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The Fate of Pliny's Letters in the Late Empire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Alan Cameron
Alan Cameron
Affiliation:
Bedford College, London
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Extract

Whatever fond hopes their author may have entertained when he published them, the Letters of the younger Pliny did not meet with an appreciative public. The first, indeed almost the only, writer before modern times to have read them with care and to have signalled his admiration by imitation is Sidonius Apollinaris, bishop of Auvergne in the late fifth century.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , December 1965 , pp. 289 - 298
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1965

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References

1 Cf. SirSyme, Ronald, Tacitus i (1958), 98.Google Scholar

2 See Geisler's index to Luetjohann's edition of Sidonius (M.G.H., A.A. viii [1887], 353–83). I would myself drastically reduce the number of these alleged echoes, but there can be no doubt that Sidonius was tiioroughly familiar with the Letters. See further below, p. 295.Google Scholar

3 Manitius, M., Philologus xlvii (1888), 566 f.Google ScholarSchuster, M., Wiener Studien xlv (1937), 120 f.,Google Scholar suggests that an epigram of Agathias on the technique of a legacy-hunting doctor (Anth. Pal. ii. 382)Google Scholar is based on Pliny's account of a similar method employed by the unscrupulous Regulus (Ep. 2. 20. 2–6). But the theme of the heredipeta is ubiquitous in the literature of the Empire, and most of their tricks were probably used often enough in real life—perhaps this one still worked in sixth-century Constantinople. In any case, my wife, who is writing a detailed study of Agathias, tells me diat he shows no sign of knowing any more Latin, than the bare minimum he may have had to get up for his profession as a lawyer (and this need not have been much after Justinian's day); certainly no sign of any acquaintance with Latin literature.

4 ‘The Tradition of Pliny's Letters’, Class. Phil. x (1915), 10 f.:Google Scholar cf. also the preface to his edition of 1922, pp. i f.

5 ‘The Coalescence of the two Plinys’, T.A.Ph.A. lxxxvi (1955), 250 f. On this date see below, p. 295 n. 2.Google Scholar

6 Duff, J. Wight, A Literary History of Rome in the Silver Age 2 (1960), p. 443,Google Scholar and Syme, , Tacitus ii (1958), p. 503 n. 5.Google ScholarSchuster, M., R-E. xxi. 1. 454, claims that the Letters found ‘in spätrömischer Zeit vielfach Nachahmung’—but the only example he cites is Sidonius.Google Scholar

7 Though hardly such an original observation as Stout seems to imagine: see, for example, the discussion of Roth, C. L., in the preface to his edition of Suetonius (1857), pp. lxxxviii f.Google Scholar

1 Essai sur Suétone (1900), p. 71.Google Scholar

2 Courcelle, P., Les lettres grecques en Occident de Macrobe à Cassiodore 2 (1948), p. 20, a serious omission in the bibliography of J. A. Willis's new Teubner edition of Macrobius.Google Scholar

3 Courcelle, op. cit., ch. 1, passim. Indeed, the text of Gellius can (or should) be of use for establishing the text of Macrobius: cf. Marshall, P. K., C.R. N.s. xiv (1964), 170, commenting on the shortcomings of Willis's edition in this respect.Google Scholar

4 Courcelle, , op. cit., p. 11.Google Scholar

1 Op cit., (n. i) p. 1.

2 Hence J. Morris was quite wrong to write of ‘the second century emperors and senators, brought up on the writings of Tacitus and Pliny’ (’Senate and Emperor’, . Studies presented to George Thomson [1963], p. 158;Google Scholar cf. p. 150). Fronto's favourite historian was undoubtedly Sallust, and Hadrian actually preferred Coelius Antipater to Sallust (S.H.A. Hadr. 16. 6).Google Scholar There is no evidence at all that Tacitus exercised the influence Morris imagines on second- or third-century thought; he did not come into his own till the fourth century, and then not primarily as a thinker (Hermes xcii [1964], 375).Google Scholar

3 Similarly he is the only writer before the fourth century to show knowledge of Juvenal: see my remarks in Hermes xcii (1964) 368 f.,Google Scholar and Highet, , Juvenal the Satirist (1954), p. 183;Google Scholar though cf. Wiesen, D., Latomus xxii (1963), 441 n. 2.Google Scholar

1 Did Tertullian's edition perhaps give inguirendi for conquirendi ?

2 See Hermes xcii (1964), 368 f.Google Scholar

3 See Highet, , Juvenal the Satirist (1954), P. 299 n. 13.Google Scholar

1 Macé, , Essai sur Suétone (1900), pp. 68–69;Google ScholarFunaioli, , R-E. iv A 598.Google Scholar

2 Hagendahl, H., Latin Fathers and the Classics (1958), pp. 308–9.Google Scholar

3 ‘De Aeschine Rhodi exulante’, Wiener Studien xxxiv (1917), 168.Google Scholar

1 Courcelle, , op. cit., pp. 67–68.Google Scholar

2 Ibid., p. 68 n. 5.

3 i.e. 395 and 398 tne dates of Jerome's Epp. 53 and 73. His Chronicle was written in 379–80, and it would be attractive to conjecture that Jerome first read Pliny's Letters some time between 380 and 395. But his commentaries on Isaiah and Ezekiel date from 408–10 and 410–14 respectively, and in any case, as I have pointed out above, p. 290, a reading of the Letters would not necessarily have saved Jerome from making the confusion.

4 Op. cit., p. 187.Google Scholar

5 On which cf. A. W. Allen, in Critical Essays on Roman Literature: Elegy Lyric, ed. J. P. Sullivan (1962), pp. 119 f.

6 But not especially surprising in one familiar with both writers: cf. Syme, , Tacitus i. 97.Google Scholar Scaliger actually suggested that the line came from one of Pliny's poems as well as one of Martial's. But while it is possible that Pliny plagiarized Martial, it is hardly likely that Ausonius had access to Pliny's poems.

1 Macé, , Essai sur Suétone (1900), pp. 68 f.Google Scholar

2 He apparently chooses 468, because the first book of Sidonius’ own Letters, decked out with imitations of Pliny, was published, he claims, in that year. In fact it was published probably in 477 (Stevens, C. E., Sidonius Apollinaris and his Age [1933], p. 169 n. 1), and in any event I fail to see why Sidonius should have ‘discovered’ the manuscript in the same year as he published a book of letters many of which he had actually written nearly twenty years earlier.Google Scholar

3 La Fin du paganisme ii (1891), 193.Google Scholar

4 Symmachus was, of course, like all panegyrists of the later empire, perfectly familiar with Pliny's Panegyricus. Hence I leave out of count Macrobius’ statement (Sat. 5. 1. 7)Google Scholar that Symmachus imitated the ‘pingue et floridum [genus dicendi]’ in which ‘Plinius Secundus’ excelled. Macrobius is thinking of Symmachus’ oratory, his principal claim to fame among his contemporaries—though Loyen, A., Sidoine Apollinaire et l'esprit précieux en Gaule aux derniers jours de l'empire (1943), p. xv,Google Scholar thinks that Macrobius may have been alluding to the style of Symmachus’ letters as well. This possibility would be effectively ruled out if, as is generally supposed, Macrobius wrote the Saturnalia in the 390's, some ten years before the publication of Symmachus’ Letters. However, I hope to argue elsewhere that it was in fact written about 430, in which case the possibility would be left open.

5 De Q. Aurelii Symmachi studiis graecis et latinis, Bresl. phil. Abh. vi. 2 (1891), 94.Google Scholar

6 Sidonius Apollinaris (1933), p. 61.Google Scholar

1 Op. cit., p. 171.Google Scholar

2 Cf. McGeachy, J. A. Jr, Quintus Aurelius Symmachus and the Senatorial Aristocracy of the West, Diss., Chicago, 1942, p. 169:Google Scholar ‘The younger Pliny seems to have influenced Symmachus more in the organisation of his letters than in style and content.’ Cf. also Romano, D., Simmaco (1955), p. 90.Google Scholar

3 p. xvii of the preface to his edition, M.G.H., A.A. vi. 1 (1883).Google Scholar

4 The relationes as we have them have a separate manuscript tradition: cf. Seeck, , op. cit., pp. xvi f.Google Scholar The famous third relatio on the altar of Victory is also transmitted along with Ambrose's refutation among the works of Ambrose.

5 ‘…als Gegenstück zu der Korrespondenz des Plinius mit Traian’, Peter, H., ‘Der Brief in der römischen Literatur,’ Abh. d. Kgl. sacks. Gesellsch. d. Wiss., Phil.-hist. Kl. xx. 3 (1901) 148.Google Scholar

6 Cf. also Stout's article ‘The Basis of the Text in Book X of Pliny's Letters’, T.A.Ph.A. lxxxvi (1955), 233 f.,Google Scholar ‘In the last years of the fifth century A.D. a manuscript of the correspondence between Pliny and Trajan was discovered …’ and his Scribe and Critic at Work in Pliny's Letters, Indiana Univ. Publ., Humanities Ser. No. 30 (1954), 54 f.Google Scholar

1 SirMynors, Roger, preface to his Oxford text of the Letters (1963), p. vi § 2.Google Scholar

2 Cf. Pasquali, G., Storia delta tradizione 2 (1952), p. 366,Google Scholar and Buchner, K., in Gesch. d. Textüberlieferung (1961), pp. 348 f.Google Scholar

3 Cf. Hermes xcii (1964), 369 f.Google Scholar

1 Hermes xcii (1964) 375.Google Scholar

2 Schuster in his second Teubner ed. ad loc. cites Rutilius Namatianus' use of the word cataracta in the sense ‘flood gate’ (De Reditu i. 481)Google Scholar as an echo of Pliny, Ep. 10. 69. 4. But the word is found so used elsewhere; the Thesaurus cites several examples from Ammianus (3. 596. 14 f.). Did Ammianus know Pliny's Letters? G. B. A. Fletcher, in his thorough study of Ammianus' literary borrowings in Rev. de Phil. lxiii (1937) 377 f.,Google Scholar found no trace of them in Ammianus' history, and E. E. L. Owens specifically remarks, on p. 10 of his unpublished dissertation Phraseological Parallels and Borrowings in Ammianus Marcellinus from Earlier Latin Authors (London, 1958),Google Scholar that Pliny ‘seems not to have been employed at all by Ammianus’. It is perhaps worth just drawing attention to G. B. Pighi's demonstration (Studia Ammianea [1935], pp. 122–3)Google Scholar that a phrase in Ammianus 21. 13. 9 that is usually emended can be retained on the analogy of Pliny, Ep. 6. 33. 3, though this can hardly be used as proof that Ammianus was consciously imitating Pliny, and Pighi certainly does not suggest this. Cataracta in this meaning is extremely rare—but this is hardly sufficient reason to insist that Rutilius and Ammianus could only have come across it so used in Pliny (it was presumably a technical term which just happens, not surprisingly, to occur but seldom in literature); it would be safer to conclude that there is really no evidence at all that either had read Pliny, though equally, of course, no proof that either had not. W. Ensslin's suggestion (Zur Geschichtsschreibung und Weltanschauung des Ammianus Marcellinus, Klio, Beiheft xvi, 1922, 18)Google Scholar that Ammianus' reflections on the danger of writing contemporary history were based on Pliny's similar remarks in Ep. v. 8, is very far-fetched. Ammianus hardly needed Pliny to tell him tiiat such an undertaking was ‘periculosae plenum opus aleae’.

3 I am grateful to Mr. A. N. Sherwin-White for kindly reading a draft of this article.