Chapter 4 identifies the Tiberian era as the moment when Roman writers started representing the establishment of the Principate as a civic rebirth. Benefiting from the hindsight granted by half a century of peace, Manilius, Velleius Paterculus, and Valerius Maximus constructed a triumphant narrative that equated the acquisition of a head of state with the end of civil war. Yet their imagery also betrayed growing concern over the succession, a weakness encoded in the fabric of the Principate’s Republican façade. This problem became acute with the violent assassination of Caligula, which exposed the vulnerability of a political community dependent on one man for its survival. Those writing under Claudius, including the Elder Seneca, Philo of Alexandria, and Curtius Rufus, consequently began returning to imagery of a sick, aged, and headless body politic. Their revival of this tradition confirmed that the Augustan restoration was not a permanent solution. With each transfer of power came a new head of state who could harm or heal the body under his care.

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.

On the Ides of March 44 BC, a momentous occasion took place in the history of Rome: Julius Caesar was assassinated in a crowded meeting of the senate.1 Almost immediately the scramble to define, legitimize, and record the act was set in motion. Marcus Junius Brutus, we are told, raised his dagger in the air and called on Cicero, presumably hoping he would be the ideal advocate for their deed; after all, Cicero had spoken out vigorously against tyranny in his published works, and this is the line they wanted to take now: that Caesar was a tyrant justly slain. For the same reason, the assassins took control over their image by rebranding themselves as ‘Liberators’ – that is, as the men who had freed Rome from Caesar’s rule. On the afternoon of the Ides, Brutus and Cassius attempted to address the people of Rome in a contio – a public meeting hastily convened in the forum. But there was little public support either then or in the meetings that followed.

Chapter 4 charts the Decameron’s rewritings of exemplary anecdotes by Roman historical authors. The young Boccaccio has been associated with Trecento vernacularizations of Livy, Ovid, and Valerius Maximus, and his early engagement with translation and his commitment to Italian literary culture are indisputable. This chapter investigates how novella 2.9’s revision of the episode of Lucretia’s suicide in Livy participates in larger debates about the nature of women and the usefulness of generalizations. It also examines Decameron 4.1 – which takes its details from the suicide of Sophonisba – to argue that in killing herself like her classical forerunners, Ghismunda attributes a closer analogy between her situation and theirs than is warranted. The end of the chapter concentrates on Day 10, dedicated to the virtue of magnanimity, especially tales 10.3, 10.6, and 10.8, which echo exempla from Valerius Maximus’ Memorable Doings and Sayings. Although all of this day’s stories seem straightforward narratives of magnificent deeds worthy of imitation, the tales slide inadvertently into ambiguity and parody, belying their ethical pretensions.