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  • The Art of Pliny's Letters: A Poetics of Allusion in the Private Correspondence
  • Diana Spencer
Ilaria Marchesi . The Art of Pliny's Letters: A Poetics of Allusion in the Private Correspondence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xii + 278 pp. Cloth, $99.

In this engagingly complex discussion of Pliny Books 1–9, Marchesi, like her Pliny, shows a facility in manipulating a multifarious network of allusions and readerly expectations. In the process she delivers one of those rarities, the academic page-turner. Marchesi finds, in Pliny, an acutely self-conscious and highly literary subject and sets out her agenda clearly in two opening sections (preface, viii–xii; introduction, 1–11); we should expect to find that "Pliny's epistolary corpus emerges as a carefully organised work that experiments with the boundaries of its own genre by allusively evoking and interacting with a variety of its literary antecedents" (ix).

Through five (often very) densely argued chapters, Marchesi makes a trenchant and highly convincing case for the Plinian collection as inheritor and developer, not to mention re-imaginer, of the games played by neoteric and Augustan poets. Moreover, Marchesi takes the challenging, but ultimately convincing, position that Pliny is also grappling with the canon and redrawing the rules and meaning of allusivity and intertextuality for a changed political world (8–11). Chapter 1 lays the groundwork for reading what might seem a collection of "individual fragments" (16) as a delicately balanced unity. From a Jaussian angle, Marchesi engages with epistolary personae, assessing Pliny's prose and verse [End Page 142] antecedents intertextually and situating him "at the center of the gravitational pull" of these traditions (16). Tackling the semiotics of structure by working through a range of authors, Marchesi shows that "Pliny is the first practitioner of [epistolography] who adopts a more balanced organizational technique that is able to preserve both the independence of the individual letters and the cohesion of the work" (18). Detailed analysis of Pliny's opening letter sets up Ovid's Ex Ponto as the collection's semiotic godfather (20–27). Successive unexpected but productive networks of allusion involving Virgil (and Horace) (27–39), and then Catullus (Nepos, Cicero, Plautus, and Horace; 39–52), substantiate this chapter's big conclusion: "By reusing [Catullus'] texts, [Pliny] uncovers the origin of his model's language and provides an interpretation of his poetics that is also a polemical correction of his extremism" (52).

Although at the end of chapter 1 the reader may feel a touch dazzled, and perhaps even a little bewildered by the kaleidoscopic array of ideas, texts, and, at times, cobweb-like allusions drawn into Marchesi's net, chapters 2 to 5 return again and again to the issues raised here. Pliny's project, it emerges, is through intertextual dexterity to critique the viability of discourses other than epistolarity and, through his command of culturally weighty texts (and thereby the past in texts and canonised past texts), to showcase epistolography as a new way of conceptualising literary, social, and political networks.

Marchesi's contention in chapter 2 is that we focus on Pliny the lawyer/politico/orator at our peril. Instead, we should explore Pliny's neo-neoteric credentials. A series of case-studies shows how "Pliny's position is both symptomatic of and coherent with a larger trend in post-Republican culture that aimed at defusing the most provocative aspects of neoteric poetry while preserving its potential as stylistic model" (56). Fixing first on Epp. 9.16 and 25, Marchesi shows clear links between the Plinian and Catullan personae (57–62). Shifting then to the relationships between their collections, she works through a detailed analysis of Ep. 4.14 (71–78), whereby the black-and-white ethos of Catullus 5 "is replaced . . . by the fluid exchange of antithetical features between the two parties. Moralists and poets are allied in a common camp, in which stern opposition to poetry is no more possible than a poetic opposition to morality" (75). Pliny's quotation of Catullus 16.5–8 demonstrates the shift: Catullus on how not to read becomes "an authoritative recipe for how to write" (77). The literary career as a topos has gained increasing scholarly...

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