Pliny Epistulae 4.13: "Communal Conspiracy" at Comum

While still at his villa in Tusculum, trying to complete what he calls an opusculum of hendecasyllabic poetry (Ep. 4.13.1), Pliny sends a praecursoria epistula (Ep. 4.13.2) to Tacitus in Rome for the appointment of a qualified teacher to instruct at a new school of rhetoric at Comum, Pliny's hometown.¹ Pliny asks Tacitus to find among his acquaintances and students candidates for the newly created position (Ep. 4.13.10), persons who would prove assets in working towards the commonweal of the small town. The school itself, as the letter explains, is being founded and funded (up to one-third) on Pliny's own initiative: he urges his fellow townsmen to recognize that young men of Comum, forced to seek further education at Mediolanum, ought to stay at home, spend less money, and benefit the local community instead.

In this letter, Pliny emphasizes the role of community as opposed to individuality by submitting his own funds, the resources of an individual, to the commonwealth of his native town. At the same time, however, through the use of appropriate vocabulary, Pliny summons the power of the rhetoric required to request his friend Tacitus' assistance in finding a teacher. Pliny's careful deployment of specific verbs, compounds of cum (con-), invites us to sense the underlying message of what could be called "communal conspiracy" for the achievement of unity which ought to prevail, according to Pliny, in the present situation. The compounds of cum used in this letter are indeed common words in the Latin corpus (such as confero); in the Epistles, for instance, confero appears forty-six times, the noun collatio ten times. Similarly, the verb consuesco appears eight times, whereas verbs such as consentio and confluo occur less frequently, four and three times respectively. In addition, the verb conduco, a common word for hiring in Latin, appears only seven times in the Plinian corpus, three of which occur in 4.13.² As I shall demonstrate in the following analysis, through the unusually heavy-handed rhetorical compilation of such vocabulary, Pliny crafts a literary discourse to gain Tacitus' support for the project in communal education.³

More specifically, in the beginning of his letter, Pliny claims that his little book of hendecasyllables needs more polishing; therefore he has to spend more days away from Rome: ipse pauculis adhuc diebus in Tusculano commorabor ("I will stay longer for just a few days in the Tusculan villa," Ep. 4.13.1).⁴ The compound appears nowhere else in the letters. This unique usage aims at preparing the careful reader for what follows, an excellent mastery of vocabulary on Pliny's part which emphasizes the communal spirit he will advocate to his fellow countrymen.

The larger part of the epistle is a detailed account of what happens at Comum during Pliny's visit and how the prestigious Roman persuades his fellow citizens to consider his plan for the foundation of a new school. This account is fashioned in an intermingling of both direct and indirect speech that makes it vivid and authoritative at the same time.⁵ When Pliny interrogates a certain young man about his studies, after a swift interchange of monolectic phrases, Pliny turns to the boy's parents to scold them for letting the youth go to another city for further studies. Here Pliny affirms parenthetically, et opportune complures patres audiebant ("and luckily several fathers were listening," Ep. 4.13.4). Following the same pattern as in the first instance examined above, Pliny uses the word complures, another compound of cum, an adjective usually coupled with dies in other contexts.⁶ In this case, the writer applies the word to people in order to lay emphasis on the sense of a community surrounding his efforts. When Pliny asserts that staying home is far more advantageous than studying abroad in terms of both expense and moral safety, he uses another compound verb, continerentur: ubi enim aut iucundius morarentur quam in patria aut pudicius continerentur quam sub oculis parentum aut minore sumptu quam domi? ("for where more pleasantly could they live than in...