Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

PLINY THE YOUNGER
serious request for information and decision? Again, the number of separate
addressees is noteworthy: 105 for 247 letters. Thus, while some get a fair
number of letters, most get very few. Why is there such a multiplicity of
names? After all most letter-writers have intimate friends, to whom they
write frankly and often. The exclusion of revealing and embarrassing letters
from a correspondence published by the writer is readily intelligible, but
it remains surprising that no really close friends emerge, if these are real
letters or even edited versions of real letters. A sceptic might say that, for
variety or some other reason, Pliny decided to introduce as many addressees
as possible: if there were no appropriate letters in his files, he could soon
create them. The frequency of standardized openings perhaps supports this
scepticism. But mere name-dropping was not Pliny's purpose: many influential
contemporaries are not addressed. We need not doubt that the
addressees were personally known to him. Having the critical reader much in
mind, Pliny was concerned with verisimilitude as •well as diversity. He selected
or composed the letters accordingly.
Most of the letters fall easily into regular types, according to subject matter:
public affairs, personalities, anecdotes, literature, personal business, descriptions,
advice, recommendation, and so on. Some of these types correspond
with recognized topics for epistolography. Nevertheless the letters probably
give a fairly accurate reflection of Pliny's range of interests, which are various
but unremarkable. Some subjects, familiar in other writers of the period, scarcely
appear at all: antiquarian lore, language and grammar, religion, and, most
surprisingly, philosophy. Pliny was not a learned man nor a thinker: it is
hard to discover any recondite information in his letters and vain to look
for profound or original thoughts. Again, he generally eschews or has erased
adverse comment upon contemporaries, except for his bete noire Regulus (1.5,
2.20, 4.2, 4.7). And he is singularly delicate about literary matters. Though he
talks much of the practice of detailed reciprocal criticism, he presents nothing
of the kind in the published correspondence: instead mere appreciations, often
vague or flattering. Similarly, in some correspondence about matters of
business (such as 3.6), various mundane details, which must have been in the
'real' letters, have been edited out. Pliny was, it seems, guided in his revision
not only by discretion but also by a sense of literary propriety and a fear of
tedium. He clearly thought that his readers had tender stomachs, and sometimes,
by weakening or indeed emasculating his original letters, he has lost
the immediacy and realism which elsewhere he successfully retains.
There are numerous echoes of other writers in Pliny's letters, both in thought
and in expression. Predictably Cicero and Virgil head the list, followed by
Horace, Martial, and Statius amongst others. The Roman poets bulked large
in Pliny's reading, as Qyintilian would have enjoined: he seems not so well
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