Macer's Villa — A Previous Owner: Pliny, Ep. 5. 18

Extract

At Pliny, Ep. 5. 18 we read that Macer, the recipient of that letter, has a villa which Pliny says must be lovely, because in qua [sc. villa] se composuerat homo felicior, antequam felicissimus fieret. The identity of this homo felicior is undoubtedly of some interest, but the latest commentary on Pliny's Letters (that of A. N. Sherwin-White) has nothing to say on the matter. However, B. Radice in her two translations of the Letters (Loeb and Penguin eds.) says that the person in question is Nerva, but adds as a second possibility ‘the dictator Sulla’. In this ambivalence she is at one with many of the older commentators on the Letters. Alone among the commentators examined by us, M. Gesner (following Cortius) elects to give preference to Sulla over Nerva. We believe Sulla is certainly the owner in question, but since the ambiguity persists in the scholarly tradition, a fresh look should be taken at the problem and the case against Nerva and for Sulla be put more fully than hitherto.

In using the phrase homo felicior, antequam felicissimus fieret without actually naming the person, it is clear that Pliny takes it for granted that the individual in question will be immediately recognizable to Macer, the recipient of the letter, by this description. It follows, therefore, that the phrase had become well established as a commonplace, inevitably and unambiguously linked to one person only. All of our evidence suggests that it cannot be applied to Nerva. First of all it is likely that such a phrase would need time to become accepted into the tradition so as to become readily identifiable, whereas Pliny was writing only a relatively short time after Nerva's reign.