This volume, the first ever devoted to Pliny's Panegyric (the commentaries of Durry 1938, Malcovati 1949, and Moreno Soldevilla 2010 notwithstanding), examines the historical, rhetorical, political, and social contexts of the speech and outlines current critical approaches to it. The book is carefully edited as is evident in the helpful cross-references across essays, the order of chapters that address progressively larger questions, the substantial indices (locorum and general), and the total absence of typographical errors, and it opens up pathways for future research on this rather under-appreciated speech.

Roche's preface (ix–x) is followed by his ‘Pliny's Thanksgiving: an Introduction to the Panegyricus’ (1–28), which does double duty as introduction to the speech and to the volume. Roche traces the rhetorical precursors of Pliny's gratiarum actio from Pindaric encomium to Cicero's Caesarian speeches. He also knits together the biographies of Domitian, Trajan, and Pliny with those of their biological and adoptive fathers, thus providing ample historical and cultural context for Pliny's self-presentation to Trajan. By stressing the admonitory function of imperial praise (6–10), Roche emphasizes style as a vehicle for imperial ideology.

With attention to style, Noreña (‘Self-fashioning in the Panegyricus’, 29–44) explores the speech as a tool of Pliny's self-aggrandizement under Trajan. Pliny poses as an experienced fiscal administrator, as insider of the imperial court, and even as the emperor's intimate friend. His revision of his personal and professional career is also effected by his co-opting of a collective senatorial perspective through his use of a fluid ‘we’, his identification with a nebulous, upper senatorial subgroup, and his definition of consular prestige as virtually equivalent if not superior to imperial authority.

In ‘The Panegyricus and the Monuments of Rome’ (45–66) Roche investigates how Pliny reinvents pre-existing urban projects, especially those of Domitian. The generic parallel between physical and rhetorical monuments offers a working metaphor for this transmutation. Physical structures are diminished as frail and ephemeral when compared to the metaphorical lasting memorials built by the emperor's character and his sound policies; other monuments cast off their earlier specious semblance and assume their true nature under Trajan; imperial interventions in the Circus Maximus and the Domus Flavia distil Trajan's benevolent transformation of the capital, his accessibility, and his parity to his subjects.

In the first half of ‘The Panegyricus and Rhetorical Theory’ (67–84) Innes enumerates eulogistic topoi (praise of ancestors, of places, of character, of the physical body, of external circumstances, etc.) from Plato and Isocrates to Cicero and Quintilian. In the second, she identifies the presence of these same categories in the organization and subheadings of the Panegyric. While this essay illustrates Pliny's firm grounding in rhetorical theory, it shies away from the political function of praise: Innes takes at face value Pliny's claim (in Ep. 3.18.2), where he ‘denies any advisory role’ to himself (83).

By addressing the utilitarian function of praise in ancient oratory, Manuwald offers a subtler reading in ‘Ciceronian Praise as a Step towards Pliny's Panegyricus’ (85–103). Especially revealing is Cicero's tactical and hortatory praise of Pompey in pro lege Manilia, of Caesar in the pro Marcello, and of Octavian in the Philippics. In all three, Cicero amalgamates eulogy and protreptic to commit his laudandi to the civic policies and communal good of his own vision and to motivate them to follow up or to undertake virtuous deeds. The parallels with Pliny emerge persuasively even before Manuwald draws them out in her conclusions.

Gibson moves the discussion to laudatory literature in Pliny's time (‘Contemporary Contexts’, 104–24). Despite the absence of theoretical discussion on epideictic rhetoric, he argues, praise and blame operate ‘on the ground’, fuelled by the social centrality of praise in Rome. The prefaces of Tacitus’ Dialogus, Agricola and Histories and Frontinus’ Aqueducts, and Dio Chrysostom's Kingship Orations provide comparable intersections of eulogy and political theory. Gibson rightly notes that perceived overlaps between Pliny and these authors result from elaborations of a common tradition rather than from conscious imitation. But Gibson also reveals strong thematic and verbal echoes between the Panegyric and imperial praise in Martial and in Statius’ Silvae, which belie Pliny's claim that Trajan's reign breaks cleanly from the empty eulogies of emperors past.

Hutchinson's ‘Politics and the Sublime in the Panegyricus’ (125–41) purports to ‘explore the nature of sublimity in the Panegyricus’ (125). It is hard to gauge the direction and contribution of this essay because the sublime is never clearly defined. Elegant points about Plinian metaphors of size (e.g. Trajan's physical height as ‘symbolic elevation’, 133) are lost in a mire of highly subjective identifications of ‘the sublime’ in isolated sentences, as in 52.6: ‘the simple language of dedit, with no nobis, rises into grandeur, made more sublime by the preceding renunciation and Trajan's understated bene facias’ (132). Even incidental remarks, such as the lack of construction mayhem in the city (51.1), are evidence of the sublime: ‘the image has a suggestion of grandeur, but verges on the parody of a military campaign or an earthquake’ (128; compare Roche's illuminating discussion of the same passage, p. 49).

In ‘Down the Pan: Historical Exemplarity in the Panegyricus’ (142–74), Henderson follows the stream of historical models and anti-models that pervade almost each chapter of the speech. While Henderson's distinctive style occasionally obfuscates fairly obvious points (‘whereas Domitian's name disappears but for its two bows early on, so that insistently vindictive disappearing of the monster into oblivion can feature extensively as the vituperative flipside of the binary rhetoric of praise’, 143), it frequently soars up Pliny's sleight of hand (‘if the emperor doesn't fulfil his vows, they won't play ball’ (147), discussing the prescriptive function of senatorial praise). Several of the exempla detected by Henderson, including Nerva as Anchises to Trajan's Aeneas, (150); Tiberius’ patronage of Sejanus echoing Nerva's adoption of Trajan (150); and Pompey lurking under a digression on the Nile (159–60), open up attractive intertexts beyond the domain of oratory.

In ‘Afterwords of Praise’ (175–88), Rees rectifies a common misconception about the reception of the speech. The position of the Panegyric as the head of the fourth-century anthology known as XII Panegyrici Latini has long encouraged the impression that it constitutes the ultimate model for all subsequent eulogies. Rees, however, shows that the Panegyric is not traceable in these later speeches as their verbal, thematic, or ideological template; the primacy of Pliny's speech in the manuscript is not recognition of its achieved status but an attempt to ensure, by precedent, the respectability of the panegyric project and to showcase by contrast the subsequent panegyrists’ original contributions to the genre.