This chapter examines Ep. 2.20’s intertextual engagement with Demosthenes’ De Corona and Cicero’s In Verrem. By analysing these ‘allusions’, we can determine that Pliny self-identifies with his famous oratorical predecessors. More specifically, Pliny’s feud with Regulus recalls Demosthenes’ rivalry with Aeschines and Cicero’s oratorical competition with Verres. Pliny casts himself as a successor of this tradition and, like his great forebears, can overcome his nemesis. Yet the letter also has a more poignant political point about Pliny’s civitas (community). Demosthenes claims that some individuals who were involved in Greek political affairs were bribed by Philip. Aeschines was therefore symptomatic of a wider failing among the Greek political elite. Similarly, Cicero claims that high ranking senators support men such as Hortensius so long as it benefits their own careers. By bringing Cicero and Demosthenes to mind, then, Pliny suggests that his own political elite community reward wicked men such as Regulus in much the same way. In fact, Pliny’s letter seems to suggest an even gloomier future, where his own civitas are worse than the precedent of the past. These intertextual allusions, then, can challenge common scholarly pre-conceptions about Pliny’s view of Rome’s future under the Trajanic principate.

This chapter has a simple argument: Pliny’s Epistles is a work of many intertextual parts. Neither beholden to Cicero’s Epistles, its professed generic forebear, nor privileging ‘poetic memory’ over prose, it integrates a broad range of predecessors, old and new, verse and prose. In a larger study of Plinian intertextuality Whitton has argued that Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria is its unsuspected protagonist, with Tacitus’ Dialogus tightly caught up in the same weave. Rather than rehearsing those claims, he uses this short contribution to pick out some other ingredients to his mix. Three short passages (from Ep. 4.3, 5.16 and 7.1) include a long-forgotten reworking of Cicero’s Orator and hitherto unremarked imitations of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, Valerius Maximus’ Facta et Dicta Memorabilia and Tacitus’ Agricola. In examining these liaisons, the chapter exemplifies some modes and norms of Plinian imitatio and demonstrates that these works and authors all have a role in his pages (so, incidentally, adding to their reception histories). More broadly – if very selectively – it argues that Pliny’s generic self-positioning is a literary act of high ambition: for all its professed simplicity, the Epistles integrates a wide range of exemplary texts into its blend. We just need to start plumbing its depths.

This chapter analyses how Pliny absorbs the consolatory philosophy of Seneca. It focuses on his intertextual use of two of Seneca’s epistles (98 and 99) that treat death, arguing that Ep. 98 looms behind Corellius Rufus’ decision to die (1.12), and that Regulus’ display of grief following the death of his son (4.2) echoes Seneca’s condemnation of improper mourning practice in Ep. 99. The allusions reveal Pliny’s opportunistic engagement with Seneca’s philosophical consideration of grief, agreeing and disagreeing with his epistolary predecessor depending upon the specific circumstances of the bereavement. Both his absorption and rejection of Seneca’s arguments show that he could engage and apply philosophical concepts to express his own grief or criticise other’s.

This chapter analyses the relationship between the two Plinys by examining how the Younger integrates subjects known from the Elder’s Naturalis Historia in his Epistles. The Younger Pliny adapts the miracle stories to the epistolary genre by selecting individual ones from his uncle’s long lists. One elaborate example replaces scientific completeness and remains in the readers’ mind because of its emotional value for Pliny and the addressee. By presenting the miracles of Italy (a volcanic eruption, dolphins, lakes, and fountains in Ep. 4.30; 6.16; 6.20; 8.20; 9.33) and repeatedly highlighting his close relationship with his hometown Comum, Pliny shows alternatives to the wondrous phenomena of the world described in the Naturalis Historia and thereby distinguishes himself from his uncle. The Younger Pliny also reflects his uncle’s habit of writing at night (lucubratio) and serving the emperor by day. The chapter shows that the Younger Pliny choses his own time of day to write literature and unite the claims of otium and negotium, of leisure and work, which have a different importance for the two Plinys. In doing so, the Younger Pliny also underlines the differences that arise from his senatorial career and his uncle’s military success.

How does Plinian intertextuality contribute to making a book unit distinctive from its fellows? Taking Book 6 as its subject, this chapter first looks at the depth of intertextual investment made by Pliny in the second Vesuvius letter (6.20), and looks at the challenge set by its apparent references to Petronius. It then looks at the persistent intertextual presence across Book 6 of Cicero, Catullus, Vergil, Quintilian and Tacitus, and argues for a coherent programme of engagement particularly with Vergil, Quintilian and the Dialogus of Tacitus. The chapter ends by reflecting on why Pliny appeared to have good reason in the early second-century CE to be confident about the vigour and life-expectancy of public oratory at Rome.

In this chapter, König examines an array of ‘literary interactions’ in Pliny’s 10th book of Letters. She draws particular attention to the book’s ‘heteroglossia’ – the multiplicity of linguistic registers and literary genres that it evokes and adopts – and she shows how that heteroglossia enables Pliny to accrue increasing authority and expertise as the book progresses. Starting with letters 10.1-14, she first explores intertexts between Pliny’s correspondence with Trajan and other close-contemporary literature (in particular, the Panegyricus and Frontinus’ De Aquis). Her focus then shifts to Pliny’s incorporation of a range of specialist discourses (architectural, religious, legal, financial, hydraulic, etc.) across the rest of the book, discourses which gradually flesh out his credentials as an administrator with the ability to command many different areas of government. She ends by exploring Pliny’s interaction with Trajan via an allusion to Pliny the Elder’s address to Titus at the start of his encyclopaedic Natural History. In drawing attention to the range and impact of different kinds of intertexts across Letters 10 – from specific textual allusions to generic interdiscursivity – she underlines what this seemingly ‘administrative’ correspondence can teach us about Roman reading and writing habits and the blurred boundary between ‘literary’ and non/less-‘literary’ texts.

Pliny the Younger’s Epistles contain a significant number of letters where Pliny presents himself as openly hostile to certain individuals by ridiculing them or expressing his indignation. The individuals who are the targets of Pliny’s epistolary invectives or satires usually do not appear as addressees in the collection: the chapter discusses Pliny’s letters 1.5 and 4.7 on Regulus, 7.29 and 8.6 on Pallas, 4.25 on an anonymous senator’s behaviour during a secret election and 6.15 on the faux pas of Iavolenus Priscus during a recitation. It then moves on with investigating how Pliny evokes the tradition of scoptic poetry, satire and invective not only in those letters where one would expect it, but also in letters which, at first glance, present themselves as friendly or joking conversations with various addressees such as Ep. 2.2 and 5.10. Here, the scoptic tone of literary models such as Catullus and Martial is transformed into a different context of communication, according to the conventions of epistolography.

In two letters addressed to a certain Montanus, Pliny’s focus is on the once powerful imperial freedman Pallas. In his first letter (7.29) Pliny tells how he accidentally came across Pallas’ tomb and read an inscription engraved on it, which he now quotes as a particularly blatant example of the freedman’s arrogance and hypocrisy. Pliny’s feelings about Pallas are those of indignatio mitigated by risus; both words evoke satire and in fact references to satire and other literary genres (paradoxography, antiquarian literature and the palliata) are scattered throughout this short letter. In the second letter of this pair (8.6), we are told that Pliny, now took the trouble to trace the senatorial decree referred to in the inscription. Thus for a moment we encounter Pliny the historian, or rather Pliny the antiquarian – but he is quickly replaced by Pliny the political moralist. Pliny voices his indignation at the senators’ debasement but, crucially, does not give any details about the reasons for honouring Pallas or the circumstances behind it. Evidently Pliny did not deem it advisable to consult available historical accounts of the event and to learn more about its context (see Tac. Ann. 12.53 and cf. Plin. HN 35.201).

While the satiric representation of city life and particularly Horace’s Satires have been already acknowledged as relevant contexts for Pliny’s Ep. 1.9, its Horatian ‘numerological parallel’, Sat. 1.9, has been left out of consideration so far. This chapter aims at filling in that gap and reading Pliny’s letter 1.9 against the background of Horace’s Sat. 1.9. As it shows, Pliny’s urban interactions go hand in hand with the generic interactions performed by his epistle: while the city forces Pliny to interact with various anonymous interlocutors (ille, ille, and ille) and thus disturbs his otium and undermines his personal autonomy, the Horatian intertext makes the epistle interact with the genre of satire which restricts its literary or generic autonomy. Due to the sinistri sermones (‘unkind insinuations’, and also ‘ominous satire’?, 1.9.5) so typical for the urbs, Pliny’s position gets dangerously close to the roles of both ‘Horace’ and the ‘Bore’ in Sat. 1.9, and his epistle starts to change into a kind of satiric representation of his life in Rome, where everybody is everybody’s ‘bore’. Pliny’s letter 1.9 is thus not only a laudatio of countryside otium, but also an intertextual tour de force that shows us the satirizing effects of urban interactions.

In his obituary of Silius Italicus (Ep. 3.7), Pliny uses a series of apposite intertextual allusions drawn from a variety of sources (especially from Seneca’s Dialogi and Epistles, Cicero’s Epistulae ad Familiares and Hesiod) which help him denigrate Silius’ posthumous reputation. Pliny evokes several titles of Senecan works and thus virtually creates an epistolary library with a section containing Stoic best sellers. In this letter, Pliny absorbs Seneca’s Stoicism, prompts his readers to evaluate Silius’ character through the lens of Stoic discourses and to notice an inconsistency between Silius’ Stoic death and his un-Stoic way of life, while all the while associating the epic poet with Epicureanism. He has good reasons to undermine Silius’ reputation, since the latter was Pliny’s rival for the title of Cicero’s heir. However, at the same time Pliny differentiates himself from Seneca by rejecting some of his central ideas, as e.g. his idea that human life is not short. The negative insinuations against Silius are further accentuated by intratextual links with other letters addressed to Caninius Rufus.

This chapter argues that Pliny’s description of his Tuscan villa (Ep. 5.6) engages in a complex intertext with Statius’ villa descriptions in the Silvae (1.3 and 2.2). The intertext involves Pliny recognizing and ‘correcting’ Statius’ combinatorial appropriation of Lucretius and Vergil’s Georgics. Statius alludes to the concept of nature in Lucretius and Vergil in order to justify his (polemical) celebration of the domination of nature by positioning it within the didactic tradition. In doing so Statius is able to praise the extravagance of his patrons and their villas. Chinn argues that Pliny acknowledges and elaborates this intertext by ‘correcting’ Statius’ Lucretian allusion and thereby positioning himself as the controller of nature and hence the object of praise.