The Epistles of Pliny

by: Gibson, R. Whitton, Chr.

This is the first volume to bring together the best scholarship on Pliny from recent decades
All ancient and modern foreign quotations are translated making important scholarship accessible
Includes several chapters currently out of print or scarcely available

Description
This volume brings together some of the best and most influential work to be published on the Epistles of Pliny the Younger in recent decades. Covering historical, (auto)biographical, and literary aspects of the Epistles and their reception, the nineteen classic articles included here offer a wide and representative range of approaches to Pliny, from prosopography and social history to intertextuality and self-representation. Topics include Pliny's villas, friends, and career, alongside literary and historical readings of some of his most famous letters, such as those on the eruption of Vesuvius and the torture of Christians, and correspondence with and about his wife Calpurnia, his uncle Pliny the Elder, his rival Regulus, the historian Tacitus and the emperor Trajan. The volume includes several chapters currently out of print or scarcely available (such as Birley's on Pliny's career and Eco's on the first Vesuvius letter), one which has been wholely rewritten (Cameron on reception) and one newly translated from German (Schenk on intertextuality). In addition, most have been updated by their authors, and translations of all Latin and other foreign languages have been added. A substantial introductory chapter by the editors offers the first full account of the history of scholarship on the Epistles from the birth of printing to the present day, summarises important recent work in languages other than English, and contextualises the articles included within the broader context of modern approaches to Pliny.

Pliny the Younger's ten books of Epistles have only recently moved into the mainstream of classical studies from their traditional role as fodder for Latin beginners or filing cabinet for Roman historians. This volume marks and consolidates that shift by reprinting nineteen of the best and most influential contributions on Pliny and his Epistles from recent decades, newly edited, revised and/or translated into English. It begins with a new, substantial account of the history of Plinian scholarship and survey of the contemporary scholarly landscape. Together this collection offers a detailed study of the man, the events of his time, his career, his friends, even his possessions, and above all the varied artistic and ideological facets of his letters.

Table of Contents
Introduction
1: Readers and Readings of Pliny's Epistles, Christopher Whitton and Roy Gibson
Pliny in History
2: Pliny's Family, Pliny's Career, A. R. Birley
3: Pliny's Less Successful Friends, R. Syme
4: The Finances of a Senator, R. Duncan-Jones
5: Pliny's Other Country, Edward Champlin
Reading Epistles 1-9
6: Pliny's Treatment of History in Epistolary Form, Henry W. Traub
7: The Chronology and Arrangement of Pliny's Letters, Charles E. Murgia
8: Pliny the Younger, and the Ideal Wife, Jo-Ann Shelton
9: A Portrait of the Elder as a Young Pliny, Umberto Eco
10: Visualizing Pliny's Villas, Bettina Bergmann
11: Self and Community in the Younger Pliny, Andrew M. Riggsby
12: Pliny's Catullus: The Politics of Literary Appropriation, Matthew Roller
13: Models of Senators and Emperors: Regulus, the Bad Senator, Stanley E. Hoffer
14: Forms of Intertextuality in the Epistles of Pliny the Younger, Peter Schenk
15: Pliny and Tacitus, Miriam Griffin
16: Knowing Someone Through Their Books: Pliny on Uncle Pliny (Epistles 3.5), John Henderson
Epistles 10: A Case Apart?
17: Trajan: Government by Correspondence, Fergus Millar
18: Pliny's Province, Greg Woolf
Pliny's Afterlife
19: Pliny's Afterlife, Alan Cameron
20: The Transmission of Pliny's Epistles, L. D. Reynolds

The Epistles of Pliny

by: Gibson, R. Whitton, Chr.

• ISBN-13: 9780199545940 / 978-0-19-954594-0
• ISBN-03: 0199545944 / 0-19-954594-4
• Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016