Among treatments of Latin epistolography Pliny's letter collection has always received special attention. This is mainly because it was compiled by the author himself, which makes it particularly suitable for literary studies. Research, thereby, usually focuses on how Pliny uses his letters for his self-fashioning as well as the design of the authorial persona, the various addressees and the communicative relationship between them. New studies on Pliny the Younger's letter collection must therefore be judged on to what extent they deepen this tableau of leading perspectives or add new aspects.
Narratological approaches represent a perspective that is still the exception in research on Pliny's letter collection as well as on ancient epistolography as a whole. Against this background, N.'s comprehensive narratological study of the Plinian letter corpus has, without any doubt, pioneering character. N. opens her study after a brief but exhaustive overview of the main tendencies in previous research (‘Einleitung’) with a broad theoretical introduction (‘Die Narrativität der Briefe’). At first, she shows that Pliny repeatedly reflects on the poetics of his letters, whereby the relationship between epistolography and historiography becomes of particular importance for her approach (‘Narrare in der antiken Epistolographie – epistolary narratives’). Accordingly, she concludes that Pliny's letter collection aims to represent a kind of fragmented historiography that offers highlights on the author's life, work and epoch. The narrative potential relevant to this is articulated in various ways: that letters can provide the basis for historiographical works, that they themselves narrate contemporary or past events or that several of them constitute comprehensive narratives together.
Having thus established a typology of narrative strategies in Pliny's letters, N. turns to modern narratological theory to grasp more clearly the specific narrativity of the Plinian letter collection (‘Epistolographie und Narratologie’). Four subchapters serve this aim. The first argues that, in addition to the voice of the author and that of his epistolary self, a wide range of voices can be identified in Pliny's oeuvre. On the one hand, Pliny makes his addressees speak in various ways; on the other, he lets the persons talked about in the letters articulate themselves (‘Epistolare Stimmen’). The second part deals with the various levels of time and their complex interaction (‘Zeit in den Briefen’). This discussion centres around the time in which the letters were written and the various time levels of the events described in them as well as the strategies for combining complementary narratives of different letters into a chronologically coherent narrative. The third subchapter analyses the category of space, with an emphasis not only on the fundamental separation of the epistolary partners, but also on the realm of events narrated in the letters (‘Der Raum der Briefe’). Here N. focuses primarily on the spatial arrangement in the fifth book of the collection, from which she sketches a typology of space first between Rome, Italy and the provinces, and then between public and private spaces as well as between spaces of political events and recreation. The fourth subchapter turns to the addressees and the persons otherwise addressed in the letters, attempts to grasp their identity and explores their function for the letter's narrative dimension (‘Adressaten und Figurenarsenal’). Through its intensive analysis of relevant letters and letter passages, the introduction elaborates a broad spectrum of narrative strategies and their functions in Pliny's letter collection. In addition, it paradigmatically explains how narratological approaches can be successfully adapted to identify and analyse narrative structures in ancient epistolography in general.
The following chapter, ‘Narrative Strategien’, works out the forms and functions of narrative strategies in Pliny's letter collection in four central thematic areas by subjecting individual letters or related groups of them to a close reading. In doing so, N. illustrates that the analysed narratives never solely seek to inform the addressee as one may expect a letter to do, but always realise a larger tableau of content or function that often surpasses the individual letter. Moreover, she points out that the various forms of narrative do not stand apart from the multiple genres that enrich Pliny's letters; instead, they serve to integrate them, either strengthening Pliny's attempt to compete with other genres or to prove the letter to be highly compatible with them.
This becomes immediately clear in the first subchapter, which is dedicated to narratives about court hearings or Pliny's own activity in court. N. explains that Pliny strives to create maximum clarity by combining the possibilities of narrative with those of drama and dialogue (‘Narrationen über rhetorische Performanz am Schauplatz Gericht’). Another focus of the chapter is on the strategies of linking several letters by comprehensive narratives. Since these are usually scattered throughout the oeuvre, Pliny develops a whole series of mechanisms to make meaningful references perceptible over a greater distance. In this way, the chapter provides illuminating insights into the composition of a collection that oscillates between programmatic varietas and contextualisation. The insights gained here are deepened in the following subchapter, which primarily examines those letters in which Pliny reports to his addressee on the inspection and assessment of epitaphs as well as on the conditions of their installation while discussing the character of the persons behind them (‘Eingelegte Schriftlichkeit: Briefe über Stimmtäfelchen und Inschriften’). Once again, N. shows how Pliny uses communication with his addressee to stage his reports as broader and complex narratives. If Pliny appeared in the first chapter as an exemplary advocate, here he is shown to present himself as a literary connoisseur who knows how to judge the inscriptions not only with regard to their historical credibility, but also in terms of style and aesthetics. That Pliny's narratives serve his self-representation is then illustrated particularly in the third subchapter, in which N. demonstrates how Pliny uses narrative strategies to construct his biography beyond the seemingly coincidental arrangement of treated topics, which gives special attention to his poetic activity (‘Konstruktion einer Dichterbiographie’). Finally, the last subchapter is devoted to those letters and groups of letters that deal with mirabilia or other natural phenomena (‘Der Briefzyklus über Mirabilien und Naturphänomene’). Although these are among the most studied of Pliny's letters, N. contributes illuminating new observations, which relate on the one hand to the aemulatio of his uncle as a specialist in natural history and on the other hand, once again, to the virtuoso adaptation of other genres. The volume ends with a concise summary of the results (‘Epilog’).
N.'s study is impressive not only because of its convincing adaptation of narratological theory to the interpretation of Pliny's letter collection, which is groundbreaking for the study of ancient epistolography as a whole, but also because of the various results of her wide-ranging readings in its extensive central chapter. This works out in comprehensive breadth the great extent to which narrative procedures shape the poetics of Pliny's letters and the collection as a whole as well as the multiple ways in which these are realised. In addition, the dense readings provide diverse new insights into the central topics of Pliny's collection. Finally, it should be acknowledged that N. has taken into account almost completely the vast research literature. Against this background, N.'s study is, without doubt, to be regarded as a milestone in the scholarship on Pliny's letter collection.
