[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]
“How far have Latin intertextual studies moved on from Conte and Hinds?” So asks Elena Giusti in her recent critical assessment of intertextuality as practised by Latinists over the last few decades.[1] Her view is that we haven’t, really, moved on at all: while the cardinal contributions of Gian Biagio Conte (Rhetoric of Imitation, Cornell University Press, 1986) and Stephen Hinds (Allusion and Intertext, Cambridge University Press, 1998) certainly tuned into the dynamism and unpredictability of Julia Kristeva’s original conception of intertextuality, they also allowed a more “static and prohibitive” model to gain traction:[2] a model that construes literary tradition in strictly linear terms, views texts as fixed entities, clings to the notion of authorial intention (despite claims otherwise), and conceives of literary relations exclusively along Oedipal (i.e., Bloomian) lines. By continuing to operate within these parameters, “[s]cholarship on Latin intertextuality has long been at a standstill”.[3]
An antidote to this dispiriting conclusion may be found in scholarship on prose intertextuality, which over the last few years has made a concerted attempt to “restore some of the Kristevan breadth” to the study of intertextuality in prose as well as verse. That is one of the stated aims of the volume Literary Interactions Under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian (eds. A. König and C. Whitton, Cambridge Uniersity Press, 2018),[4] the first volume spawned by the Literary Interactions Project led by Alice König at St. Andrew’s, which has since produced an even more ambitious follow-up, Literature and Culture in the Roman Empire, 96-235: Cross-Cultural Interactions (eds. A. König, R. Langlands, and J. Uden, Cambridge University Press, 2020). “Interactions” is indeed the operative term here, designed as it is to liberate us from the baggage that has, whether we like it or not, accrued around ‘intertextuality’ (authorially intended; signalled by rare lexis or syntax; deployed by ‘canonical’ poets; etc.), and thus to encourage exploration of a host of new areas: the “fuzzier”,[5] less concrete convergences in theme or content; the absence or occlusion of intertextual relations; the relationship between literary texts and ‘non-literary’ sources (oral anecdotes; monuments; ‘technical’ literature), and whether such a distinction is even viable; and so on. An attempt, in other words, has at least been started to answer Don Fowler’s typically prescient call to progress beyond the “tamed and domesticated” model of intertextuality that has tended to hold the most currency in Classics.[6]
The volume under review is a welcome contribution to this attempt. The editors explicitly invoke the work of the Literary Interactions Project (p.9) and so adopt a broad range of intertextual modes in order to show that (and how) Pliny “absorbs” (the key term: pp. 6, 7, 12, 13, 16, 24, 26) a wealth of genres and discourses into his own epistolary edifice. The volume therefore also has a more immediate aim within Plinian studies: to demonstrate not simply that the Epistles is intertextually dense (the ‘intertextual turn’ in Plinian scholarship is well and truly mainstream now),[7] but that this intertextuality contributes specifically to the “generic enrichment” of the epistolary form (pp. 6-7). As the editors show in their introduction (replete with a case-study on an “interactive” [note the term] trio of letters: see pp. 13-20 on Ep. 4.26-8), Pliny’s “absorption” of other genres plays into a number of his main concerns in the Epistles: his literary ambitions (his creation of an “epistolary ‘super-genre’”, pp. 7, 12) and self-positioning (for absorption entails both assimilation to, and differentiation from, other genres; p. 12); his ethical self-fashioning (cf. p. 18); and his assertion of the “generic mobility” of epistolography more generally (p. 8). This last point of course raises the question of how other ancient letter-collections incorporate foreign discourses—a question that the editors welcome as an object of further study (p. 26).
There is no room here to discuss in detail each of the ensuing chapters, but there is also no need: the editors themselves helpfully summarise each one and its place within the volume (pp. 21-6), a feature that should be a mainstay of all edited volumes. So let me paint with a broader brush: most of the chapters take a single letter or a small selection of letters to provide a case-study in how Pliny engages with an author, text, or entire generic discourse and adapts it to the “communicative purposes” (p. 7) of his particular context; Gibson (Ch. 2) and König (Ch. 3), however, take a wider perspective by asking how Pliny’s intertextuality is shaped over the course of a whole book (Book 6 in Gibson’s case, very much whetting our appetites for his forthcoming volume on that book; Book 10 in König’s). These are particularly valuable contributions that should encourage us to study Plinian intertextuality within a broader context or sequence, rather than through single, isolated examples. That is not to say, though, that the more targeted studies in this volume do not make for stimulating reading. Neger (Ch.13), for instance, offers an excellent demonstration of how Pliny domesticates satiric or iambic ira within the affability of epistolary amicitia, while Chinn (Ch.10) shows that Pliny locates the villa ecphrasis of Ep. 5.16 within a didactic tradition (chiefly represented by Lucretius) that legitimises rather than castigates human manipulation of nature—a good example, I think, of how Pliny’s rejection of rigid, traditional moralising is not intellectual complacency but something that he seeks to justify as an ethical position in its own right. This dovetails with Pliny’s “opportunistic” use of Senecan philosophy as discussed by Hanaghan (Ch. 7, pp. 149 n. 3, 157) and Tzounakas (Ch. 8, pp. 165, 184): while I think this term risks underplaying the care and thoroughness with which Pliny conducts his engagement with Seneca, it nevertheless captures how he rarely adopts the philosopher’s moral strictures wholesale and in fact “differentiate[s]” himself from him in order to “safeguard for himself the image of humanus” (pp. 174-5).
Naturally, every individual intertextual claim will not convince everyone. The specific connection between Ep. 10.2 and Tac. Agr. 44-5 (p. 76), while interesting, should perhaps have acknowledged that Pliny’s conceit (the desire to have children under a ‘good’ emperor) is a stock feature of imperial praise;[8] the parallel (p. 154) between Ep. 1.12.8 securus liberque moriturus and Ep. mor. 98.18 libenter moritur is muddied slightly by the fact that liber (and its derivatives) is found with mori several times elsewhere in Seneca and before him;[9] and the idea that Ep. 3.7 includes references to the titles of “almost all the essays that constitute Seneca’s Dialogi” (p. 170) would, I think, have been more persuasive if it had addressed whether Seneca’s dialogues bore the same titles in antiquity as they do today,[10] and whether they were circulated or recognised as a distinct set of twelve in Pliny’s day.[11] But even in these more contentious moments, the volume succeeds in provoking reflections about the kind of evidence that we (or at least I) tend to assume is the ‘right’ sort on which to base claims of intentional intertextual reference.
Nor does the volume confine itself to intentionalist claims. The editors are explicit about this (pp. 8-9); and while most of the ensuing chapters do argue for the intentional evocation of a text (or author or genre) on the part of Pliny himself (Whitton; König, esp. pp. 82-3; Gibson; Mordue; Hanaghan; Tzounakas; Chinn; Pigoń; Neger), many of them operate on the more ‘interactive’ side of the spectrum (Hindermann; Marchesi), remain alert to the reader’s role in forging intertexts (Introduction, p. 20; König, pp. 92-3), acknowledge the autonomy of the text (Mordue, pp. 100-1), and, in Kristevan fashion, emphasise the inevitability of certain literary interactions (Canobbio, p. 195; Tamás, pp. 221, 223, 240). As I have already said, this diversity of intertextual modes is important if we are to restore to Latin intertextual studies the sort of dynamism called for by Giusti; it is also desirable, since, as Marchesi emphasises in the volume’s final chapter (pp. 301-2), the different modes are often entangled with one another, and productively so. It should be added, too, that these less authorially centred modes do not run counter to the volume’s ultimately intentionalist claim about “Pliny’s praxis of absorbing literary genres” (p. 12);[12] for while interactions that are “not generated deliberately by the author” (p. 8) may not inform us about Pliny’s own artistic strategies, they illustrate the inherent interactivity of epistolography (or indeed any text) and how Pliny works with that. Tamás’ chapter is a fine example of this, showing that the situation depicted in Ep. 1.9 inevitably drags Pliny into dialogue with (Horatian) satire, but that this dialogue is hardly obfuscated by Pliny himself, not least because of the curious “numerological parallel” of Ep. 1.9 ~ Hor. Sat. 1.9 (pp. 227-8). In short, the volume is a healthy reminder that a broadly intentionalist purpose need not adopt a solely intentionalist methodology.
Nevertheless, the diversity of intertextual modes calls for a practical consideration. Since the volume explicitly positions itself in relation to the Literary Interactions Project, I would have preferred that it were more consistent with that project’s terminology. In König & Whitton 2018: 13, “extratextuality” denotes interactions between literary texts and oral anecdotes, but in the present volume the term refers to when two (or more) texts exhibit similar but seemingly independent treatment of the same theme or “discursive field” (pp. 8-9, 283). That definition, however, is much closer to what König & Whitton 2018: 12 call “interdiscursivity” (“synchronic but seemingly independent convergences in theme and content”)—a term used in the present volume, however, to denote “evocations of whole genres and discourses” (pp. 9, 68n.6), which is in turn a definition that corresponds to what König and Whitton 2018: 21 call “generic interdiscursivity”. Can we be consistent with these terms or at least explicate disagreements over their referents?
Lest I end on a negative note, however, I will reiterate that this volume constitutes a set of lucidly written essays that refine our understanding of intertextuality in the Epistles, and indeed of intertextuality more generally.[13]
Authors and Titles
Introduction—Margot Neger and Spyridon Tzounakas
Part I: Intertextuality and Interdiscursivity in Pliny’s Letters
- Pliny, Man of Many Parts—Christopher Whitton
- Intertextuality in Pliny, Epistles 6—Roy Gibson
- Discourses of Authority in Pliny, Epistles 10—Alice König
Part II: Models and Anti-Models: Pliny’s Interaction with Oratory and Natural History
- Oratorical Speeches and the Political Elite in the Regulus Cycle—Matthew Mordue
- Again on Corinthian Bronzes and Vases and on the Use of Cicero’s Verrine Orations in Pliny’s Works—Stefano Rocchi
- The Elder Pliny as Source of Inspiration: Pliny the Younger’s Reception of the Naturalis Historia and his Uncle’s Writing by the Light of the Lamp (lucubratio)—Judith Hindermann
Part III: Pliny and Seneca: Discourses of Grief and Posthumous Reputation
- Pliny’s Seneca and the Intertextuality of Grief—Michael Hanaghan
- Intertextuality and Posthumous Reputation in Pliny’s Letter on the Death of Silius Italicus (Plin. Ep. 3.7)—Spyridon Tzounakas
Part IV: Pliny’s Villas and their Poetic Models
- The Villa and the Monument: Horace in Pliny, Epistles 1.3—Alberto Canobbio
- The Villas of Pliny and Statius—Christopher Chinn
Part IV: Pliny Turns Nasty: Satire and the Scoptic Tradition
- A Busy Day in Rome: Pliny, Epistles 1.9 Satirized by Horace, Satires 1.9—Ábel Tamás
- Putting Pallas Out of Context: Pliny on the Roman Senate Voting Honours to a Freedman (Plin. Ep. 7.29 and 8.6)—Jakub Pigoń
- Risus et indignatio: Scoptic Elements in Pliny’s Letters—Margot Neger
Part VI: Final Thoughts: Discourses of Representation and Reproduction
14. Pliny’s Calpurnia: Filiation, Imitation, Allusion—Ilaria Marchesi
Notes
[1] E. Giusti, “Vergilian Criticism and the Intertextual Aeneid”, Mnemosyne 76.5 (2023), pp.871-95, at p.874 (open access).
[2] Ibid., p.872.
[3] Ibid.
[4] See König and Whitton, “Introduction”, pp.1-34, at p.12 with n.61 (also p.22).
[5] Ibid., p.21.
[6] D. Fowler, “On the Shoulders of Giants: Intertextuality and Classical Studies”, MD 39 (1997), pp. 13-34, at p. 13.
[7] The editors provide a helpful and up-to-date bibliography on scholarship on Plinian intertextuality (p. 5 n. 24).
[8] See Sen. Clem. 1.13.5 with Braund, S. (ed., tr.), Seneca, De clementia, Oxford University Press (2009), p.313.
[9] Ep. mor. 7.5, 61.2 (note also 76.27); Cic. Rab. perd. 16, Att. 7.9.4; Liv. 2.40.8; Sen. Contr. 9.4.5 (note also Suas. 6.10).
[10] E.g. De constantia Sapientis (“recalled”, p.169, by Pliny in 3.7.2 inreuocabili constantia and 3.7.3 sapienter se … gesserat) is called Nec iniuriam nec contumeliam accipere sapientem in the Ambrosianus (our oldest MS), and this may preserve an ancient title; see also Lact. Diu. inst. 5.22.11 on De prouidentia. Plin. Ep. 3.7.2 probably does have Seneca in view, though: insanabilis clauus, cuius taedio ad mortem inreuocabili constantia decucurrit ~ Ep. mor. 24.22 (paraphrasing Epicurus) Ridiculum est currere ad mortem taedio uitae (a letter Pliny echoes elsewhere, Ep. 1.8-10 ~ 24.24-5).
[11] See e.g. Rossbach, O., “De Senecae Dialogis”, Hermes 17 (1882), pp.365-76; Griffin, M., Seneca: a Philosopher in Politics, Oxford Clarendon Press (1976), pp.413-15; Reynolds, L.D. (ed.), L. Annaei Senecae Dialogorum Libri Duodecim, Oxford Clarendon Press (1977), pp.ix-x.
[12] See also the blurb (“Pliny’s strategies…”) and pp.8, 13, and 26 for intentionalist language.
[13] There are some typos (e.g. “absorbed in Pliny’<s> letters”, p. 24; “target[t]ing”, p.41; “about whom he writes [about] with more warmth”, p. 130; “skoptic”, p. 302, but “scoptic” elsewhere), but none of any consequence.