Pliny's Epistles potentially offer a significant amount of information not only about the role of women in Roman elite society generally, but also about the lives of individual women in particular. They contain seven letters addressed to women (all perhaps related to him in some way), and mention by name around 30 other women, alongside anonymised references to over 40 more. Nevertheless – Pliny's letters to Calpurnia aside – critical uptake on the literary, historical and social riches on offer here has been relatively tardy. It is now decisively bolstered by the appearance of two monographs devoted to the study of women in Pliny's letters: J. Carlon's Pliny's Women: Constructing Virtue and Creating Identity in the Roman World (2009) and the volume under review here. S.'s book has been long in the making, and her interest in the subject can be traced back to a classic article from over two decades ago: ‘Pliny the Younger, and the Ideal Wife’, Classica & Mediaevalia 41 (1990), 163–86.

These two monographs have their own context and lineage within the study of Pliny. Recent approaches to the Epistles have – very broadly – tended to divide into the categories of the ‘realist’, ‘instrumentalist’ or ‘literary’ (as is suggested in the introduction to Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: the Epistles of Pliny, R.K. Gibson and C.L. Whitton [edd.], forthcoming). The first takes the Epistles and the data they provide largely at face value, and studies them for what can be learnt about (for example) Pliny's progress up the cursus honorum, or Roman agriculture and the economy of large estates. ‘Instrumentalist’ readings concentrate on the author and view his Epistles as the instruments through which Pliny constructs or conceals his appearance. While literary readings privilege the text over the author and attempt to treat the letters as serious works of literature in the mode of early imperial poetry. Of course, not all recent scholarship fits quite comfortably into these boxes, and few contributions to Plinian scholarship are (for example) either exclusively ‘literary’ or purely ‘realist’. But it is fair to say that ‘instrumentalist’ and ‘literary’ readings have dominated the scene in the Anglophone world, for example in S. Hoffer's Anxieties of Pliny the Younger (1999) and I. Marchesi's The Art of Pliny's Letters (2008).

Where Carlon studies the women of the Epistles for the ways in which they advance Pliny's main goals of ensuring his own fame and glory (and so comes close to the ‘instrumentalist’ focus on Plinian strategies of self-representation), S., by contrast, belongs more to the ‘realist’ tradition of extracting from the letters useable historical data, in the prosopographical manner so familiar from the work of Sir Ronald Syme. The primary aim of S.'s book is to bring Pliny's women into the foreground and to capture ‘images of the lives of the individual women he mentions’ (p. 1). To this end, S. gives brief biographies of the women of Pliny's letters, arranged by type (‘Mothers, nurses and stepmothers’, ‘Daughters and sisters’, ‘Women outside the family’, etc.) across seven thematic chapters. Given this organisation, there is inevitably quite an amount of repetition of material between biographical entries for separate but related women. As such, the book is perhaps best understood and used as a work of reference rather than as something to read from cover to cover. Nevertheless, S. also ultimately moves beyond purely biographical concerns, and seeks to investigate ‘how the concept of the model Roman woman is constructed in Pliny and elsewhere in our sources’ (p. 5). This is not something that would have interested Syme, who studied elite Romans largely in order to trace the alliances they formed in pursuit of power.

Syme remains a useful touchstone for S.'s book. For all his well-rehearsed distaste for Pliny (and self-flattering identification with Tacitus), Syme devoted a succession of articles to the epistolographer – including the seventh and final volume of the Roman Papers (1991), which was in effect a prosopographical study of the younger Pliny and his north Italian context and circle. Yet Syme devoted little enough separate study to the numerous women within this circle, despite the importance they played in the formation of those alliances in pursuit of power. (Elsewhere, in chapter 13 of The Augustan Aristocracy [1989], he conceded that ‘Women have their uses for historians. They offer relief from warfare, legislation, and the history of ideas; and they enrich the central theme of social history, if and when enough evidence is available’.) S.'s book can thus be understood, in part, as an illumination of one of the holes in the project of the twentieth-century's greatest Roman historian. She also manages more successfully than M.-T. Raepsaet-Charlier to avoid the tendency to concentrate on the male relatives of the women studied (although full use has been made of the latter's monumental two volume work, Prosopographie des femmes de l'ordre sénatorial [1987]).

S. is also more honest than Syme about the historical limitations of the material she works with. In an illuminating example of how to indulge in speculation without creating a revealing vapour trail, Syme conjectured advice on the choice of Pliny's wife from ‘senior mentors … from women among the family friends like the sisters of Corellius Rufus. These people would not be moved by the precepts of [the Stoic philosopher] Musonius Rufus, who deprecated the primacy of wealth or beauty or high birth. Superior matrimony was at first perhaps out of reach, and they knew its hazards. They would counsel an attachment within their own congenial circle, or at least not far away. But in any case, with ample resources’ (Roman Papers 7, p. 554). It takes an effort to realise that what we have here is pure imagination – albeit imagination based on profound knowledge and superior intuition. By contrast, in her entry for Pliny's mother (presumably called Plinia), S. produces a list of the things we do not know: ‘The year of Plinia's birth is unknown’; ‘We do not know how many pregnancies she may have had’; ‘We know nothing about Plinia's parents’; ‘We have no way of knowing how old Caecilius was at the time of his marriage to Plinia’; ‘We don't know if Plinia accompanied [her son to Rome for his education]’ – and so on for a further eight indications of ignorance across six pages on the life and death of Pliny's mother (pp. 188–93). The result, of course, is harder to read than Syme. But it provides an object lesson in the (very large amount of) things we do not know about Roman women.

Readers of the book may wish to join me in (mentally) composing a curse tablet for conceptual burial under the offices of the publishers, who have elected to enforce the use of endnotes in a work that cries out for footnotes brimming with inscriptional and other prosopographical material ready for evaluation by the reader at the foot of the page. I will say nothing of the exorbitant price.