Pliny's Letters Research Articles

DOMITIAN'S LIGHTNING BOLTS AND CLOSE SHAVES IN PLINY

Pliny's portrayal of his public life under Domitian has often come under fire from both those who approach Pliny's Letters from a historical perspective and those who study them as a literary production. This article reevaluates Pliny's experiences in five significant areas: public speaking, amicitia, political promotion, threats of political persecution, and survival and reconciliation. In all of these circumstances, Pliny is found to be an honest narrator of his own political struggles under Domitian and an eloquent voice for his generation's endurance.

Between the Grand Tour and the sublime sea: Thomas Coke and William Kent at Holkham

Holkham is one of the best-known eighteenth-century English estates. Acknowledging Coke's and Kent's travels on the Grand Tour, previous studies have underestimated the significance of the estate's...

Pliny,Epistles8.14: Senate, Slavery and theAgricola

ABSTRACTEpistles8.14, one of Pliny's longest letters, has been widely dismissed as a clumsy combination of two ill-fitting stretches of prose. This article demonstrates a significant chain of allusions in the letter's opening to Tacitus’Agricola, as well as to Cicero, Ovid and Seneca; it shows how Pliny prompts such a reading in the surroundingEpistles8.13 and 8.15; and, through consideration of the diptych form and the theme of slavery, it demonstrates the letter's pivotal role as centrepiece to Book 8.

Drinking from the Water-Clock: Time and Speech in Imperial Rome

This article traces a representational history of the judicial clepsydra (water-clock) in early imperial Rome. While the topic of time has recently flourished in Roman studies, there has been relatively little focus on short-term and diurnal temporality as opposed to the time schemes of the annual calendar and broader history. The article offers a Roman complement to the study of democratic Athens in the 1996 essay "A Schedule of Boundaries" by Danielle Allen, and builds on the essay, "For Whom the Clock Drips," by Andrew Riggsby, with which it is co-published in this volume. Riggsby argues that the clepsydra offered an impersonal manifestation of imperial time specific to the period of the early principate, and shows how this aspect of the clepsydra is reflected in the letters of Pliny the Younger. This article contextualizes Pliny within the history of changing time limits in the early imperial courts, and compares the attitudes of Pliny with allusions to the clepsydra in Martial's epigrams. There are occasional mentions of time limits enforced by clepsydrae in Ciceronian oratory, but a self-conscious discourse on such limits, and on the role of the clepsydra in enforcing them, is not evident until the Dialogus de Oratoribus of Tacitus. There the opposing speakers Aper and Maternus are in agreement about the encroachment of time limits, and of limits on the number of clepsydrae (approximately 15-minute units) allowed to speakers, especially in the context of the centumviral courts. But while Aper celebrates this as in keeping with a new aesthetics of oratorical brevity, Maternus sees it as a symptom of the loss of republican "times"-in the sense both of historical time and of less restrictive time keeping conventions. These points of view are each echoed in the various mentions of clepsydrae in Pliny and Martial. Pliny, in accounts of his activities as both orator and judge ( Ep. 1.20, 1.23, 2.11, 6.2), variously celebrates his ability to shield himself from the impositions of the clepsydra, and advertises the liberality with which he has given time to speakers or has received capacious clepsydrae from the emperor Trajan. Martial, however, in two epigrams mocking speakers who exhibit excessive greed for clepsydrae and thus try the patience of audiences in the courtroom (6.35, 8.7), aligns the time restricting power of the clepsydra with the brevitas aesthetic of his epigrams-his poems in effect becoming clepsydrae through which he can appropriate time from his opponents. (Martial's clepsydra poems can also be interestingly juxtaposed with an epigram by the emperor Trajan [ Anth. Graec. 11.418 Beckby] that mocks someone by comparing his nose and gaping mouth to the gnomon and face of a sundial.) These diametrically opposed attitudes toward the clepsydra are in keeping with the time economies of Pliny's letters and Martial's epigrams more generally, the one celebrating an overflow and free exchange of time and seeing in this the possibility of retrieving republican times, the other searching for ways to steal or preserve time from the incursions of others, especially through performances of epigrammatic brevity.

Ancient Letters: Classical and Late Antique Epistolography (review)

Reviewed by: Ancient Letters: Classical and Late Antique Epistolography Elaine Fantham Ruth Morello and A. D. Morrison, eds. Ancient Letters: Classical and Late Antique Epistolography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. xviii + 373 pp. 4 figs. Cloth, $115. This collection of papers is equally rich in its range of subject matter and variety of approaches. Based on a conference held at Manchester, UK in 2004, it has made excellent use of the recent flowering of texts and discussions of Greek and Latin letters. It specifically acknowledges our common debt to M. B. Trapp's fine anthology, Greek and Latin Letters (Cambridge 2003), with its substantial analytical introduction and eighty texts (documentary and literary, independent or embedded) drawn from all periods, each with translation and commentary, to which we can add Patricia Rosenmeyer's monograph, Ancient Epistolary Fictions (Cambridge 2001), C. D. N. Costa's collection of translated Greek Fictional Letters (Oxford 2001), and now Bagnall and Cribiore's collection, Women's Letters from Ancient Egypt (Ann Arbor 2006). The editors have modified the usual practice by dividing their general considerations between a preface ("Why Letters?"), which covers the utility and accessibility of letters, power dynamics and role playing, special epistolary topics, letters as a didactic mode, the effect of collections of letters, and the readers' expectations, and an introduction ("What is a Letter?") by Morello and Roy Gibson, which briefly reviews alternative versions of rules of genre before testing [End Page 135] their simple set of requirements for a letter on two extreme categories: Greek verse epistles like Theocritus 11 and Cicero's three-volume treatise De Officiis addressed to his son. Their criteria stress the physical separation of the two persons involved and the form and scale of the text but miss what most require in a good letter, namely, "engagement with the addressee" (111, from Morrison's chapter; cf. 113–14), and, we might add, with his interests and recent activities. It is this relative indifference to the addressee which leaves me dissatisfied with the letters of Pliny and makes it so difficult to remember the addressee of any given letter. Rightly, many of the fourteen chapters focus not on single ancient authors but on topics: Hutchinson's delightfully shrewd analysis of a papyrus letter from an unnamed student to his family and two letters from Paphnuthis to his parents and brother, providing social context and penetrating literary pretext to reconstruct events and motives (chap. 1); Henderson on Cicero's extended Ad Q. Fr. 3.1 (chap. 2) and Hoffer on Cicero's adoption of the metaphor stomachus, stomachari to label and limit passages of complaint, along with other typical allusive expressions (chap. 3); Morrison on "didacticism and epistolarity in Horace Epistles 1" (the best treatment since McGann's Studies in Horace's First Book of Epistles [Bruxelles 1969]) (chap. 4); an important chapter by Inwood arguing for Seneca's deliberate emulation of the letters of Epicurus and explaining Seneca's choice of continuous letter form (including some quasi-dialogue) over his previous use of "Dialogues" (chap. 5). Next, Roger Rees on litterae commendaticiae from Cicero through Pliny to Fronto (chap. 6). Plus, two chapters on Pliny: Morello on Pliny's preoccupation with protecting his circle of literary friends from invidia, putting tact and courtesy before critical standards (chap. 7) and Fitzgerald illustrating from Pliny's seventh book his obsession with literary productivity and oblique methods of commemorating his own moral and literary integrity (chap. 8). Langslow (chap. 9) offers a dazzling demonstration of the sheer complexity with which the medical tradition accumulates and incorporates earlier dedicatory works, reattributing both author and addressee to attract readers. Freisenbruch in "Back to Fronto" (chap. 10) combines two recurring themes: the daily details of ill-health lavished with equal zeal by the imperial pupil and his master and their use of this topic to pay court to each other. In chapters 11 and 12, on Second Sophistic letter collections, Konig illustrates Alciphron's use of the fictional epistle while Hodkinson uses Alciphron and Aelian to show how letters could serve their writer "better than speech" (cf. the title of the preface to the volume, "Why Letters?"). The last two papers consider Christian...

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

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

Le monde romain dans les lettres de Pline le Jeune: espace et valeurs

AbstractIn this article the geographical allusions are considered which the reader can find in Pliny's letters, with special reference to those containing the writer's appreciation. They suggest a mental representation of the contemporary Roman world. The ancient ciceronian distinction between parua patria and magna patria still remains valid. But Pliny is conscious of belonging to a much larger territory that is neither his native land of northern Italy nor the city of Rome, in which he had his political career: the Roman empire. However, in Pliny's mind this empire is not a completely united one. It is divided into a Roman or occidental and a Greek or oriental half. This distinction is both geographical and moral. Each part is associated with ethical notions, which are for the former part positive ones, for the latter part negative ones. Even if he is periodically aspiring to reject even his Roman roots or links, in order to find an ideal place for intellectual work, Pliny only feels himself as belonging to the western part, which can no longer be only Rome, because of its moral decline, but also includes the most ancient provinces.

Each Man's Father Served as his Teacher: Constructing Relatedness in Pliny'sLetters: In loving memory of Harry Bernstein (1913–2008)

Recent scholarship has examined Pliny's efforts to embed his acts of patronage in the rhetorical context of paternity. This paper examines how Pliny employs the discourse of paternity in representing himself as a mentor and exemplary model for young men, with particular focus on Book 8 of the Letters. Though he lacks a child or adoptive heir himself, Pliny embeds his work in a tradition in which Roman writers from the Elder Cato onward presented literary authority as coextensive with paternal authority. In Ep. 8.14, Pliny presents an idealized image of education by fathers or paternal surrogates that legitimates both his receipt of benefits from his mentors and his own efforts to instruct young men in the manner of a father. Pliny presents his published work as a model for Genialis in Ep. 8.13 and his personal life as an example for Junius Avitus in Ep. 8.23. Ep. 8.10, 11 and 18 provide further contexts for Pliny's discourse of paternity. Two additional examples of the creation of relatedness in elite Roman culture (interactions with caregivers and the experience of contubernium) are briefly discussed. I consider in conclusion how study of Pliny's Letters may contribute to the larger cross-cultural project of understanding how otherwise unrelated persons, through informal activities such as mentorship, may construct relationships more salient to them than their biological or legal kinships.

Hunting for Boars with Pliny and Tacitus

This paper will examine intertextual references between the Dialogus of Tacitus and the letters of Pliny, in particular those regarding boar hunting. It will argue that there are clues in the letters of Pliny which can help us to understand the relationship between these two writers as well as the tone and purpose of the Dialogus. By studying Pliny's letters to Tacitus on hunting (1.6, 9.10), one can see the specific reference to boars as an allusion to Marcus Aper, the chief spokesperson for contemporary eloquence in the dialogue, indicating a degree of humor and irony in the Dialogus that is further displayed by the similarity of Pliny's opening exhortation in Epistle 1.6, ridebis et licet rideas, to the final words of the Dialogus, cum adrisissent, discessimus. Moreover, the dialogue between Pliny and Tacitus in Pliny's letters can be seen as an indication that the Dialogus itself may have been revised throughout the years, thus problematizing the debate about the “publication date” of the Dialogus.

The Social Economy of Pliny's Correspondence with Trajan

Though the primary function of Pliny's correspondence with Trajan was the transaction of imperial business, these letters could also serve as vehicles for the self-representation and public image of both correspondents. What made these letters mutually beneficial to Pliny and Trajan is the impression that emerges from them, artfully constructed, of a personal friendship between senator and emperor. Because Pliny and Trajan both benefited from being seen to correspond with one another on intimate terms, their letters can be interpreted as symbolic exchanges in a system in which the demonstration of friendship could serve as an important bearer of social capital.

Roman concept of mental capacity to make end-of-life decisions

When assessing decisional competence of patients, psychiatrists have to balance the patients' right to personal autonomy, their condition and wishes against principles of medical ethics and professional discretion. This article explores the age-old legal and ethical dilemmas posed by refusal of vital medical treatment by patients and their mental capacity to make end-of-life decisions against the background of philosophical, legal and medical approaches to these issues in the time of the Younger Pliny ( c62– c113 CE). Classical Roman discourse regarding mental competency and "voluntary death" formed an important theme of the vast corpus of Greco-Roman writings, which was moulded not only by legal permissibility of suicide but also by philosophical (in modern terms, moral or ethical) considerations. Indeed, the legal and ethical issues of evaluating the acceptability of end of life decisions discussed in the Letters are as pertinent today as they were 2000 years ago. We may gain valuable insights about our own methodologies and frames of reference in this area of the law and psychiatry by examining Classical Roman approaches to evaluating acceptability of death-choices as described in Pliny's Letters and the writings of some of his peers.

Servile Functionaries or Priestly Leaders?

Attention to literary artifice marks an important advance in research on Pliny's famous letter on the Christians (Ep. 10,96). Literary features in the letter shape the depiction of events to serve the larger patterns of Pliny's particular story. According to Angelika Reichert, for example, Pliny wants Trajan to put the whole account together in a way that exonerates the Christians whom the governor has already freed. Approaching Pliny for his literary style and purpose rather than for neutral reporting of objective “facts” about Christians in Bithynia-Pontus confirms what Robert M. Grant suggested over a half century ago. Grant argued that Pliny patterned his passage on the Christian sacramentum (10,96,7) after the literary model and legal precedent of Livy's reference to sacramentum in the Bacchanalian conspiracy. The intertextual echoes of Livy in Pliny's letter make untenable the simple reading of the passage as social description of a fixed baptismal creed in second-century Christian liturgy. The present essay confirms the value of this literary approach by applying these findings to Pliny's passage on the tortured Christian slave women (ancillae) called ministrae (Ep. 10,96,8).

Otium as Luxuria : Economy of Status in the Younger Pliny's Letters

Otium as Luxuria : Economy of Status in the Younger Pliny's Letters

Introduction

This collection has its origin in a one-day conference held at the University of Manchester in November 2000, part of which was then taken on the road as a panel for the APA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia in January 2002. The impetus for the project was twofold: first, the sense that Pliny had for too long been a quarry for critics prospecting for Realien, who mined the rich seams of the letters for "information" on all aspects of Roman social, agricultural, and legal life or imperial government; and, secondly, that the monumental guide to such practices that was Sherwin-White's magisterial commentary of 1966 needed to be re-evaluated and its effects balanced out by more "literary" approaches, particularly those of critics who showed a more modern awareness of how Pliny "salted his mine" by constructing and controlling in a highly crafted epistolary mosaic (to use the image proposed by Henderson in the first paper of this volume) the representation of himself and his world. That these images—of mosaic and mine/quarry—seem uneasily combined in this way reflects the tensions inherent in the critical handling of the "authenticity" of the letters: for some critics, they are raw material, rough stones and ores, while for others, including all of the contributors to this volume, they have already been cut and polished to precisely calibrated dimensions and assembled by the epistolary craftsman into a masterly design. Our collective enterprise is, we believe, timely, as Pliny is beginning to have his share in the revival of interest in Latin literature of the so-called "silver age" which has hitherto largely focussed on the poets of the immediately post-Augustan era (Statius, Lucan, Martial, and Valerius Flaccus have all received one or more recent major studies) and on the enduring colossus of Tacitus. A useful onomasticon (Birley 2000) and several monographs have appeared recently, including those by Ludolph (1997), Hoffer [End Page 109] (1999), and Beutel (2000), of which Hoffer, in particular, has substantially contributed to the development of these papers in the aftermath of the conference. 1 Our collection is avowedly diverse in its critical viewpoints, but all the papers are united by the desire to focus the gaze of critics on the letters themselves as bearers of meaning, on Pliny's carefully hidden agenda and the attention-deflecting strategies of concealment he deploys, or on the nature of the literary monument he has constructed. In the interests of moving away from the search for Realien, we have excluded consideration of Book 10, but the papers collectively cover a representative range of letters, topics, and issues from the first nine books. The opening two papers deal with general, but central, issues: the fallacy of the "documentary" approach and the self-fashioning of the writer of epistles. The first paper, by John Henderson, lays out the basic context in which research on Pliny has taken place in the Anglophone world: namely A. N. Sherwin-White's monumental commentary (1966), his edition of Fifty Letters of Pliny from the following year, and the various contributions of Betty Radice in article and translation form. These scholars emphasised the transparency of the letters and their provision of relatively easy and unmediated access to Pliny the man and to the society in which he lived. Henderson emphasises instead the extent to which the letters provide a highly self-conscious self-representation: addressees are carefully chosen, letters carefully edited, and doubt, fear, and hesitation skilfully deflected away from the persona of the writer himself. Particularly telling for his remodelling of the self, it is argued, are Pliny's villa letters (which feature twice later in the volume), which offer a studiously idealising self-portrait of their owner and of his letters. Anna de Pretis, in concord with Henderson's approach, likewise insists that a documentary approach, a search for "authenticity," "sincerity," or "truth and accuracy" in the letters is mistaken. Rather, she seeks to establish an alternative approach based on "epistolarity": the use of the letter's formal properties to generate meaning. The paper...

S. E. Hoffer, The Anxieties of Pliny The Younger. (American Philological Association American Classical Studies 43). Pp. v + 250. Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars Press, 1999. ISBN 0-7885-0565-3. US$ 29.95.

This book provides a new understanding of Pliny's letters by combining historical analysis of the social pressures that shape Pliny's authorial pose with close literary analysis of the letters themselves. It demonstrates how ruling-class ideology is disseminated and how it shapes the literary persona and personal identity of a ruling-class member. The powerful heuristic tool of examining the interplay between confidence and anxieties in the letters will help restore Pliny's relatively neglected masterpiece to a more prominent place in undergraduate Latin and Roman Civilization courses.

Haunted Greece and Rome: Ghost Stories from Classical AntiquityRestless Dead: Encounters between the Living and Dead in Ancient Greece

Preface Introduction One. The Folklore of Ghosts Two. Problems of Definition and Classification Three. Haunted Houses Four. Plautus's Haunted House Five. The Supernatural in Pliny's Letters Six. Lucian's Ghost Stories Seven. The Fate of the Ghost Story Notes Bibliography Index of Passages Cited General Index

"For My Child, Onesimus": Paul and Domestic Power in Philemon

I. Philemon's Family Language Early in the second century CE, the younger Pliny wrote letter to his friend Sabinianus on behalf of an errant freedman: I know you are angry with him, and I know, too, it is not without reason; but clemency can never exert itself more laudably than when there is more cause for resentment. You once had an affection for this man, and, I hope, will have again .... do not make himself uneasy any longer, and I will add too, do not make yourself so; for man of your benevolence of heart cannot be angry without feeling great uneasiness. (Ep. 9.21) Here free Roman intervenes for another party as an amicus domini (a friend of the master). Paul's letter to Philemon also exemplifies this type of intercession. I Both epistles flatter and appeal to the emotions of the addressees, but the tone of the apostle's letter differs from Pliny's composition.2 Kinship imagery, which Pliny's letter lacks, imbues Paul's letter with familial intimacy; these metaphors draw Philemon, Onesimus, and the apostle himself into literary consanguinity.3 this article I situate Paul's letter to Philemon within the ancient cultural fields that enlivened its contents. The methodology I employ attends to the complex ideologies informing the Pauline corpus and reveals the conversational character of these epistles.4 Just as power is quality that inheres in social relationships, so meaning is product of communities of readers (and writers).5 Paul's symbolic universe, then, does not solely determine the significance of his epistolary language; by ascribing meaning to this language, his readers play crucial role in the formation of Pauline discourse. Recent scholarship on Philemon disregards this audience factor, however.fi Here I seek to discover how the epistle's metaphors worked within the Greco-Roman context shared by Paul and Philemon's household. Specifically, I will investigate the myriad ways that this letter simultaneously expresses and counters claims to authority. Dale B. Martin's Slavery as Salvation, which examines Paul's selfdesignation as a slave of Christ, models my approach to the epistle. His study demonstrates that the slave metaphor conveyed variety of denotations for Paul's readers: In some contexts it could carry meanings of humility; at other times it implied power.8 Martin concludes provocatively that Paul used the complex of meaning produced by the slave metaphor to privilege his position vis-a-vis his readers.9 Similarly, family imagery held potential for advancing Paul's concerns. The present analysis focuses on the effects of family metaphors in the letter to Philemon.10 Within first-century, Mediterranean environment, this household imagery signaled an assortment of notions-not only intimacy and affection but also economics and paternal authority.ll I suggest that the epistle's family language constructs rhetorical household that rivals Philemon's actual household. this new setting Onesimus becomes the apostle's mechanism, technology, or what I term Paul`sr :vo(v)-ology of power. II. The Roman Domus The study of metaphor and representation sharpens the difficulty of connecting language (i.e., linguistic signifiers) to social reality (i.e., actual signified things). 12 The case of the ancient family is particularly problematic, for neither ancient Greek nor Hebrew nor Latin had words that directly translate what modern Western English means by 'family' or 'house.'13 The inexact correspondence between the English term and the ancient societal unit reflects the substantial differences that exist between modern and ancient family structures. It should also caution scholars against assuming transcendent or natural status for family language. Just as kinship patterns vary according to time and place, so terms such as child evoke different sentiments in different contexts.14 To ascertain what family language may have connoted for the apostle and his readers, I begin with survey of Roman household roles and discourse. …

The A.D. 79 eruption as a future explosive scenario in the Vesuvian area: evaluation of associated risk

Due to the lack of an effective policy of planning and prevention, over the past decades the area around Mt. Vesuvio has undergone a steady increase in population and uncontrolled housing development. Consequently, it has become one of the most hazardous volcanic areas in the world. In order to mitigate the damage that the impact of an explosive event would cause in the area, the Department of Civil Defense has worked out an Emergency Management Plan using the A.D. 1631 subplinian eruption as the most probable short-term event. However, from 25 000 years B.P. to present, the activity of the Somma-Vesuvio volcano has shown a sequence of eight eruptive cycles, which always began with a strong plinian eruption. In this paper we utilize the A.D. 79 eruption as an example of a potential large explosive eruption that might occur again at Vesuvio. A detailed tephrostratigraphic analysis of the eruption products was processed by a multivariate statistical analysis. This analysis proved useful for identifying marker layers in the sequences, thus allowing the recognition of some major phases of synchronous deposition and hence the definition of the chronological and spatial evolution of the eruption. By combining this reconstruction with land-use maps, a scenario is proposed with time intervals in the eruptive sequence similar to those reported in Pliny's letter. Thus, it was calculated that, after 7 h from the start of the eruption, a total area of approximately 300 km2 would be covered with the eruption products. In the following 11 h, a total area of approximately 500 km2 would be involved. The third and last phase of deposition would not cause significant variation in the total area involved, but it would bring about an increase in the thickness of the pyroclastic deposits in the perivolcanic area.

Naming in Pliny's letters

The use of someone's name is a privilege and is most strongly felt to be so in direct address. The right is bestowed by an introductory process. Factors such as status, gender, age and inclination affect this process, which is reflected in literature by the greater fullness of denomination for a character's first mention. Evidence is sought in Pliny's letters and variations are explained in terms of the factors mentioned.

A Note on Revision and Authenticity in Pliny's Letters

A Note on Revision and Authenticity in Pliny's Letters