I INTRODUCTION: THE LETTER AND THE PROBLEM(s)
In Epistles 8.14 Pliny writes to the distinguished jurist Titius Aristo to ask his advice concerning a recent senatorial debate.Footnote 1 The consul Afranius Dexter had been found dead, and his freedmen were suspected of complicity.Footnote 2 The Senate faced three choices on their fate: acquittal, exile or death. As sententiae are usually voted on one at a time, Pliny feared that the advocates of exile and death would unite against his own proposal for acquittal, only to split their vote later. With some dextrous procedural arguments, he succeeded in forcing the proponent of death to stand down. Now the debate is over, he professes concern: were his arguments legitimate? Of course he should know the answer himself, but his generation is beset with ignorance of senatorial law, the result of the Senate's suppression and impotence under the tyrant Domitian; this is why he must turn for help to Aristo. Such is the letter as Pliny frames it.
This is the third longest of Pliny's letters, in a strong position near the centre of its book. Yet it has received little scholarly attention. Talbert found it exasperating as an historical source, frustrated that (as he thought) Pliny does not report the final verdict in the debate.Footnote 3 Sherwin-White had more patience perhaps, but was disappointed with its composition. His introduction to the letter regrets a ‘lack of unity of theme, pictorial quality, and incident’.Footnote 4 It is true that the letter comprises two strikingly different segments. The bulk of it (ss. 12–26) reports Pliny's arguments in the senatorial debate, at unusual length. Or rather, it not so much reports as performs: Pliny subjects his reader to a barrage of legal sophistry, re-enacting in writing his off-the-cuff performance in the house.Footnote 5 But, curiously, he delays the exposition by spending a full third of the letter (ss. 2–10)Footnote 6 justifying his need to ask Aristo for advice with an extended lament for the decline of senatorial traditions under Domitian. In apologizing for his professed inexperience, he embarks on one of the Epistles’ most spectacular assaults on the last Flavian.Footnote 7
The present article proposes to reassess this, one of Pliny's longest and, I suggest, most important letters. Instead of faulting its composition, I ask why Pliny has allowed this diptych so prominent a place in his crafted collection of Epistles.Footnote 8 For Pliny, size matters:Footnote 9 it is hard not to see the longest single epistle after the Tuscan villa and the Classicus trial calling for especial attention.Footnote 10 What is more, he ends 5.6, his longest letter of all, with the statement that length is justified only by an incessant focus on one's topic and the eschewal of unnecessary digression.Footnote 11 If we take this central and programmatic claim seriously, we must accept the challenge of understanding 8.14 as a unity, as a letter with a single purpose. A structural observation may help set our problem in perspective. 8.14 stands just off-centre amid its book's twenty-four letters. Book 2 features, in a similar position, a diptych of a different sort (if Books 1 and 9 frame the collection, responsion between Books 2 and 8 should occasion no surprise).Footnote 12 Amid its twenty letters, 2.11 narrates the trial of Marius Priscus, with 2.12 functioning as a pendant and sequel, underlining the place of 2.11, or 2.11–12 together, as a focal point of the book.Footnote 13 The Priscus trial showcases Pliny and Tacitus, together with Trajan at his most ciuilis as presiding consul, proving that the Senate is once again the arbiter of justice. The political importance of this (near-)centrepiece to Book 2 is clear even from this bald summary; my intention here is to demonstrate that 8.14, in its own way, unites this triumvirate for a similar purpose.Footnote 14
Having established the letter's exemplary nature (Section II), I will demonstrate that its opening purple passage, formally structured as a digression, contains a remarkable chain of allusions to Tacitus’ Agricola, making this letter one of the most extensive engagements with Tacitus’ works anywhere in Pliny (Section III).Footnote 15 Yet this is no feeble pastiche: simultaneous evocation of Cicero, Ovid and Seneca generates a complex intertextual web, and a novel analogy for the senatorial experience of Domitian's principate as internal exile (Section IV). We will see how Pliny flags up the complexity of his metaliterary play in the framing Epistles 8.13 and 8.15 (Section V). Finally, I will set the letter into the context of its book as a whole (Section VI). Within Book 8's running theme of slavery, Epistles 8.14 takes centre stage, marshalling the Agricola's rhetoric of a Senate enslaved to proclaim, in a quintessentially Plinian marriage of law and literature, of poetics and politics, the difference between past and present, and the inextricability of literature and governance in the Trajanic senatorial élite.
II THE EXEMPLARY FRAME
Let us begin at the beginning, and establish — as Pliny does — the crucial emphasis on exemplarity which frames his letter. He announces his topic, ius senatorium, through an encomium of the excellent Aristo: ‘since you are highly experienced in both private and public law, which includes senatorial law’ (s. 1, ‘cum sis peritissimus et priuati iuris et publici, cuius pars senatorium est’).Footnote 16 Ostensibly motivated by self-doubt (‘I’m keen to hear from you of all people whether I made a mistake recently in the senate or not’, ‘cupio ex te potissimum audire, errauerim in senatu proxime necne’), he knows that what's done is done, but seeks advice for the future (‘not with an eye to the past — too late for that — but so that I can be instructed for the future, if anything similar comes up’, ‘non ut in praeteritum (serum enim), uerum ut in futurum si quid simile inciderit erudiar’).
We should not miss the programmatic resonance of this last comment. 8.14 is to be doubly exemplary: the tirade against Domitian serves, as routinely in Trajanic literature, an apotreptic function,Footnote 17 while the letter as a whole offers a protreptic presentation of lawyerly discussion. For of course Pliny is addressing himself, in this published letter, not only to his human thesaurus Aristo but also to a wider élite readership.Footnote 18 This is didactic prose: for all his mock-modesty,Footnote 19 Pliny offers himself here, alongside Aristo, as an example, holding up for display one great expert (himself) consulting another on the niceties of procedure.Footnote 20 In professing ignorance, he deploys a familiar protreptic tactic, the captatio beneuolentiae inherent in presenting oneself as ‘a fallible fellow-pupil’.Footnote 21 Just in case we miss the point, he makes it all but explicit when he rounds off his opening excuses: even the skilled practitioners of the past had not sufficiently considered, if at all, the particular problem Pliny raises here (‘atque ego arbitror illis etiam, quibus plurimarum rerum agitatio frequens nihil esse ignotum patiebatur, genus quaestionis quod adfero ad te aut non satis tritum aut etiam inexpertum fuisse’, s. 11). Far from admitting ignorance,Footnote 22 Pliny prepares an entire audience of potential Aristones for a dazzling rhetorical display.Footnote 23
At this point, he might easily have plunged into the res, but a putative objection from Aristo interrupts him: ‘You’ll say: Why are you asking what you should have known?’ (s. 2, ‘dices: cur quaeris quod nosse debebas?’). This provokes the lament at the impotence of the Senate under Domitian which ‘interrupts’ the topic in hand, a passage usually, and with reason, referred to as a ‘digression’ or ‘excursus’.Footnote 24 It is clearly delimited formally: as Pliny returns to the promised topic of the letter, he rounds it off (s. 10, ‘and that's why I’m justified in asking …’, ‘quo iustius peto …’), and uses chiastic repetition in his praise of Aristo to generate ring-composition (s. 1, ‘peritissimus et priuati iuris et publici’ ~ s. 10 ‘sic iura publica ut priuata … tractare’). This is no casual bolt-on: it is tightly integrated into the letter by the artful structure which embraces both the digression and its framing justification.Footnote 25 In other genres digression is now appreciated as an eloquent structural device, generating not just the ‘narrative retardation’ which sets what follows into higher relief,Footnote 26 but also producing meaning through the interaction of digression and narrative.Footnote 27 The same, I suggest, is true here. But before we can consider what that meaning may be, we need to look more closely at the digression itself.
III RE-READING THE AGRICOLA (AND HISTORIES)
Pliny's inexperience, or rather that of his generation, is to be blamed on the oppression of the Senate under Domitian. In (unspecified) times of old there was a noble tradition of learning by practice — in war, in law, and in politics — observing one's elders and preparing to instruct one's youngers in a chain of exemplarity. When Pliny was a young man, however, this tradition had lost all meaning: yes, they went to war and saw the curia, but there was no bravery or obedience in the camps, no freedom to speak in the Senate. Pliny himself and his fellow-senators had to endure these misfortunes over many years, and the time to recuperate, though happy, has been all too short.
If the theme of stunted intellect and brief recovery strikes a familiar note, the allusivity of these lines confirms it: Pliny has the Agricola firmly in his sights. Many readers of this letter have been struck by similarities with Tacitus’ monograph, and rightly so;Footnote 28 but the textual bond has received scarce attention. The ample evidence in the Panegyricus that, at the very least, Pliny was attentive to Tacitus’ style,Footnote 29 and the reminiscences of the Agricola which have been heard elsewhere in the Epistles,Footnote 30 suggest that intertextuality in this letter is not a priori unlikely. Pliny's opening words, as he replies to Aristo's putative objection, set the scene: ‘priorum temporum seruitus’ (s. 2, ‘the slavery of former times’). Slogans of libertas and seruitus had been promiscuous in the Late Republic,Footnote 31 and slavery was a well-used metaphor for the Principate by the a.d. 100s, not least in Pliny's own Panegyricus.Footnote 32 Nevertheless, the Agricola must stand out. Not only does the word seruitus feature twice in Tacitus’ fiery proem, the imagery of enslavement provides the crucial link between the narrative of Agricola's enslavement of Britain, in particular Calgacus’ speech of resistance, and the framing exploration of senatorial servitude to Domitian.Footnote 33 Pliny's short, sharp ‘priorum temporum seruitus’ is only the second time he has used seruitus in the Epistles.Footnote 34 Tacitus ended his proemial attack on Domitian with a promise to write one day a ‘memoriam prioris seruitutis’ (Ag. 3.3, ‘memorial of our former slavery’). Pliny, I suggest, is making a clear allusion. He retains the word-order of ‘prioris seruitutis’ (so renouncing an explosive ‘seruitus’ beginning the sentence) and replaces ‘prioris’ with ‘priorum temporum’ (keeping the genitive), in a technique, familiar to readers of Latin poetry and increasingly prose, of reworking with variation.
On its own this might seem a tenuous claim, but the cumulative weight of the correspondences, as I set them out, should speak for itself. The Agricola's third paragraph dwells on the difficulty of finding a voice after the long slavery to Domitian. With the unique new combination of Principate and freedom (‘principatum ac libertatem’), our minds are at last coming back to life (‘nunc demum redit animus’); but like human bodies, which grow slowly but are extinguished in an instant (‘cito extinguuntur’), literary talent is easier to suppress than to revive, once depressed by the sweetness of sloth (‘inertiae dulcedo’). Nevertheless, Tacitus will try to write, even in an unformed and rough voice (‘uel incondita ac rudi uoce’). Pliny's digression begins (s. 3) by dwelling on the difficulty of playing one's part in the Senate after the long slavery to Domitian. The restoration of freedom (‘reducta libertas’) has caught senators rough and inexperienced (‘rudes nos et imperitos deprehendit’). Nevertheless, fired up (‘accensi’) by the sweetness (‘dulcedine’) of freedom, they do their best, sometimes doing things before knowing how.
The theme in both is rehabilitation: neither explicitly celebrates the restoration of libertas so much as assesses its consequences.Footnote 35 But the similarity is not just thematic. Tacitus describes bodies being ‘extinguished’, in an unprecedented flame metaphor;Footnote 36 Pliny's senators are ‘fired up’ in what would be a less remarkable expression, were ‘accensi’ not combined with ‘dulcedine’ to create the striking synaesthesia ‘fired up by sweetness’.Footnote 37 It is a strange coincidence if Pliny has formed this obtrusive pairing of flame metaphor and dulcedo without thinking of Tacitus, who combines the two in a single sentence of Agricola 3. Further, Pliny's formulation ‘rudes nos et imperitos’, describing the after-effects of disenfranchisement, and Tacitus’ ‘incondita ac rudi uoce’, describing the after-effects of silence, bear all the hallmarks of an intertextual relationship. Heubner noticed a similarity ‘of thought’.Footnote 38 But it is more than that: the retained ‘rudis’, the inversion of the adjectives, and the substitution of ‘imperitus’ for ‘inconditus’ (quadrisyllable for quadrisyllable) are all, I contend, markers of allusion.Footnote 39
This is a subtle form of reference, far from straightforward quotation.Footnote 40 In addition, the emphases are different, and importantly so. Tacitus’ proem is concerned with the recovery of the (or rather, his) literary voice after the long Domitianic silence, and the power of literature to memorialize for posterity. Pliny recognizes and responds to this; but he is primarily concerned with education and governance. He makes this clear early on (s. 2): ‘priorum temporum seruitus ut aliarum optimarum artium, sic etiam iuris senatorii obliuionem quandam et ignorantiam induxit’, which might be glossed as ‘we know Domitian's reign was devastating for literature and the rest [aliarum optimarum artium, that is, ‘cf. Tac., Agr.’], but my focus is different: senatorial practice [iuris senatorii]’. At the same time, Pliny tones down Tacitus’ forceful rhetoric. In a memorable phrase (Ag. 2.3), the latter claimed that ‘we would have forgotten memory itself as well [sc. as speech], if it were as much in our power to forget as to be silent’ (‘memoriam quoque ipsam cum uoce perdidissemus, si tam in nostra potestate esset obliuisci quam tacere’).Footnote 41 Tacitus and his fellow-senators could not forget, however hard they tried. Pliny is more matter-of-fact: slavery has caused ‘a certain lack of recall’ (‘obliuionem quandam’) of correct protocol: hyperbole gives way to pragmatism.
After this initial statement of the problem, Pliny moves back in time to explain how exemplarity functioned in former times, in both military and civil spheres (ss. 4–6, ‘erat autem antiquitus institutum …’: recall Agricola 1.1, ‘antiquitus usitatum’).Footnote 42 Against this he sets the experience of his own generation, first in the army (s. 7), then in the Senate (ss. 8–9). After the dense engagement with the Agricola in s. 3, echoes here are sparser, though the double phrase ‘when valour was suspect, inaction valued’ (s. 7, ‘cum suspecta uirtus, inertia in pretio’) resonates with Tacitus’ description of Domitian and his age, ‘hostile to virtues’ (Ag. 1.4, ‘infesta uirtutibus tempora’; Ag. 41.1, ‘infensus uirtutibus princeps’),Footnote 43 and with his apology for Agricola's low profile under Nero, ‘a time when inaction counted as wisdom’ (Ag. 6.3, ‘temporum, quibus inertia pro sapientia fuit’).Footnote 44 But it is when Pliny reaches the climax of his self-justification that Tacitus comes most clearly to the fore:
(8) iidem prospeximus curiam, sed curiam trepidam et elinguem, cum dicere quod uelles periculosum, quod nolles miserum esset. quid tunc disci potuit, quid didicisse iuuit, cum senatus aut ad otium summum aut ad summum nefas uocaretur, et modo ludibrio modo dolori retentus numquam seria, tristia saepe censeret? (9) eadem mala iam senatores, iam participes malorum multos per annos uidimus tulimusque; quibus ingenia nostra in posterum quoque hebetata fracta contusa sunt. (10) breue tempus (nam tanto breuius omne quanto felicius tempus) quo libet scire quid simus, libet exercere quod scimus.
(8) Likewise, we saw before us the Senate, but a fearful and tongue-tied Senate, when it was dangerous to say what you wanted, wretched to say what you did not. What could you learn then, what was the point of learning it, when the Senate was summoned either for utter idleness or utter wickedness; kept on as a laughing-stock one minute, a tragedy the next; never passing serious laws, often passing savage ones? (9) These same ills we saw and bore for many years, now senators, now taking part in them; these ills have left our minds, even for the future, dulled, broken, crushed. (10) The time has been short (for time is always shorter, the happier it is) when we have wanted to know what we are, to put into practice what we know.
Syme noted a ‘parallel’ between s. 9 and Agricola 3, without further comment.Footnote 45 Certainly that sentence reprises the theme, familiar from Tacitus’ proem, that we saw Pliny develop earlier in the letter: the effects of Domitian's principate on the senatorial psyche, continuing ‘even for the future’ (‘in posterum quoque’).Footnote 46 We may note too Pliny's emphasis on corporate guilt. Throughout ss. 2–10 (and nowhere else in the letter) he uses the inclusive first-person plural which binds an entire senatorial generation into a common experience, as for instance ‘rudes nos et imperitos’ (s. 3). Here in s. 9 the rhetoric becomes stronger: we did not just witness the evils of Domitian's age over many years,Footnote 47 we tolerated them (‘uidimus tulimusque’);Footnote 48 more than that, we participated in them as ‘accomplices’ (s. 9, ‘participes malorum’). This ‘associative plural’, and the assertion of shared guilt, is crucial to Tacitus’ rhetoric in the Agricola, both in the proem and later in the climactic recollection of the trials of a.d. 93: ‘our hands dragged Helvidius to the executioner, we were struck by the sight of Mauricus and Rusticus, we were spattered with Senecio's innocent blood’ (Ag. 45.1, ‘mox nostrae duxere Heluidium in carcerem manus; nos Maurici Rusticique uisus <adflixit>; nos innocenti sanguine Senecio perfudit’).Footnote 49 Given Pliny's default position in the Epistles of generating maximal distance between himself and Domitian's supposed agents of evil, his collapsing of distinctions here is striking.Footnote 50 Another departure from his usual technique concerns Domitian's name. Tacitus conspicuously fails to name the dead emperor in his proem, avenging fifteen years of silence by imposing a silence of his own.Footnote 51 Elsewhere in the Epistles, Pliny does not hesitate to name and shame;Footnote 52 here, uniquely, he replicates Tacitus’ rhetoric of suppression.
We have now seen a series of reasons to suppose that Pliny is engaging here, especially in s. 3 and in ss. 8–10, with the text as well as the thrust of the Agricola. In the latter passage, though, the apogee of the ‘digression’, he complements the Agricola by invoking another famous passage of Tacitus, the encomium of Trajan which ends the first paragraph of Histories. Already the double phrase ‘it was dangerous to say what you wanted, wretched to say what you did not’ (s. 8, ‘dicere quod uelles periculosum, quod nolles miserum esset’) might bring to mind Tacitus’ converse praise of ‘the rare good fortune of a time when you can think what you like and say what you think’ (H. 1.1.4, ‘rara temporum felicitate ubi sentire quae uelis et quae sentias dicere licet’), even if the idea of curbed speech is hardly unique.Footnote 53 But s. 10, quoted above, is clearer. The time has been brief — for happy times always feel brief — when ‘we have wanted to know what we are, to put into practice what we know’ (s. 10, ‘quo libet scire quid simus, libet exercere quod scimus’). The idea that happy times are brief/rare and the matching double step of ‘scire quid simus … exercere quod scimus’ ~ ‘sentire quae uelis et quae sentias dicere’ are too similar for coincidence.Footnote 54 The two passages may be in lexical terms wholly — studiously? — unrelated, but it is hard not to see Pliny responding here to Tacitus.
If Pliny recalls the phrase, he subjects it yet again to a shift in referent. Whatever the implications of Tacitus’ notorious recusatio, it refers most obviously to freedom of speech, which one might most naturally connect with his own project of writing freely about recent history. So too the ‘ingenia studiaque’ of Agricola 3.1 meant specifically literary talent.Footnote 55 Pliny's concern, though, is more practical: his ingenia (s. 9) are more broadly ‘spirits’ or ‘acuity’, and his interest lies in the application of knowledge (‘libet exercere quod scimus’, s. 10). Whether he is importing this different sense, or exposing a subtle reference already in Tacitus’ text to a specifically senatorial freedom of speech,Footnote 56 he firmly appropriates the rhetoric for his purpose: the practical restoration of governance under Trajan.
In bringing together two texts of Tacitus, Pliny draws out the connection (though it is clear enough in any case) between the two moments where Tacitus comes closest to explicit panegyric of the new regime, in both cases made through contrast of the present with the enforced silence — the slavery — of the last principate.Footnote 57 We see, then, that Pliny's professed self-justification, attacking the old and praising the new, is constructed in markedly Tacitean terms. Like Tacitus he deplores the former, praises the latter, and, in a move strongly redolent of Agricola 3, excuses his shortcomings on the basis that the recovery, though welcome, is as yet brief. Where Pliny's eighth book appears to buck a trend (Tacitus, who has become increasingly prominent since Book 6, receives only a single letter, Epistle 8.7),Footnote 58 we find that, far from lapsing from view, Tacitus has a covert star role in the longest letter of the book, co-opted as colleague in the literary project of damning Domitian and legitimizing Trajan. But Pliny uses the Agricola (and, more briefly, Histories) for a purpose very much his own. We have seen repeatedly how he reformulates both verbally and conceptually, not simply emending phrases in aemulatio, but adapting Tacitus’ literary meditations for his own senatorial project.
IV PLINY'S EXILE
It remains to be seen how an understanding of Tacitus’ place in this ‘digression’ helps us make sense of the letter as a whole. But before leaving ss. 8–10, I pause to consider a different allusive direction, in what will seem for a moment to be a turn away from Tacitus. Here Cicero, Ovid and Seneca come to the fore, and complement the Agricolan metaphor of an enslaved senate with a different analogy, that of exile. Let me quote again the relevant sentences (for a translation, see Section III above).
(8) iidem prospeximus curiam, sed curiam trepidam et elinguem … (9) eadem mala iam senatores, iam participes malorum multos per annos uidimus tulimusque; quibus ingenia nostra in posterum quoque hebetata fracta contusa sunt.
It was a ‘fearful and tongue-tied Senate’ (‘curiam trepidam et elinguem’)Footnote 59 that the young Pliny and his peers saw before them (‘prospeximus’). There is only one other ‘curia elinguis’ in extant Latin, in Cicero's speech Post reditum in senatu. Speaking on his return from exile in 57 b.c., the orator tells the Senate how to remember the time of his absence: ‘mutum forum, elinguem curiam, tacitam et fractam ciuitatem uidebatis’ (Red. sen. 6, ‘you saw the forum mute, the Senate tongue-tied, the state silent and broken’). This piquant tricolonFootnote 60 encapsulates a principal strand of the speech's line of invective. Clodius had included in his law de exilio Ciceronis a clause prohibiting any senatorial debate which might lead to the repeal of his exile.Footnote 61 Characterizing this as a suppression of free speech, Cicero makes it central to his denunciation of the ‘tyranny’ exercised by the consuls Gabinius and Calpurnius, in which Rome, and specifically the Senate, was reduced to mute slavery.Footnote 62 When Pliny calls the Domitianic Senate elinguis, then, he takes a rare word from an eminently apt context.Footnote 63 Not only does this align Pliny's experience of Domitianic ‘slavery’ with what Cicero depicts as the dominatio of the year 58 b.c.,Footnote 64 it develops and adds to Tacitus’ emphasis in the Agricola's proem on silence, both literal and literary, as the ultimate index of tyranny.Footnote 65
Yet Cicero's exile is also at stake here, to judge from the following sentence, s. 9. We have seen how the first half of that sentence engages with Tacitus in almost every word, and noted how the motif of stunted intellects (‘ingenia … hebetata fracta contusa’) recalls Agricola 3. But if the motif is similar, the diction — Pliny's violent trio of adjectives — is quite different. In fact this combination of images, the notion of intellectual power ‘dulled, broken, crushed’, is strongly reminiscent of the language of exile as deployed by Ovid and Seneca.
To take Ovid first: in Tristia 5.12.31 he complains that ‘contudit ingenium patientia longa malorum’ (‘long suffering of ills has crushed my talent’),Footnote 66 in Tristia 3.14.33 that ‘ingenium fregere meum mala’ (‘the ills have broken my talent’),Footnote 67 and in Ex Ponto 4.1.17 he writes, ‘da mihi, si quid ea est, hebetantem pectora Lethen’ (‘give me, if it exists, Lethe which dulls the heart’). Here we find all the elements of Pliny's tricolon ‘ingenia … hebetata fracta contusa’, gathered in the poems of exile.Footnote 68 Seneca associated these Ovidian complaints specifically with exile, to judge from his reuse of the ‘blunted intellect’ motif.Footnote 69 He applies it once to himself, signing off his letter to Polybius with an apology: if his attempt at consolation is ineffective, that is because he himself, suffering in his Corsican exile, is writing with ‘blunted mind’ (‘hebetato animo’).Footnote 70 He also puts the metaphor into the mouth of another exile, the eponymous victim of the Thyestes. In the final act, oblivious to what he is digesting, Thyestes tries to convince himself that the ills of exile are over: ‘pectora longis hebetata malis, | iam sollicitas ponite curas’ (‘heart dulled by long ills, put now your anxious cares aside’, Thy. 920–1).Footnote 71 If we read on, we find further correspondences with Pliny. With ‘ingenia … fracta’, compare ‘fracti … regni’ (Thy. 930). With ‘ingenia … contusa’, compare ‘pectora … | contusa’ (Thy. 1045–6). And with the ‘curiam trepidam’ of Pliny's previous sentence (‘trepidus’ is one adjective that Cicero did not use in the Post reditum), compare Seneca's ‘trepidi … exilii’ (Thy. 923).Footnote 72
If this were chance similarity of vocabulary, it would be a stunning coincidence: every one of Pliny's colourful adjectives, except for Cicero's elinguis, finds a match in Ovid and Seneca, each time with exile as the theme.Footnote 73 In his depiction of the Domitianic tyranny, Pliny has blended Cicero's condemnation of Clodius et al. with a different literary tradition, adding the two other most important models for his Epistles Footnote 74 — or, if you prefer, he evokes recognizable clichés of exile literature. Either way, he generates thereby a powerful figurative presentation of the Domitianic experience as a state of exile.
Exile was well established in Roman literature as a highly emotive trope, associated with tyrannical repression and the suffering of the innocent.Footnote 75 This trope plays out most famously, in varying nuances and degrees, in the literary-biographical exiles of Cicero, Ovid and Seneca — precisely the three authors whose words are recalled by Pliny here in Epistles 8.14. In his reworking, he marshals this trope in a different direction: where many had literally been exiled under Domitian, those senators who had remained (including Pliny) had suffered their own form of internal exile. Even this variation on the theme is indebted to Cicero,Footnote 76 whose later works develop what Doblhofer has called ‘eine fragmentarische Typologie des inneren Exils’,Footnote 77 in a move which both decries the political climate and defends his toleration of it.Footnote 78 And indeed this brings us full circle to the Agricola, where, as I argue in another place, Tacitus develops his self-presentation as a voice emerging out of tyranny's silence from Cicero's rhetoric of figurative exile and speech restored in the Pro Marcello.Footnote 79 So Pliny's marshalling of multiple loci classici of the trope of exile, all within a single sentence, may itself be a form of reply to Tacitus, replying to his Ciceronian ‘silence’ motif with a complementary, and ultimately equally Ciceronian, move.
V FRAMING THE LETTER
Epistles 8.14, unusually, is bracketed by two short notes. These framing letters do not merely provide contrast. Between them they give good reason to believe first that Pliny encourages reading for allusion, and second that he draws attention to the unusual length of 8.14 and the challenge of its diptych form (a challenge I will confront in Section VI). Before turning to these, let us consider briefly how the choice of Aristo as addressee already offers hints in both directions. Through his prosopographical lens Sherwin-White saw only Aristo the lawyer, doubtless an important aspect of Aristo's role in Pliny's collection, as 1.22 and the legal content of 8.14 attest. But Pliny's only other letter to Aristo, Epistles 5.3, deals not with law but with literature. There Pliny defends his dilettante interest in writing poetry; he opens the topic by expressing how pleased he is that Aristo has been hosting critical discussions of Pliny's efforts (‘fuisse apud te de uersiculis meis multum copiosumque sermonem’, 5.3.1). The remarkable degree to which such meetings focused on minutiae of language and style is well attested;Footnote 80 Aristo is thereby accredited as a literary critic no less than a jurisprudent. Indeed, Pliny went further the first time he mentioned Aristo, in Epistles 1.22, extravagantly proclaiming that Aristo's illness was a threat not just to one man's life, but to literature itself (‘litterae ipsae’, 1.22.1). With this background established earlier in the collection, Aristo's suitability as a reader of 8.14 is evident, and twofold: as the man of law, he is the right man for Pliny to (affect to) consult on the senatorial debate; as the man of literature, he is equipped to recognize and interpret the fine allusive texture of the opening attack on Domitian.
As an ‘agent’ in the narrative,Footnote 81 then, Aristo embraces and unifies the two different sections of the letter. Even before we reach Epistles 8.14, however, the preceding letter has invited precisely the sort of reading I have been proposing, if we are willing to appreciate the linearity of Pliny's epistolary books. To borrow a popular term, individual letters function like tiles in a mosaic.Footnote 82 Each can stand alone, but it also has a role to play in the larger narrative of the collection. Sequence and linearity clearly have a function in Pliny's Epistles, at the most basic level in neighbouring pairs of letters such as 2.11 and 2.12 (on the Priscus trial) or 8.10 and 8.11 (on Calpurnia's miscarriage), but also in more subtle ways, one of which I aim to show here.Footnote 83
A reading, first, of Epistles 8.13 reveals Pliny parading the allusivity of the letter that follows.
C. Plinivs Geniali svo s.
(1) probo quod libellos meos cum patre legisti. pertinet ad profectum tuum a disertissimo uiro discere, quid laudandum quid reprehendendum, simul ita institui, ut uerum dicere assuescas. (2) uides quem sequi, cuius debeas implere uestigia. o te beatum, cui contigit unum atque idem optimum et coniunctissimum exemplar, qui denique eum potissimum imitandum habes, cui natura esse te simillimum uoluit! uale.
Dear Genialis — Well done for reading my speeches together with your father. It is good for your progress to learn from a man of the highest eloquence what should be praised and what faulted, and to be brought up to make a habit of speaking the truth. You see whom you should follow, whose footsteps you should fill. How fortunate you are! Your best and closest exemplar is one and the same: in short, the man you must especially imitate is the one whom nature wanted you to resemble the most. Yours, Pliny.
A genial note for young Genialis,Footnote 84 commending his studia and enlarging a little on paternal exemplarity: sufficiently banal material to leave Sherwin-White all but silent. ‘Banal’ would be wrong, though: as Bernstein has shown, paternity functions as an important motif in Book 8. In his reading of this letter, he draws attention to the phrase ‘cuius debeas implere uestigia’, which he connects with Virgil's famous image of filial succession, Ascanius following Aeneas ‘with unequal footsteps’ (Aen. 2.724, ‘non passibus aequis’).Footnote 85 I wish to focus on the same phrase, with an eye not to literal but to literary paternity. The word uestigia serves as a familiar and explicit signpost of literary imitation since at least Lucretius in Latin and Callimachus in Greek, not least in Horace's Epistles.Footnote 86 The only other time Pliny uses such a phrase, when he congratulates himself that the young careerists Fuscus and Quadratus ‘seemed to be treading in my footsteps’ (6.11.2, ‘meis instare uestigiis uidebantur’), he is combining metaphors of oratorical exemplarity (Fuscus’ and Quadratus’ following Pliny's example) and literary allusion (since at this point he evokes an analogous situation in Cicero's De oratore).Footnote 87 Here too, I suggest, the second trope is in play no less than the first.
The motif of literary filiation is underscored in the following sentence, where ‘o te beatum, cui contigit …’ contains a subtle but striking resonance of another famous (and famously allusive) Virgilian passage, the opening of Aeneas’ first speech: ‘o terque quaterque beati, | quis ante ora patrum Troiae sub moenibus altis | contigit oppetere!’ (‘Three times, four times blessed, you whose fate it was to die beneath Troy's lofty walls, before the eyes of your fathers!’).Footnote 88 Neptune's storm and Trojan deaths may have little to do with Genialis’ situation, but the echo, and indeed the aptness of Aeneas’ ‘ante ora patrum’ for Pliny's theme of paternal imitation, suggests allusion to what must have been among the Aeneid's best known lines. At the same time, the very process of allusion, as with Iulus’ unequal steps, self-consciously implies a strong literary dimension to these uestigia.Footnote 89
Pliny has already used Virgilian play to characterize his relationship with Tacitus. In Book 7, he recalls his fervent admiration of Tacitus when Pliny was still an adulescentulus but Tacitus was already famous: ‘I longed to follow you, to be and to be considered “nearest but by a long way” to you’ (7.20.4, ‘te sequi, tibi “longo sed proximus interuallo” et esse et haberi concupiscebam’), quoting from the boat-race of Aeneid 5.Footnote 90 He goes on, ‘it is you whom I thought I could especially imitate — should especially imitate’ (‘tu mihi … maxime imitabilis, maxime imitandus uidebaris’): a statement which we might (without taking the self-depreciation literally) see cashed out in the allusivity of 8.14.Footnote 91 Again, in Book 9, he writes to Tacitus with language that, as Marchesi has shown, evokes Aeneid 6: ‘let us just continue along the path we have begun’ (9.14, ‘pergamus modo itinere instituto’) recalls Aeneas and the Sibyl as they ‘complete the path they had begun’ (Aen. 6.384, ‘ergo iter inceptum peragunt’).Footnote 92 Here are the beginnings of a pattern in which Pliny appeals to Virgilian models to construct a literary relationship with his near-contemporary Tacitus.
The only letter to Tacitus in Book 8 brings us nearer to the scenario of 8.13. In 8.7 Pliny replies to a letter in which Tacitus apparently called himself Pliny's pupil, and insists, in bantering tone, that the reverse is the case: in fact Tacitus is magister to Pliny the discipulus. As Genialis studies with his father, so Pliny is pupil to his teacher Tacitus. Does he also, like Genialis, follow ‘with unequal footsteps’? As letter-writer, Pliny is exhorting Genialis to emulate his father. But at the same time, as author-editor of a collection of letters, he is using this apparently trivial note as a metaliterary advert to herald the allusive textuality of the following 8.14, and to announce Tacitus’ paternity, as it were, of Pliny's product.Footnote 93
Before returning to 8.14, we can see more briefly how a similar approach to 8.15 steers us towards recognition of the book's cohesion. Taken as self-reflexive comment on 8.14, this letter too offers the reader of the collection more than light relief.
C. Plinivs Ivniori svo s.
(1) oneraui te tot pariter missis uoluminibus, sed oneraui primum quia exegeras, deinde quia scripseras tam graciles istic uindemias esse, ut plane scirem tibi uacaturum, quod uulgo dicitur, librum legere. (2) eadem ex meis agellis nuntiantur. igitur mihi quoque licebit scribere quae legas, sit modo unde chartae emi possint; aut necessario quidquid scripserimus boni maliue delebimus. uale.
Dear Junior — I have weighed you down by sending so many books at once, but I did so first because you asked me to, and then because you wrote that the harvest in your parts was so meagre as to leave me quite sure you would have time to ‘leaf through a book’ (as they say). The news from my patch is the same. So I too will have time to write something for you to read — if, that is, I can find somewhere to buy paper. Otherwise I will have to erase whatever I write, good or bad. Yours, Pliny.
After the intricacies of Epistles 8.14 Pliny gives his reader pause for breath, with another short, jocular note; as with 8.13, the tone of this letter is not merely anodyne bonhomie, but a contribution to the light and shade of the book.Footnote 94 The addressee may not be a young man like Genialis, but his eloquent name ‘Junior’ puts Pliny in avuncular if not paternal mode once again.Footnote 95 This is the first of several letters in which grape harvests and literary composition intertwine;Footnote 96 here the pun of ‘librum legere’ (literally ‘read/gather a book’) makes the connection particularly close. If we follow this hint and try a meta-epistolary reading, Epistles 8.15 makes a consummate tailpiece to 8.14. Yes, says Pliny, I know the last letter was a burden (‘oneraui’); indeed, he has exhausted his supply of papyrus (‘sit modo unde chartae emi possint’). Is there even a nod to the challenge of the previous letter's apparently divided nature, or its multiple allusions, in ‘tot uoluminibus’?Footnote 97 After all, Junior (like Aristo) has proven literary credentials, including an appetite for voluminous reading.Footnote 98 The customary epistolary diffidence returns, as Pliny devalues his writings with the threat to destroy them to make a palimpsest.Footnote 99 But we surely realize by now that Pliny would not publish a thousand-word letter, and put it at the centre of Book 8, if he did not attach very real significance to it.
VI RE-UNITING THE DIPTYCH
We have seen that dense allusivity is an important generator of meaning in the ‘digression’, and that Pliny himself has invited the attentive reading required to see it. It remains to face up to the challenge he poses: how to relate the first section to the long exposition of psephological ingenuity which follows, other than by giving up and asserting, with Sherwin-White, that there is ‘no genuine connexion’ with the rest of this ‘otherwise dull, technical letter’?Footnote 100 One might object that there need be no such connection, that the search for thematic unity is based on false assumptions about ancient expectations.Footnote 101 There may be some truth to this; on the other hand, unity of theme is the norm (if not absolute default) in Pliny's letters, and he says as much explicitly (Section I). In fact, unity can be found in Epistles 8.14, a unity which at the same time reveals this letter as the keystone of its book. The unity is thematic, and the theme is slavery.Footnote 102
Slavery was a ubiquitous feature of everyday life, and a productive source of literary inspiration; in particular, it was a widespread and powerful metaphor in social and political discourse.Footnote 103 As we saw in Section III, the Agricola is a striking case where the theme of slavery takes a key structural role in a complex literary composition. This is the light in which we should read 8.14, with its juxtaposition of (metaphorical) senatorial seruitus and a (real) senatorial debate concerning a consul's freedmen.Footnote 104 Certainly it is a formula which Tacitus later found effective. His narrative of a.d. 61 comprises three principal panels: Boudicca's revolt, a shameful case of testamentary fraud involving several senators, and Cassius’ speech in the Senate (Annals 14.29–39, 40–1, 42–5). This last concerns the slaves of Pedanius Secundus, a murdered consular, whose execution en masse Cassius demands. The rich slavery imagery of the British narrative, the juxtaposition, and telling paronomasia, all invite the reader to read across these episodes.Footnote 105 We need not press any direct relationship between Pliny and Annals 14 to see the similarity: in each case imagery familiar from the Agricola is juxtaposed with a senatorial debate concerning the familia of a dead consul/consular.Footnote 106 And whatever the ironies of Cassius’ speech within its narrative frame,Footnote 107 it portrays, like Pliny's letter, a rare moment when the inverted social values of a tyranny are corrected, and senators are restored to power over their slaves.Footnote 108
Returning to Epistles 8.14,Footnote 109 we have seen Pliny's recognition of slavery as a, if not the, crucial theme of the Agricola, clear both from his rare use of seruitus and from the development of the motif throughout the ‘digression’. But as well as integrating it into his text through allusion, he also responds with juxtaposition, setting the ‘enslaved Senate’ in dialogue with a scene of senators in debate over the fate of freedmen. There is, however, a crucial difference. The juxtaposition of slavishness in provincials and in senators in the Agricola problematizes.Footnote 110 Parallels of language and situation between Britons under Roman rule and Roman senators under Domitian suggest alarming similarities between the positions of these two ‘enslaved’ groups.Footnote 111 Pliny tells a different story, in which the shift from Domitianic past to Trajanic present is all-important. After the perverse suppression of the élite under Domitian, his senatorial performance in the letter's second half shows a society where order is restored: the now liberated and re-empowered Senate take their paternal role as (preferably humane) dispensers of justice to the literal servile class.Footnote 112
The combination of literal and metaphorical slavery in Epistles 8.14 is complemented by, and helps to explain, slavery's role as a broader theme of Book 8. The Agricola, the exposé of Domitianic slavery par excellence, takes a central role, supplying the paradigm which unites the book. Consider the following overview. The first letter of the book is a short lament for the illness of Pliny's lector Encolpius, presumably a freedman;Footnote 113 two further notes, 8.16 and 8.19, pick up the theme by reporting the deaths of some of his slaves.Footnote 114 The book's longest letter, as we have seen, deals with a senatorial debate concerning the liberti of a dead consul. The second-longest letter, Epistles 8.6, is Pliny's vituperative assault on Claudius’ freedman Pallas, replete with slavish behaviour on the part of the Senate, of which more in a moment; it is followed by a letter to Tacitus which features an extended pun on slavery.Footnote 115 We might put just a little weight on the opening of 8.22 (a letter featuring Thrasea, avatar of senatorial libertas): ‘you know those people who are slaves to every pleasure …’ (‘nostine hos qui omnium libidinum serui …’, 8.22.1).Footnote 116 Certainly, we cannot fail to notice that the book ends with another letter (8.24) in which slavery imagery, now applied to provincial rule, is prominent: Pliny urges Maximus to remember, in his command of Achaea, to distinguish that province's ‘free’ cities from the ‘enslaved’ inhabitants of Asian provinces, to consider how doctors treat free men better than slaves (8.24.5),Footnote 117 and to strive not to seem to have been a kinder governor of ‘slaves’ (the Bithynians) than of Achaea's ‘free men’ (8.24.9, ‘ne inter seruientes quam liberos … missus … humanior … fuisse uidearis’).Footnote 118 For ‘how disgraceful it would be … if freedom were exchanged for slavery!’ (8.24.8, ‘quam turpe, si … libertas seruitute mutetur’) — words with a bearing on the book as a whole, not least 8.14. The use of enslavement as metaphor for governing the provinces, common in Roman discourse, is not my focus here;Footnote 119 nor the much discussed Ciceronian allusivity of this letter.Footnote 120 It is sufficient for our purposes to recognize how slavery, in various literal and metaphorical guises, resonates through Book 8: first and final letter, the two longest, and three more besides, all concerned with slavery in some aspect: this is as close to a book-theme as Pliny's carefully haphazard arrangement might allow.
In particular, the placement of 8.6 and 8.14 as the two principal letters of the book demands attention. 8.6 is the second of two letters on Claudius’ freedman Pallas, which Roller has called ‘the fullest and most rhetorically sustained expression of elite resentment at powerful imperial freedmen’.Footnote 121 In Book 7, Pliny was amused and disgusted to find a monument to Pallas on the Via Tiburtina (7.29). This motivated him to look up the senatorial decree commissioning it, which he indignantly reports in 8.6, articulating his anger in the language of slavery. It was slaves, not senators, who offered Pallas praetorian insignia: ‘I pass over the fact that praetorian insignia are being offered to Pallas, a slave (since they are being offered by slaves) …’ (8.6.4, ‘mitto quod Pallanti seruo praetoria ornamenta offeruntur (quippe offeruntur a seruis)’).Footnote 122 While the Senate debases itself with servile obsequium (8.6.12),Footnote 123 Pallas himself is only asked to ‘comply’ with their wishes (8.6.8, 9, ‘cedere senatui’) in language anything but slavish: a perfect role reversal.Footnote 124 As in 8.14, Pliny is careful to emphasize the crucial difference between past and present, concluding ‘how glad I am that I did not find myself in those times, which cause me as much shame as if I had lived in them!’ (8.6.17, ‘quam iuuat quod in tempora illa non incidi, quorum sic me tamquam illis uixerim pudet!’).
Taken together, 8.6 and 8.14 make a stimulating pair of meditations on senatorial seruitus. The kowtowing of the Claudian Senate prefigures the Domitianic slavery that the later letter will decry. But once again the difference is crucial. In the Claudian letter we see the total failure and inversion of social hierarchy. 8.14 holds up the spectre of more recent trauma, but answers it with a senatorial scene to be proud of. When the Senate legislates over freedmen under Trajan it is not to fawn on them, but to determine their fate. Power is back where it belongs.Footnote 125
The two letters are also bound by a connection to Tacitus. As well as noting the general Taciteanism of Pliny's indignatio Footnote 126 in 8.6, we should be alert to the placement of Book 8's sole letter to Tacitus immediately after this diatribe. This is one of four occasions when Pliny places a note to Tacitus concerning literary composition immediately after a substantial letter featuring the tyranny of an earlier principate.Footnote 127 With this further integration of Tacitus into Pliny's epistolary construction and the models of slavery resonating throughout the book, the importance of 8.14 at its heart, with its combination of senatorial slavery à la Agricola and a debate on freedmen, is clear. Pliny generates a provocative juxtaposition of real and figurative experience of the institution of slavery, and creates a powerful centre-piece for the book. At the same time, the thematic cohesion of the book only strengthens the message of 8.14: as Tacitus’ exposure of Domitianic slavery is resoundingly reversed, the waves of imagery reach both beginning and end of Book 8.
I suggested near the beginning of this article that Epistles 2.11 and 8.14, structural equivalents, may have something in common. In the earlier letter, Pliny depicted himself pleading alongside Tacitus in a senatorial court presided over by Trajan. In a.d. 105, the emperor is absent from the debate over Dexter's freedmen, marching to war (as Pliny reminds us with 8.4, advertising Caninius’ forthcoming Greek epic ‘On the Dacian War’),Footnote 128 but the panegyric implicit in the vitiation of Domitian is hardly to be missed. Tacitus too is absent from the narrative of 8.14; yet we have seen ample evidence that here, as in 2.11, Pliny is co-opting Tacitus as his co-advocate, borrowing and adapting the language of his eloquentissimus fellow consular for this performative display of senatorial participation.Footnote 129 Like Tacitus in the Agricola, Pliny both proclaims the return of life to the Senate after its Flavian stagnation and leads the way in the continuation of that revival.Footnote 130 A return to full health can only be gradual; hence the need for this exemplary intervention.Footnote 131 In the process, he offers perhaps his most holistic self-presentation in the Epistles: here in one letter we meet Pliny the littérateur and Pliny the lawyer, Pliny the poetic alluder and Pliny the politician — the ideal Trajanic senator in a nutshell. We have seen that appreciation of the poetics of this prose, down to its finest details, opens up rich layers of meaning; that far from being a lame addition, 8.14 fulfils a crucial structural role in Book 8; and that here (as elsewhere) poetics go hand in hand with politics, as Pliny joins with Tacitus to play his part in shaping past and present. Aristo had the credentials to read this challenging juxtaposition of literature and politics, the instantiation of a programme for a new age: have we?
