By Ilaria Marchesi
During this 2008 e-book on intertextuality in Pliny the more youthful, Professor Marchesi invitations an alternate studying of Pliny's number of inner most epistles: the letters are tested because the fabricated from an authorial method controlling either the rhetorical cloth of person devices and their association within the assortment. via placing recognisable fragments of canonical authors into his epistles, Pliny imports into the nonetheless fluid perform of letter-writing the rules of composition and service provider that for his contemporaries characterized different writings as literature. Allusions develop into the celebration for a metapoetic discussion, particularly with the collection's privileged addressee, Tacitus. An energetic player within the cultural politics of his time, Pliny entrusts to the letters his perspectives on poetry, oratory and historiography. In defining a version of epistolography substitute to Cicero's and complementing these of Horace, Ovid and Seneca, he additionally effectively carves a distinct segment for his paintings within the Roman literary canon.
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Extra info for The Art of Pliny's Letters: A Poetics of Allusion in the Private Correspondence
Sample text
The result of his (and of Horace’s own) efforts will be the well-adjusted and productive wisdom of a man who lives actively in his society without being engulfed by it. This is the task at hand, the poem remarks, if he wants to be at once dear to himself and to his country. In Horace’s text, the image the poem constructs of sender and addressee comes to resemble the effects of a double vision. The force of the verbs properemus and volumus in lines 28 and 29 progressively brings them together, almost to the point of identification.
Seu, 23–4). This equivalence, however, might be no less optimistic than it is precarious. In his illuminating comparative reading of these lines as setting up Horace’s Ep. 2, Kirk Freudenburg has insisted on the legal language and concerns that seep into the text and suspend it between a discussion of poetic matters and one on the necessity of civil engagement. He might, however, not have been the first to pick up on the lexical signals: the Horace–Pliny connection might help us to read Horace’s epistle in its fully problematic light.
In Pliny’s collection situationally connected epistles contribute to the same fragmenting effect. 1 (on the illness of the slave reader), all addressed to Septicius Clarus. 18 (on strategies for securing public beneficence after one’s death). 11 (on the questionable sale of part of Pliny’s estate by one of his freedmen). 30 (on the nature and forms of generosity). By reinforcing the sense that we are reading a disordered gathering of independent texts, the recurrence of the same addressee contributes to the reality effect of the collection.