually it is to them 92

93

On the exemplarity of the Emperor’s portrait advanced in Pan. 4.1, see Radice 1968: 168–9, and Leach 1990: 36–9, depicting the Panegyricus as “a code of imperial conduct composed from a senatorial point of view” (37). For a less optimistic picture Bartsch 1994: 148–87. On the interplay between Pliny’s and Trajan’s portraiture(s) in a reading of 3.18 in light of the statue-motif informing Book 3, see Henderson 2002a: 141–51. Cf. Brown 1988, Pernot 1993: 710–24 and Braund 1998. The notion was originally Aristotelian (Rh. 1.9.35 = 1367b).

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that the text is ultimately addressed, thanks to the in vitro experience of the three-day recitation: Cepi autem non mediocrem voluptatem, quod hunc librum cum amicis recitare voluissem, non per codicillos, non per libellos, sed “si commodum” et “si valde vacaret” admoniti (numquam porro aut valde vacat Romae aut commodum est audire recitantem), foedissimis insuper tempestatibus per biduum convenerunt, cumque modestia mea finem recitationi facere voluisset, ut adicerem tertium diem exegerunt. Mihi hunc honorem habitum putem an studiis? studiis malo, quae prope exstincta refoventur. At cui materiae hanc sedulitatem praestiterunt? nempe quam in senatu quoque, ubi perpeti necesse erat, gravari tamen vel puncto temporis solebamus, eandem nunc et qui recitare et qui audire triduo velint inveniuntur, non quia eloquentius quam prius, sed quia liberius ideoque etiam libentius scribitur. Accedet ergo hoc quoque laudibus principis nostri, quod res antea tam invisa quam falsa, nunc ut vera ita amabilis facta est. (Ep. 3.18.4–7) I was indeed delighted to see that all the friends I had informed about the recital (and not with the usual invitations and letters of summons, but personally asking “if, by any chance, they were free,” and you know how in Rome you are almost never free and have the leisure to listen to a recital), those friends came for two evenings in a row, braving the weather. And when I wanted to stop the recital, they insisted I should go on for a third day. Do you think they did this out of respect for me or in literature’s honor? I prefer to think it was for literature’s sake, resuscitating it from death, so to speak. What is more, consider the topic to which they devoted their assiduous attention: it is the same that, in the senate, we used to suffer through (because we had to) and now it finds people willing and able to give and attend a three-day recital! It’s not because we are now more eloquent than before: rather, we are freer, and thus better inspired. An additional cause for praising our emperor: he has turned what used to be an activity that was as annoying as it was false into a pleasant, because truthful, one.

It is in this double-audience perspective that Pliny’s attentions to (and musings on) the style of the text find their reason to be. When he notes the possible discrepancies between an Atticist-oriented immediate audience, which seems to react favorably only to the more compact and composed passages, and a more Asianist-inclined eventual posterity, Pliny is treading the fine line of the rhetorical debates of his time. On the one hand, Pliny admits he might have gone rhetorically overboard apparently elated by the occasion of Trajan’s accession, which he enthusiastically celebrates as a spring-like return of freedom to the Republic (yet, it is precisely this occasion that justifies the orneriness of his style). On the other hand, even if he claims he was justified in his rhetorical excess, words such as dulcia and blanda are signposts for the position he wants his readers to see him take in the anti-Asian (actually, anti-Neronian) polemic of his day. Championed by Quintilian under the battle flag of Seneca’s dulcia vitia, Flavian classicism was actually

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a reaction to the inflated, extravagant and tumid style of late Julio-Claudian oratory. Just like Quintilian, into whose ranks he patiently returns in the closing of the epistle, Pliny finds that modern eloquence may sometimes become excessively passionate: Sed ego cum studium audientium tum iudicium mire probavi: animadverti enim severissima quaeque vel maxime satisfacere. Memini quidem me non multis recitasse quod omnibus scripsi, nihilo minus tamen, tamquam sit eadem omnium futura sententia, hac severitate aurium laetor, ac sicut olim theatra male musicos canere docuerunt, ita nunc in spem adducor posse fieri, ut eadem theatra bene canere musicos doceant. Omnes enim, qui placendi causa scribunt, qualia placere viderint scribent. Ac mihi quidem confido in hoc genere materiae laetioris stili constare rationem, cum ea potius quae pressius et adstrictius, quam illa quae hilarius et quasi exsultantius scripsi, possint videri accersita et inducta. Non ideo tamen segnius precor, ut quandoque veniat dies (utinamque iam venerit!), quo austeris illis severisque dulcia haec blandaque vel iusta possessione decedant. (Ep. 3.18.8–10) I was impressed that the audience was not only attentive, but also critically engaged: I sensed they liked the rigorous passages the most. I know that what I was reciting to a few I had written for everyone; and yet, I delight in the severity of their judgment no less than if it were the opinion of posterity as a whole. Just as, in the past, singers were taught to sing poorly by the audiences they pandered to in theatres, so now, I hope, the same theatres will teach them to sing well, figuratively speaking. All those who write in order to please, will write in the style that they think will please the most. As for me, I am sure they will understand that the circumstances did indeed call for the more florid eloquence I used, in particular because it is the stricter and more concise passages that may sound strained and contrived. Look, I too wish that a day will come (I wish it had come already!) in which our sweet and insipid style will be superseded by a sober and grave one in any situation, even in those in which it was actually called for.

Beyond rhetorical debates and stylistic preoccupations for the future, the epistle, in its present, is concerned with substituting presence for absence. Accordingly, it is to the transmission of its subject-matter that the final sentence returns: Habes acta mea tridui; quibus cognitis volui tantum te voluptatis absentem et studiorum nomine et meo capere, quantum praesens percipere potuisses. Vale. (Ep. 3.18.11) In sum, this is what I have done on those three days. I wanted you (a friend of culture and of mine) to know all about it, so that, while absent, you still could derive the same pleasure you would have had had you been present. Take care.

The situation Pliny constructs in delivering to his friend a copy of his speech about Trajan appears to be extremely peaceful and the model of

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exemplarity it envisions utterly successful. The closing of 3.18 assertively presents the situation as ideal, and assumes that the text is quite naturally able to bridge the distance between the original recitation (the event, if not its primary object, the laudandus) and its present, private, and readerly reception. In order to posit exemplarity as a truly felicitous event, however, the text has to pay a high price. It has to gloss over the long chain of intermediate reproductions that unite (and distance) the original and the end-product, the model and its final copy. In receiving a copy of the Panegyric from Pliny, Severus is asked to accept an artifact that is at least four times removed from the original as a perfect substitute for it. The copy of the Panegyric that accompanies 3.18 is, in fact, the reproduction of the recitation that Pliny held in front of his friends. In turn, this text is the (artistically developed) reproduction of a speech Pliny has delivered in front of the Senate. In its more “private” form, the original Senate speech consisted in the reproduction of its object, namely the emperor himself. In the ideal setting assumed in the epistle, the existence of which Pliny can only posit (far from being able to demonstrate), beginning and end are made to coincide: Severus derives from Pliny’s retelling the same pleasure as he would have, had he been present at the initial event. The problematic status of imitation comes back to haunt the next item in the collection addressed to Severus. The actual circumstances that brought Pliny to address a second letter to him are unknown. No trace survives of any reply to 3.18 and there is no way to determine whether Pliny’s 4.28 should be read as a sequel. The text is careful in delineating the occasional quality of the short note by a very limited, and hardly interpretable, set of conditions: C. PLINIUS VIBIO SEVERO SUO S. Herennius Severus vir doctissimus magni aestimat in bibliotheca sua ponere imagines municipum tuorum Corneli Nepotis et Titi Cati petitque, si sunt istic, ut esse credibile est, exscribendas pingendasque delegem. Quam curam tibi potissimum iniungo, primum quia desideriis meis amicissime obsequeris, deinde quia tibi studiorum summa reverentia, summus amor studiosorum, postremo quod patriam tuam omnesque, qui nomen eius auxerunt, ut patriam ipsam veneraris et diligis. Peto autem, ut pictorem quam diligentissimum adsumas. Nam cum est arduum similitudinem effingere ex vero, tum longe difficillima est imitationis imitatio; a qua rogo ut artificem quem elegeris ne in melius quidem sinas aberrare. Vale. Dear Vibius, Herennius, that most learned of men, would like to have displayed in his library the portraits of your “neighbors” Cornelius Nepos and Titus Catius: it sounds like a big deal to him. He asks that if, as seems reasonable, there are any in your

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neck of the woods, I have them copied and painted. A task that I immediately pass on to you, first because your friendship will make you most eagerly grant my wish, second because you hold culture in the highest esteem and greatly love her representatives, and finally because you have a special, affective connection no less with your hometown than with all those who have contributed to its reputation. What I ask, however, is that you hire the most meticulous of painters. You know how difficult it is to reproduce an image from its tangible model; all the more difficult is to reproduce a reproduction. In particular, I request that you not allow the artisan you will have selected to err. Not even on the side of charity. Be well.

Herennius Severus apparently needs help in furnishing his library with portraits of notable intellectuals. He asks Pliny to intervene, according to the customary Roman friend-of-a-friend chain of officia, and procure him these portraits. Pliny is happy to oblige, by simply passing the task on to Vibius Severus, who is, so to speak, geographically closer to the source of images depicting the true features of Nepos and Catius. We may be tempted to read Herennius’ (and Pliny’s) underlying argument as limitative: it is most likely that portraits of these intellectuals may be found in Vibius’ municipium, because they were after all very specifically “local” glories. Both historical circumstances94 and the fact that Pliny’s humor (if there is any) seems to be located elsewhere make the reading quite unlikely. The implication of Pliny’s and Herennius’ geographically specific request must have something to do with what the epistle addresses last, namely the degree of resemblance uniting model and copy. All the information contained in the letter solidly anchors Pliny’s sentence-long appendix on artistic imitation to a concrete context: the sententious statement stressing the difficulty of producing a credible imitation from an already imitative model is perfectly in tune with the ensuing recommendation that the addressee should exercise his greatest care in choosing a painter for the job at hand. While it is treated as an afterthought, the potential (un-)faithfulness inherent in any portraiture forms the actual conceptual core of the epistle. Even when he applies it to the particular instance of portraits to be copied from existing portraits, Pliny unmistakably inflects the Platonic model–imitation dichotomy he had cavalierly bypassed in the case of his Panegyric. Plato’s notion that progressive decay and distancing from truth are inherent in artistic imitation was articulated in exactly the same terms as in Pliny. For Plato mimetic art is the imitation of an imitation, able to produce, at its best, a mere semblance out of a semblance (Rep. 596C). His literalness notwithstanding, Pliny is not merely reciting 94

Nepos might have been insuber, but he was in close contact with the urban elites of his day (Cicero, Catullus, Atticus). On the Epicurean Catius, see Quint. Inst. 10.1.124.

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(or musing upon) a philosophical principle that should orient Vibius’ practical choices. Linked to 3.18 by way of the common addressee, the second letter to Vibius comes to refine (and redefine) the all-too-peaceful picture painted in its antecedent. Actually, it tackles squarely, if humorously, the central issue that Pliny had overenthusiastically disregarded (or, worse, avoided in bad conscience) when he had presented his Panegyricus: the troubled relationship between model and copy. While observing that the portraits must be faithful, Pliny also notes that they should not be allowed to depart from truth, either for the sake of embellishing their subjects or for the sake of their own pleasantness. They should not be, in other words, “ideal” portraits. If this is the note that 4.28 sounds in its close, what is the message? What is the role of this letter in the collection? Two options are possible. First, the epistle may be seen as the corrective deconstruction of the over-optimistic model posited in 3.18. The chain of imitation and reproduction that had been asserted there is now shown to produce a constant decay at each of its turns. The emperor, the first panegyric in the Senate, Pliny’s subsequent vocalization in his recital, and the final written version submitted to Vibius are all part of a chain of imitation and re-production. If Plato’s argument may be taken seriously, in the passing from the first to the last link in this chain, the capability of the final artifact to represent its primary object in its immediate presence is close to nothing. Pliny’s second letter to Vibius may therefore be regarded as an after-thought, addressed to the same addressee and aimed at de-emphasizing the rhetorical assertiveness of the first letter. Alternatively, however, the letter may be viewed as an ironic in-my-shoes argument that Pliny is now addressing to Vibius. In Pliny’s collection there is no other trace of Vibius’ presence, no way of divining whether or not he had indeed answered Pliny’s courtesy note accompanying the shipping of the Panegyric. Consequently, little may be said about 4.28 as a reply to a reply to 3.18. We may never know whether the Panegyric received a warm welcome from Vibius, or whether it elicited a cool reception from the primary recipient, that is a reply insisting on the Platonic framework for the question of imitation. What we do know, however, is that 4.28 contains a response to precisely that potential criticism. Even if Vibius was never the issuer of a critical reaction to Pliny’s home-delivered Panegyric, the second epistle treats him as such. A final, ironic twist may be present in the epistle. One of the two portraits that the fellow literary man requests is that of Cornelius Nepos. Cornelius was famous for creating portraits that were all but ideal and all but exemplary. When, in his general prologue, Nepos responds to Rome-centric

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critics that he will not refrain from praising Greek characters in spite of the differences their lives exhibit from Roman mores, he clearly casts himself as a non-panegyrist. That is, Nepos intends neither to impose non-Romans’ characters as unqualified models to be imitated for their achievements, nor does he intend to gloss over his subjects’ shortcomings in order to turn them into such imitable models. It is particularly ironic that, in treating Nepos as the object of a distinctly non-flattering portrait, Pliny is modeling himself on his example. In asking that no mercy be exercised in painting Nepos’ portrait, Pliny constructs his own image in Nepos’ likeness: he, too, is no flatterer. His brand of cultural appreciation is patently honest, and most importantly truthful. In professing allegiance to Nepos’ own model, however, Pliny takes a stance that is not limited to the question at hand. His present request for objectivity has an ulterior motive: it should retrospectively guarantee also the integrity of his earlier modelizing enterprise. In Pliny’s repaying Nepos with his own coin, the ultimate stake is the Panegyricus itself.95 In this chapter, a discourse on historiography has eventually brought us back to oratory: from the impossibility of distinguishing between laudandus and laudator, to the blocked alternative imposed by the intertwined features of history and oratory, to the historicized exitus of the two “fathers” of Pliny (by adoption and tutelage), to the final option in favor of the oratorical monument penned by Pliny (and his defense thereof ). Although Pliny avoided playing the role of a historian, in his letters he has claimed for the orator the task of the historian. He presents his career as a counterpoint to the intellectual history of Tacitus, a counter-trajectory to the strategic cultural decision of his avowed model. To the carrer choice of his favorite correspondent, Pliny opposes the sum total of his orations and their culminating achievement. Although his epistles find no real locus on the accepted map of canonic literature, they do not intend to leave that map untouched. By entering into a close-knit dialogue with the texts that belong and contributed to the shaping of that canon, they also look ahead at their own possible inclusion. When they pass from the dialogue with the living Tacitus to addressing the dead Cicero they move into their final stage of a bid for canonicity. 95

Model, imitation, exemplarity are not as straightforward categories as Radicke 2003 would put it. See also Gazich 2003: 124–5 with reference to Ep. 8.14.4–6.

chap t e r 5

Overcoming Ciceronian anxiety: Pliny’s niche/nike in literary history

“Est enim,” inquam, “mihi cum Cicerone aemulatio.” Pliny, Ep. 1.5.12

Literary canons have two intrinsically integrated yet distinct dimensions: they are simultaneously diachronic and synchronic. A canon is diachronic in its encyclopedic nature: it is based upon a selection of texts produced in the past that it organizes and preserves. It bears witness to a large body of past literature from which it selects its membership and without which it simply would not exist. Indeed, the canon is the artificially created image of a culture’s past. A canon, however, is also synchronic because it is organizationally systematic in a normative sense: it consists of a controlled system of interrelated texts, the mutual relations of which (their hierarchies) are determined in the present. Ultimately, a canon witnesses the present order among texts that derive meaning from their relative placement within it. In every age, to join the canon means to intervene in and partake of both aspects. In the previous chapters, we have seen how Pliny’s letters are involved in a process of constant cultural negotiation, how they propose a reinterpretation of the received past and seek to engage in the debates of the present. Chapter 2 examined Pliny’s reworking of the Catullan heritage in light of what post-Augustan culture and society deemed appropriate literary behaviors. Chapters 3 and 4 highlighted several instances in which the letters became the privileged vehicle of Pliny’s dialogue with Tacitus on the status of contemporary eloquence and the value of historiography. The final aim of the epistles was not, however, merely retrospective or polemical: by addressing the literary-historical questions of the past or the heatedly debated issues of the present, Pliny’s letters were also making a bid for their future inclusion in the canon they helped to define. When authors aim for canonical status, one central determination is involved: what is the place that they envision for their texts? Is the location on the cultural map that they choose to occupy at a busy cultural 207

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intersection or in an uncharted territory? Is the position their texts will eventually occupy still free or does a previous text need to be displaced in order to make room for the new one? In Pliny’s case, the answers to these questions are closely connected to the relationship his letters establish with the model of Cicero’s epistolary corpus. The present chapter explores how Pliny’s new kind of epistolography defined itself in close confrontation with Cicero’s collection of letters. As we shall see, they are both Pliny’s immediate model and his primary polemical target – both the example against which Pliny’s first readers were going to measure his letters and the implicit term of comparison he chose for them. As suggested in Chapter 1, the corpus of Cicero’s letters represents a watershed in the development of the tradition of Latin epistolography. Practically nothing is known about why and how Cicero’s letters were published, but the issue of their date of publication bears relevance, in particular for a post-Neronian writer of collected epistles. The circumstances of the publication of Cicero’s ad Atticum and ad Familiares are two distinct philological issues. Although nothing is known with certainty about the phases of publication of ad Familiares, except that Seneca (Suas. 1.5) knew of Fam. 15.19.4 to Cassius, and Quintilian (Inst. 8.3.35) knew of Fam. 3.8.3, scholars generally agree that Tiro published the collection soon after Cicero’s death.1 In Att. 16.5.5 of July 9, 44 bce, Cicero indicates that Tiro had already begun a collection of his epistles: Mearum epistularum nulla est ; sed habet Tiro instar septuaginta, et quidem sunt a te quaedam sumenda. Eas ego oportet perspiciam, corrigam; tum denique edentur. There is no collection of my letters, but Tiro has about seventy, and some will also have to come from you. It is better if I look them over and correct them; only then they can be published.

No general consensus has been reached for the epistles ad Atticum:2 some scholars, including Shackleton Bailey, maintain that the collection was not published before the first half of the first century ce, since Asconius Pedanius, the famous commentator on Cicero’s speeches, writing around 55 ce, never mentions it.3 Others believe that Atticus, Cicero’s son and Tiro 1

2 3

Cugusi argues that all of Cicero’s letters had been published soon after his death (1983:140). Specifically, for Fam. 10, 11 and 12, Taylor has proposed a terminus ante quem of 32 bce (1951–2: 416). For a more general discussion of the dating of the publication of ad Familiares, see the bibliography in Cugusi 1983: 172–3. For a summary of the debate, with bibliography, see Cugusi 1983: 168–73. Shackleton Bailey underlines how, in the 94 pages of the OCT, Asconius Pedanius never makes any mention of Cicero’s letters nor shows acquaintance with their contents (1965, 1: 63).

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published them earlier. As evidence, they quote passages from the epistles ad Atticum from which Cicero appears to have circulated individual letters and intended to do the same with collections of epistles.4 To the evidence from Cicero they add that Nepos, in his Life of Atticus (published when its protagonist was still alive: cf. Nep. Att. 19.1) speaks of eleven volumina of letters to Atticus (Nep. Att. 16.3) that Cugusi describes as “ready for publication.” The evidence is not compelling. The reference made by Cicero himself indicates only an intention to publish, and the fact that he circulated individual letters does not constitute publication of a corpus. What is more, the letters about which Nepos writes are “clearly unpublished,” as Horsfall suggests in commenting on Nep. Att. 16.3. He notes, in particular, that the biography of Atticus speaks of eleven books while sixteen have come down to us.5 In the latest monograph on Cicero’s correspondence Hutchinson addresses the problem of publication in a footnote. Considering the evidence for Neronian publication weak, he simply states that the ad Atticum were published after Nepos (“and maybe redivided into 16 books to match the Fam.”) and that the ad Familiares were most likely published by Tiro.6 Whatever the date was at which Cicero’s letters came to light as an organized corpus ready for dissemination, the indirect evidence just surveyed suggests two things. First, already some years before the inception of Pliny’s epistolary experiment, Cicero’s letters had acquired cultural relevance in the canon. Second, from internal evidence, it was clear that their survival had been possible only due to the editorial kindness of either friends (Tiro himself ) or a stranger, a later unknown philologist working on centuryold texts. Pliny is mindful of both these issues when he decides to make his modest bid to join (or replace) Cicero as canonic epistolographer, by initiating and personally following the editorial progress of his letters. As a whole, Cicero’s epistolographic corpus constituted a powerful and unavoidable point of comparison for Pliny’s work even from the point of view of its reception. Pliny’s readers would more easily associate his literary endeavor with the example set by Cicero than with the more recent experiment with epistolary conventions attempted by Seneca. Unlike Seneca’s, Pliny’s epistolary persona primarily reflects his public role as man of politics and 4

5

6

Cf. Att. 8.9.1: Epistulam meam quod pervulgatam scribis esse non fero moleste, quin etiam ipse multis dedi describendam and Att. 4.6.4: Epistulam Lucceio quam misi, qua meas res ut scribat rogo, fac ut ab eo sumas, together with Att. 16.5.5 quoted above, in the text. Horsfall 1989, ad loc. As Shackleton Bailey maintains (1965, 1: 72), the eleven rolls may have been a selection Atticus made for his friends. Hutchinson 1998: 4, n. 4. The controversy about the publication of Cicero’s letters is best summarized by Nicholson 1998; an efficient summary of the status quaestionis is now in Beard 2002: 116–19.

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letters, and his moral philosophy is at best occasional. Even when his letters tackle questions the import of which may stretch beyond the confines of active life, his point of departure and his scope remain deeply rooted in it (as Ep. 1.10, promoting the philosophy of Euphrates, shows). Even the few epistles that seem to depart from the contingent occasion that produced them are more literary than philosophical essays, since, as we have seen, they were devoted principally to issues of poetics, oratory and historiography.7 While Cicero’s example constituted an almost impossibly high standard to be held to, Pliny knew that his readers were going to measure his attempts against the success of his predecessor. Several common features are shared by the massive Ciceronian correspondence and Pliny’s small-scale epistolary corpus. Both corpora contained epistles drafted in prose and devoted to all aspects of political negotium and intellectual otium; both came from the pen of a politician, an aspiring novus homo; both ultimately afforded – at least potentially and certainly through a stylistic veil – a glimpse into the semiprivate life of an orator and man of letters. As with Cicero, Pliny’s work includes accounts of his trials, political actions and business enterprises; friendly exchanges of compliments, books and news are joined to litterae commendaticiae, digressive set-pieces on the geography of his country, and descriptions of the architecture of his estates.8 Pliny’s letters thus resonate with Cicero’s texts, and it is not a coincidence that Cicero’s work is the target of Pliny’s most explicit citations – just as Cicero is the object of his deepest “anxiety of influence.”9 Pliny himself invites comparison with Cicero the epistolographer. There are several areas in which Pliny’s collection preserves traces of the model. A number of Ciceronian verbal echoes, often unspecific, are audible in the epistles, elicited by the similarity of topic and rhetorical approach. Pliny also refers several times to Cicero as an authority in matters of oratorical choices10 and as an example of freedom in choosing a poetic lineage.11 Finally, at least three epistles by Pliny have been recognized as being wholly modeled in theme and treatment on specific letters ad Familiares,12 and in others Cicero becomes the target of an allusive redeployment of his own 7

8 9

10 12

The distancing from Seneca’s model is all on Pliny’s part. Seneca offered his letters as epistles with a philosophical content, not as essays in epistolary form. One may ascribe to the success of Pliny’s model the modern tendency to classify Seneca’s epistles as essays. On a sobering argument in favor of redefining Seneca’s ad Lucilium in epistolary terms, see Wilson 2001: 164–6 and 178–9. For a survey of thematic areas of contact, see Nutting 1926. The notion of anxiety, initially elaborated for Romantic poetry, can be exported (with some qualification) to pre-modern texts. Bloom 1973 explores as an example the Dante and Virgil relationship in the Divine Comedy. 11 Ep. 5.3 and 7.4. Cf. above, Chapter 2. Ep. 1.2, 1.5, 1.20, 9.36. Ep. 7.33, 8.24 and 9.6. On the socio-cultural meaning contained in Pliny’s choice of model, cf. Riggsby 1995.

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language. As Lef`evre has most recently proposed, in Pliny’s letters the result of the comparison between the two personalities is made clear from the start. Impossible to be glossed over, the model is in (and for) Pliny’s work the “unattainable antecedent.”13 The situation is potentially open to paradox. On the one hand, Cicero appears as the necessary point of comparison and the ultimate source of canonical legitimacy for Pliny’s epistles: he is the exemplum. On the other hand, Cicero must be overcome if Pliny’s letters are to acquire more than epigonal status. The potential paradox produces an ambiguous rhetoric: Pliny wavers between resignation and optimism, praise and subtle qualification. No matter how hard one may try now, Pliny keeps telling his readers when he refers to Cicero, one cannot reach him. Cicero plays in a different league: he is an antiquus.14 He is a model of oratorical ability, political activism and self-abnegation in the interest of the res publica, by which our modern court oratory, our limited political commitment in the face of the princeps, and our resistance to the petty abuses of the enemies of the boni should be inspired. Yet, of course, times are no longer what they were, and neither the same kind nor the same amount of activism is possible, or indeed advisable, today.15 Cicero also embodies the perfect balance between commitment to a career in the public sphere and otium cum litteris; and we should similarly try to juggle our double engagement with officia and aeternitas by practicing law and publishing our orations, just as he did. Yet, of course, we find ourselves in a situation in which trials are no longer so important for the life of the res publica, and oratorical fame is not a guarantee of making it into history on its account. In defense of their author, Pliny’s letters proclaim that Cicero could count on varied, momentous, and interesting subject-matter for his writings. Pliny often remarks that times have changed and the rules of the game have followed suit.16 Some things, nevertheless, have not changed. With all his deference to the unattainable model of Cicero, Pliny plays a subtle 13

14

15

16

Lef`evre 1996b; but he is only the latest in a long and unanimous tradition: see 334, n. 6. In more general terms and for Pliny’s more combative attitude towards Cicero, see also Weische 1989. For the sense of distance between Cicero’s and Pliny’s age, see Tac. Dial. 16.4–7 and Quint. Inst. 8.5.33 (see above, Chapter 3). In general, on the arbitrariness of historical consciousness, Cic. Brut. 39 and Hor. Ep. 2.1.34–49. To this effect, Pliny’s expression [factorum] materia in aliena manu (“decisive action is in other people’s hands,” 3.7.14) has become almost proverbial for his denunciatory (or, rather, “renunciatory”) attitude. See Lef`evre 1989: 121–3. On how much the political situation has changed between Cicero’s and Pliny’s times, see Ep. 9.2.1 and the analysis below (pp. 229–39). Pliny comments three times in his epistles on the limited opportunities for glory afforded by the age in which he lived. On the occasions for fame in the public sphere, see Ep. 3.7.14, cited above, note 15. In Ep. 3.20, Pliny remarks that any occasion to treat political questions in his writings should be seized, since the opportunities to do so are fewer than in the past (rarior quam veteribus occasio, 10). Finally, in Ep. 9.2.1, he apologizes for the short and rare letters he sends to Sabinus on account of

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game with him in the letters. For example, he insinuates through Martial that his published works, namely his orations in the centumviral court, might be compared to Cicero’s achievements.17 What is more, Pliny enables his readers to calculate the dates of his own advance through the cursus honorum and invites them to check his record against Cicero’s. Both new men had impressive careers, but Pliny’s was a little faster.18 Comparing dates of advancement in a career is a source of petty satisfaction, and Pliny understates his achievement: Sed utinam ut sacerdotium idem, ut consulatum multo etiam iuvenior quam ille sum consecutus, ita senex saltem ingenium eius aliqua ex parte adsequi possim! (4.8.5) However, I wish that just as I reached the priesthood at the same age as he and the consulate at a much younger age, so I will be able to achieve, at least when I am old, a small part of his talent.

Pliny almost succeeds in being a gracious winner and thus, more importantly, in leaving the ranking unchallenged. Cicero is still Cicero, the model beyond reach – and yet he is not entirely so. Once the allegedly unattainable example has been qualified, the idea that Pliny might invariably accept being secundus seems less inevitable. Indeed, there is a field in which the ranking might be reversed: epistolography. For all their similarities in scope, tone and genre, and for all the deferential attitude that the younger author might display toward his model, Pliny’s and Cicero’s letters differed in the method of their compilation and publication. The haphazard nature of Cicero’s correspondence formed no model for its counterpart, such is the care with which Pliny edited and crafted his epistolary books. Whereas Cicero may have planned but did not organize and oversee the publication of the letters ad Familiares, Pliny devoted great attention to preparing his manuscripts for publication, publishing them, and, above all, letting his readers know about them. Not only are his epistles the product of authorial selection, arrangement and revision, they are also an editorial project for which the author takes full

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the lack of suitable subjects: praeterea nec materia plura scribendi dabatur. On Pliny’s remarks as an indication of political concerns, see below. Cf. Ep. 3.21, citing Martial, 10.20.12–21. See Chapter 2. Cicero was consul at 43 and augur at 53, whereas Pliny was consul at 38/9 and augur probably at 43 (see Sherwin-White 1966). For the dates, figures and sources of Cicero’s career, see Shackleton Bailey 1971 and, more recently, Fuhrmann 1992. The most up-to-date account of Pliny’s career, incorporating Alf¨oldy’s convincing supplement of lines 2–4 of the main inscription that records Pliny’s cursus honorum (CIL V 5262), is now in Birley 2000: 5–16. See also Lef`evre 1996b: 343–7, on Pliny’s letter on his auguratus (4.8). Further examples of Pliny’s allusive pride in his own political precocity may be found in Ep. 5.14 and 7.16, as commented in Griffin 1999: 142–4.

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responsibility.19 As a reading of Ep. 9.2 will suggest, Pliny is able to come to terms with the crushing weight of his Ciceronian model thanks primarily to this aspect of his work.20 He surely did not dare to play the same game with chance as Cicero did in delaying the publication of his epistolary corpus until it was too late. Pliny was not prepared to take this risk; for him, publishing his own work was imperative. Speaking of his orations (but the concept can be easily extended to his letters), he notes that nam si rationem posteritatis habeas, quidquid non est peractum, pro non incohato est (“from the point of view of posterity, what is not finished is as good as not begun,” Ep. 5.8.7). Building upon Weische’s conclusions, one might say that by publishing his work, Pliny actively (subjektiv) strove after what the collections of Ciceronian letters passively (objektiv) offered, namely the permanence not only of his self-portrait but of the collection itself (381).21 If this facet of the pursuit of aeternitas required hard work, it also afforded a territory in which Pliny could finally, and unambiguously, improve upon the record Cicero had set. In the following pages one subheading is devoted to each of the three ways in which Cicero’s texts make their presence felt in Pliny’s letters. “Fragments of a common discourse” reviews the cases in which Pliny’s texts might be shown to bear traces of Ciceronian language, but only in unmarked enunciation. That is, the coincidences in diction are triggered by the parallel treatment of similar topics and conveyed in a language not specific to Cicero. This is the most common way in which Pliny’s text comes into contact with Cicero’s, but also the least meaningful: if, by accident of transmission, Cicero’s texts had not reached us, we would still be able to trace Pliny’s language to different sources and to see him as part of a tradition. Here Cicero is an accidental antecedent, one whose stylistic influence left its mark on all imperial Latin prose. The following section, “Cicero as exemplar,” surveys some instances of Pliny’s re-use of markedly Ciceronian language or typical Ciceronian letter forms. In this second group are included allusions which, like the direct allusions studied thus far, invite the reader to take up again the Ciceronian corpus and to evaluate the original context of the quoted fragment in order to fully appreciate Pliny’s text. These represent the kinds of allusions that an accident in 19

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On Cicero’s letters as “readymades” and Pliny’s as “assisted readymades,” see Henderson 2002a: 20–2. For an opposite point of view, see Lef`evre 1996a: 351–3. Commenting on the necessary brevity of Pliny’s letters (as put forth in Ep. 9.2.5), Lef`evre writes that Pliny could not be a Cicero in the epistolary field, just as Sabinus (and the other addressees) were not Atticus (353). Weische 1989: 381. Anticipating Ludolph’s approach, Weische insists that Pliny’s goal in the epistles is the drafting of “eine dokumentarische Autobiographie” (384).

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the transmission of Cicero’s text would have dissolved. Here Cicero is a recommended antecedent. Finally, “The epistolary challenge” analyzes the letters in which Pliny refers to Cicero variously by name (praenomen, nomen, cognomen), thus inviting a comparison between both their literary corpora and their personalities. This type of reference requires the interaction of categories larger than individual texts. By naming Cicero, Pliny asks to be measured against distinctive features of his model (as augur, as orator, as poet), not strictly against his texts. The references by name also mark the highest level of openness in Pliny’s intertextual dialogue with Cicero and the closest it comes to articulating his “anxiety of influence.” From the typology of Pliny’s methods of allusion thus sketched, Cicero emerges as the necessary antecedent and the precursor that needs to be overcome. f ragments of a common discourse In Pliny’s epistles, the presence of a language that scholars regard as Ciceronian is heavy. By applying some degree of ingenuity, in almost every letter he penned one may find a theme or a turn of phrase that has at least a remote antecedent in Cicero. The real question, however, should not be whether Pliny can be shown to derive elements of his letters from Cicero but whether these elements evoke Cicero’s texts directly and inevitably. As a pupil of the classicizing rhetorician Quintilian and as a classicizing orator himself, Pliny is constantly aware of Cicero’s writings.22 While producing a handful of examples of Ciceronian parallels, Guillemin rightly argued that these coincidences indicate Pliny’s deep knowledge of Cicero’s texts, rather than their pointed imitation.23 Her point of view finds support in the table I attach in the Appendix to Chapter 5. Along with passages that can be shown to require readers to perceive Ciceronian elements in the background of Pliny’s text, there are several instances in which the alleged borrowing seems due more to the critic’s optimism than to the cogency of the supposed parallel. In short, Cicero is audible everywhere in Pliny, but often as a sort of background music. From several of the alleged Ciceronian parallels we surmise, for instance, that Pliny knew Cicero’s philosophical works. The De finibus perhaps left traces in the letter on historiography (Ep. 5.8);24 the De officiis might have 22

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On Pliny’s schooling with Quintilian, see Chapter 3. For Pliny’s rhetorical theories (as laid out in 7.9), see Guillemin 1929: 69; Leeman 1963, 1: 323–7; Picone 1978: 23–27 and 39–47; Cova 1966: 136–40, and Weische 1989: 376. Guillemin 1929: 114–15. See Ussani 1974–5: 181. Pliny’s 5.8.4 is a locus of heightened density, with three references to de Finibus (Fin. 1.25; 5.6, and 5.42). Other correspondences with Cicero’s philosophical works have

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even been Pliny’s favorite Ciceronian reading (one reader considers it Pliny’s ethical vademecum).25 Similarly, one can gather from his only extant example of oratory, the Panegyricus, which has been shown to bear several traces of Cicero’s Pro Marcello, that Pliny studied Cicero’s orations.26 Despite his oratorical prowess, however, Pliny does not seem to write his letters under the influence of these works. The same argument can be made for Cicero’s rhetorical works. Pliny must have dealt with them at some time in his study (probably in his rhetorical apprenticeship with Quintilian) but while his definition of the vis orationis is utterly Ciceronian, it is also hardly distinguishable in several details from that of his teacher Quintilian.27 In sum, what scholars have sometimes seen as Ciceronian in Pliny’s text is due to the sheer quantity and cultural centrality of the Ciceronian corpus canonized since antiquity and handed down to us. The influence that Cicero’s collection of letters may have exerted on Pliny’s epistolary writing is a special case. Even just a survey of the traditional commentaries and analyses of Pliny’s epistles shows that Cicero’s correspondence exerts a more permeating influence than all other works in his corpus.28 The comparatively higher density of connections established with Cicero’s letters may be due to the homology of genres. Proximity in genre influences both the production of a text, via imitation, and the readers’ perception of textual connections. While it is in no way true that inter-genre exchange is impossible, homogeneous texts invite their audience to perceive them in an immediate dialogue. The commerce of epic and elegy is probably the most evident case of inter-genre cross-fertilization (e.g., Virgil’s redeployment of Catullan language in the Andromache episode explored above in Chapter 4), but historiography and epic can build similarly strong connections (e.g., Thucydides’ allusion to Homeric proems in his prologue).29 On the other hand, allusive redeployment of a commonplace contributes

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been detected throughout the epistles: at least three instances from de Legibus, five from de Amicitia, two from Cato, and one each from de Senectute, Paradoxa Stoicorum and Tusculanae Disputationes (see Appendix). Korfmacher 1946: 50–3. See also Picone 1978: 154, citing Guillemin 1929: 1ff. The list of potential correspondences with Cicero’s de Officiis comprises at least nineteen parallel loci. Suster 1890. In the epistles, four echoes have been found from pro Archia, two from Philippicae, two from pro Murena and one each from Catilinariae, pro Rege Deiotaro, pro Flacco and in Verrem. See Ussani’s discussion of Ep. 5.8 (1970). Guillemin is able to find only a single certain quotation from Cicero’s de Oratore 2.195 in Ep. 2.11.12–13. In addition, she cites, more cautiously, de Orat. 2.344 as a possible antecedent of Pliny 3.7.25 and, perhaps, 8.3.2 (1929: 117). In both cases the connection is tenuous: on 8.3.2, see De Orat. 3.1. See also Brut. 68 (Pliny 5.8.10); Brut. 173 (Pliny 7.20.4); Brut. 326 (Pliny 2.5.5); Orat. 129 (Pliny 5.8.6). The list of correspondences traditionally identified covers the whole epistolographic production by Cicero, from ad Atticum, to ad Familiares, to ad Quintum fratrem (see Appendix). See Woodman 1988: 28–9.

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to building a sense of tradition. A literary genre involves a relatively fixed set of requirements for the texts it embraces. For instance, at the most basic level, the genre of epic requires that there should be a storm scene resulting in shipwreck. No matter if it is Aeneas being cast on the shores of Libya or Odysseus washed ashore on the island of the Phaeacians or Caesar ominously crossing the Adriatic, each scene contributes to (and fulfills) the expectation that an epic poem includes a “storm at sea” set-piece. Similar considerations could be made for another epic centerpiece, usually the climactic culmination of (some part of ) the plot: when protagonist and antagonist face each other in a duel, their struggle resonates with traditional models, their individual identities open to a multiplicity of antecedents. In strongly defined genres the author-reader collaboration is probably at its highest. Generic requirements imposed on authors build intertextual expectations in their audience, and vice versa: authors can play with the traditions that their texts attempt to join because they can rely on their readers’ ability to find parallels in homogeneous texts more immediately. Even if the genre in question were less strictly defined than epic, Pliny’s first readers might have had the same tendency to read epistolary corpora in relation to one another. Intertextual connections are not impeded by genre-lines, but they may be facilitated when no such line has to be crossed. Perceptions, nevertheless, may be deceiving. Not all the Ciceronian fragments that seem to come from the letters into Pliny’s collection are so stringently related to Cicero’s writing. Certain elements of Pliny’s letters that scholars have considered Ciceronian can be plausibly traced to a different source or can be shown to be commonplace. Themes such as the pedagogic value of friendship,30 the caution one should exercise in liberalitas,31 affection for relatives,32 the importance of studia and the difficulty of striking a balance between otium and negotium33 which appear both in Cicero and in Pliny, seem to be treated in similar terms only because 30

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The principle that Pliny applies so liberally to his friends, namely that the true duty of friendship is reciprocal criticism, is laid out in Cic. Amic. 91: monere et moneri proprium est verae amicitiae. B¨utler lists the relevant texts in the epistles (1970: 97). On the system of beneficia as a general norm of conduct, see B¨utler 1970: 123–7, who connects Cicero’s Off. 1.49 and 2.52 with Pliny’s sense of moral and material obligation towards his friends. See also Guillemin 1929: 8–12. Guillemin sees Pliny’s loving epistles to Calpurnia (Ep. 6.7, but also 6.4 and 7.5) as reminiscent of Cicero’s “affectionate inquiries about the health of Terentia (e.g., Fam. 14.2.2–3)” (1929: 138). Contra Sherwin-White, who argues that “she exaggerates their debt to Cicero . . . the letters to Calpurnia are very unlike those to Terentia,” because Pliny has nothing to say about his business and public affairs to his wife (1966, ad 6.7). Pliny’s expression in 7.3.2 connecting leisure with figurative autocracy (Quin ergo aliquando in urbem [scil., ad negotia] redis? . . . Quousque regnabis?) is probably inspired by the common source in Stoic philosophy that prompted Cicero’s simile at Off. 1.70: his [scil., qui delectati sunt re sua familiari] idem

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we tend to attribute to Cicero’s voice and to the proximity in genre the highest authority. One example may suffice to show both how strong and how potentially misleading the temptation to hyper-ciceronianize Pliny can be. In Ep. 1.10, Pliny draws for his friend Attius Clemens a portrait of Euphrates, his Greek teacher of philosophy and mentor. While extolling Euphrates’ “tamed” brand of philosophy, one that gives negotia the central place they deserve in the life of an active and committed man of political ambitions, Pliny encourages Attius to take advantage of his teachings.34 His invitation is phrased in peculiar language: Quo magis te cui vacat hortor, cum in urbem proxime veneris (venias autem ob hoc maturius), illi te expoliendum limandumque permittas. (Ep. 1.10.11) Since you are the one who has some free time, I will be more insistent: next time you come to town (and you should come sooner for this), I urge you to let him sand off and file away your sharp edges and burrs.

Hoffer sees in Cicero’s compliment to Volumnius’ “fine and polished wit” (limatulo et polito tuo iudicio, Fam. 7.33.2) a suitable term of comparison for Pliny’s expoliendum limandumque.35 The parallel is certainly tempting. However, Pliny’s language reflects a fully literary and more widespread combination of concepts and terminology. For instance, Pliny’s invitation to Attius plausibly reflects Catullus’ description of his new booklet, arida modo pumice expolitum (1.2) as well as the Alexandrian notion of limae labor that Horace expresses, with his usual corrective caveats, in the Ars poetica: Vos, o Pompilius sanguis, carmen reprehendite, quod non multa dies et multa litura coercuit atque praesectum deciens non castigavit ad unguem. (Ars 291–4)

For your part, you sons of Pompilius, don’t endorse any poem that has not been reined in by many days, and thorough filing: nothing that has not been made ten times smooth to the last detail.

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propositum fuit quod regibus, ut ne qua re egerent, ne cui parerent, libertate uterentur, cuius proprium est sic vivere ut velis; cf. Dyck 1996: 199–201. For the suggested connection, see B¨utler 1970: 44. Pliny’s Ep. 1.10 is part of a diptych, with 8.9, devoted to the contrasting but not irreconcilable spheres of otium and negotium. See B¨utler’s comments, 1970: 42 and 45. On the notion of the “tame philosopher,” see Hoffer’s analysis of 1.10 (1999: 119–40). The brand of moderate philosophical life that Euphrates advocates (and that in paragraphs 9 and 10 consoles Pliny for the drudgery of his days) is reminiscent of Cicero’s indictment of the couture-philosophers (echoed in Quint. Inst. 12.3.12 and Sen. Ep. 5.2) and his defense of a moral engagement in political life against pure philosophical or scientific speculation (Off. 1.19: cuius studio a rebus gerendis abduci contra officium est; virtutis enim laus omnis in actione consistit). Hoffer 1999: 129–31.

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Two elements in Pliny’s letter are particularly reminiscent of Horace. First, the witty association of literary and ethical concerns brings Pliny to measure his days of negotia against the preferred activities of the litterati auditors of philosophy: his officia only resemble the intellectual activity of the studia; in truth they produce the paradoxical “most illiterate of letters.” Second, the continuous exchange of terminology between the two (thus overlapping) semantic fields of culture and ethics comes from the satirical poet’s repertoire. In Horace, the language of the art connoisseur is equally at home in the sphere of the moral or that of stylistic refinement, so that in Satire 1.5.31–2 one reads that Fonteius Capito is an ad unguem / factus homo (“a perfect human being to the last detail”). The circumstance that ethics and poetics can be shown to share a common vocabulary in Horace points to a larger context than that of Cicero’s letters. By allowing the overbearing presence of Cicero to occupy the foreground, one risks losing sight of a larger intertextual picture.36 cicero as e x e m p l a r The influence Cicero’s model exerted on Pliny’s work can be measured in yet a more explicit and more pointed type of interconnection. Pliny alludes to the texts of his model either by recycling his loaded language – in particular, Greek – or by modeling individual letters on Ciceronian exemplars.37 To the first category, that of local and allusive interaction between their texts, belongs, for example, Pliny’s allusion to Cicero’s semi-technical label   in 1.2.4. In ad Atticum 1.14.3 Cicero had used the term for his ornate style, and, as Shackleton Bailey notes, probably in the sense of pictorial embellishments: Totum hunc locum, quem ego varie meis orationibus, quarum tu Aristarchus es, soleo pingere, de flamma, de ferro (nosti illas  ) valde graviter pertexuit. (Att. 1.14.3) He [Crassus] treated in all details and emphatically the very same theme that I am used to painting with various colors in those speeches of mine of which you are the first critic: the usual fires and swords (you know my palette).

Pliny takes into account the visual connotation that the metaphor had in Cicero when he suggests his imitation of rhetorical colores.38 36 37

38

For further examples of questionable associations, see the Appendix. On the use of Greek in epistolography, see Cugusi 1983: 83–93. More specifically for Pliny, Deane 1918: 41–54 and Guillemin 1929: 78; for Cicero, Adams 2003: 308–47. Deane 1918: 42–3: “The word [. . .] has hardly the dignity of a technical term, but is Cicero’s jesting and almost slang word for the rhetorical flourishes of his Orations.” For a technical valence of the

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Non tamen omnino Marci nostri   fugimus, quotiens paulum itinere decedere non intempestivis, amoenitatibus admonebamur. (Ep. 1.2.4) I did not shun, to be sure, the flourishes of our dear Marcus Tullius, whenever I thought it could be time to digress a little onto a more pleasant road.

A further example of Pliny’s re-use of a Greek expression found in Cicero is offered in Ep. 9.1.3. Inviting Maximus to hasten the publication of his books against Planta, Pliny goes back to a sententious Homeric statement from Odyssey 22.412. If you publish immediately, he states, you will not be accused of having found the courage to write only after Planta’s death and, at the same time, you will avoid being reproached for attacking a person’s memory: Et simul vitabis illud     (Ep. 9.1.3). The proverbial nature of the fragment (highlighted by Pliny’s use of illud) is balanced by the presence in Cicero’s and Pliny’s letters of the same variation on Homer’s text. In a passage lamentably incomplete, Cicero wrote to Atticus: De Metello,    , sed tamen multis annis civis nemo erat mortuus, cui equidem . . . † (“As for Metellus, de mortuis nil nisi bonum: yet, no Roman citizen has died in a long time to whom indeed . . . ,” Att. 4.7.2).39 Homer’s line read, however,    (“those who have been killed,” instead of “those who are dead”). Pliny inherits the entire package from Cicero: the Homeric expression, its textual modification, and the field of its application. Both Cicero and Pliny use it to suggest the balance one should achieve when characterizing a detestable man after his death.40 Similarly modeled on Cicero is Pliny’s witty remark to Octavius Rufus in 1.7.5: cur enim non usquequaque Homericis versibus agam tecum? (“why shouldn’t I deal with you in a cento of Homeric verses?”). Pliny’s witticism is based on his having addressed his friend in the relatively short epistle with two Homeric quotations: first he has cited in full Il. 16.250 (   ! " #,   $, Ep. 1.7.1), then he has reinforced the epic tone of the epistle with a second fragment, Il. 1.528 (% &   

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term see, contra, Shackleton Bailey who refers to Horace, Ep. 1.3.14 (an tragica desaevit et ampullatur in arte?) and Ars 96–7 (Telephus et Peleus, cum pauper et exsul uterque / proicit ampullas et sesquipedalia verba) (Shackleton Bailey 1965, 1: 308). Horace’s usage of the term in the context of a transgression of generic boundaries between tragedy and comedy is probably an allusion to Aristophanes, Ra. 1200–45. For the possible value of the term in the Greek tradition and a bibliographical note, see Dover 1993: 337–9. I reproduce Shackleton Bailey’s conjecture cui equidem instead of the reading quid quidem the manuscripts have before the lacuna. Cf. Shackleton Bailey 1965, 2: 180. On Pliny’s adjusting the verse to fit the circumstances of Planta’s death, Deane weakly appeals to the (presumed) requirements of accuracy: “as Planta has died a natural death, he substitutes   for ” (1918: 51). Equally uninterested in the variation is Shackleton Bailey (1965, 2: 180) who simply remarks on Cicero’s line “just so Pliny.”

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'#  (  ), 1.7.4).41 In both cases, Pliny lightheartedly plays on the minimal consonance between his situation and the world of Homer and in so doing comes close to a Ciceronian model.42 In Fam. 7.6, to the Trebatius Testa whom he has convinced to follow Caesar to Gaul, Cicero had overwhelmed his young friend with a plethora of sententious citations drawn from Ennius’ Medea. In the close of the epistle Cicero adds: et quoniam Medeam coepi agere, illud semper memento (“and since I have started to play Medea, always keep the following in mind”) and fires off the last (proverbial) bit of wisdom: qui ipse sibi sapiens prodesse non quit, nequiquam sapit (“he who is wise only to the benefit of others is not wise at all”).43 As both Guillemin and Weische note, the point of contact between Pliny and Cicero is the verb agere, which appears in both texts as the summation of a series of poetic fragments interspersed in argumentative prose.44 A last Homeric parallel between Cicero and Pliny is worth commenting upon. In Ep. 1.18.4 Pliny provides an account of an initially ominous dream he had before speaking in the trial for Iunius Pastor. In the context of this self-congratulating letter, he explains that the nightmare did not deter him from speaking (and in doing so effectively) because, as Homer maintained, to fight on the side of one’s homeland is the strongest presage of victory: * +, - $   #& #.  (“when you fight for your country, you have God on your side,” Il. 12.243). Homer’s encouragement overcomes the fears the dream had elicited, and that trial actually becomes the first milestone in Pliny’s brilliant oratorical career: prospere cessit, atque adeo illa actio mihi aures hominum, illa ianuam famae patefecit (“the trial ended well, and the part I played in it opened the ears of the public for me, the door to fame”). The contrast between the negative presage of the dream (which Pliny does not heed) and Homer’s maxim promising the best possible omen perfectly fits the occasion of Pliny’s letter: Iunius was asking 41

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Deane lists Pliny’s Homeric quotations and observes that “the fact that five of the twelve quotations from the Iliad are from the first three books may be held to indicate that these books, the earliest read, were the best remembered, as would be the case with most modern readers” (1918: 50). There is also a chance that the invitation from Octavius already contained Homeric undertones: vide in quo me fastigio collocaris, cum mihi idem potestatis idemque regni dederis quod Homerus Iovi Optimo Maximo (Ep. 1.7.1): cf. Ludolph 1997: 178. As in the case of Tacitus’ Virgilian invitation at the outset of Ep. 6.20 (see above, Chapter 4), Pliny seems to enjoy topping his correspondents’ allusions with some of his own. On these forms of rhetorical accommodation, see Adams 2003: 295–6. The dictum, which recurs also in Off. 3.62 (scen. 273 Vahlen2 ), is probably an Ennian redeployment of a similar Euripidean fragment:  , /  0 1 (see Dyck 1996: 573). Cicero quotes the Greek original in a letter to Caesar (Fam. 3.15.2). Cf. Guillemin 1929: 115 and Weische 1989: 380.

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for a delay in his trial on account of a bad dream. But the line evokes also a Ciceronian background. In Att. 2.3.4, Cicero had capped with the same hexameter his “Socratic process of deliberation” about his upcoming role in the matter of Caesar’s sponsored agrarian law of the year 60. Pliny’s display of self-praise in 1.18 might seem excessive to modern readers, but when one compares it with Cicero’s antecedent, it can be shown to conform to an intertextual rhetoric of understatement. In the short span of ten lines in a modern edition, Cicero cites three verses from his De consulatu suo, indicates that his elegant and sententious poem is also going to dictate his moral standards in the present circumstances, and finally deploys high-pitched, self-congratulatory Homeric language. It is ironic that Cicero’s letter ended with his request to Atticus to bring him Theophrastus’ #&  . Pliny’s short essay “On Ambition” in 1.18 capitalizes on that irony.45 To the second category outlined above, that of entire letters modeled on recognizably Ciceronian antecedents, belong Pliny’s programmatic epistle on the writing of history (5.8, about which see Chapter 4) and its companion piece, 7.33 to Tacitus, both modeled after Fam. 5.12.46 The later letter, in which Pliny narrates an episode that displayed behavior “worthy of ancient times,” is more strictly connected with Cicero’s Fam. 5.12 to Lucceius than the theoretical disquisition of 5.8. The situation of Pliny’s 7.33 is – si parva licet – the same as Cicero’s. Both writers address contemporary historians, politely asking to be recorded in their works on account of some extraordinary act of virtue. Cicero held up the troubled year of his consulship; Pliny reports the elegant and brave reply he gave during the prosecution of Baebius Massa to a counter-attack by the former delator and prot´eg´e of Domitian – an action remarkable only because of Pliny’s customary caution. Both ask their addressees to apply a less than strict observance of the law of historical objectivity. In asking that their actions be embellished, Cicero’s plea is more direct than Pliny’s discreet praeteritio, but they amount to the same request.47 Friendship should allow the laws of historiography to be relaxed, but not beyond the boundaries of truth: Itaque te plane etiam atque etiam rogo ut ornes ea vehementius etiam quam fortasse sentis et in eo leges historiae neglegas gratiamque illam [. . .] ne aspernere amorique nostrum plusculum etiam, quam concedet veritas largiare.48 (Fam. 5.12.3) 45 46

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Hoffer mentions that Cicero had already quoted the line (1999: 219). For prosopographical information on the addressee and for the dating of Cicero’s letter, see Shackleton Bailey 1977, ad loc. On Cicero’s rhetorical strategy and finesse, see Rudd 1992: 30–2. See Rudd 1992: 22–3 and Cova 1966: 28–30. With Cicero’s plea to Lucceius one can compare the sentiment expressed in Pliny’s Ep. 9.33 regarding the subject-matter for a poetic (epyllion-like?) composition: quamquam non est opus adfingas aliquid aut adstruas; sufficit ne ea quae sunt vera minuantur (11).

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And so I entreat you with all my force to adorn these events even more ardently that you perhaps feel inclined to, thus paying no attention to the rules of historiography. I hope you will not neglect that grace; rather, you will let your affection for me have just a little bit more than truth would allow. Haec, utcumque se habent, notiora clariora maiora tu facies; quamquam non exigo ut excedas actae rei modum. Nam nec historia debet egredi veritatem, et honeste factis veritas sufficit. (Ep. 7.33.10) However it may be, I hope you will make these events more known, more famous, and more grandiose. I am not asking, of course, that you go beyond the measure of the facts. History, you know, must not cross the borders of truth: truth is enough for deeds accomplished in good conscience.

To be sure, Cicero’s 5.12 resonates elsewhere in Pliny’s collection,49 but the parallels of theme, language, and rhetorical strategy between Pliny’s letter to Tacitus and Cicero’s to Lucceius suggest that in this case Pliny expected his readers to keep Cicero’s letter in mind and draw their own conclusions on the precedent that 5.12 represented for 7.33. The theoretical statement on the duties of history, which appears as a centerpiece in both letters, is reinforced by their shared use of the same example. The rare balance of flattery and self-promotion Cicero achieved in 5.12.7, in suggesting to Lucceius that Alexander had been careful to choose the best artists (Apelles and Lysippus) to preserve his image in painting and sculpture, finds a parallel in Pliny’s appeal to Tacitus: Neque enim Alexander ille gratiae causa ab Apelle potissimum pingi et a Lysippo fingi volebat. Sed quod illorum artem cum ipsis, tum etiam sibi gloriae faciebat. (Fam. 5.12.7) When Alexander the Great insisted on being portrayed by Apelles and Lysippus, it was not because of their elegance, but because he thought that their art would bring glory not only to them but to himself as well. Nam si esse nobis curae solet ut facies nostra ab optimo quoque artifice exprimatur, nonne debemus optare, ut operibus nostris similis tui scriptor praedicatorque contingat? (Ep. 7.33.2) You know, if it is common practice that we take the utmost care that our portraits are made only by the best artists, why shouldn’t we wish that our actions may find their reporter in a writer of your caliber? 49

In addition to Ep. 5.8.1–2 = Fam. 5.12.1 and 6. Both Cicero and Pliny are aflame with a desire for glory – immediately, in Cicero’s case, more deferentially and patiently in Pliny’s: Neque enim me solum commemoratio posteritatis ad spem quandam immortalitatis rapit, sed etiam illa cupiditas ut . . . vivi perfruamur, Fam. 5.12.1; Me autem nihil aeque ac diuturnitatis amor et cupido sollicitat, Ep. 5.8.2. Cugusi (1983: 128–9 and 224) stresses that Ep. 1.8.5–6 depends on 5.12.8 and Ep. 6.16.1 and 3 depends on Cicero’s 5.12.1.

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In this connection, Pliny treats the historical example as already fully established; he feels no need to indicate the origin of the precept he gives and he makes no mention of Alexander. The detail suggests that one is invited to perceive Cicero in the background. Pliny’s protasis (si . . . solet) has its historical grounding in Cicero’s text.50 A similar case of allusive interaction is offered in Pliny’s Ep. 8.24, a letter patterned on Cicero’s ad Quintum Fratrem 1.1. Zucker draws attention to a series of significant parallels in structure and diction between the two letters.51 The association of advice to a friend or family member about the responsibilities of one’s situation (logos paraenetikos) with the form of an epistolary propemptikon is common. However, as Zucker demonstrates, Pliny establishes a privileged relationship with the epistle Cicero sends to his brother who had just been appointed governor of Asia.52 Particularly meaningful is the way Pliny positions the two most explicit references to Cicero’s epistle in the first and last sections of his text.53 A comparison of the framing passages of the two allows for the appreciation of Pliny’s art of variation in continuity: Amor in te meus cogit, non ut praecipiam (neque enim praeceptore eges), admoneam tamen, ut quae scis teneas et observes, aut nescire melius. (Ep. 8.24.1)

Neque enim prudentia tua cuiusquam praecepta desiderat. (Q. fr. 1.1.36)

My love for you compels me I wouldn’t say to instruct you (for indeed you don’t need a preceptor), but at least to advise that you keep in mind and observe what you know: if you don’t, then it is better not to know.

For indeed you don’t need any precepts on how to behave.

50

51 52

53

Shackleton Bailey 1977, ad loc., cites a parallel treatment of the exemplum in Horace’s Ep. 2.1.239 and comments that Cicero offers the earliest version of the story. The Elder Pliny refers twice to the anecdote; cf. Nat. 7.125 and 35.85. Zucker 1929. See his discussion of Greek and Roman models at pages 216–21 (particularly interesting is the connection of the Abschied-theme and epistolary form that he notes in Statius, Silv. 3.2). In the commentary, Shackleton Bailey too stresses the connection between Cicero’s epistle for Quintus’ proconsulship of Asia and Pliny’s letter (1977, ad loc.). Sherwin-White labels Cicero’s letter as “Pliny’s prototype” and, following Zucker (222 and 231), comments on a further Ciceronian reference to Pro Flacco 61–2 (1966: 477) for Pliny’s second section. For Sherwin-White, Pliny’s choice of language (non te praecipiam . . . admoneam tamen) “closely echoes but modifies Cicero’s blunter approach to Curio,” in Fam. 2.1.2 (Breve est, quod me tibi praecipere meus incredibilis in te amor cogit). The nexus amor cogit, however, is a commonplace (and goes back at least to Plautus, Ps. 206; cf., e.g., Cic. Fam. 13.7.4, Hor. Carm. 3.15.11, Verg. Aen. 4.412, Mart. 5.48.1).

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Accedit quod tibi certamen est tecum: onerat te quaesturae tuae fama [. . .]; onerat testimonium principis; onerat tribunatus, praetura atque haec ipsa legatio quasi praemium data. (8)

Ac si te ipse vehementius ad omnes partes bene audiendi excitaris, non ut cum aliis, sed ut tecum iam ipse certes. (3)

Add to it that it is with yourself that you have a contest. The reputation you acquired during your quaestorship is on your shoulders . . . just as are the esteem in which the princeps holds you, your tribunate, your praetorship and even the present legateship you have received as if in reward.

And if you will have exhorted yourself to all aspects of acting well, you will not be challenging others, but yourself.

The concluding metaphor Pliny lifts from Cicero’s text (to compete with oneself ) is so productive that it dictates Zucker’s overall interpretation of the letter.54 Twice the critic remarks that Pliny enters into a stylistic contest with his antecedent, a contest that relies on the active complicity of a readership able to compare the new and the old text in order to appreciate the differences between them.55 Indeed, Zucker may be right in seeing a signal of the ambiguity of Pliny’s relationship with Cicero’s epistolography in his choice to allude to Cicero’s competitive metaphor. Q. Fr. 1.1 is the actual alter-ego of Pliny’s text. The competition in which his letter engages is a shadow combat with Cicero’s text, ultimately a contest with itself.56 The positioning of Pliny’s allusions to Cicero’s models should not be overlooked. Epistles 7.33 and 8.24 are the last items in their books. Like the incipit, the explicit of a text, whether an individual letter or a unit in a collection, is a locus that can contain important signals.57 From their 54

55

56

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Zucker sees an additional parallel between Cicero’s constat enim provincia primum ex eo genere sociorum, quod est ex hominum omni genere humanissimum (6) and Pliny’s variation id est ad homines maxime homines, ad liberos maxime liberos (2). The nexus is one of Cicero’s favorites: humanissimos homines is found also, for instance, in Arch. 19 (see also Verr. 2.4.98, Pis. 68, de Orat. 2.3 and Att. 16.16c.3); Pliny the Elder refers to humanissimam artem hominum (Nat. 34.89). At the root of the expression one might see its inverted paradigm in Terence, Ph. 509 (homo inhumanissimus). Zucker’s terminology is revealing. He sees Pliny challenge Cicero (“konkurrieren”) in the sphere of this letter (1929: 219). On Pliny’s challenge to Cicero’s style, see also 223. A similar argument can be advanced regarding other items in Pliny’s collection. For example, Ep. 9.39.1 to Mustius on the renovation of the temple of Ceres might recall Cicero’s ad Att. 12.12, 35, 37 and 40, on the construction of a fanum (a commemorative shrine) for Tullia. See Sherwin-White’s discussion of Guillemin’s proposal as not cogent: “Guillemin sees in this letter only the desire of Pliny to include something parallel to Cicero’s letters about the shrine to Tullia.” He continues, noting that “this is not the only letter about a shrine in Pliny, as Guillemin maintained: see Ep. 3.6, 4.1, 8.8.” For further discussion of the issue, see the Appendix. See, e.g., Seneca’s habit of citing maxims of Epicurus at the end of almost every letter (23 out of 29) of Books 1–3 of the Epistles ad Lucilium (Lana 1991: 281; Wilson 2001: 176–7 and 181–3). Marked

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marked position they can be read as contrastive allusions to Cicero and his epistolary model. If Books 7 and 8 were published together as a unit, the placement is even more pronounced and significant. Rounding off the next-to-last installment of his corpus, Pliny draws attention to two epistles in a corpus that did not receive as much editorial care from its author. Similar, albeit less notable, signals of a Ciceronian antecedent can also be found in the concluding epistle of Book 6 (6.34), in which Pliny remarks to Maximus that no one would hold it against him if the Africanae (that is, the wild animals used for the venationes) did not arrive in time for the games he is offering in Verona. This rather trivial detail brings to mind the small cycle of letters in Cicero’s corpus that deals with importing panthers from the eastern provinces for Caelius’ aedilician games.58 Pliny’s praise of Maximus’ generosity in offering circenses is un-Ciceronian, however. Even when Pliny has the same moralistic reaction as his model, he maintains a measure of independence. For instance, again in the area of mass entertainment, Cicero had composed a dismissive epistle (Fam. 7.1.2) to Marius about the games Spurius Maecius Tarpa had organized in 55 to celebrate the dedication of Pompey’s new theatre.59 Indeed, as Sherwin-White notes, in Ep. 9.6 “Pliny follows the lead of Cicero in his intellectual snobbery (Off. 2.57, Arch. 13),” but Pliny’s attitude is not always consistent with his model: the object of Pliny’s snobbery in 9.6 is not the same as Cicero’s in Fam. 7.1.2 (and Seneca’s in Ep. 7.3–5) – that is, the gladiatorial shows that turn the arena into a slaughterhouse – but rather the chariot races. Pliny updates his exemplar, directing his annoyance to the new passion. His sense of moral indignation has old roots, but Pliny finds a new occasion to exercise it. The epistles surveyed above contribute in different ways to constituting and shaping the genre into which they enter. The process of allusion establishes a tradition as much as it signals a text’s membership in it. Allusion, as Barchiesi notes, is a process that involves the reading of a model no less than an attempt to inscribe one’s work into it.60 The transfer of authority that allusions involve, one may add, goes both ways. Cicero’s collection becomes a suitable model only insofar as Pliny chooses to pattern his texts on its example. Pliny’s allusions reinterpret the texts to which they refer while reinforcing the exemplary prestige of their Ciceronian antecedents.

58 59

portions of prose writing possessed the same memorability as the more dense poetic language. In the case of the Sallustian allusion in the epistle about Lake Vadimon (Ep. 8.20), for example, Pliny counts on the “positional” advantage of alluding to the proem of a prose work (cf. Saylor 1982). Incipit, explicit, and (often) midpoints are marked sections of a text. See Conte 1974 and 1992. Fam. 2.11.2, 8.4.5, 8.8.10 – in which Africanae are mentioned; 8.9.3; see also Att. 5.8.5. 60 Barchiesi 2001a: 142. Cf. Shackleton Bailey, ad Fam. 7.1; for Tarpa, see Hor. S. 1.10.38.

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At the same time, any single allusion enriches the resonance of the text in which it appears by signaling that it belongs to the tradition it has helped to establish. Allusions, however, also bring into play the third chronological aspect of canonization: the future of reception and imitation. The fact that Cicero had a letter in the form of a propemptikon is one of the reasons why Pliny thought he should include one in his collection. At the same time, Pliny’s choice of appropriating that precise text in Cicero’s corpus adds one feature to the identity of the epistolographic genre, namely the possibility and the opportunity of including such a text. In fact, Pliny’s redeployment of Cicero’s example influenced the choice of later epistolographers. When they modeled their texts on Pliny’s, they confirmed the features of the genre as he had defined it and also claimed a place in the same literary lineage.61 the epistol ary challenge Pliny’s relationship with Cicero does not stop at the elusive level of allusions in his letters. As an explicit point of comparison, Cicero is cited by name on several occasions, always as a model to whose achievements Pliny deferentially aspires. Lef`evre has authored the most recent and thorough account of Pliny’s pronouncements on his primary model and has argued that Cicero was for Pliny a model not only in the art of speaking, but also, and more importantly, in the most disparate fields of his endeavors: as an orator, a public personality, a poet, and an epistolographer.62 While one can subscribe to Lef`evre’s conclusions insofar as Pliny’s image of Cicero as orator, politician and poet is concerned, his argument about Pliny’s deference to Cicero as a letter writer merits closer consideration. Pliny’s rapport with Cicero is less “tragic” than Lef`evre argues, their relative placement in the canon less pre-established (334). Indeed, one can show that such rapport is not even phrased as a respectful imitation from a distance but rather as flat out competition. What we have observed in the case of Pliny’s relations with Catullus and Tacitus likely applies to his confrontation with Cicero as well. When it comes to the issue of canon formation, Pliny is more an active participant in the cultural debate of his day than a passive receiver of traditional literary wisdom. Whether the field of tensions into which he moves is poetics, rhetoric, historiography or letter-writing, Pliny does not shy away from making a personal stand, often a polemical one. 61

62

For a discussion of Pliny’s influence on Lucius Verus, who wrote a letter to his teacher Fronto inspired by Pliny’s Ep. 7.33, see Cugusi 1983: 221. Lef`evre 1996b: 334.

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In the passage that serves as the epigraph of this chapter, Pliny uses for Cicero the loaded term “emulation”: est mihi cum Cicerone aemulatio (1.5.12). The word he uses goes one step further than straightforward imitation. It may suffice to look at Pliny’s own contrastive usage of the words imitatio and aemulatio elsewhere in his collection to measure how strongly competitive a connotation is embedded in his language. Writing about the oratorical model that guided him during the composition of his pamphlet de Helvidi ultione, Pliny notes: Quam [scil., orationem Demosthenis 2 3] sane, cum componerem illos [scil., libellos de Helvidi ultione], habui in manibus, non ut aemularer (improbum enim ac paene furiosum), sed tamen imitarer et sequerer. (Ep. 7.30.5) As I was drafting my pamphlets, I kept Demosthenes’ oration Against Meidias at hand: I didn’t mean to challenge it (something in between crime and sheer madness), but rather to imitate and follow it.

If Demosthenes’ example cannot be matched and competitive emulation needs to be given up from the start as impious and almost delirious, Cicero is a model with whom Pliny can (and will) cross swords. The same loaded language can be found in Pliny’s Ep. 4.8.4: laetaris enim quod honoribus eius [scil., Cicero’s] insistam, quem aemulari in studiis cupio (“you rejoice that I trail from nearby the career of the one whom I wish to emulate in his, and my, literary works”) – again connecting cursus honorum and literary careers.63 A survey of all the places in which Cicero is mentioned in Pliny’s correspondence yields interesting results. As we have seen in Ep. 1.2, Pliny admits that he does not shun Cicero’s rhetorical colores and he writes with a healthy imitative zelos, keeping in mind his oratorical model. Cicero also provides an example of a legitimate grand style in Ep. 7.17.13, an object of explicit emulation in Ep. 1.5.11–12 and a justification for writing long speeches in Ep. 1.20.4–10.64 Cicero’s metaphors, moreover, are examples of an imitable daring approach to rhetorical pathos, comparable to that of Demosthenes in 9.26.8. Similarly, Pliny goes back to Cicero as a legitimizing antecedent when it comes to writing verses. In 3.15.1 Cicero is remembered for his role as a patron of poets, a role Pliny rejoices in having taken up after him; in 5.3.5 he appears as a writer of light poetry, like Pliny himself; in 7.4.3–6 a spurious Ciceronian epigram on Tiro is Pliny’s model for his own hendecasyllabic poetry.65 63

64

65

On the heretical approach Pliny took in defining the intersection of his literary and political careers, see Gibson and Steel 2007, developing and adjusting Farrell 2002. Birley adds to the catalogue also 1.3.2 as a case in which Cicero is “unnamed, quoted on average quality” (2000: 49). For a different view, see the Appendix at 1.3.2. For a discussion of the issue of Pliny the poet, see Chapter 2.

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Finally, Cicero is mentioned in 4.8.4 as consul and augur, as Pliny himself is, and in 3.21.5 he figures as the author of published speeches with which, at least according to Martial’s flattering epigram, 10.20, Pliny’s own will one day be compared. Pliny does not miss the opportunity to remind Tacitus about his latest career advancement even when he opens his Ciceronian Ep. 7.33 with an allusive joke about his own priesthood: auguror, nec me fallit augurium (1). So far, Cicero appears as a paragon to whom Pliny willingly and almost eagerly (as Lef`evre characterizes his attitude) accepts coming second. Things change, however, at the end of the collection, when Pliny considers his own and Cicero’s achievement in the realm of epistolography. Two final allusions to Cicero, an explicit reference in Ep. 9.2 and the re-use of a theme in 8.15, show that Pliny saw Cicero’s letters as the weakest link in his antecedent’s cultural legacy. A closer reading of the diptych illuminates this aspect of Pliny’s relation to his model. In Ep. 8.15 to Terentius Iunior Pliny writes that during his stay in the countryside, he has written so much that he is running out of paper. Soon, he adds, he will be forced to write palimpsests. C. PLINIUS IUNIORI SUO S. Oneravi te tot pariter missis voluminibus, sed oneravi primum quia exegeras, deinde quia scripseras tam graciles istic vindemias esse, ut plane scirem tibi vacaturum, quod vulgo dicitur, librum legere. Eadem ex meis agellis nuntiantur. Igitur mihi quoque licebit scribere quae legas, sit modo unde chartae emi possint; aut necessario quidquid scripserimus boni malive delebimus. Vale. Dear Iunior, I have burdened you with so many volumes sent all at once, but I did it first because you had asked for it, second because I knew, having received from you a letter to that effect, that the grape harvest was so meager down there that your hands were free (as the saying goes) to read a book. I get the same tidings from my fields. So, I too will have a chance to write something for you to read – provided I find somewhere to buy paper. In case I cannot, I will be forced to erase whatever I have written, good or bad. Be well.

Pliny’s jest contains an allusion to a theme found in a Ciceronian note to Trebatius in which Cicero joked about the questionable legal expertise of his correspondent and wittily asserted the superiority of his own letters to Trebatius’ formulae: Sed, ut ad epistulas tuas redeam, cetera belle; illud miro: quis solet eodem exemplo plures dare, qui sua manu scribit? Nam quod in palimpsesto, laudo equidem parcimoniam. Sed miror quid in illa chartula fuerit quod delere malueris quam non haec scribere; nisi forte tuas formulas. Non enim puto te meas epistulas delere

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ut reponas tuas. An hoc significas, nihil fieri, frigere te, ne chartam quidem tibi suppeditare? (Fam. 7.18.2)66 But, to come back to your letters, all is fine. I only wonder: who taught you to send more than one copy in your own hand? As for the palimpsest, I approve of it, if only on account of frugality. I only ask myself what would have been on that page that you preferred to erase rather than not to write. Your legal briefs, I surmise. I don’t think you would delete my letters to make room for yours. Or do you mean to say that nothing has changed, that you are still out in the cold, and you don’t even have paper?

If one can read in Cicero’s tone a jesting threat to Trebatius (“I hope you have not erased my letters to write yours”) and an invitation to consider the epistles the orator has produced as texts worth preserving, one is also compelled to make the point that, in his career as self-editor and publisher, Cicero had done little (if anything) to preserve them himself. Through his allusion to Cicero’s theme of “running out of paper,” Pliny makes precisely this point. When he implies that he is ready to erase something he has written to make room for an epistle, he takes Cicero’s irony seriously and turns the topos on its head. Pliny aligns his letters with Cicero’s and endows them with a paradoxical prominence. New epistles to Iunior will take the place of other literature. What is more, as the very letter before the (general) reader’s eyes demonstrates, they will survive because of the un-Ciceronian care with which he has edited and published them. A second Ciceronian allusion contained in Book 9 suggests that Pliny measured his success against Cicero’s fortuitous epistolographic rescue from oblivion. Ep. 9.2 is an apologetic note in reply to a certain Sabinus explaining why he has received from Pliny only short and infrequent letters. There are two reasons for Pliny’s breaking the epistolary contract with his friend. First, Pliny is busy, as his friend must be during a military campaign. Second, Pliny is not Marcus Tullius, to whose example Sabinus invites him to aspire: Cicero had both greater ingenium than Pliny and more interesting things about which to write.67 Pliny’s limited intellectual capacities are further constrained by the limited scope of his active life: C. PLINIUS SABINO SUO S. Facis iucunde quod non solum plurimas epistulas meas verum etiam longissimas flagitas; in quibus parcior fui partim quia tuas occupationes verebar, partim quia 66

67

See Shackleton Bailey 1977, ad loc., for the joke about multiple autograph copies of the same text (“Of course these letters were not really identical [there lies the joke], only tediously similar”) and on the deleting of Trebatius’ formulas (“With the usual facetious implication that Trebatius did not know his legal business. Forms of procedure drawn up by him would be expendable”). For a close and insightful reading of the Ciceronian background of 9.2, see Morello 2003.

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ipse multum distringebar plerumque frigidis negotiis quae simul et avocant animum et comminuunt. Praeterea nec materia plura scribendi dabatur. Neque enim eadem nostra condicio quae M. Tulli, ad cuius exemplum nos vocas. Illi enim et copiosissimum ingenium, et par ingenio qua varietas rerum qua magnitudo largissime suppetebat; nos quam angustis terminis claudamur etiam tacente me perspicis, nisi forte volumus scholasticas tibi atque, ut ita dicam, umbraticas litteras mittere. Sed nihil minus aptum arbitramur, cum arma vestra cum castra, cum denique cornua tubas sudorem pulverem soles cogitamus. Habes, ut puto, iustam excusationem, quam tamen dubito an tibi probari velim. Est enim summi amoris negare veniam brevibus epistulis amicorum, quamvis scias illis constare rationem. Vale. (Ep. 9.2.1–5) Dear Sabinus, You are joking (right?) when you ask that I send you not only many letters but also of the longest kind. I refrained from doing so, partly because I respect people who are busy, partly because I too am seriously tied up, mostly with stone-cold business, of the kind that at once detains your mind and thwarts it. Add to it that there wasn’t much to write about. I’m not in the same circumstances as Cicero, to whose example you call me. He had the richest of minds, and to match his wits he had at his disposal a host of varied and momentous situations. Me, I don’t need to spell out how narrow are the confines in which I am restricted: unless I decided to send you letters that sound like school-exercises. Used as they are to the dim light of schoolrooms, I thought they were going to be the least appropriate companions for you, when I pictured the arms all around, the encampment, the horns, bugles, sweat, dust, and blazing sun. Here you have, I think, a justifying excuse – one that I don’t know if you will want to endorse. It is in truth a sign of great love when you refuse to pardon your friends for writing short letters, even if you know that they had a perfectly good reason to do so. Take care.

The apparently modest tone of the letter and the deferential profession of allegiance to the model of Cicero, however, transmit a different signal that a reader should not miss. In its lighthearted opening, the letter is allusively intertextual. By evoking another, distant item in Pliny’s collection, 9.2 is indeed a prominent example of Pliny being addressed (or pretending that he is addressed) with a citation in praesentia from his epistolary corpus.68 The first and last paragraph of 9.2 are patterned, literally and allusively, on Pliny’s own words and argument in 2.2: C. PLINIUS PAULINO SUO S. Irascor, nec liquet mihi an debeam, sed irascor. Scis, quam sit amor iniquus interdum, impotens saepe,  semper. Haec tamen causa magna est, nescio an iusta; sed ego, tamquam non minus iusta quam magna sit, graviter irascor, quod a te tam diu litterae nullae. Exorare me potes uno modo, si nunc saltem plurimas 68

For the concept of citation in praesentia, see my discussion in the introduction of Chapter 3.

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et longissimas miseris. Haec mihi sola excusatio vera, ceterae falsae videbuntur. Non sum auditurus “non eram Romae” vel “occupatior eram”; illud enim nec di sinant, ut “infirmior”. Ipse ad villam partim studiis partim desidia fruor, quorum utrumque ex otio nascitur. Vale. (Ep. 2.2) I am upset. I don’t know if I should be, but I am upset. You know how love is at times unbalanced, often powerless, and always susceptible to the smallest of causes. But this is a great cause! Granted, I don’t know if this is also a just cause – and yet, I’ll behave as if it were no less just than it is great. I am deeply upset because for such a long time I got no letters from you. (2) You may appease me in only one way: if you have already sent many letters, and of the longest kind. This is to me the only true excuse; I will find false all others. I won’t hear “I was out of town” or “I have been so busy” – as for the “I’ve-been-sick” excuse, may the gods never allow me to hear it. Me, I am in the countryside, dividing my time between study and indolence – both children of leisure. Be well.

We have already considered this epistle in the context of a potential Catullan echo contained in its opening. What interests us now is the possibility that it acted as the model for the epistle by Sabinus to which Pliny’s 9.2 will respond. As a matter of fact, the two epistles mirror one another in their chiastic order of argumentation. In 9.2 Pliny argues that (A) “you want many long letters from me” and (B) “I did not write them first because I was concerned about your busy life, second because I too was busy, and third because there was not much to write about,” but (C) “I hope you will not forgive me because this would be a sign of your love for me”; in 2.2 Pliny moves from (C) “my love for you makes your not writing an unforgivable offense,” to (B) “do not give me any reasons (such as I was not in Rome, I was too busy, too sick),” to (A) “other than that you are already writing me many long letters.” On the level of diction, the quantity and quality of the letters Sabinus now seeks from Pliny are exactly the same as those he had exacted from Paulinus: plurimas and longissimas. Similarly, the excuses Pliny makes now (tuas occupationes verebar) he had already preempted in 2.2, undermining the validity of Paulinus’ occupatior eram. His well-founded apology (iusta excusatio) contrasts with the only true excuse that Paulinus could provide (mihi sola excusatio vera). No wonder Pliny writes that he does not want Sabinus to accept his pretexts for not writing. In 2.2 he had already claimed that such excuses were unacceptable. Even the bipartite structure of argumentation (partim . . . partim) echoes the phrasing of 2.2.2 (partim studiis, partim desidia fruor). But how could Sabinus know Pliny’s letter so well as to re-use it when writing to Pliny? The presence of so many parallels contrasts with the difference in addressee. The only explanation that seems plausible is that

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Sabinus has read Pliny’s letter to Paulinus in published form. What is more, Sabinus’ literal recasting is perhaps also a signal that he had received Pliny’s epistles as a part of a literary corpus. He considered them reusable and their arguments capable of becoming the vehicle of new allusions. The example of Cicero that the text of 9.2 evokes is thus doubly contrastive. On the surface, as Lef`evre insists, Pliny is using Cicero as a foil for his accomplishments. On a deeper level, among Cicero’s accomplishments there was not the joy of having his published letters quoted back to him. Of course, my argument presumes that Sabinus did write as Pliny implies, whereas it might be the case that Pliny added the internal allusion in the revision of his letters for publication. If this falls short of philological proof of the actual chronology of publication, it does not undermine the value of the signal: a quotation in Book 9 from Book 2 invites readers to make the same assumption as I did. Besides being the locus of one of Pliny’s most enjoyable and anxietydefusing jibes at Cicero, who seems never to have produced an edition of his letters, the epistle to Sabinus invites a re-evaluation for a second reason. The name of Pliny’s addressee, Sabinus, recalls a well-known, if lighthearted, Ovidian musing on the fortuna of his other, fictional collection of epistles: the Heroides. At Amores 2.18.27–32, Ovid had written that a certain Sabinus had gone around visiting all the original addressees of the Heroides and had brought back replies to some of them: Quam cito de toto rediit meus orbe Sabinus scriptaque diversis rettulit ille locis! candida Penelope signum cognovit Ulixis; legit ab Hippolyto scripta noverca suo. iam pius Aeneas miserae rescripsit Elissae, quodque legat Phyllis, si modo vivit, adest. tristis ad Hypsipylen ab Iasone littera venit; det votam Phoebo Lesbis amata lyram. How soon from the world’s ends my friend Sabinus returned with letters written each in a foreign land! Penelope the faithful recognized Ulysses’ signature, and the stepmother read the words written by her Hippolytos. Aeneas duty-bound has answered Dido already, and Phyllis, if she is alive, has something to read. Hypsipyle gets a sober letter from Jason, Sappho, now loved, may offer the lyre she promised to Apollo.

The coincidental homonymy of Pliny’s addressee and Ovid’s friend might be no coincidence at all. Sabinus is, in fact, mentioned again in Ovid’s poetry: his activity as respondent to the fictional invitation to correspond embedded in the Heroides is highlighted again, in a similar context, in Ex Ponto 4.13–16:

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et qui Penelopae rescribere iussit Ulixem errantem saevo per duo lustra mari, quique suam Troezena inperfectumque dierum deseruit celeri morte Sabinus opus. And there was he who had Penelope write back to Ulysses, who had wondered ten years on the cruel sea, Sabinus, who, because of his early death, left unfinished his Troezena and his work on the Fasti.

In both cases, the literary game in which Ovid and his friend appear to have indulged is extremely amusing.69 In Ovid, Sabinus is the poet who has playfully taken up the epistolary character of the fictional Heroides; he has treated them as real letters to the point of looking up the address of their fictional addressees, traveling to the four corners of their imaginary world, and collecting their implausible replies. Inversely, Pliny’s Sabinus is the correspondent who has taken so seriously the author’s attempt to present his real correspondence as literary that he has taken a letter of Book 2 addressed to Paulinus and has quoted it allusively in his own epistle to Pliny, an epistle to which Pliny is now replying in Book 9. Ovid’s repeated mentioning of Sabinus, in other words, might have appeared to Pliny a sufficient invitation to address to a new Sabinus a letter about epistolary exchange – a text in which the literary nature of his own collection could be fully brought to the fore. As a privileged reader, who bears the same name as a poet cited by Ovid in two metaliterary passages, Sabinus is in a good position to enjoy Pliny’s humorous allusion: unlike the original addressee, however, the modern reader needs a certain degree of critical labor to perceive the tenuous traces of the intertextual game. The trace of the Ovidian model is tenuous, but it is entrusted to a highly marked element of the epistle: the name of the addressee. Pliny is not new to this type of intertextual game: as we have seen, on the level of intra-textual connections, he has paired letters with the same addressee throughout his collection (see above, Chapter 1). He now appears ready to up the ante and use instances of parallel onomastics to establish inter-textual connections. The case of the letter to Sabinus is immediately reinforced by an equally allusive epistle to Paulinus that not only evokes the addressee of 2.2 (and thus reinforces the pertinence of the intra-textual connection 2.2–9.2 69

On the circumstances of this creative and unlikely reader response, see McKeown 1987, 3: 383–4 and 397–401. If Sabinus’ replies are implausible, they are no less so than their originals: cf. Jolivet 2001 and Fulkerson 2005, 9–11, with bibliography. For the prosopography of the character Sabinus, see Syme 1978: 75 (renouncing any attempt at identification) and Helzle 2003: 38–40, who proposes a connection between Sabinus and the unnamed turncoat friend of Ovid’s Pont. 4.3 (Massurius Sabinus?).

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just explored), but opens up this area of the collection to an inter-textual dialogue with other works in the canon. If 9.2 focused on the epistolary quality by explicitly engaging the model of Cicero as letter writer and more subtly evoking the epistolary dimension of Ovid’s Heroides, 9.3 shifts to a work in which the name Paulinus is writ large: Seneca’s treatise De brevitate vitae. The coincidental homonymy of addressees is only the trigger for an act of recollection that should bring together Seneca’s extended philosophical meditation on the correct use of time and Pliny’s miniature treatment of the same issue in 9.3. Other details in theme and diction allow the texts to be read in parallel: C. PLINIUS PAULINO SUO S. Alius aliud: ego beatissimum existimo, qui bonae mansuraeque famae praesumptione perfruitur, certusque posteritatis cum futura gloria vivit. Ac mihi nisi praemium aeternitatis ante oculos, pingue illud altumque otium placeat. Etenim omnes homines arbitror oportere aut immortalitatem suam aut mortalitatem cogitare, et illos quidem contendere eniti, hos quiescere remitti, nec brevem vitam caducis laboribus fatigare, ut video multos misera simul et ingrata imagine industriae ad vilitatem sui pervenire. Haec ego tecum quae cotidie mecum, ut desinam mecum, si dissenties tu; quamquam non dissenties, ut qui semper clarum aliquid et immortale meditere. Vale. Dear Paulinus, This is a free country. I think, however, that he has the perfect life, who can assume his good reputation will endure and can count on glory to come his way in the future. Were it not for this prize of eternal endurance constantly dangling before my eyes, I’d go for a life of full and secluded leisure. There is no third way here, I believe: we all have to mull over either our immortality or our mortality. Those who do the former should rise and shine; the others just snooze and lose. We should not burden our short life with futile and short-lived toils, as I see in the case of many who degrade themselves by pursuing the mere appearance of action, at once sad and unrewarding. This I am saying to you as I say it to myself every day: I’ll stop with myself if you don’t agree. But I know you will agree, since you always contemplate something great that shall endure the test of time. Be well.

Anticipated in 9.2 by the central meditation on the brevity of life and potential duration of fame (quam angustis terminis claudamur, 9.2.3), the theme of 9.3 is established via the interaction of charged lexicon and allusive addressee. The letter is about the recommended use of time. Set up as a dilemmatic opposition between leisure and work, the letter’s reasoning clearly opts for the second member as a more reliable source of glory. The argument is compact and refined. A meditation on mortality is bound to lead to a potentially anti-social carpe diem: a good idea in the short

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run, but one with absolutely deadly side effects for the subject’s chances of permanence in the cultural memory of his community (gloria). On the other side, contemplating what makes one immortal leads to action. The prize that activity (in the form of social and cultural activism) may offer is the highest possible and the most desirable, once the notion of “work” is qualified as non-trivial and not only an apparent toil (caducis laboribus, imagine industriae). However stringent it may be, the argument is not completely selfenclosed. The letter offers several clear signals that it is not to be read in isolation, starting with the initial compendious statement: alius aliud (“everybody is entitled to their opinion”). The initially interdiscursive dimension of the epistle – which points to a generic, multi-focal, and apparently commonly held, opinion on what constitutes a “blessed life” – is specified to the point of becoming intertextual by the presence of the nexus brevem vitam. In combination with the addressee’s name, it works as a specific textual allusion that establishes the letter as Pliny’s miniaturized response to Seneca’s De brevitate vitae. Once the target text is put into focus, Pliny’s epistle appears, for the most part and perhaps indirectly, as a polemical response to positions Seneca had taken, there and elsewhere, on the same issue. The treatise’s incipit provides other significant points of contact with Pliny’s meditation on time: L. ANNAEI SENECAE AD PAULINVM DE BREVITATE VITAE Maior pars mortalium, Pauline, de naturae malignitate conqueritur, quod in exiguum aevi gignimur, quod haec tam velociter, tam rapide dati nobis temporis spatia decurrant, adeo ut exceptis admodum paucis ceteros in ipso vitae apparatu vita destituat. The majority of mortals, dear Paulinus, complain that Nature is really evil. We are born, they say, to a short life-span. The measures of the time allotted us fly by at an incredible tempo, so fast that in general, with relatively few exceptions, life is consumed in preparing for it.

Seneca’s maior pars mortalium is taken up in Pliny’s philosophically marked expression omnes homines, a nexus that invites a contrastive cross-referencing of Seneca’s text with the opening of Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae (omnes homines, qui sese student praestare ceteris animalibus), potentially closer to Pliny’s pro-engagement solution to the work/leisure dilemma. Similarly, the common complaint about the brevity of life allotted naturally to humans (in exiguum aevi gignimur) recalls another text Pliny had penned, a philosophizing epistle addressed to Fabius Valens, in which “short (time)”

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and “(long) age” are juxtaposed: si computes annos, exiguum tempus, si vices rerum, aevum putes (Ep. 4.24.5). Though specifically evoked by its title, Seneca’s treatise is not the only point of reference for Pliny’s letter. To the authorial construct “Seneca” refer also Pliny’s allusive words: pingue illud altumque otium. The expression, intertextually marked with the pronoun illud, originates in another text that Pliny references: ad Luc. 73.10: Confitebitur ergo multum se debere ei cuius administratione ac providentia contingit illi pingue otium et arbitrium sui temporis et imperturbata publicis occupationibus quies. He (scil. Virgil in Eclogue 1) acknowledges that he owes a lot to the person on whose enlightened rule depends his full leisure and complete control over his own time, and a peace undisturbed by public duties.

While he points to the intertextual antecedent, Pliny does not seem to like what Seneca had to say there. The pingue otium that was recommended to Lucilius was certainly a safe path to tranquility of the soul, but it also amounted to a retreat from the duties of public life. Pliny suggests the exact opposite when he advocates “efforts and struggles” opposed to the “quiescence and contentment” of retirement. Otium is not what Pliny appears to be after. Even the object of meditation Pliny proposes to Paulinus is the exact opposite of what Seneca had recommended to Lucilius: the nexus mortalitatem cogitare responds to what Seneca wanted Lucilus to do in ad Luc. 30.18: Tu tamen mortem, ut nunquam timeas, semper cogita. Both Pliny and his addressee concur in discarding this option in the initial dilemma (aut . . . aut). Pliny corrects Seneca at the end of his letter, by inviting Paulinus to a meditation not on mortality, but on something luminous and immortal. Even the final stance Pliny takes as Paulinus’ teacher is modeled on Seneca’s antecedent. Blurring the distinction between instruction and soliloquy, Pliny presents himself as a modest teacher who is only passing on to his addressee the same precepts he constantly repeats to himself. When he notes that the content of 9.3 coincides with that of his daily self-admonition (ego tecum quae cotidie mecum), Pliny is following Seneca’s suit: Sic itaque me audi tamquam mecum loquar; in secretum te meum admitto et te adhibito mecum exigo. Clamo mihi ipse . . . (“So, now listen to me while I speak as to myself. I am inviting you into my innermost core, and with you as a witness I examine myself. With these words I call to myself . . . ,” ad Luc. 27.1–2).70 70

Uncoincidentally, Ep. 9.3 echoes this same distinctly Senecan theme (and its associated diction) as 4.24 in its final sentence: Mihi autem familiare est omnes cogitationes meas tecum communicare,

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One final detail of 9.2 deserves commentary, now that the meditative thread uniting it with 9.3 has been isolated. Once the subtle literary play with the letter’s allusive sources is brought to light, even Pliny’s expression quam angustis terminis claudamur may be re-evaluated. Traditional wisdom maintains that Pliny entrusts to these words a double admission of defeat. In political terms, he appears to condemn the present in light of a Republican past in which political action had not been stifled by imperial power.71 In literary terms, he admits total defeat in his challenge to Cicero’s model.72 Both statements need to be qualified and corrected. Pliny’s words do not intimate his dissatisfaction with life under a princeps, a regime in which occasions for glory in the form of suitable public action are curbed. If read in this light, they would actually contradict the position that Pliny takes in his refutation of Tacitus’ political diagnosis of the status of eloquence under the Principate (see above, Chapter 3). It would be rather strange for Pliny to declare the health of eloquence (and culture) in one letter, and then take its alleged decadence as an excuse not to engage in epistolary communication in another. A different interpretation of the sentence is not only desirable, it is also possible. Pliny’s diction has a long literary lineage. Again, a reevaluation of the intertextual context with which Pliny’s language resonates helps to establish its meaning. The origin of the special metaphor and its association with perpetual fame seems to be Virgil, Georgica 4.206–8. Speaking of individual bees that are ready to sacrifice themselves for the common good of the hive, he noted: Ergo ipsas quamvis angusti terminus aevi / excipiat (neque enim plus septima ducitur aestas) / at genus immortale manet (“thus, even if they are held inside the narrow confines of a short life – indeed, no one goes on living beyond the seventh summer – the species still is immortal”). The shift from the survival of the species to that of an individual in the metaphoric field of literary fame is not surprising.73 Defending the value of poetic fame in the voice of Maternus, Tacitus writes at Dial. 12.5:

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isdemque te vel praeceptis vel exemplis monere, quibus ipse me moneo; quae ratio huius epistulae fuit. What 4.24 presents as “the very reason for this letter” (its content) anticipates the paedagogical choice Pliny makes in 9.3 (the letter’s method). Guillemin 1929: 113, note 3 (“cette r´eflexion de Pline laisse percer un regret discret de l’ancienne vie politique r´epublicaine”); Ussani 1970: 291 (with discussion of previous bibliography); SherwinWhite 1966, ad 3.7.14 (“one of Pliny’s rare complaints about the imperial autocracy”). Cf. Lef`evre 1996b: 333–4. The transfer was helped, perhaps, by Virgil’s mention of generandi gloria mellis in line 285 and by the mediation of Horace, Carm. 4.2.27–32 (a metapoetic meditation that will be more explicitly developed by Seneca in Ep. 84.2–4). The lineage will be rediscovered and redeployed by no less an expert in Ciceronian epistolography than Petrarch in Fam. 1.8 and 23.19.

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Illud certe mihi concedes, Aper, non minorem honorem Homero quam Demostheni apud posteros, nec angustioribus terminis famam Euripidis aut Sophoclis quam Lysiae aut Hyperidis includi. At least, dear Aper, you will grant me that Homer does not enjoy any lesser reputation with posterity than Demosthenes does, nor that the fame of Euripides and Sophocles is bound by narrower confines than that of Lisias and Hyperides.74

Messalla, on the other hand, advances a fully Ciceronian claim for the farreaching subject-matter of oratory: neque oratoris vis et facultas sicut ceterarum rerum angustis et brevibus terminis clauditur (“the field of application of oratory, its pertinence, is not limited by as strict and narrow confines as that of all other activities,” 30.5). In his preterition etiam tacente me, Pliny invites Sabinus to read his statement against the background of this tradition and, in a surge of epistolographic optimism, to recognize that epistolography combines the advantageous endurance of poetry with the wide subject-matter available to oratory.75 By connecting the metaphor with resistance (or lack thereof ) to the passing of time, the long intertextual tradition of the expression invites a de-politicized reading. Pliny’s words allude to the possibility for a writer to overcome death through literature. But there is more: Pliny’s 3.7.13 contains similar language in contexts that can be shown to be related. In Pliny’s account of the death of Silius Italicus, the statement has the undertone of a solemn admonition about human frailty: tam angustis terminis tantae multitudinis vivacitas ipsa concluditur, ut mihi non venia solum dignae, verum etiam laude videantur illae regiae lacrimae (“the life of so many people is limited by such narrow confines that I not only understand but also excuse the tears shed by that great king”). In Ep. 9.2, just as in 3.7, studia are called upon to counteract time. Writing to Caninius Rufus, Pliny urged him to make every effort to produce a lasting work: relinquamus aliquid, quo nos vixisse testemur (“let’s leave behind something as a testimony that indeed we have lived,” 3.7.14). Having reached the end of his collection, with Sabinus, Pliny acknowledges that his (epistolary) work has begun accomplishing this task. Appearing in conjunction with his emulative portrait of Cicero, Pliny’s letter contains less an acknowledgement of resignation in the face of a necessarily imperfect 74

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The name of Cicero soon follows (12.5) as one whose claim to glory remains challenged: plures hodie reperies qui Ciceronis gloriam quam qui Vergilii detrectent. On Tacitus’ name as allusive to silence, see Sailor 2004: 156, who calls him Mr Quiet in the context of his first published historical piece, the Agricola. On that work as breaking the barrier of silence, see also Hedrick 2000: 153–6 and 164–70. Pliny’s ablative absolute cannot be read literally (cf. Ep. 3.7 and 9.2). The expression is widespread: for etiam me tacente cf., for example, Cic. Brut. 330 and Quint. Inst. 11.3.134; for etiam tacente me, cf. Cic. Sull. 69.

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political climate than a vindication of success against the destructive force of time. With the publishing of Book 9, Pliny’s work in the new genre of epistolography has reached a safe haven and can now contemplate from the shore the perils to which other works of less careful authors are still exposed. With a pun on the double meaning of litterae, Pliny contrasts his security with the dangers to which litterae (“literature”) have been exposed by the illness of Passennus Paulus. The Propertian and Horatian poet has now recovered, Pliny writes, and the lovers of literature can now rejoice: Gratulare mihi, gratulare etiam litteris ipsis, quae ex periculo eius tantum discrimen adierunt, quantum ex salute gloriae consequentur. (Ep. 9.22.3) Celebrate with me and with the letters themselves. His danger put them as much at risk as his safety will give them glory.

In a book as ominously dominated by a sense of impending death as Book 9, Pliny’s imperative of publishing before perishing extends from the advice he addresses to his friends to his own enterprise. When darkness comes, and Fuscus – the last addressee of his corpus – receives the final tessera in Pliny’s mosaic, the author of the epistle can confidently end his work. He has achieved closure. In discussing the “final conceptualization of the collection as a whole” in which Pliny engages in his last book of epistles, Leach reviews several cases in which texts from Book 9 look back at previous items in the collection.76 In a gesture reminiscent of a large-scale ring composition, she argues, Pliny concludes his work by going back to its beginnings. One detail should be added to Leach’s observation that Pliny’s self-reflexivity “seems to aim towards valediction”: from the vantage point of Book 9, Pliny goes back to the rest of his collection specifically as a published corpus of epistles. In the course of our selective survey of Pliny’s collection, we have already encountered some letters in which the same pattern detected by Leach appeared. In the triptych devoted to the burial and monument of Verginius Rufus (2.1, 6.10, 9.19), for instance, the last epistle refers to the second item in the collection as a text that was enjoying circulation beyond its initial private scope. Addressing Ruso, Pliny notes that his correspondent has read “in some letter of mine that Verginius Rufus had left orders to 76

Cf. Leach 2003: 162–3. The cases she surveys are the series 3.1, 7.9, 9.36 on otium; 9.32 and 9.2 on writing from and in a state of leisure (a discussion that points back to 1.3 and 2.2); 9.14 and 9.23 addressing Tacitus’ and Pliny’s relative rankings (and evoking the situation of 1.6 and 7.20); 9.13 on Pliny’s vindication of Helvidius Priscus (discussed already in 7.19); and 9.26 on oratory (establishing a clear parallel with 1.20).

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inscribe an epitaph on his tomb” (Significas legisse te in quadam epistula mea iussisse Verginium Rufum inscribi sepulcro suo, Ep. 9.19.1). The epistle to which he refers is 6.10, a letter addressed to Albinus. But how did Ruso get his hands on a letter that was not addressed to him? The situation that 9.19 allusively constructs matches the case of Sabinus’ redeployment of a text similarly not addressed to him that we have analyzed above. These two converging instances of retrospective re-use of published material also invite a re-evaluation of the curious situation we encountered when analyzing the mirroring texts of epistles 1.6 and 9.10 to Tacitus. The paradigm at work in Book 9 suggests that Tacitus’ lost letter to which Pliny replies in 9.10 may not have been a reply to Pliny’s private version of 1.6 but to its public (that is, published) version. From the beginning, even before being overheard by modern readers, the conversation between Pliny and Tacitus was held on a public stage. If this was the case, the final book in Pliny’s collection may indeed contain epistles that read like corrections of letters belonging to previous books, as Cova noted,77 but not only because Pliny had changed his mind. Pliny returns to his starting point because he is reacting to the re-use that others have made of his published books.78 Having reached the final pages of his epistolary corpus, Pliny’s recapitulative return to the dawn of his collection may be meant, in other words, to signal (and respond to) the early reception of his published work. 77 78

Cf. Cova 1966: 132. Fantham 1996 adds 9.11 and 9.23 to the list of internal testimonial for the editorial success of Pliny’s collection (210–11).

From dawn till dusk: four notes in lieu of a conclusion

Il mio maestro mi insegn`o com’`e difficile trovare l’alba dentro all’imbrunire. Franco Battiato, Prospettiva Nevski

Forty years ago, in the introduction to what remains today the largest and most detailed commentary on Pliny’s epistolary corpus, Sherwin-White claimed that Pliny rewrote or edited a selection of his Gebrauchsbriefe “according to the rules of the literary genre” (xvi). Sherwin-White’s assessment is both true and potentially misleading. It is true because Pliny certainly did rewrite and edit his letters before publishing them; it is misleading because it implies Pliny’s observance of rules without spelling out what those rules were. In fact, Pliny did not conform to the rules of a genre because there was no genre to conform to. As I have shown, Pliny inherited a variety of letter-writing practices, ranging from the quotidian and the matter-offact to the highly refined and extremely formalized, from the personal and private to the philosophical and poetic. His nine books of epistles did not so much reproduce a received paradigm as they contributed to shaping a tradition into one. By engaging in a constant dialogue with other literary texts and genres, Pliny imported into the confines of the still fluid practice of literary letter-writing principles of composition and organization drawn from more canonical neighboring traditions. In so doing, Pliny created a new form of literary epistolography at the same time as he inscribed himself into an established but eclectic literary tradition.

s o l i and chorus In an effort to avoid the potentially circular process of explication that inevitably affects the analysis of literary texts conducted in artificial isolation, this study has constantly moved between Pliny’s texts and their contexts. Close reading of a selection of Pliny’s letters has revealed intertextual connections and strands of communication that endow them with 241

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more than occasional relevance. At the same time, the cultural discourses circulating in Pliny’s day – against which he could have expected his readers to evaluate his statements – have informed the consideration of individual letters. Pliny’s letters intersect with, and intervene into, a larger discursive medium; their cultural resonances depend on the dialogue thus established. In order to reconstruct the contours of the cultural environment with which Pliny’s epistles were designed to interact, I have concentrated on two distinct forms of cultural circulation: the technical, self-reflexive, literary discourse (“metapoetics”) and the web of interconnected redeployments of a charged lexicon among individual texts (the different “languages of genre”). In embracing a plurality of texts, both the metapoetic (and thus potentially theoretical) discourse and the specific (potentially technical) language of genres function as instantiations of context. In other words, they form an essential and relatively accessible part of the readers’ encyclopedia. Even though metapoetic texts such as Horace’s Ars and Cicero’s rhetorical dialogues or treatises are not more semiotically stable than the texts they are designed to explicate, they constitute a less idiosyncratic point of reference than an individual text: they are part of the general literary collective consciousness of a community. When viewed in context, individual texts appear to relate to their literary environment in much the same way as soloists relate to the chorus in a musical performance. Leading voices stand out from the larger vocal ensemble, but it is from their interplay that the final harmony (or dissonance) of the piece is produced. The relative prominence accorded to a particular text is, to be sure, a product more of the emphasis given to it by the critic than of any intrinsically privileged status of its voice; yet, even if artificially imposed, the individual quality of a text’s voice must be recognized and picked out in order for it to be analyzed. In order to be perceived, an individual voice must depart from the chorus. Yet its departure must also conform to the tonal pattern of the overall composition. Any analysis that focuses on individual texts should separate them from their contexts only with the awareness that this operation is itself artificial, though ultimately essential to a proper appreciation of the larger whole. The meaning of an individual text depends on how the culture collectively processes it and hence on its perceived relationship with other texts that circulate in a given time and social practices that frame a given environment. Pliny’s letters are no exception. Their meaning depends on what relations they established with the literary/cultural discourses that surrounded them, on what position they intended (and were allowed) to occupy in the semiotic fabric of the society in which they were produced. Their meaning, in

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other words, depends on the complicit or adversarial relation they establish between author and readers. The configurations into which authorship and readership enter range from respectful collaboration with, to intentional betrayal of one another’s intentions and expectations. The notion of the readers’ encyclopedia has acted as a fil rouge for the intertextual analyses pursued in the preceding chapters, providing an element of continuity within the varied strategies of Pliny’s literary program. Indeed, drawing on his readers’ encyclopedia was crucial to Pliny’s cultural politics: the composition and articulation of the literary canon that he shared with his first readers formed the basis of Pliny’s engagement with them. The key to the canon was the faculty and discipline of memory, both the individually cultivated fourth part of the ars rhetorica and the collectively practiced technology of cultural preservation. prose and poetry Pliny’s redeployment of compositional techniques that originated in the poetic tradition has formed a recurrent theme in my analysis of his collection of prose texts. Pliny’s attention to the disposition of his material and his re-use of charged language originating in other texts bring his prosework into close contact with poetic antecedents. Careful arrangement of individual compositions in a corpus and subtle citation strategies were, in his day, commonly recognized characteristics of poetic collections that had been adopted by several prose authors during the first century ce. The cross-pollination of prose and poetry was intrinsic to Roman literary culture. The Roman elite was educated within a culture of memory, and memory spanned the divide between prose and verse. Latin poetry thrived on the constant re-use of antecedents and reveled in the pleasures of canon formation, which is why so many critical poetic explications du texte begin today from an explication des sources. The study of the dynamics that link texts with their poetic models, and of the formation and contamination of traditional poetic genres, relies on the notion that poetry is constantly dialoguing with other poetic texts. The same is true for prose. Even if prose cannot claim the same density and memorability as poetry, it does not differ in essence from it. In antiquity the same cultural principles that governed the composition and reception of poetry applied also to prose. Fundamentally, one can say that prose and poetry appear to differ only on the level of dispositio and elocutio, to adopt a convenient rhetorical vocabulary. Yet even in this respect the boundaries are more fluid than they appear. In narrating, prose generally follows the ordo naturalis, whereas poetry privileges the ordo

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artificialis. Works that subvert those principles are considered unnatural. There is, moreover, a difference between the poetic (especially epic) diction and the lexical register of prose, and yet certain kinds of prose may be perceived as carmen solutum (Quint. Inst. 10.1.31), just as some poetry may be treated as metrical prose (Hor. S. 1.4). Inventio and memoria are shared by the two: the same principles and techniques thus circulate freely between Horace’s Ars Poetica and Cicero’s De Oratore. The proximity of prose and poetry is understandable when one considers how the careers of Latin writers often crisscrossed between the two. Cicero, Pliny’s avowed model, practiced many of the recognized genres of prose, ranging from oratory to philosophy, both in the form of dialogue and in that of treatise, but ventured also, with arguably little success, into the realm of self-celebratory epic (De consulatu suo), neoteric poetry and even, with his translation of Aratus’ Phaenomena (apparently unknown to Pliny), didactic poetry. To be sure, not all attempts to work on both sides of the prose/poetry divide were equally successful, and writers tended to specialize in one form or the other. In Tacitus’ Dialogus, for instance, Aper’s trenchant dismissal of Cicero’s poetic exercises is paired with an assessment of Brutus’ and Caesar’s weak eloquence and relatively clumsy poetry: fecerunt enim et carmina et in bibliothecas rettulerunt, non melius quam Cicero, sed felicius, quia illos fecisse pauciores sciunt (“they also wrote poetry, and left it behind in libraries: no better poetry than Cicero, but with better fortune, since fewer know they actually wrote it,” Dial. 21.6). Pliny’s literary oeuvre comprised not only prose composition (oratory and his carefully collected correspondence) but poetry, composed in a Catullan mode, which he mentions (and occasionally cites) in his letters, but which has met with little favor among modern critics, and indeed has not survived independently. However negative these evaluations may be in individual cases, they attest that a writer’s career was allowed, if not even expected, to involve both prose and poetry. Educated Romans developed early in life the habit of thinking intertextually. The role of imitation and memorization in elementary education favored it (cf. Tac. Dial. 20.4). Both literary prose writers and prose readers were able to produce and to appreciate the subtle play of texts intersecting and mirroring one another in any sector of their diffusely intertextual culture. Pliny was well aware of it, and explicitly invited one of his readers to read his work intertextually: tu facillime iudicabis, qui tam memoriter tenes omnes, ut conferre cum hac dum hanc solam legis possis (“adjudicating this question will be the easiest of tasks for you, since you have stored in your memory all these texts, so that you can compare them with this one, even as you read this text alone,” Ep. 6.33.11). There is, to be sure, a difference

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between intertextuality in poetry and prose, a difference that coincides with the different nature of the marks of allusion used in each mode. The disparity in technique depends on the relative density of the two media. In poetry, the elements signaling the presence of an intertextual relationship are situated on the level of language and rhythm: a word or a syntagm in a particular metrical position can create an audible connection between two poems that triggers a mnemonic reaction in the educated reader. In the looser and more entropic language of prose, the signals that ignite the process of intertextual memory must be stronger and more evident. The charged language of poetry appealed to Pliny precisely for this reason: standing out from his prose environment, it appeared as a good marker for constructing intertextual relationships in his prose texts. Furthermore, providing more than just a reservoir of quotable authorities and memorable sententiae, as it did for the often-quoting Seneca, poetry supplied Pliny not only with the individual building blocks needed to design the structure of his collection but (also) the polysemous intertextual fabric of his literary edifice. allusions and canon As much as it has been about Pliny, this book has also been about the technique of allusion. Three central chapters of this work examined Pliny’s engagement in a lively conversation with the cultural elite of his time, in which he discussed matters of poetry, rhetoric and historiography. Allusions were both the vehicle and the idiom by which Pliny conveyed his views about poetics and literary history – in short, about the canon. In his metapoetic dialogue with the readers (and co-practitioners) of his peculiar brand of (neo-) Catullan poetry, Pliny attempted a retrospective re-evaluation and radical erasure of the potentially subversive political character of neotericism. Filtered through the de-politicizing and corrective lens of Horace, Pliny’s Catullus becomes a purely poetic model, stripped of political overtone. From the defensive and apparently apologetic discussion of his own leisurely and disengaged activity as consumer and producer of poetry to the oblique and allusive incorporation of the charged poetic lexicon of the neoterics, Pliny ensures that his readers keep ever in mind the literary artifice of occasional poetry when evaluating his epistolary prose. Similarly, but with a stricter focus on one correspondent, Pliny’s deeper and more urgent engagement with the genres of rhetorical writing and historiography consists in a subtly polemical dialogue with his principal contemporary interlocutor, Tacitus. In their one-sided exchange, Pliny’s

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recirculation of verbal material (loaded technical language, syntagms and metaphors) borrowed from Tacitus becomes the medium through which debate on the status of oratory and on the technical parameters and goals of historiography is engaged. Thanks to the allusive recycling of Tacitus’ own language – both actual, in the case of the Dialogus, and presumed, in the apparent citation of unpublished letters – a miniature epistolary exchange can function as Pliny’s epistolary treatise in defense of oratory. In a similar vein, Pliny’s dialogue with Tacitus, by mobilizing an even larger array of intertexts, advances through the same dialectic interplay of texts and antecedents a coherent critical assessment of historiography. The ambiguously Thucydidean synkrisis of oratory and historiography, which Pliny imposes as a theoretical framework for his non-committal engagement with history-writing, deals in the same currency of allusive language as do his practical experiments with writing in an historical mode about his uncle’s death and his own adventures during the eruption of Vesuvius. Manifesting a strong tendency to deconstruct the same clear-cut distinctions they pretend to posit and uphold, the letters presenting Pliny’s meditations on historiography blend the characteristic, but reciprocally undermining dictions of poetry and historiography. The game of mutual reflection and refraction into which Pliny enters in his historical writing is dizzying. Familiar fragments from Thucydides, Virgil, Livy and Ovid vie for primacy in Pliny’s diction. Collectively they establish but also destabilize the meaning as well as the tone of the letters in which they are deployed. Posited via an oblique recitation of Thucydides’ proemial contrast between  and   the theoretical impossibility of distinguishing oratory and historiography for Pliny amounted to a concrete refusal to practice the two genres in isolation. In this light, his vindication of the unifying role that exemplary images play in both epideictic oratory and historiography undoes the clear-cut opposition Tacitus had posed in writing the Dialogus. Again, Pliny responds to Tacitus through allusion. In Pliny’s commemoration of Verginius Rufus, Virgil’s and Ovid’s treatments of the Orpheus-myth interact with the voice of the author of the Agricola to confer upon the triptych of epistles devoted to Verginius the role of a counter-text, a vindication of familiaritas against the official rhetoric of his eulogy. The same pointed evocation and echoing of poetic voices that is at work in the epistles on historiography and rhetoric here informs Pliny’s construction of a more intimate, and yet still exemplary, space for his eulogy of Verginius, and attempts to create an alternative space of textualization for his model. If Pliny’s epistolary lament invites an epistolary consolation from his correspondent, to the explicit exclusion of any other form of response, both texts

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locate Verginius’ image in an ambiguously semi-private space that parallels the ambiguously semi-private nature of the epistolary exchange in which it is couched. While allusion, in its manifold manifestations, provides an element of continuity in Pliny’s dialogue with the canon, epistolography serves as both the medium of choice and the object of promotion. Bakhtin’s idea that the novel is the omnivorous genre of modern literature (thanks to its protean nature and its capacity to incorporate the widest social spectrum of technical sub-languages) can be transposed and equally well applied to ancient literature. A variety of genres embody the same totalizing drive: (Virgilian) epic and (Tacitean) historiography as much as (Ovidian) elegy and (Menippean) satire. Just as the novel is the macro-genre that absorbs and artistically redeploys the individual and independent genres traditionally practiced in isolation, each of these models, in their incorporation and oblique representation of each other’s language and canonical features, makes a plausible bid at instating itself as the leading literary form of its day. Pliny’s epistles appear to make the same bid. In addressing obliquely and in a dialogical fashion crucial issues of poetics, rhetoric and historiography, Pliny’s epistles promote themselves (and the form they embody) to the role of overarching genre. Pliny’s Neotericism is not limited to letters concerning the writing of poetry, but informs the diction of epistles that have nothing to do with poetics and everything to do with the establishing of epistolographic bon ton. Similarly, abstract discussions of rhetoric and historiography lead to epistolographic experiments in the oratorical and historiographic potentials of letterwriting. If the canon is articulated by several interdependent genres, Pliny’s letters, in dialogue with many of them, reshape them in epistolary form. Such a multifaceted literary enterprise enabled Pliny to address a wide spectrum of cultural interventions. No genre, it seems, was safe from Pliny’s modest but determined effort to secure for his text a canonical status. For a late-comer like Pliny, however, achieving a place in the canon entailed locating epistolography on the literary map. In order to carve a niche into the catalogue of imitable texts, Pliny was forced to reckon with a set of already established epistolographic models. Although the genre was undertheorized and fluid in its form, its canonical membership already appeared to be saturated with old and authoritative models. Other epistolographers had already published formal collections in both poetry and prose. In particular, in the form of a massive corpus of personal prose epistles, Pliny’s most immediate and threatening antecedent was Cicero. Pliny’s letters answered the challenge posed by the Ciceronian corpus by combining their bid to participate in the epistolographic tradition with an attempt to shape that

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The Art of Pliny’s Letters

tradition in their own image. Allusions directly targeting Cicero’s letters serve this purpose. They cast Cicero in a double role: from his authority Pliny drew his own authority and against his example Pliny defined his own exemplarity. Paradoxically, Pliny realized that if he could rival neither Cicero’s impressive political career nor his fame as an orator and his authority as a rhetorical model, he could nonetheless engage his predecessor’s work in a game of aemulatio. The only field in which the result was not a foregone conclusion was indeed epistolography. Pliny asserted his own superiority as a careful editor and timely publisher of his epistolographic work. Seizing upon the haphazard survival of Cicero’s correspondence, and in an effort to rival and perhaps even displace Cicero’s standing in the tradition of epistolary prose writing, Pliny not only managed to produce a corpus of letters that survived the philological shipwreck of the middle ages, when much of Latin textual culture was lost, he also established its viability as an epistolary model. When later practitioners of epistolography such as Symmachus and Sidonius Apollinaris reconstructed the tradition and the identity of the literary genre they practiced, they relied less on Cicero’s massive but unformed epistolary corpus than on Pliny’s meticulously crafted work. structure and canon Pliny’s immodest proposal to promote epistolography to the rank of an all-embracing genre did not take place in a void. While he distanced himself from the encumbering model of Cicero, Pliny shaped his collection of literary letters according to principles similar to those followed in the collections of occasional poetry available at the booksellers in his time. By conveying additional meanings through the relative placement of their constituent parts, these poetic antecedents shaped Pliny’s fashioning of his epistolary corpus into a unitary whole. The disposition of the individual units within a complex network and their allusive connections with one another owe more to the epistolary collections of Ovid and Horace than to the chronologically or addressee-oriented corpora of Seneca and Cicero. As we have seen, paired epistles in Pliny’s collection work in the same ways as similarly matched pairings in the poetic antecedents of Horace and Ovid. Modeling his work on poetic predecessors allowed Pliny to invest individual letters with a higher claim to permanence in a coherently articulated collection than they would have had in isolation; the connection to poetic models also contributed significantly to the canonization of his work. In the internal articulation of the “book-” and “collection-form” and in the evocation of other literary works through allusion, the poetic epistles of the Augustan age lent authority to Pliny’s new kind of epistolary writing. Their

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example enabled his texts to enter into the dynamics of literary imitation that characterized classical canonical writings. What is more, in Pliny’s collection both the positioning of individual letters and markers of epistolarity function as semiotic tools for the creation and the conveyance of meaning. Such apparently technical features of an epistolary collection not only frame the message, they contain and convey part of its meaning. One final example, which may be taken as emblematic of Pliny’s technique and, in a sense, as a summation of my argument, is the peculiarly subtle allusive relationship Pliny constructs between the addressees of the first and last letters of his work. It is a particularly refined onomastic game, one deeply indebted to poetic techniques of allusion, in particular to poetic epistolarity. The first letter of the collection (1.1) is addressed to Septicius Clarus, the last (9.40) to Pedanius Fuscus (Salinator), the oratorical trainee who had already received 7.9 and 9.36. The two addressees have nothing in common except for the felicitous semantic associations inspired by their names: clarity and light for the former, obscurity and darkness for the latter. The juxtaposition of the two names may appear no more than a coincidence; yet, the content of the last letter, in detailing Pliny’s daily routine from dawn till dusk, shows that Pliny was measuring his text (at least on the micro-level of the individual epistle) in terms of a daily movement from light to darkness. In 9.36 Pliny had received from Fuscus an inquiry about how he allocated his time while in the countryside: Quaeris quemadmodum in Tuscis diem aestate disponam (“you want to know how I partition my day during the summer when I am in my Tuscan estate,” 9.36.1). The issue of arrangement (disponam) is paramount in Pliny’s explanation of his routine and in tune with the scholarly nature of the activities he engages in during his summers in Tuscany: composing, editing, dictating, reciting, and listening to recitations. The final item in the collection, addressed to the same correspondent, builds on the same theme but adds a new note, namely the larger space that darkness now occupies, both in the winter days and within the short span of the final epistle. In the closing sentence, night is the last image to occupy the reader’s eye: Habes aestate, hieme consuetudinem: addas huc licet ver et autumnum, quae inter hiemem aestatemque media, ut nihil de die perdunt, de nocte parvolum adquirunt. You have my summer and winter habits. Now you can add also spring and autumn: being intermediate seasons between winter and summer, they lose nothing of the day and gain a little bit from the night. (Ep. 9.40.3)

Once perceived in the dim light of early winter nights, the addressee’s name appears more significant. The epistles Fuscus receives are not just linked to each other in a compact narrative sequence that spans the arc of a day

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and the seasons of a year. The second epistle in the series is also tonally connected to his name and associated with darkness. At the other end of the collection, as at the other end of the day, we find the opposite note of light sounded in the name of the addressee. Evoked by contrast at the end of the collection, and thus retrospectively highlighted, Clarus’ name becomes a signpost for the work’s (and day’s) inception. In order to be perceived as a unitary corpus, metaphorically spanning the period from dawn till dusk, Pliny’s epistolary project required the collaboration of active and engaged readers. He expected them to be ready to accept the subtleties of his authorial allusive games as part of their hermeneutic responsibilities. No special training in epistolary allusive art was required of them – none, that is, beyond what other allusive writers had asked of their readers in the past. Authorial play on onomastics was already widespread in Latin literature from Varro’s ornithological puns at the opening of the second book of his De re rustica, where the interlocutors gathered at an augur’s villa bear birds’ names (Merula, Pavo, Pica, Passer) to Trimalchio’s infamous carver-slave Carpus, who, when addressed (Carpe), was simultaneously bid to perform his chosen task (carpe). Recognizing and interpreting “speaking names” was certainly not beyond the reading competence or habits of Pliny’s readers. But was his readers’ encyclopedia rich enough for Pliny to expect them to perceive such a subtle play on light and darkness? It might not have been, had not one of Pliny’s main epistolographic models introduced a similar play in the names of two of his literary correspondents. Albius, the addressee of Horace’s Ep. 1.4, is the candid judge of Horace’s most prosaic poetry (Albi, nostrorum sermonum candide iudex, 1.4.1), just as Clarus, the promoter and publisher of Pliny’s epistles, is an evident admirer of Pliny’s poetic prose. Fuscus, the addressee of Horace’s Ep. 1.10, on the other hand, acts as inquisitor, the city-dweller who – like Pliny’s Fuscus, inquiring into his routine in the country – receives greetings and news from his literary correspondent, in peaceful and salubrious retreat at his rural estate: Urbis amatorem Fuscum salvere iubemus / ruris amatores (1.10.1–2). With this last allusive comment, Pliny demands the highest sensitivity of his readers. Not only do they have to pay attention to the epistolary quality of his work and to appreciate the subtle semiotics of its addressees, they have also to remember Horace’s epistolary poetry book and to recognize it as pertinent to their appreciation of Pliny’s text. In their reading, they have to be ready not only to connect the disiecta membra of Pliny’s epistolographic corpus and to perceive the arrangement of the letters in a meaningful pattern but also to embrace the collection as a unified work. In the end, Pliny asks much of his readers – though not unreasonably much, if they

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have followed his epistolary program until now. For if the collection has succeeded in asserting itself as a work worthy of reading, it has done so to the extent that it has trained its public to read it as a collection of occasional prose crafted with all the care of an Augustan poetry book. The invitation to resume the reading embedded in Pliny’s final allusion applies no less to his initial readership than to the posterity he so keenly envisioned for his work. My analyses of a selection of his letters is similarly intended as an invitation to pick up his text again and to explore other facets of his allusive writing. Having reached the end of his book, we are finally prepared to read it again from the start.

Appendix to chapter 5

Below is a list of the most relevant passages in Pliny’s letters in which scholars have detected potential links to Cicero, both literal references and thematic echoes. I referred to several of them in Chapter 5, but they are so numerous that the detailed list of passages needed to be deferred to this Appendix. As a target of allusion, Cicero’s case is only apparently privileged, and my notes to the table are often aimed at questioning traditional identifications. The following abbreviations are used for the secondary sources (for Lenaz, Schuster, Sherwin-White, and Trisoglio the reference is always ad locum): Guillemin = Guillemin 1929 Lenaz = Lenaz 1994 Schuster = Schuster-Hanslik 1958 S-W = Sherwin-White 1966 Trisoglio = Trisoglio 1973 Ussani I = Ussani 1970 Ussani II = Ussani 1974–5 For names that do not appear in the above list, see the general List of Works Cited. The names appearing in the third column of the table do not indicate the work in which the parallel has been first proposed, but rather the scholarly contribution that devotes the most space to its discussion and an account of relevant bibliography. Pliny

Cicero

Secondary Source

1.1.1. neque enim historiam componebam 1.2.4  Cicero mentioned as Marci nostri 1.3.1 euripus

Epistles ad Atticum

Hoffer, 231

Att. 1.14.3

Deane, 42; Lenaz, S-W

Leg. 2.2.2

S-W.2

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253

Pliny

Cicero

Secondary Source

1.3.2 unus ex multis 1.4.4 on being mitis 1.5.1 structure of opening question on Regulus 1.5.11 and 12 Cicero mentioned by cognomen 1.7.4 cur . . . agam 1.8.5–6 on (self-) praise of virtue 1.8.6 1.8.8 theme of liberalitas sine impetu 1.9.8 on otium 1.10.12 expoliendum limandumque 1.11.1 on having nothing to write in a letter

general ref. to Cicero Catil. 4.11 Fam. 8.15.1

Birley3 Trisoglio Hoffer, 64–54

Fam. 7.6.2 Fam. 5.12.8 De Orat. 2.344 Off. 1.49 Off. 3.1 Fam. 7.33.2 Att. 4.8a.4; Fam. 16.26.2 Att. 10.3a.1; 1.12.4 Att. 13.8 Att. 13.31.3 Off. 1.57

Guillemin, 115 Cugusi, 129 Guillemin, 117 B¨utler, 124 B¨utler, 465 Hoffer, 129 S-W; B¨utler, 103 Lenaz B¨utler, 1036 Lef`evre VII, 350 Lenaz B¨utler, 1297

Off. 1.130

B¨utler, 70

Ver. 2.4.82 Off. 1.30 Off. 2.15 Att. 2.3.4

B¨utler, 24 S-W Weische, 378 B¨utler, 20

Off. 1.65

B¨utler, 658

Off. 1.114 Amic. 102 Att. 12.6.1 Parad. 49

B¨utler, 67 See Chapter 3.3 Guillemin, 1159 B¨utler, 120

Off. 2.52 Brut. 326

B¨utler, 123 B¨utler, 106

de Orat. 2.195

Guillemin, 117

Att. 12.9 Fam. 12.20 Fam. 8.16.2 Cato 33 Off. 1.122 Att. 2.1.3 Arch. 12; 14; 27; 30

Guillemin, 11610 Guillemin, 115 Ussani I, 27911 B¨utler, 116

1.12.10    1.12.11 on the greatest love owed to res publica 1.14.8 on one’s countenance as indicator of dignitas 1.16.8 1.18.3 1.18.4 cit. Iliad 12.243 1.20.4 Cicero mentioned as M. Tullius 1.22.5 on following one’s own conscience regardless of fame or public opinion 1.23.5 on sapiens as histrio 2.1.11 vivit enim vivetque semper 2.2.2 means to grant forgiveness 2.4.3 on frugality as equivalent to wealth 2.4.4 on liberalitas 2.5.5 on the appropriate kind of eloquence in one’s youth 2.11.12–13 on the impact of pity in a trial 2.17 description of Laurentinum 2.17.29 on personification of a villa 2.18.5 offensas subire 3.1.2 on the different kinds of life suitable to young and old age 3.5 on a catalogue of works 3.7.14 3.9.2 see note to 2.18.5

Morello, 199–20012 B¨utler, 2313 (cont.)

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Pliny

Cicero

Secondary Source

3.11.2 on taking up the debts of one’s friends 3.15.1 Cicero mentioned as M. Tullius 3.20 on the epistolary art of saying nothing 3.20.12 on power in the hand of one individual 3.21.5 Cicero mentioned indirectly in Arpinis chartis 4.3.3 on the balance of gravity and kindness 4.8.4 Cicero mentioned as M. Tullius 4.15.3 4.17.11 see note to 2.18.5 4.25.5 Greek maxim 5.3.1 on friendship as fostering morality and education among peers 5.3.5 Cicero mentioned as M. Tullius 5.3.6 on sanctitas morum 5.5.4 in diem vivunt

Off. 2.55

B¨utler, 123

Fam. 4.13

Morello 192–4

Fam. 13.18.1

Ussani I, 311

Leg. 3.1

B¨utler, 108

Amic. 18

B¨utler, 98

Att. 12.3.2 and 14.17.3 Amic. 91

Lenaz, 38 B¨utler, 97

Off. 1.107 “schon bei Cicero o¨ fters” Fam. 5.12

B¨utler, 6814 B¨utler, 2115

Fin. 5.6 Fin. 1.25 Fin. 5.42 Orat. 129 general reference to Cicero Brut. 68 Leg. 1.8 Att. 16.13c.2

Ussani II, 181 Ussani II, 181 Ussani II, 182 See Chapter 4 Birley16

Att. 7.8.1

B¨utler, 9918

Fam. 14.2, 4, 5, 7

Guillemin, 138–919

Q. fr. 3.3.1

B¨utler, 99

See above, for Ep. 6.4 Fam. 2.2.1

Guillemin, 115

5.8 content and language modeled on Cicero 5.8.4 homines curiosi 5.8.4 nuda rerum cognitione 5.8.4 fabellisque ducantur 5.8.6 egi magnas et graves causas 5.8.8 per caliginem video 5.8.10 rhetorical metaphor of ossa 5.8.12 vetera /nova 5.8.14 requesting subject-matter from Capito 5.14.4 on friendship as rooted in the appreciation of the same people 6.4 preoccupation with Calpurnia’s health 6.4.3 on involuntary thought associations 6.7 conjugal love 6.12.3–4 on being reminded of one’s own negligence 6.20.10 theme of deceased who cares about living relatives 6.27.4 on the mutability of circumstances and their impact on decorum

Fam. 4.5.6 Off. 1.142

S-W

Schuster Ussani I, 278 Guillemin, 13217

Guillemin, 115–1620 B¨utler, 67

Appendix to chapter 5

255

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Cicero

Secondary Source

6.34 on beasts to be used in games

Fam. 2.11.2 Fam. 8.8.10 Fam. 8.9.3 Off. 1.70

S-W

7.3.3 on otium 7.4 Cicero mentioned four times by his cognomen 7.5 conjugal love 7.17.14 sermunculis 7.17.13 Cicero mentioned by cognomen 7.20.4 longo sed proximus intervallo 7.33 content and language modeled on Cicero 7.33.10 8.2.2 on paria peccata 8.3.2 8.3.2 theme of constant improvement in literary and oratorial achievements 8.4 image of vela orationis 8.5.3 on the ineluctability of death 8.6.3 on dedecus 8.9.10 on friendship as a surmounting duty 8.15.2 comment on scarcity of paper 8.16 on sadness for the death of slaves 8.19.2 on self-control facing pain 8.24 content and language modeled on Cicero 8.24.1 8.24.2 on humanitas 8.24.8 on expectations and responsibilities 9.1.3 Od. 22.412 9.2 on the “nothing to say” motif 9.2.2 Cicero mentioned as M. Tullius 9.3.2 on the Stoic theory of persona 9.6 content and language modeled on Cicero 9.26.8 Cicero mentioned as M. Tullius 9.30 theme of restrictions on liberalitas 9.30.3 theme of societas humana

B¨utler, 44

See above, for Ep. 6.4 Att. 13.10.3 and Deiot. 33

Ussani II, 182

Brut. 173 Fam. 5.12

See Chapter 3 Rudd

Fam. 5.12.3 Mur. 29 and 30 de Orat. 2.344 de Orat. 3.1

Guillemin, 11621 Trisoglio Guillemin 11722 Trisoglio

Tusc. 4.9 Cato 4 Phil. 3.36 General reference to works such as Laelius and De officiis Fam. 7.18.2 Att. 1.12.4 Amic. 48 Q. fr. 1.1

Trisoglio B¨utler, 78 Trisoglio B¨utler, 28

Fam. 2.1.2 Flac. 61–62 Off. 3.6

S-W25 S-W Guillemin, 1946, 8626

Att. 4.7.2 Fam. 4.13

Guillemin, 78 Morello, 194–5

Off. 1.107ff. Fam. 7.1

B¨utler, 21 S-W

Off. 1.42

B¨utler, 127

Off. 1.22

B¨utler, 127

S-W B¨utler, 112–1323 B¨utler, 113 Zucker24

(cont.)

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Pliny

Cicero

Secondary Source

9.32 theme of the otiosus, who prefers reading to writing 9.36 type of letter: ordinatio diurna 9.36.5 9.39.1 building of a shrine

Fam. 16.22.1

B¨utler, 47

Fam. 9.20.3 Fam. 9.20.3 Att. 12.19.1; 12.35.2; 12.37.4

Guillemin, 132 S-W Guillemin, 11427

Hoffer argues that Pliny’s comment might be deliberately contrasting his project to the letters Ad Atticum that, when considered in chronological order, could have been read as history. See Chapter 4. 2 At Leg. 2.2.2 Cicero facetiously comments about gardens embellished by the artificial water-course named euripi. See also, as Sherwin-White notes, Sen. Ep. 83.5, but neither of the parallels seems relevant for Pliny. 3 Birley 2000, entry “Cicero”: “unnamed, quoted on average quality.” The expression, however, is proverbial. See Otto 1890: 358, who lists Cic. Tusc. 1.9.17; Hor. S. 1.9.71; Sen. Ep. 93.5. To Otto’s examples one can add Col. 11.1.6; Cic. Scaur. 45; Cic. Phil. 13.29; Hor. Ep. 1.6.60; Sen. Ep. 84.7. 4 Hoffer refers to Trisoglio for “Caelius’ high-spirited romp through the follies of Roman politics” (Ecquando tu hominem ineptiorem quam tuum Cn. Pompeium vidisti?) as an epistolary parallel and possible model for Pliny’s jab at Regulus (Vidistine quemquam M. Regulo timidiorem humiliorem post Domitiani mortem?). 5 B¨utler sees Pliny’s dictum satius est enim . . . otiosum esse quam nihil agere as a variation of the famous aphorisma of Scipio Africanus, who was quoted as saying that he never felt less at leisure than when he was at leisure, or less alone than when he was alone (numquam se minus otiosum esse, quam cum otiosus, nec minus solum, quam cum solus esset). 6 What B¨utler indicates as 12.44.4 (= 12.45.1) is in fact Att. 1.12.4, which contains the famous expression si rem nullam habebis, quod in buccam venerit scribito, cited in a critical vein by Seneca in Ep. 118.1 (the same expression also in Att. 7.10.1 and 14.7.2). The closest parallel to Pliny’s diction (at hoc ipsum scribe, nihil esse, quod scribas) seems to be Att. 4.8a.4: ubi nihil erit quod scribas, id ipsum scribito (Att. 10.3a.1: sed tamen, etiamsi nihil erit, id ipsum ad me velim scribas; Fam. 16.26.2: sic tu, etiam si quid scribas non habebis, scribito tamen). 7 To a similar argument corresponds here, perhaps, also a parallel diction. Pliny writes about Corellius Rufus: decessit superstitibus suis, florente re publica, quae illi omnibus carior erat. On the most important allegiance in the life of a Roman citizen, Cicero remarked: omnium societatum, nulla est gravior, nulla carior quam ea, quae cum re publica est uni cuique nostrum. 8 For the same theme B¨utler refers also to Sen. Dial. 7.20.4. 9 See my discussion of Ep. 2.2 in Chapters 2 and 5. 10 For Pliny’s description of Laurentinum Guillemin refers to Att. 12.9 (where Cicero says that villas, beaches and seascapes are not a good subject for longioribus litteris) as a contrastive reminiscence (“par r´efutation de la pens´ee”). 11 Pliny uses the same idiom (attested only in Cicero, once; Fam. 8.16.2 = Att. 10.9a.2) also in 3.9.2 and 4.17.11. 12 Whereas Morello sees a connection only with Pliny’s bibliography of the Elder, the opening motif of Cicero’s letter recalls Pliny’s amusing preface to the list of his own literary achievements in 7.4.1. 13 For the same theme B¨utler refers also to Sall. Cat. 3.1. 14 Cicero’s passage, on honestum and decorum, seems to have only the slightest connection with Pliny’s letter. 1

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B¨utler indicates Cicero, but recognizes that it is a proverbial expression. See Otto 1890: 114: Tusc. 5.11.33; de Orat. 2.169; Liv. 22.39.13, 27.12.4, 40.8; Col. 3.3.6. 16 Birley 2000, entry “Cicero”: “unnamed, quoted on seeing dimly.” Birley, as in the case of unus ex multis (1.3.2), does not indicate the Ciceronian locus he has in mind, but he is probably referring to Schuster, who lists Cic. Phil. 12.10: Quod videbam equidem sed quasi per caliginem, and Fin. 5.43: in infirma aetate inbecillaque mente vis naturae quasi per caliginem cernitur. The expression is also, in a non-metaphorical usage, in Petronius 9.1: quasi per caliginem vidi Gitona in crepidine semitae stantem. 17 Guillemin suggests that Pliny’s entreaty recalls Cicero’s request to Atticus for historical information; she also “oddly imagines” (as Sherwin-White puts it) that Capito is to put the imperial archives at Pliny’s disposal. See above, Chapter 4. 18 But one could refer as well to Cic. Off. 1.15.56. 19 Guillemin sees the letters to Calpurnia (6.4, 6.7 and 7.5) and the theme of conjugal love as a combination of the language Ovid uses for his wife in the Tristia (3.3.17–18, 4.3.23–4) and Cicero’s terms of endearment (“appellations affectueuses”) for Terentia. Sherwin-White does not see as much formality in Pliny’s letters to Calpurnia and denies their debt to Cicero. For Pliny’s attitude in the letters to his wife, see Shelton 1990: 163–86. 20 Guillemin perceives an echo of the consolatory words Servius addresses to Cicero encouraging him not to yield to grief (quod si qui etiam inferis sensus est . . . hoc certe illa te facere non vult) in the “cogent syllogism” of the unnamed Spaniard in 6.20: Si periit, superstites voluit. For a different source for this scene, see my discussion in Chapter 4. 21 See note at Ep. 2.17. 22 See note at Ep. 1.8.6. 23 Both letters address the theme of the death of a slave, frontally in Pliny, tangentially in Cicero. B¨utler invites a parallel reading of the texts, remarking similarities in diction. Possibly, however, the allusion is contrastive and corrects his model while evoking it. In particular, see how Pliny shifts Cicero’s notion of excessive grieving to his own excessive writing and immediately dismisses the idea. Cf. Pliny, Ep. 8.16.5: de his plura fortasse quam debui, sed pauciora, quam volui with Cic. Att. 1.12.4: me . . . plus, quam servi mors debere videbatur, commoverat. Indeed, the occasion for a display of humanitas deserves a longer letter. 24 Zucker 1929: 209–32. 25 For Sherwin-White non ut praecipiam . . . admoneam tamen “closely echoes but modifies Cicero’s blunter approach to Curio.” The reference number is incorrect in S-W (Fam. 2.2.1). 26 Guillemin considers as proofs of imitation the verbal coincidences between Cicero, who is inviting his son not to forget that he left for Greece so that he could become what was expected from him (sustines enim non parvam expectationem . . . suscepisti onus) and Pliny’s warnings to Maximus (onerat te quaesturae tuae fama . . . onerat testimonium principis, onerat tribunatus). 27 In Pliny’s comment that the old temple of Ceres he wants to rebuild is very crowded on its special anniversary (sit alioqui stato die frequentissima) Guillemin sees a parallel of Cicero’s wish to find a crowded place for Tullia’s shrine: sed nescio quo pacto celebritatem requiro . . . maxima est Scapulae (hortis) celebritas (Att. 12.37.2); nihil enim video quod tam celebre esse possit (Att. 12.19.1). She notes that Cicero’s letters about Tullia’s shrine are the motive for the inclusion of this epistle in Pliny’s correspondence. Certainly over-ingenious appears Guillemin’s point that the words Pliny addresses to Mustius at 9.39.6 (nisi tu melius invenies) recall several Ciceronian passages from the same context: mihi venit in mentem (Att. 12.35.2), multa . . . in mentem veniunt (Att. 12.37.4) and mihi . . . in mentem venit (Att. 12.40.2). 15

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General index

Aeneas, 29, 33, 37, 38, 39, 176–9, 181–5 Agricola (Caius Iulius), 193, 196–7 Agrippa, 43 Ajax, 52 Alba Longa, 186–8 Amata, 180 Anchises, 136, 177 Androgeus, 181 Andromache, 181–5 Aper, 115, 126, 129, 135, 138, 198 Apuleius, 9 Arria Faelilla, 22, 171 Asianism, 201 Asinius Gallus, 82 Atticism, 201 Atticus, epistles, 13 death of, 43 Aufidius Bassus, 145 Augustus, epistles, 13 Baebius Macer, 145 Baebius Massa, 148, 221 Bakhtin, M., 107 Barchiesi, A., 225 Benveniste, E., 144 Bloom, H., 214 Bodel, J., 12 Brutus, epistles, 13 Caesar, 179–80 epistles, 13 Calpurnia, 25 Calpurnius Fabatus, 24–5 Calpurnius Siculus, 121, 129 Calvisius Rufus, 25 Calvus, 28, 30, 59, 68, 110–11 Calypso, 52 Caninius Rufus, 24, 27, 30–2, 36, 58 Capito (Titinius Capito), 153, 162–3, 169–70 Catius (Titus Catius), 204 Cato the Elder, 2, 68

Cato the Younger, 46, 52 Catullus, 15–16, 39–52, 54–7, 59–95, 109–13, 184 Charon, 39 Cicero, 9, 46–7, 51, 66, 82, 85–6, 98, 124, 128, 138, 147, 158, 161, 244, 247–8 epistles, 6, 7, 14, 16–19, 208–39 arrangement of, 18 publication of, 208–9 Circe, 52 Clarus (Septicius Clarus), 20, 24, 249 Cluvius Rufus, 146–7 Corellius Rufus, 15, 22, 40–3, 52, 171 Cugusi, P., 6, 15–16 Damon, C., 25 decorum, 75, 76, 77 Democritus, 85 Demosthenes, 28, 30, 138, 227 De Pretis, A., 6 Diana, 120, 122, 131–2 Dido, 177, 182 Domitian, 13, 221 Ennius, 155–6, 158, 160 Epicurus epistles, 15–16 Euphrates, 217 Eurydice, 194 exitus (narratives), 22, 40–52, 170–89, 193, 197 Florus, 33–6, 87, 89 Freudenburg, K., 32, 35 Frontinus, 159–60 furor, 85–8 Fuscus (Pedanius Fuscus Salinator), 25, 60–1, 135, 239, 249 Gamberini, F., 58 Gibson, R., 174 Gigante, M., 175–6

272

General index Greene, E., 46 Guillemin, A., 30, 33, 214 Hades, 29, 33, 37–8 Hector, 181 Helen, 99 Helenus, 50, 182 Hellanicus, 168 Henderson, J., 4, 6 Hercules, 154 Herennius Severus, 204 Herodotus, 168 Hesiod, 141 Hoffer, S., 2–4, 217 Homer, 141, 219–21 Horace, 9, 33–6, 50–2, 71, 74, 78–88, 94, 217–18 epistles, 6–8, 15–16, 18–19 Horsfall, N., 209 Hutchinson, G. O., 6, 209 Jakobson, R., 17 Jupiter, 154 Leach, E., 239 Lef`evre, E., 132, 211, 226 Lesbia, 43 libertas, 47, 109, 125 Livy, 9, 158, 180, 186–8 Lucan, 179–80 Lucceius Albinus, 147, 221 Luce, T. J., 134 Lucilius, 15 Lucretius, 129–31, 179 Ludolph, M., 2–4 Macrinus, 24–5 Mamilianus (Pomponius Mamilianus), 58, 62 Martial, 22, 64–7, 212 Maternus, 94, 102, 115, 122–6, 129, 132–5, 198, 237 Maturus (Arrianus Maturus), 25, 27 Mayer, R., 133 Menander, 45 Messalla, 126, 129, 238 Mettus, 186 Minerva, 120, 122, 131–2 Mnestheus, 156–7 Murgia, C., 101, 127 Naevius, 9 Neotericism, 51, 54, 56–78, 89–96, 97, 245 Nepos, 43, 55, 199, 204, 205–6, 209 Oliva, A., 168 Orpheus, 194–6

273

otium, 69–71, 92–4, 101, 127–8, 211, 216 Ovid, 7, 8, 15–16, 18–19, 20–2, 23, 25–6, 98, 185–6, 193, 232–3 Paetus (Thrasea Paetus), 171 Palinurus, 38 Pallas, 154 Panaetius, 46 Paris, 99 Paternus, 71 Paulinus (issue of homonymy), 230, 233–5 Petronius, 9, 95 Plato, 85, 204 epistles, 9, 15–16 Plautus, 49, 108, 109 Pliny the Elder, 55, 145, 148, 152–3, 161–2, 171–6 Pliny the Younger De Helvidi ultione, 145, 227 Panegyricus, 134, 150, 199–203, 205, 215 letters, arrangement of Pliny’s, 12, 18, 22–3; publication of Pliny’s, 49, 225, 229, 232, 240 Pontius Allifanus, 79 posterity, 99, 102, 112, 114, 142–3, 152, 251 Propertius, 78 Quintilian, 8, 10, 95, 97, 126, 128, 165, 168, 201, 214–15 Roller, M., 57, 70–1 Rosianus Geminus, 24 Ruso (Cremutius Ruso), 159 Sabinianus, 25 Sabinus (issue of homonymy), 229–33, 240 Sallust, 9, 151–2 Sappho, 86 Saturnalia, 107–12 Saturninus (Pompeius Saturninus), 25, 59 Secundus (Julius Secundus), 127, 129 Seneca, 9, 46, 95, 98, 120, 157, 201, 234–6 epistles, 6, 7, 14–15, 16, 17, 209; arrangement of, 18, 19–20 Sentius Augurinus, 67–8 servitium amoris, 47 Servius, 27, 29, 121, 140–2 Shackleton Bailey, D.R., 208, 218 Sherwin-White, A.N., 2, 103, 168, 241 Sibyl, 29, 37, 39, 116–17 Silius Italicus, 22, 238 Sp. Mummius, 15 Statius, 37, 135, 141–2 Stoicism, 43–8, 67, 176 Suetonius, 81

274

General index

Syme, R., 2, 100, 191, 192 Tacitus, 9, 25, 38, 58, 94, 95, 97–143, 147–206, 228, 237, 240, 245–7 Agricola, 150, 189–98 Dialogus, 94, 97, 101–2, 105, 115, 118–35, 138, 198 Historiae, 148, 189 Terence, 27, 29, 80 Theocritus, 141 Thucydides, 9, 149, 166–8, 172 Tiresias, 51–2 Trajan, 12, 13, 200–3 Troy, 176–88 Ulysses, 51–2 Ummidia Quadratilla, 24 Ussani, V., 165–6, 168

Valerianus (Iulius Valerianus), 25 Valerius Paulinus, 89. See also Paulinus (homonymy) Varro, epistles, 13 Velleius Paterculus, 126 Verginius Rufus, 146–7, 150, 158–60, 189–98, 199, 239–40 Vesuvius, 171 Vibius Severus, 150, 198, 203–5 Virgil, 9, 39, 78, 102, 115–17, 120, 135, 140–2, 154–6, 158, 160, 175–85, 193 Voconius Romanus, 190 Weische, P. , 213 Wills, J., 33 Woodman, A., 93, 144 Zucker, F., 223–4

Index locorum

Calpurnius Siculus Ecl. 7.30-32, 121 Catullus 1, 55, 64, 217 2, 63–5 3, 31 5, 75 8, 27, 43–52 14, 47, 50, 109–12 16, 76–7 35, 31, 91 38, 90–3 50, 69 51, 90, 92–3, 94 52, 47 53, 47 65, 15 68a, 15, 99 85, 90–1 101, 185 Cicero Ad Atticum 1.14, 218, 219 2.3, 221 4.7, 219 Ad Familiares 2.11, 15 5.2, 98 5.12, 147, 221–3 7.1, 225 7.6, 220 7.18, 229 7.33, 217 8.8, 15 8.9, 15 Ad Quintum fratrem 1.1, 223–4 Brutus 45, 124 173, 141

De Legibus 1.5, 149 De Officiis 1.18, 51 1.63, 51 1.67, 46 1.112, 46 1.113, 52 De Oratore 2.194, 86 Div. 1.80, 85 Gellius 15.7.3, 13 Homer Iliad 1.528, 219 12.243, 220 16.250, 219 Odyssey 22.412, 218, 219 Horace Ars 291-4, 217 295-8, 86 Carmina 2.16, 94 Epistles 1.3, 33–7 1.4, 250 1.10, 250 2.2, 35 Satires 1.4, 50, 244 1.5, 218 1.10, 51 2.5, 50–1 2.7, 109

275

276 Livy 1.29.1-3, 186 1.29.4-6, 187 7.17.3, 180 27.2.9, 188 Lucan 1.496-8, 180 2.525, 180 Lucretius 1.248-64, 130 Martial 1.7, 64 4.14, 64 10.20, 65, 228 12.1, 121 Nepos Att. 16.3, 209 19.1, 209 21-22, 43 Ovid Amores 2.18.27-32, 232 Ars 1.431, 33 Her. 17, 99 Met. 11.50-3, 194 Pont. 3.7, 23 3.9, 21 4.13-16, 232 Tristia 1, 26 1.2, 26 1.3, 26, 185–6 1.4, 26 1.5, 26 1.7, 26 1.8, 26 1.9, 26 1.10, 26 1.11, 26 2.2, 74 Plato Rep. 596C, 204 Plautus Bacchides 162-5, 108 Trinummus 1026, 49

Index locorum Pliny the Elder Naturalis Historia Praef. 1, 55 14.66, 13 33.39, 13 37.81, 47 Pliny the Younger Epistles 1.1, 20–2, 24, 36, 144, 249–50 1.2, 27–36, 39, 116–17, 218 1.3, 24, 27, 30–6, 89, 117 1.5, 122, 190, 227 1.6, 94, 101–2, 105, 118–31, 240 1.7, 219 1.10, 51, 210, 217 1.12, 15, 22, 27, 40–52, 59, 171 1.13, 27, 47–52, 59 1.15, 24 1.16, 59, 74 1.18, 220–1 1.20, 165, 227 2.1, 146, 150, 158, 189–99, 239 2.2, 88–96, 230–3 2.7, 145 2.11, 25 2.12, 25 2.17, 31 2.20, 25 3.1, 25 3.5, 145 3.7, 22, 238 3.10, 145 3.15, 227 3.16, 22, 171 3.18, 198–203 3.21, 22, 65–7, 79, 228 4.8, 212, 227–8 4.14, 58–9, 71–8 4.24, 236 4.27, 67, 79 4.28, 198–9, 203–6 5.3, 27, 58, 60, 74, 76, 80, 227 5.4, 25 5.5, 150 5.6, 31 5.8, 115, 145, 149, 153–70, 174, 213–14, 221 5.13, 25 6.4, 25 6.7, 25 6.10, 146, 158–9, 239–40 6.12, 24 6.16, 23, 25, 100, 145, 148–9, 151–3, 171–89 6.20, 25, 100, 149, 171–89 6.30, 24 6.33, 244

Index locorum 6.34, 15, 225 7.1, 24 7.4, 27, 54, 78–88, 227 7.6, 25 7.7, 25 7.9, 58, 60–1, 249 7.10, 25 7.11, 24 7.15, 25 7.16, 25 7.17, 227 7.18, 24–9 7.20, 100, 102–4, 114, 135–43, 156, 157 7.23, 25 7.24, 24 7.28, 24 7.30, 145, 227 7.32, 25 7.33, 148, 221–4, 228 8.1, 24 8.5, 24 8.7, 50, 100–13, 115 8.14, 145 8.15, 228–9 8.21, 58 8.22, 24 8.24, 223–4 9.1, 218 9.2, 213, 228–34, 237–9 9.3, 234–6 9.7, 32 9.10, 58, 62, 101, 105, 118, 131–5, 240 9.11, 24 9.13, 36–9, 145 9.14, 37–9, 101, 113–17 9.16, 58, 62–5 9.19, 146, 158–60, 195, 239–40 9.21, 25 9.22, 239 9.24, 25 9.25, 58, 62–4 9.26, 227 9.29, 53 9.30, 24 9.36, 15, 25, 135, 249–50 9.40, 15, 25, 135, 249–50 Propertius 1.19, 91 4.3, 16 Quintilian Institutio Oratoria 6.2.7, 32

10.1.31, 168, 244 10.1.85-96, 8 10.2.21, 165 Sallust Bellum Catilinae 1.1, 115, 235 1.3, 151 2.2, 151 3.2, 151, 170 4.2, 155 53.6, 115 Seneca De Beneficiis 1.11.6, 119 Epistulae ad Lucilium 7, 15, 225 25, 15 27, 236 30, 236 32, 15 66, 46 73, 236 83, 15 118, 14 Seneca Rhetor Suasoriae 6.21, 158, 189 Statius Silvae 4.4, 15 Thebaid 8.84-5, 37 12.816-19, 142 Suetonius Jul. 56.5-7, 13 Virg. 75, 81 130, 81 Tacitus Agricola 46.1, 196 46.3, 197 46.4, 192 Annales 1.1, 155 Dialogus 2.1, 129 8.4, 198 9.1, 115 9.6, 118, 132–3 11.3, 198 12.1, 118, 133

277

278 Tacitus (cont.) 12.5, 237 13.3, 115 16.6, 97, 138 16.7, 138 20.4, 244 21.6, 244 27.1-2, 133 30.5, 238 36.1, 118, 122 36.1-4, 123 36.3, 130 38.2, 125 40.2, 124, 133 Terence Hau. 77, 27, 80 Thucydides 1.22, 167, 172 Virgil Aeneid 1.376, 184 2.10, 177 2.12-13, 176 2.40, 178 2.313, 179, 187 2.324-5, 179 2.351-2, 179 2.370, 178 2.373-4, 181 2.411, 178 2.424, 178 2.450, 178 2.487-8, 179

Index locorum 2.492-5, 187 2.638-44, 177 2.796-8, 178 3.299-300, 182 3.310-12, 181 3.311, 181 3.325, 184 3.338-43, 181 3.343, 181 3.349-51, 183 3.459, 50 5.194-7, 157 5.195, 156 5.320, 102, 136, 140–2 6.105, 37 6.123, 116 6.127-31, 116–17 6.129, 27, 36 6.264, 39 6.383, 38 6.384, 38 6.692, 184 6.851, 175 7.377, 180 10.284, 176 10.467-9, 154–5 10.811, 37 Eclogues 3.74-5, 120–1, 128–9 Georgica 3.8-9, 156 4.206-8, 237 4.500-2, 194 4.523-7, 193