Introduction: Pliny the Younger in Late Antiquity

History does not record who was pronounced the winner in a poetic contest between the emperor Valentinian and Ausonius, the tutor to his son Gratian. If the contest was prompted by Gratian's wedding, it would date to about 374, but our knowledge of it is restricted to Ausonius's cento nuptialis as sent in a letter to his friend Paulus a few years later, complete with prose introduction and epilogue.¹ Ausonius's Vergilian cento is best known for its closing, sensationally pornographic section (101-31), after which he turns again to Paulus, in apologia; Ausonius's defensive strategy here is essentially to include himself in a catalogue of writers where clear differentiation was required between an author's publications and their moral conduct (139.1-8 Green):

sed cum legeris, adesto mihi aduersum eos, qui, ut Iuvenalis ait "Curios simulant et Bacchanalia uiuunt," ne fortasse mores meos spectent de carmine. "lasciua est nobis pagina, uita proba," ut Martialis dicit. meminerint autem, quippe eruditi, probissimo uiro Plinio in poematiis lasciuiam, in moribus constitisse censuram, prurire opusculum Sulpiciae, frontem caperare, esse Apuleium in uita philosophum, in epigrammatis amatorem, in praeceptis Ciceronis exstare seueritatem, in epistulis ad Caerelliam subesse petulantiam . . .

But when you have read it, stand with me against those who, as Juvenal says, "pretend to be Curii and live like Bacchanals" [Sat. 2.3], so they don't by chance view my conduct from my poem. "My page is wanton, my life virtuous" as Martial says [Epig. 1.4.8]. But let them recall, erudite as they are, that Pliny, a most virtuous man, is wanton in his verses, severe in his manners; that Sulpicia's little work is spicy, her forehead wrinkled; that Apuleius was a philosopher in his lifestyle, a lover in his epigrams; that seriousness distinguishes Cicero's precepts, licentiousness lurks in his letters to Caerellia . . .

The list goes on to include Plato, Annianus, Laevius, Evenus, Menander, and Vergil himself. The catalogue draws us in with its glimpses of reading habits in late fourth-century Gaul, but teases with its exclusions and inclusions: why not the locus classicus, Catullus 16, or Ovid's lengthy insistence on his moral innocence which itself catalogues many Greek and Roman authors (Tristia 2.359ff.)?² How did Ausonius know of Sulpicia's poetry?³ How did Apuleius's Epigrams and Cicero's licentious letters to Caerellia reach Ausonius and when were they then lost? What was to be the subsequent fate of Annianus, Laevius, and Evenus? And— to introduce the headline act of this volume's focus—what did Ausonius know of Pliny the Younger?

The first point to be made is textual. The reference seems to attest to a familiarity, at least on the part of Ausonius and his addressee Paulus, with Pliny's poetry and a contrasting personal reputation. We can be sure from his own poetry that Ausonius knew Martial's epigrams, but nevertheless, in the passage above, the manuscripts of the cento nuptialis read "lasciua est nobis pagina, uita proba, ut Plinius dicit" (i.e., Plinius not Martialis).⁴ Scaliger suggested that a Pliny poem had contained the same verse as Martial's verbatim and so defended the transmitted text; Alan Cameron, in his landmark 1965 article, agrees that the text was correct as transmitted, but also that it preserved a confusion on Ausonius's part between Pliny and Martial that was entirely understandable in the circumstances (especially in view of Pliny's letter about Martial, Epist. 3.21). R. P. H. Green adopts Poelman's emendation to Martialis, assuming a transmission error caused by Plinio in the next line.⁵

If the MS reading is accepted, then one possible answer to the question posed above is that Ausonius did not know the work of Pliny the Younger as well as he wanted his reader(s) to believe. But even if Poelman's emendation is preferred and Ausonius is absolved of the charge of carelessness in citation, what the passage reveals of his knowledge of Pliny still appears compromising. The grecism poematia was not the standard word for...