The Women of Pliny’s Letters by Jo-Ann Shelton (review)

This latest addition to Routledge’s Women of the Ancient World series is by far the most ambitious and complex, undertaking as it does consideration of the lives of the dozens of women who are mentioned in Pliny the Younger’s Epistulae. Reconstructing the lives of Roman women is a task fraught with difficulties, not the least of which is the male perspective of the sources. As much recent scholarship has clearly demonstrated, Pliny’s letters are all about Pliny, with all the individuals he writes or refers to playing their roles in his “life story,” as he has written it. Shelton is acutely aware of Pliny’s intent to present himself and the individuals he characterizes as exempla, both positive and negative, and indeed it is this very feature of the letters that makes them an ideal conduit for the examination of the lives of Roman elite women, yet not for the purpose of creating biographies per se—too little is known of most of these women—but rather biographical sketches of individual women that begin from whatever Pliny has to say, and are fleshed out by what we know of Roman social, legal, and cultural practices. As a result, the work frequently and sometimes frustratingly relies on supposition about a woman’s life: what might have happened to her at a given stage or in particular circumstances. But Shelton is careful to acknowledge the speculative nature of her hypotheses, and her choice to enrich what can be gleaned from Pliny with digressions on various aspects of Roman culture does create a cohesive text of what might otherwise be merely a collection of disjointed bits of information. What emerges is a handbook for the study of Roman women at the end of the first and beginning of the second century c.e.—comprehensive and particularly suited for teachers and students of Roman society of the early Principate.

In seven chapters, Shelton considers all of the women in Pliny’s letters, both named and unnamed, including whatever prosopographical information is available, almost all of which, not surprisingly, pertains to their fathers, brothers, and husbands. She offers stemmata at the beginning of the book for some of the more complex familial relationships considered and in every case distills relevant scholarship in such a way as to make it accessible for the non-specialist in the main text and engaging for the specialist in the endnotes.

The first and second chapters stand apart for their focus on particular women, Arria the Elder (immortalized for uttering the words, “It does not hurt, Paetus,” as she killed herself in order to encourage her condemned husband to do the same and die with honor) and her family, respectively, while the remaining chapters deal with women in their various roles (chap. 3, “Pliny’s Wives”; chap. 4, “Mothers, Nurses, and Stepmothers”; chap. 5, “Grandmothers, Aunts, and Mothers-in-Law; chap. 6, “Daughters and Sisters”; chap. 7, “Women outside the Family,” i.e., Vestal Virgins, slaves, freedwomen). Although it is difficult to imagine an alternative arrangement that would be any less problematic, the structure she has chosen forces Shelton to repeat information later in the text for Arria and her family, who are, of course, wives, mothers, and sisters, and for many other women who fit more than one category, and to insert numerous backward and forward references; such repetition is particularly noticeable when the book is read in large chunks and even occurs occasionally within chapters (e.g., concerning Calpurnius Fabatus’ potential misgivings about Pliny as a suitable husband for his granddaughter, 101 and 112–13) or between the notes and the text (e.g., 112 and 357, n. 72). As distracting as it can be for the persistent reader, however, this approach does allow the book to be read piecemeal, which may make it friendlier when used as a textbook or for quick reference.

Shelton’s decision to separate Arria the Elder...