Introduction
Among Pliny the Younger's appearances in the age of politeness, none is more curious than his role in a short book entitled The description of Epsom, with the humors and politicks of the place: in a Letter to Eudoxa. Printed in London in 1711, this letter from ‘Britto-Batavus’ to ‘Eudoxa’ offers a wryly rhapsodic description of his new summer residence at Epsom, with an appended ‘Specimen of letters out of Pliny’ bringing the volume to a modest forty-four octavo pages.Footnote 1 This short book is an oddity among the works of the Irish deist and ‘free thinker’ John Toland. It is an unusual witness, too, to Pliny's early modern reception, combining as it does selection, translation and a very particular sort of imitation. As an account of Epsom in its heyday as a fashionable spa town, the Description has drawn attention from Surrey antiquarians,Footnote 2 while its biographical and philosophical interest earns it occasional notice in Toland scholarship.Footnote 3 Yet it remains barely known to eighteenth-century scholars and even less so to classicists. Intensely engaged with the Epistles at the time (a further anthology of translations followed in 1712), Toland made the two villa letters, and Pliny's epistolary self-portrait, central to his portrayal of Epsom, and of himself. A recognition and assessment of this response not only promises a richer reading of Epsom and a notable episode in Pliny's reception history, but also opens a new, strikingly Horatian vista on the Epistles: good reasons, I suggest, to take a closer look at Toland's Pliny.
Pliny was a fashionable writer in Queen Anne England (if, as usual, no rival for Cicero or Horace).Footnote 4 The first British editions of the Epistles had appeared in Oxford in 1677 and Reference Hearne and Masson1703, John Masson published a book-length biography in Reference Masson1709, and Pliny's entertaining social portraiture and urbane Latinity earned him regular notice in the new periodicals. Here and elsewhere extracts were being turned, almost for the first time, into English:Footnote 5 a miscellany from Tom Brown in Reference Brown1700, the three Calpurnia letters in the Tatler (1710), a letter of recommendation in the Spectator (1711).Footnote 6 If these tended to be shorter pieces, Pliny's descriptions of his ‘Laurentine’ villa (Laurentinum) on the coast near Rome (Ep. 2.17), and his ‘Etruscan’ estate (Tusci) at Tifernum Tiberinum in the Apennines (Ep. 5.6), were also beginning to earn notice. These extensive prose accounts of country estates, two of Pliny's longest letters, are exceptional among classical texts and have piqued the interest of many an archaeologist and architect.Footnote 7 They would receive lavish treatment in Robert Castell's Villas of the ancients illustrated (Reference Castell1728),Footnote 8 and had already appeared with French translations in the substantial edition of Jean-François Félibien, published in Paris in Reference Félibien des Avaux1699 and reprinted in London in 1707.Footnote 9 It was around this time, too, that the two letters, notable for their combination of rapture and Raffinesse, began to inspire new literary imitations.Footnote 10 A modest example is the account of a Cornwall orangery published in the Tatler (1710), citing Pliny's ‘long letter to his friend Gallus’ (Ep. 2.17) as its model;Footnote 11 a more discreet but much more substantial instance, as we shall see, is Toland's Description of Epsom. This form of homage, or parody, would live on through the eighteenth century, for instance in Alexander Pope's satirical portrait of his uncomfortable lodgings at Stanton Harcourt (c. 1718),Footnote 12 Horace Walpole's affectionate account of his estate at Strawberry Hill (1753)Footnote 13 and Thomas Wright's ‘Description of his villa at Byer's Green’ (1760s–80s),Footnote 14 and flowing ultimately into the whole genre of guides to palaces and country houses that has flourished since. Epsom thus takes its place in the vanguard of a rich literary tradition.
Toland's interest in the Epistles did not stop at the villa letters. His engagement with Pliny at the time he was writing Epsom is among the most intense, creative and idiosyncratic responses of any reader. This article takes stock of that response, beginning with his translations of the Epistles (Section 1). The central part of the paper is concerned with Epsom, demonstrating its substantial (but hitherto unremarked) interaction with Pliny's villa letters (Section 2) and situating that engagement within Toland's blend of parody and rhapsody (Section 3), before focusing on Toland's closing self-portrait, where the intertextuality is tuned rather to poetry and other Plinian letters (Section 4). A striking feature of that close is the pairing of Pliny with Horace as literary and ethical model. In a final move (Section 5) I consider the consequences of this combination, not just for what it can tell us about Pliny's reception in early modern England, but also for how it can inform a historicist reading of the Epistles themselves.
1. Toland as translator
By 1711 John Toland was well established in Britain and beyond as an erudite polymath and scandalous ‘free thinker’. Notorious for his anticlerical polemic, above all in Christianity not mysterious (Reference Toland1696), he had also carved himself a distinctive political–intellectual niche as a republican, commonwealth Whig and agitator for the Hanover succession.Footnote 15 In his heterogeneous output classical learning played a significant if subsidiary role. Plans for a complete edition of Cicero attest to his philological ambitions, even if they never got off the ground: he completed only a prospective essay, Cicero illustratus Toland (Reference Toland1712).Footnote 16 Other authors provided ammunition for theological polemic: Adeisidaemon (Reference Toland1709), on superstition in Livy, raised dangerous questions about atheism; Origines Judaicae (published together with Adeisidaemon) defended Strabo's account of Jewish antiquity against the authority of the Old Testament.Footnote 17 But Toland's involvement with Pliny's Epistles in 1711 and 1712 – which he had evidently known for some timeFootnote 18 – was of a rather different sort.
In the spring of 1711 Toland set up house in Epsom,Footnote 19 thanks, it is generally assumed, to his old patron Robert Harley.Footnote 20 The description of Epsom, dated ‘May 30, 1711’, nowhere names Pliny; but it shows unmistakeably (I shall argue) that his Epistles were in mind, and indeed in hand.Footnote 21 So of course do his translations, which is one reason for starting with them here. But there is more to it than that: these anthologies, generally overlooked and in one case actively scorned,Footnote 22 comprise a unique and enlightening take on their original. Of course Pliny's ‘private’ correspondence, a collection of 247 self-standing miniatures,Footnote 23 lays itself open to excerption, and Toland stands here in a long tradition stretching from (at least) the early fifteenth century to the present.Footnote 24 But his own emphases are unique, and revealing.
Let me begin, then, with the eight-page ‘Specimen of letters out of Pliny’ appended to the Description of Epsom. It seems an arbitrary pairing, an impression not immediately corrected by the (unsigned) dedicatory epistle (pp. 37–8). Dated ‘Epsom, Aug. 4. 1711’, it reads as a brief sequel to the Description, which Toland's (unnamed) correspondent has now read. Toland thanks him for his compliments, replies to some follow-up questions and assures him that a sequel is forthcoming, once he is free of some business currently occupying him. Meanwhile (‘till I regain my dear leisure’) he encloses a sample from his planned translation of Pliny's Epistles. The connection with Epsom seems wholly casual, as if Pliny just happens to be on Toland's desk at the moment; only Toland's lack of ‘leisure’ – and the Plinian feel of the letter itselfFootnote 25 – hint at the literary and autobiographical fusion of author and translator that will gradually emerge in my discussion.
Toland justifies his translation project – which, had he completed it, would have been a firstFootnote 26 – with a brief encomium of his subject:
For what they call a happy turn, delicacy of expression, and speaking only to the business in hand, I think no modern comes near him, no more than in the variety of his subjects, such as intrigues of state, points of literature and history, questions in natural philosophy, rural pleasures, the concerns of his friends, and some trifles which he renders important. (p. 38)
This Plinian praise for Pliny's variety chimes with the experience of many readers,Footnote 27 and Toland's little catalogue gives a good impression of the Epistles' broad range of topics. It also encapsulates what we shall see of his response to Pliny in Epsom: warm enthusiasm, but not without a mild sardonic edge (‘some trifles which he renders important’).Footnote 28 Yet these remarks are a strikingly poor fit with the selection that follows. Anything but diverse, Toland's ‘Specimen’ is a neat quartet on the associated themes of secessus (‘withdrawal’ from Rome) and studia (literary efforts).Footnote 29
First comes Epistles 1.3, sensuously evoking the delights of Caninius Rufus' villa in Pliny's native Comum. Writing from Rome, Pliny urges Rufus to put his freedom to good use and devote himself to studia. Then the longer Ep. 1.9,Footnote 30 moving from reflections on the futility of urban busyness into a paean to Pliny's Laurentine villa, sanctuary of leisured composition. Third is another letter to Caninius in Comum (Ep. 2.8), dreaming of sport and study and lamenting the bonds that tie Pliny himself to Rome.
Given this cumulative emphasis on villa life and otium litteratum, Toland's fourth choice (Ep. 7.26) may seem a strange addition. Plucked from far later in the collection, it features neither secessus nor studia. Instead, light philosophising prompted by the illness of a friend: we are best when we are unwell, because our desires are reduced to the single, wholesome wish for good health. That yields an epigrammatic ethical prescription, ‘that when we are well, we continue to be such, as we profess our selves resolv'd to be, when we are sick.’Footnote 31 Why end the ‘Specimen’ here? The closing sententia, typical of Pliny, was evidently to Toland's taste,Footnote 32 and the juxtaposition with Ep. 2.8 is neat: there Pliny ‘yearn[s for Comum] as the sick yearn for wine, or baths, or fountains’; in Ep. 7.26 analogy has become theme, an invalid whose ‘thoughts are wholly set on baths and fountains’.Footnote 33 It is apt imagery, too, for Epsom. The ‘excellent mineral Waters’ (p. 3) that made this spa town famous were used for purging, not bathing, but thoughts of invalids and springs make a fitting sequel to the Description: Toland's epistolary account and his translations from Pliny thus flow into one, in an implicit invitation to his addressee to visit Epsom for himself (albeit, we may hope, in good health).Footnote 34
Yet Toland had one more reason, I think, for including Ep. 7.26. It lies in the broader ethical connection between the rustic calm in the first three letters and the simplicity of the sick man's desires here:
[H]e pursues no amours, he covets no honours, he neglects riches … He envies no body, he admires no body, he despises no body, neither is he curious to hear or is pleas'd even with scandal. His thoughts are wholly set on baths and fountains. The top of his cares, the top of his wishes is, that, after escaping his distemper, he may become sleek and plump: which is to say, that he resolves to lead an innocent and happy life for the future.Footnote 35
Toland has misconstrued the Latin here, transforming Pliny's ‘soft and easy life’ into a passing (autobiographical?) image of a ‘sleek and plump’ man;Footnote 36 but the point remains: a twin emphasis on simple comforts and inner tranquillity. The philosophical underpinning is characteristic of Pliny, a soft-focus blend of Stoicism and Epicureanism, emphasising the rejection of ambition and cultivation of the self but allowing for some creature comforts too. Toland surely saw what one or two modern readers have also seen, that the ethical focus makes Ep. 7.26, for all its difference of theme, an intimate relative of Pliny's rustic otium letters.Footnote 37 Although this letter contains no countryside and no studia, it gives unusually intense expression to a recurrent theme in the Epistles, and one more important than salts and water to (Toland's) Epsom: the bliss of retreat.
There is no sign that Toland ever completed his intended translation of Pliny's Epistles as a whole – not unusually for a man who ‘hardly put out a Book, but he promis'd in it one or two more’.Footnote 38 He did, however, produce an extended selection the following year. It contains thirty-two complete epistles (including the four from his first set) and curtailed versions of the two villa letters. It is a fair bet that he was already at work on them in the spring of 1711;Footnote 39 at all events this second selection reached its final form, again in Epsom, in September 1712, but apparently remained unpublished until after Toland's death.Footnote 40 Even more than his first ‘Specimen’, this larger anthology is remarkable for its strong focus on a small group of themes.
Most obvious among them, again, is the calm of rus. The great senatorial trials (Ep. 2.11, 3.9, etc.) are omitted, along with the long discussions of style (Ep. 1.20, 9.26), the drama at Vesuvius (Ep. 6.16, 6.20), most letters of recommendation and virtually all those with political and legal themes. Instead, we find all three ‘nature letters’Footnote 41 – the mysterious spring near Lake Como (Ep. 4.30), the fons Clitumnus (Ep. 8.8) and the floating islands of Lake Vadimon (Ep. 8.20) – as well as another natural marvel, the dolphin at Hippo (Ep. 9.33). This focus on nature's wonders is maintained through Toland's cropping of both villa letters. He includes less than a sixth of Ep. 2.17, just the first view of the estate and its surroundings (§§1–4a) and the coda (§27). The longer Ep. 5.6 gets more substantial treatment, with the languid setting of the scene (§§1–14) and the account of the ‘hippodrome’ (driving circuit) and gardens (§§32–6) adding up to a third of the original; but again the body of the letter, and with it the main buildings, are omitted. There may be an aesthetic motivation, making the two letters a better fit for their companions in Toland's collection; and perhaps the tricky architectural vocabulary did not appeal. Still, it is striking that the houses themselves have been stripped out of both pieces entirely, leaving two letters dwelling instead on countryside and gardens: not the mediating interiors that dominate in Pliny's account, but the outdoor delights that surround them.
These pared-down villa epistles and the ‘nature letters’ are the longest pieces in Toland's selection, along with Ep. 3.1 on Spurinna's blissful retirement at his villa; together they constitute almost half of his anthology, and make a remarkable group in themselves.Footnote 42 Among the shorter letters, villa visits and rural otium are a recurrent theme (Ep. 1.6, 5.18, 6.14, 9.32), including the lakeside defenestration at Comum (Ep. 6.24). Most of those letters feature literary endeavour, and the theme recurs in several more – not the longer accounts of recitatio but several brief odes to studia in different guises (Ep. 5.15,Footnote 43 7.13, 8.9, 8.19, 9.8, 9.14, 9.29, 9.38) and two recommendation letters, both focused on literary prowess (Ep. 7.22, 7.25). Brief moralising letters are well represented, on hospitality (Ep. 2.6 and 3.12), tolerance (Ep. 8.22) and liberality (Ep. 9.30). Pliny's preface (Ep. 1.1), a brief request for letters (Ep. 1.11), the striking note on the power of history (Ep. 9.27)Footnote 44 and a single letter on politics (Ep. 6.19)Footnote 45 complete the set.Footnote 46
Together, Toland's selection is a nice demonstration of the power of anthologies to shift the balance of Pliny's self-presentation. The Epistles do indeed have several physical centres of gravity, including Comum, Laurentum and Tifernum; and Pliny's desire for the quiet life of retreat is a recurrent strain. Yet that is offset by – and in many ways dependent on – the strong pull of the urbs: Rome is the focus of Pliny's civic contributions as advocate and senator, and of the recitations that are so central to Plinian literary production.Footnote 47 If the dichotomies of negotium and otium, city and country, inform much of the Epistles, Pliny rarely attempts to resolve the contradiction between his professed desires for retreat and his devotion to duties at Rome; indeed, the resulting tension is (one might say) definitive of his collection.Footnote 48 In Toland's anthology, by contrast, negotia are all but elided, serving at most as a backdrop for yearnings in the direction of rus and studia. This squeezing out of senatorial business shifts Pliny in the direction of Horace (Section 5) – and chimes nicely with Toland's own situation in Epsom. There both villa letters play a substantial and affective role, but not as the sole Plinian element, nor as the only Roman inspiration: poetic loci classici, above all from Horace, are also marshalled for Toland's take on rural idyll. And it is precisely Pliny's integration into that context that makes his contribution to Toland's self-portraiture in Epsom, and Toland's contribution as a reader of Pliny, so distinctive.
2. Epsom as villa
Toland published his Description of Epsom anonymously, addressing it as a letter to ‘Eudoxa’ (‘Lady of fair renown’) and signing himself, in thin disguise, ‘Britto-Batavus’ (‘Brito-Dutchman’).Footnote 49 A preface, purportedly from the publisher, adds that it was written for ‘two very eminent patrons’, Eudoxa, who wishes to learn about Epsom, and a ‘Gentleman, that, for some reasons, was desirous to see the Author write in a manner different from his ordinary stile, in a strain he did not approve himself, and which is scarce ever allow'd by good judges’. This is doubtless the ‘noblest Cheruscus’ to whom Eudoxa is later asked to pass the letter,Footnote 50 and (we might suppose) the dedicatee of the translations that follow. The double purpose, information and entertainment, establishes the Janus-like nature of the Description to come: on the one hand, a ‘severely exact’ historical account, on the other, a stylistic jeu d'esprit.Footnote 51 It is a balancing-act presaged by the preface itself, teetering on the brink between po-face and parody:
Of late years there have been printed several Descriptions of particular places in a jocular manner, in order to introduce such characters as might excite laughter only, without designing any sort of instruction, and yet often missing of this merry aim.Footnote 52 But hearing the Description of EPSOM was a serious thing, …
Of course that can be taken straight; but, like most prefatory denials, it will also bear a strong pinch of salt. As for the Greco-Latinate names, they are not exceptional for Toland,Footnote 53 but are well enough suited both to the playful manner and to the distinctly Roman colouring to come.
The Description itself is a substantial account of Epsom, its amenities, its society, and the surrounding countryside.Footnote 54 It says almost nothing about Toland's own house there;Footnote 55 but mutatis mutandis this elegantly ecstatic account of a summer abode near London is a close match for Pliny's accounts of his ‘suburban’ villa at Laurentum and his summer retreat in Etruria. No less Plinian is the elaborate ring structure. Since no précis will substitute for reading the letter itself, let me offer just a brutal reduction:
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pp. 1–3 Preface: style (the author will be ‘more a Poet than a Historian’)
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pp. 3–10 Location and surrounding countryside (with poetic parody)
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pp. 11–19 Epsom and its social life (with mild satire)Footnote 56
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pp. 19–23 ‘Digression’: attack on politicians and priests
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pp. 23–5 Social life in Epsom (mildly satirical)
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pp. 25–32 Surrounding countryside (increasingly poetic)
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pp. 32–5 Coda: Toland's otium litteratum
By this (highly summative) account, Epsom is symmetrical in both content and style, centred on precisely the portion discounted as a digression ‘like some Episode in a Poem’ (p. 22) – in which Toland is anything but poetic or even lightly satirical.Footnote 57 Epsom is thus less insulated from the hurly-burly of London and national politics than might at first appear:Footnote 58 the negotia otherwise screened out come bursting in with a savageness of invective nowhere to be found in Pliny, at least as Toland anthologises him.Footnote 59 If this seems a far cry from the villa letters, with their insistent aura of calm contentment, it is only an intensification of the tension that, I have already remarked, runs through the Epistles as a whole. But politics, and the possibility that Toland himself felt frozen out of Westminster at the time, will be as subdued in this paper as in the rest of Epsom. Instead, let us follow him to the carefully depoliticised otium of Pliny's villas.
In broad terms the villa letters provide an obvious model, both as delighted descriptions and for the frame arrangement. Ep. 2.17 briefly situates Laurentum in relation to Rome and describes the land around (§§2–3), tours the villa and gardens in detail (§§4–24) and returns to the advantages of its location (§§25–8), before a closing invitation to Pliny's addressee to visit (§29).Footnote 60 In Ep. 5.6 Pliny introduces the region and climate (§§1–6), then slowly surveys the view from the hills above (§§7–13), tours the villa buildings at length (§§14–31) and lingers on the outdoor spaces (§§32–40); he ends with an apology, marked as a digression, for the exceptional length of the letter (§§41–4), before a conclusion (§§45–6). In both cases, Pliny embeds his tour of the buildings within their natural surroundings, as Toland frames Epsom with the Downs above.
If that seems a plastic comparison, it is typical of the relationship between these texts. With two exceptions, no single detail definitively points to Pliny, so that we are moving within the familiar grey zones of intertextuality. But this is expressive of the subtlety with which Pliny is incorporated. To summarise what follows: his presence is most concentrated and most evident in the first pages; it fades out towards the middle; but it returns, in a new and striking guise, at the end. The villa letters in particular make their mark both in terms of structure and in individual descriptive modules – but Pliny's role in Epsom goes far beyond the topographical.
The Description opens with an emblematic blend of Plinian motifs:
Madam,
Since the Place in which I pass the summer was thought fit, on a certain occasion you remember, to be compar'd with my Mistress, who makes it summer wherever she is; you desire, that as I show'd you the picture of the one, I wou'd likewise send you the description of the other, and as like the original as may be. (p. 1)
In good ‘epistoliterary’ style, this first sentence lets eavesdroppers imagine the exchange that has preceded, infer the writer's intimacy with Eudoxa and wonder who his ‘Mistress’ might be.Footnote 61 Britto-Batavus, we learn, is merely obliging a request of Eudoxa – a dedicatory topos used by Pliny in both villa letters: in Ep. 2.17 Gallus is surprised that Pliny likes his Laurentinum so much; in Ep. 5.6 Apollinaris is concerned that the Apennines may not make for a healthy summer sojourn. If Eudoxa is neither surprised nor concerned, the thrust of the move, a token deflection of responsibility for the pages that follow, is the same, while the evocation of summer replays the opening of the Etruscan letter in particular.Footnote 62 Toland's figuring of his epistle as a portrait may be another soft intertext, given Pliny's general fondness for epistolary portraiture,Footnote 63 and more particularly his use of the same conceit in a passage of Ep. 5.6 which Toland evokes later in Epsom.Footnote 64 At all events, it leads the sentence to a piquant close: ‘as like as the original may be’ is an apt banner for this intensely imitative – and innovative – epistle.
The most striking conceit, though, is the comparison of Epsom to a mistress; no passing fancy, it will return in a flirtatious passage near the end (p. 33).Footnote 65 The figure could be situated in contemporary terms,Footnote 66 but likely inspiration lies in a moment of rapture at Pliny's Laurentine villa. In a climax of the personification running through the letter, Pliny styles a favourite pavilion amores mei, re uera amores (‘my darling, yes, truly my darling’, Ep. 2.17.20). The phrase is extraordinary, as others saw: Henley translates ‘my Delight, and indeed, my Mistress’, and Boyle comments that Pliny ‘speaks of his favourite edifice in the rapturous stile of a lover’.Footnote 67 Of course Toland is not Henley or Boyle, and this passage does not feature in his 1712 translation. But neither do others on which he draws elsewhere,Footnote 68 and Pliny certainly provides a proximate and pertinent – if less archly developed – model for his conceit.
Before the description itself comes an apologia for Toland's poetic style. Here the villa letters (which make no such apology) are left aside, but Pliny remains a first point of reference. As intimated in the ‘publisher's preface’, Toland undertakes to write in a rich, ‘nay, … turgid’ manner, since style, like a woman, is nothing without adornment, ‘a slatternly negligence, or a tawdry affectation, being no less disgusting in the one than in the other’ (p. 2). In itself the endorsement of a copious style is Ciceronian,Footnote 69 as is the analogy with female ornament.Footnote 70 But in explicitly advocating a jewelled style, Toland takes a significant step beyond Cicero. When he then justifies a manner that is actually poetic, he goes further still, into Plinian territory:
You know (without being one of those they call Virtuoso-Ladies)Footnote 71 that there's the low and the sublime, the epistolary, the historical, the oratorial stile, with many other such differences. And in this Letter I fancy you'll easily agree, the stile ought to be a little luxuriant, like the subject itself. … I ought to show myself more a poet than a historian … Nature teaches us … to delight in the same innocent Variety; particularly in prospects, landschapes, and the descriptions of extraordinary places … (pp. 2–3, my italics).
Compare Epistles 2.5, a cover-letter in which Pliny defends the stylistic freedom of a speech on Comum: ‘it is not forbidden to treat descriptions of places … not just like a historian but almost like a poet’; some may think he has written ‘more luxuriantly than the strictness of oratory demands’, but he hopes that he may satisfy different tastes with several styles of oratory, and that, above all, the variety itself will win over his readers'.Footnote 72 The accumulation of shared details is not matched in any other ancient text, or indeed in Toland's other treatments of style.Footnote 73 Pliny returns to the theme in another well-known letter (Ep. 7.9). There he distinguishes three types of prose – oratory, history and letters (the same trio as Toland's) – and advises young Fuscus that ‘even in a speech a need often arises for descriptions, not just historical but almost poetical’.Footnote 74 Again, neither letter features in Toland's 1712 translation, but there is every reason to suppose that they are in mind: not just Pliny's practice, but his stylistic theorising underlies the description to come. Whether Toland's hint that his own poeticising verges on the ‘turgid’ applies to Pliny too is another question, which I save for Section 3.
These preliminaries over, we reach ‘Epsom, a village in the county of Surry’ (p. 3), and the intertextual focus returns to the villa letters, both for small details and for the broad vista. Toland begins by situating his subject against London with a double measurement: ‘Epsom … is distant about fourteen Italian miles from London-bridge, and twelve from Fox-hall’ (p. 3). Pliny begins Ep. 2.17 by situating his Laurentine villa against Rome (‘but seventeen miles’), then specifies two further markers of distance: ‘… but after fourteen miles you quit the Laurentin, after eleven the Ostian road’ (Ep. 2.17.2, JT). Epsom ‘is deliciously situated in a warm even bottom’ (p. 3);Footnote 75 Pliny's Laurentine estate has ‘downs’ above (Toland's striking translation of montibus in Ep. 2.17.2), while the Etruscan villa ‘stands towards the foot of the hill’ (Ep. 5.6.14, JT). This hill, Pliny remarks, ‘rises so easily and by such slow degrees, that you find yourself got up without perceiving that you mounted’.Footnote 76 The same gentle conceit recurs almost verbatim in Epsom: ‘Indeed the Risings are many times so easy, that you find your self got to the top, without perceiving that you mounted’ (p. 5).Footnote 77 If we have been dealing so far mostly in fuzzy intertextuality, this close imitation guarantees Pliny's place in the text. But it is exceptional, too, the only phrase from the villa letters integrated whole: it is not so much that Toland was concerned to ‘plant’ close echoes, as that he found a particular use for this sententious turn.Footnote 78
With the villa letters in view, a series of smaller details start to look familiar. ‘The form of this our village … is exactly semicircular’ (p. 5), like the end of Pliny's Etruscan ‘hippodrome’ (Ep. 5.6.33 hemicyclio ‘a semicircle’, JT). ‘EPSOM never misses of the eastern or the western Sun’ (p. 5), a mannered expression of orientation evocative of Pliny's obsessive attention with capturing the morning and evening sun at Laurentum.Footnote 79 Thanks to its meadows and hedges, Epsom's constituent parts ‘seem to be so many distinct little villages’ (p. 6); from a Laurentine dining room Pliny looks out at the other villas around, ‘which give the appearance of numerous cities’.Footnote 80 Epsom's lodging-houses have ‘handsom tho not large Gardens’ (p. 8), with all the modest pride familiar from Pliny (e.g. Ep. 2.17.4 ‘a petite but cheerful garden’).Footnote 81 Its trees are ‘in many places artificially wreath'd into verdant Porticos, cut into variety of figures …’ (p. 7); beside one of the several porticos at the Etruscan villa is ‘an ambulatory enclosed by dense foliage, cut into various shapes’.Footnote 82 ‘[T]hese vegetable Canopies, in the very heat of the day, yield a grateful and refreshing coolness, by the fanning breezes they collect from the delicate air of the Downs’ (pp. 7–8) – like Pliny's cryptoportico at Laurentum, which paradoxically ‘lacks the sun above all at the moment when it burns down most on its roof’ and ‘collects and transmits the spring breezes’:Footnote 83 the ‘point’ is not lost on Toland, even in his milder version (‘in the very heat of the day’). Amid all Epsom's delights, ‘One thing is wanting,’ – namely, running water – ‘and happy is the situation that wants no more!’ (p. 9). Compare the Laurentinum: ‘This convenience and charm lack just one thing, running water’.Footnote 84
Not to say that Epsom did not enjoy all these charms, any more than one denies the reality of Pliny's villas in emphasising the textuality of his descriptions. Numerous points of difference make this clear enough, if they needed to: the inclusion of a jail (p. 7), the two ‘rival bowling greens’ (p. 11),Footnote 85 the travelling grocers (pp. 23–4), to name just a few. What we see here is rather a form of literary assimilation, and only of one ingredient among several. It is concentrated, too, in the opening pages: as we move from topography into social observation (a mode alien to the villa letters), Pliny fades from view, and in the stormy digression he is nowhere to be seen. Yet as Toland calms the waves, his affability has a Plinian touch:
A just indignation at our senseless quarrels has extorted this Censure, like some Episode in a Poem. But (that I may not digress too farr, tho in a place where you may ramble long enough without fearing to lose your way) … (p. 22)
The genial tone, the curtailing of the ‘digression’, the play on ‘ramble’, and the comparison with poetry, all find close analogies in the remarkable ‘digression’ towards the end of Pliny's Etruscan letter. I have allowed myself to give you such a long epistolary tour, he tells Apollinaris, ‘not least because you could occasionally take a break if you wanted, putting down the letter and, as it were, taking a seat’; Pliny then compares his description to famous poetic ecphrases, and exits with a joke, ‘But back to where I started, for fear that I will be justly charged with breaking my own rules if I take too long about this digression …’.Footnote 86
The villa letters are most present in the opening pages, then, but Toland does not lose sight of them; Footnote 87 and, as we shall see in Section 4, Pliny plays a central role in the climactic self-description to come. First, however, I want briefly to address more explicitly a playful aspect of the Description that seems to have passed most readers by, and consider its consequences for Pliny. To put the question in a nutshell: is Toland's tongue in his cheek when he adds these Roman touches to his local town?
3. Parody, pathos and Pliny
In the first pages of Epsom rhapsody teeters more than once on the brink of farce. Consider the ‘clay-hills’ to the west,
variously chequer'd with woods and groves of oak, ash, elm, and beech, with both the poplars, the intoxicating yew, and the florid white-beam. The wyche-tree, the horn-beam, and the correcting birch are not wanting. I need not mention the numberless copses of hazel, thorn, holly, maple, and other trees and shrubs of dwarfish growth, that agreeably diversify all this country: nor that, for the most part, they are amorously claspt in the twining embraces of Ivy and Hony-suckles. (p. 4)
Here one reader ‘can feel, almost physically, the sensuous relish Toland experienced while writing …’.Footnote 88 We might be more cynical when faced with this epic arboreal catalogue, complete with elaborate ornamental epithets (‘intoxicating yew’, ‘florid white-beam’, ‘correcting birch’) and a climactic poetic cliché (‘amorously claspt …’).Footnote 89 Seen in those terms, the elegant ‘I need not mention’ doubles up as an ironic pointer to the superfluity of both list and hackneyed language.Footnote 90 Toland may indeed have delighted in such botanic variety, but his manner of expression seems to me, at any rate, to be touched with a dose of (self-)parody.
I write ‘(self-)parody’ deliberately, since these opening pages hover between mockery of contemporary poetic prose (that ‘strain … which is scarce ever allow'd by good judges’)Footnote 91 and irony at Toland's own expense for adopting it. Epsom as a whole, abounding as it does in precise observation and description, does not read as pure farce. Nor does it lack affection for its subject. Yet there are frequent touches of ironic distance.Footnote 92 The manner is Ovid pure, combining empathy and witty detachment to produce a text that is both affective and entertaining.Footnote 93 It is the same duality that we saw encapsulated in the publisher's preface, with its asseveration that ‘no historical account can be more severely exact’: exact it is, rigorously so, perhaps; but the manner is, for the most part, anything but severe.
Take Toland's outrageous rhapsody on the aquatic delights that Epsom … lacks:
For in this place … are not to be heard the precipitant murmurs of impetuous cascades; there are no purling streams in our groves to temper the shrill notes of the warbling choristers, whose never-ceasing concerts exceed Bononcini and Corelli … (p. 9)
– and so on for half a page. The remark that follows is a typical blend of playful and serious: ‘I leave you to guess, whether in these periods I design'd to show how well read I am in bombast-romance, or rather to exhibit the various images under which Water naturally delights us in the country.’Footnote 94 Clearly Toland is having fun at the expense of contemporary purple prose; but the following ruminations are far from sardonic, as he suggests a potential remedy to ‘this present defect’ in the form of an artificial watercourse from Ewell (‘And I am persuaded from physical reasons …’, p. 10). Conceivably this earnestness too is parodic, as Toland briefly plays the natural scientist;Footnote 95 but it seems more likely to reflect civic engagement: the wry overdressing of the ‘impetuous cascades’ need not negate the desirability of the amenity itself.
How, then, does Pliny fit into this texture? Despite his advocacy in Ep. 2.5 and elsewhere of a more ‘poetic’ oratory, his own letters are worlds apart from these passages of elegiac overload. The Etruscan villa, it is true, rejoices in an impressive array of water-features, but Pliny's description of them is (characteristically) limpid, not bombastic.Footnote 96 Nor does he catalogue trees at length; and the creepers are framed in his usual mannered antithesis, not amorous cliché: ‘these [sc. plane-trees] are so cover'd with ivy, that their lower parts are green with its leaves, as the tops are with their own …’.Footnote 97 As for the various conceits that (I have suggested) Toland may owe him, they are integrated without obvious parody. Just one moment of absurdity may catch Pliny with a satirical lash. The semicircular Epsom has its church at one end, a palace at the other; ‘or, lest our stile here shou'd offend you (Madam) it has a Palace for its head, and a Church for its tail’ (p. 5). The remark welcomes a political reading, as comment on secular and sacred power;Footnote 98 but by raising the spectre of offensive style Toland also underlines the comic potential of his zoographic imagery. Is Pliny in mind, with his extraordinary corporeal description of the ‘niche’ in his ‘darling’ pavilion, ‘it has the sea at its feet, the villa at its back and the woods at its head’?Footnote 99 Pliny's niche is human, while Epsom more resembles a snake or a rat; but the very oddity of both conceits is remarkable. If so, this is Toland's clearest tweak of Pliny's nose,Footnote 100 and not very clear at that: the humour of his stylistic transgression stands with or without the intertext.
In that last respect the putative reference here is typical. By and large, Toland unobtrusively incorporates Plinian elements rather than pointedly ‘alluding’ to them: although diversion is on offer to the reader who savours his imitations, this does not look like a simple game of ‘spot the intertext’.Footnote 101 Likewise, the blend of affect and wit makes ‘parody’ too bald a term. Pliny's villas are folded into a description that is far from naïve, but no simple burlesque either: Toland's highly self-conscious literariness brings with it a continuous ironising of his descriptive genre, but that need not, I suggest, entail deflating the (Plinian) ethos of delight.
4. On the Downs with Pliny and the poets
In the final pages of the Description that ethos of delight reaches a climax. Here we move from ‘Epsom’ to ‘Toland at Epsom’, from portraiture to self-portraiture: so far Toland has played a discreet role as narrator and commentator, but at p. 30 (‘I that love the country entirely … have fixt my residence here’) he steps onto his own stage. At the same time the focus shifts from Epsom as idyllic summer home to Epsom as the ideal abode of the man of letters – from otium to otium litteratum. Here Toland once again replays Pliny in structural terms, reworking the moment of revelation late in the Laurentine letter, where the climactic account of his ‘darling’ pavilion ends with a glimpse of the master himself inhabiting his domain, blissfully buried in his books.Footnote 102 Again, the motif is not recycled unchanged. Pliny stages himself indoors, revelling in the pleasant calm and mediated views that the interior spaces of his villa, so extensively described, can offer. Toland's backdrop, by contrast, is nature at large and unmediated: Epsom fades away and the Downs become the backdrop for a scene of blissful rural retreat. At this point the poetic colours, too, take on a new hue.
His palette is identifiably that of the ‘happy man’ tradition, a rich vein of contemporary thought which drew time and again from a handful of loci classici in Roman poetry.Footnote 103 The most rhapsodic passage (‘O refreshing Zephirs …! O cooling shades and grots, ye retir'd caves, mossy springs, and awful woods!’, p. 34) evokes it in all its glory, with an eye to a favourite passage, Virgil's ‘praises of Italy’ in the Georgics.Footnote 104 Another canonical scene is evoked just below:
I call you all to witness, that, tir'd with sport or study, and sleeping on the grass under a spreading beech, I enjoy not a more solid and secure Repose, than the proudest monarch in his gilded Palace? (pp. 34–5)
The snatch of the Eclogues could not have escaped many Latinate readers, coming as it does from the very first line of the book, ‘You, Tityrus, reclining under the shade of a spreading beech’.Footnote 105 It is joined, perhaps, by a delicate reflex of another canonical moment, the epilogue to the Georgics, in which Virgil returns full circle to that pastoral opening: ‘while I sported with the poems of shepherds [cf. Toland's ‘sport or study’] and, in the boldness of youth, sang of you, Tityrus, under the shade of a spreading beech.’Footnote 106 If so, the change from sporting on the page to literal sport is a striking move, since Toland's hunting ‘n’ scribbling, as we shall see, has immediate Plinian precedent.
The Virgilian echo is not sustained: his beech is just one of several stock features in Toland's locus amoenus, along with the grassy bedFootnote 107 and the sound sleep of the humble man.Footnote 108 That in turn chimes with a broader motif of ambition renounced which runs through these pages: ‘I ingloriously resign’ (p. 32), ‘as void of care as of ambition’ (p. 35), and its most impassioned development:
Let some therefore hide their aking scars under laurels, or raise estates to their children by ruining their clients, or squander the gettings of their fathers in corrupting elections against their country, while others kill whom they can't cure, or preach what they don't believe: but grant me, ye powers, luxurious Tranquillity! (p. 32)
The Stoic celebration of simple self-contentment is familiar enough from Virgil or Seneca,Footnote 109 but both the ‘priamel’ form, cataloguing lifestyles rejected, and the unabashedly Epicurean twist at the end (‘luxurious Tranquillity’) point first and foremost to Horace.Footnote 110 His Odes were famous in Toland's time as they are now for their celebration of country over city life, and for admitting a generous dose of Epicurean indulgence alongside the Stoic ideals of a tough farmer's life. Toland for one is not shy of allowing himself small luxuries in his retreat:
Here then, EUDOXA, let me have Books and Bread enough without Dependance, a bottle of Hermitage and a plate of Olives for a select Friend, with an early Rose to present a young Lady, as an emblem of discretion no less than of beauty. (pp. 31–2)
The fine wine and imported nibbles have seemed incongruous to some,Footnote 111 but they make a fitting eighteenth-century version of a Horatian table scene: Hermitage for Horace's best wines, Mediterranean olives for his Asian oils, a rose-bud for the rose-petals that routinely make up a trio of sympotic trappings.Footnote 112 The wine is well named, of course,Footnote 113 and the olives just might have a Plinian tang;Footnote 114 but this intimate tête-à-tête with a ‘select Friend’, complete with walk-on beauty, is evocative above all of the Odes:Footnote 115 less through verbal intertextuality than through situational allusion, Toland at Epsom looks very much like Horace at leisure out of Rome.Footnote 116
The countryside is thus for Toland, as for Horace, a site of comparative rather than total solitude.Footnote 117 Yet it is also a place of quiet contemplation and study. That too is a core Horatian motif, less in the lyric poems than in his Epodes, Satires and above all the first book of Epistles, where the town/country dichotomy and the inner life are recurrent, intertwined themes.Footnote 118 Epistles 1.18, for instance, ends with a famous statement of simple contentment: happy on his Sabine estate, Horace need offer no more ambitious prayer than sit bona librorum et prouisae frugis in annum | copia (‘Let there be a good supply of books and grain provisions for a year’, Ep. 1.18.109–10). If the sympotic world of the Odes is evoked (I have suggested) by Toland's Hermitage and olives, this line from the Epistles is a sure model for his prayer, ‘Let me have Books and Bread enough’.Footnote 119 In another idyllic evocation Horace wonders how fellow-poet Tibullus is passing time at his villa:
Toland figures himself after the same mould, inviting Eudoxa to ‘imagin to see me wandring as void of care as of ambition, and always a book in my hand or in my head’ (p. 34). Again the association is loose, but not in doubt, even without the footnote that he added in revision: Toland is recycling this part of his self-portrait from an earlier, Latin work, where the Horatian echo is unmissable.Footnote 121
It is above all Horace, then, who sets the poetic tone for Toland's idealised life at Epsom. If his presence becomes most obvious only in these final pages,Footnote 122 the ethos has been implicit since the frontispiece, with its pregnant motto, ‘Quid quaeris? vivo & regno. Hor.’ – one of Horace's most evocative encapsulations of the Stoic/Epicurean ideal.Footnote 123 But here too Pliny plays a significant part. If his villa letters provided both effects and affect in the description of Epsom, here Pliny himself makes his most conspicuous entrance onto Toland's stage, in a climax of imitative Selbstinszenierung:
Minerva is to be met on our Downs as well as Diana: and if ever I go a hunting, ‘tis always (as a learned Roman has recorded of himself) with a pocket-book and a pencil, that if I happen to take nothing, I may yet bring something home. (pp. 33–4)
It is Toland's most obtrusive reference to Pliny (if too oblique to have been noticed by modern readers), alluding to the early letter in which Pliny tells Tacitus about his unorthodox hunting technique (Ep. 1.6). Tacitus will be amused, Pliny writes, that he has caught three boar; but – here a familiar touch of mildly Horatian self-depreciation – he has not abandoned his life of laziness completely. Sitting by the nets,Footnote 124 he was equipped not with ‘a hunting-pole and a lance’ but with ‘a pocket-book and a pencil’, so that ‘if I went home with empty hands, yet I might bring with me full pages’ (JT, my italics).Footnote 125 The silence of the hunt is an excellent spur to concentration; ‘[w]hen therefore you go a hunting hereafter, you may upon my authority carry with you a pocket-book and a pencil, as well as a pouch and a bottle. You'll find that Minerva does no less wander upon the mountains, than Diana’ (ditto).Footnote 126
Minerva and Diana are not multi-purpose mythological extras:Footnote 127 they evoke a famous exchange with Pliny's best-known correspondent.Footnote 128 That is not all. The closing epigram (‘that if I happen to take nothing, I may yet bring something home’) looks like a variation on Pliny's manus uacuas. So it is; but the variation is Pliny's own, from late in Book 9: ‘I hunt from time to time, but not without my pocket-books, so that though I take nothing, I may yet bring something home’.Footnote 129 The connection was well spotted, whether or not Toland found it for himself.Footnote 130 Through it, his sentence alludes not just to the famous Tacitus letter, but also to an acme of Plinian autobiography, the letter in which Pliny – near the very end of his Epistles – describes a day in his life on the Etruscan estate.Footnote 131 There, as in Ep. 1.6, literary pursuits loom large, confirming the deep intrication of villas and studia in his letter-collection as a whole.Footnote 132 With it, Toland's passing self-portrait as a latter-day Pliny – no more naïve than Pliny's own self-portrait,Footnote 133 if a little less reverent in its framingFootnote 134 – reaches to the heart of the Epistles.
This cameo from a very particular ‘learned Roman’ confirms what so much of Epsom, and of Toland's translation project, implies: in Pliny he found an attractive model not just for epistolary politesse and description, but for his own self-fashioning at Epsom.Footnote 135 It is no coincidence, I think, that Epistles 1.6 is one of the letters that shows Pliny at his most Horatian, at least in its self-depreciatory proclamation of laziness, given the place of this cameo in Toland's distinctly Horatian ‘happy life’. The implications of this idiosyncratic blend will occupy the final section of the paper. First, allow me just a few words on Toland's own variation on the ruralist theme.
It is not just the addition of Pliny to the usual poetic suspects that makes these ‘bucolic posturings’ stand out from the crowd.Footnote 136 For one thing, Toland's insistence on ‘Retirement’ rather than ‘Solitude’ (pp. 30–1) expressly rejects the fetishising of solitary rustic idyll in contemporary thought.Footnote 137 It also contrasts with Pliny's careful emphasis in both villa letters on undisturbed tranquillity.Footnote 138 Likewise, for all the implied celebration of country over city, the capital retains an important part: ‘In two or three hours time I can be at London, whenever I will, at my ease’ (p. 31). It is a distinctive note, whether measured against contemporary fantasies of rural escapism or against Pliny's satisfaction that his Laurentine villa is only a half a day's journey from Rome (Ep. 2.17.2): Pliny likes to be able to get away from town, Toland (also) to get back to it – an equal partnership underlined in the revised version, ‘Thus I remove at pleasure, as I grow weary of the country or town, as I avoid a crowd, or seek company’.Footnote 139 Finally, he goes a step further still, defining Epsom not as an end in itself or even as one of two equals, but as a temporary respite, and a functional one: all the bookish wandering is ‘yet still with a design of returning more entertaining to private conversation, or more serviceable to publick Society’ (p. 35).Footnote 140
Toland is not simply sinking into bucolic cliché.Footnote 141 Nor is he ‘just’ replaying Pliny, or Horace. For Horace, rural nostalgia may dominate but the city never loses its draw, a tension to which he merrily confesses as a charming weakness: Romae Tibur amem, uentosus Tibure Romam.Footnote 142 In the case of Pliny, engaged advocate and senator, the tension is stronger still, between duties at Rome and (usually rustic) devotion to self and studies. He too lets it stand for the most part unresolved,Footnote 143 without the Horatian self-depreciation; as Méthy puts it (2007: 439), this abstract contradiction finds only an unstated, practical resolution, in the varied life on display in the Epistles. How far Toland's liking for city as well as country reflects his own political engagements and frustrations (witness the ‘digression’) is another question – one which for now, like him (and Pliny), I deflect.
5. Horace and Pliny, via Toland
The Description of Epsom turns out to be a unique creative response to Pliny's villa letters, reworking structure, details and ethos. But Toland's engagement goes far beyond the topographical: as the Description reaches its climax, this ‘happy man’ grants us a striking glimpse of his Plinian self jotting on the hunt. As we read on (or back) to the translations, Toland's fusion with his subject continues: where Pliny spent his leisured villa days writing Epistles, Toland devoted his Epsom otium to translating them. The collections that resulted, like all anthologies, have as much to tell about Toland as about Pliny. But these translations, and the Description of Epsom, also reveal a good deal about their original. Toland's response, I suggest, is not just a peculiar episode in Pliny's reception, but can also make a significant contribution to a reading of the Epistles themselves.Footnote 144
When Toland combines Horace and Pliny, I have said, he creates a striking effect. But how contingent is that effect? Is Toland Horatianising the Epistles, or is he revealing a side to them which recent readers have tended to forget? Let us glance again at the four letters that Toland translates in the appendix to Epsom. All soon start to look, to varying degrees, Horatian. Epistles 1.3, asking Caninius Rufus how he is spending his time at Comum and urging him to devote himself to literature, bears more than a passing resemblance to the scenario of Horace Epistles 1.4, asking Tibullus what he is doing at Pedum, and urging devotion to philosophy and study of the self.Footnote 145 That same poem seems to intrude in Toland's version of Ep. 7.26, with its curiously ‘sleek and plump’ man; for it is there that Horace famously styles himself pinguem et nitidum bene curata cute … | … Epicuri de grege porcum (‘plump and gleaming, my hide well-groomed, … a pig from Epicurus’ drove', Ep. 1.4.15–16). As we saw, Toland has distorted Pliny's syntax here, and I do not press a claim that Pliny, for his part, is alluding to Horace.Footnote 146 On the other hand, we can hardly exclude the possibility that the reflex Toland (perhaps) perceived is no mere readerly quirk. Certainly the soft point remains, that Ep. 7.26, Pliny's most extreme endorsement of the easy life and of self-contemplation, free of the negotia that loom so large in the Epistles as a whole, and even of the studia that dominate his life of retreat, is one of his most Horatian in ethos.
In Ep. 2.8 Toland has picked out another of Pliny's strongest laments over negotia. Yearning for the country, he figures his duties at Rome as slavery: hos artissimos laqueos … tot nexibus, tot quasi catenis (Ep. 2.8.2–3 ‘these intolerable bonds … so many cords and chains’, JT). The language here sounds Senecan, and the imagery goes back at least to Cicero; but again Pliny shares it with Horace: in the uiuo et regno passage that supplies Epsom's epigraph, Horace talks of escaping the city like a ‘runaway slave’.Footnote 147 Most Horatian of all, though, is Ep. 1.9, as Pliny laments the futile hurry of life at Rome and dreams of his happy Laurentine retreat. Wieland saw it at once:
Ein vortreflicher Commentar über diese Verse des Horaz, deren Wahrheit und schöner Ausdruck sie immer so sehr empfohlen hat:
Wieland quotes from Satires 2.6, an early development of the city/country theme that proves so central in Horace's first book of Epistles. Horace there laments the ‘hundred occupations’ that come flying at you in the city, listing a few; between them ‘the day is lost’, while you ask in vain, o rus, quando ego te aspiciam …? Footnote 149 This and further prayers give way to a fantasy scene of relaxed rural conversation, free from envy and devoted to philosophy,Footnote 150 before the parable of the town mouse and country mouse gets underway. Pliny's letter is rodent-free, but the similarities with Horace are substantial: he lists some of the obligations one fulfils on any given day in Rome, then remarks that, though they seem important one by one, cumulatively ‘they must appear to be pure losing of time’.Footnote 151 This thought strikes him especially when he is at Laurentum, where he enjoys a life of calm retreat, free of ‘malicious discourses’ and devoted to himself and his books.Footnote 152 Of course there are differences, most obviously the double shift from convivial philosophising to solitary studia.Footnote 153 Nor is there obviously ‘allusive’ language.Footnote 154 But Wieland was surely right, and I suspect Toland saw it too: both the run of the letter and its ethos show Pliny in particularly Horatian guise.
I do not propose to pursue Toland similarly through his 1712 anthology, but for two small observations. One is his mistake with the addressee of Pliny's first letter: ‘Septicius’ to us, ‘Septitius’ to editors three hundred years ago, but ‘Septimius’ in Toland's translation. Carelessness, no doubt, but also perhaps a Freudian slip: this rare name (nowhere in Pliny) is associated above all with Odes 2.6, another memorable paean to rustic bliss.Footnote 155 My second remark concerns one letter Toland did not include. Ep. 7.3 looks at first sight like a counterweight to Pliny's theme of rustic nostalgia, as he taxes the aptly named Praesens with lingering too long in southern Italy. But Pliny quickly lets the nostalgia seep in, as rebukes slide into envy:
quousque regnabis? quousque uigilabis cum uoles, dormies quamdiu uoles? quousque calcei nusquam, toga feriata, liber totus dies? tempus est te reuisere molestias nostras …
How long will you be king? How long will you stay up when you please, sleep as long as you please? How long will your formal shoes be out of sight, your dress casual, your whole day free? It's high time you paid a visit to our life of troubles … (Ep. 7.3.2)
With Horace fresh in the mind, can we miss the echo, in quousque regnabis, of that motto uiuo et regno?Footnote 156
Toland omitted this letter, whether by accident or design. But I include it to illustrate how reading Pliny with him can teach us something not just about Toland, but also about the Epistles – to recognise the degree to which Horatian ethics are moulded into this self-portrait of a senator.Footnote 157 How far we owe this effect to the tint of Toland's spectacles, or to the fact that this was a generation steeped in Horace, is debatable. What is certain is that modern scholarship, tuned above all to Pliny's much vaunted emulation of Cicero,Footnote 158 has tended to neglect other epistolary forebears – not least Horace.Footnote 159 Pliny does not explicitly signal a debt to him, or flaunt allusions, making it hard to demonstrate intertextuality in terms of certifiable linguistic reflexes. A preference for ‘evidence’ of that sort is the natural corollary of any historicist agenda, protecting our authors (as we might see it) from arbitrary or anachronistic interpretation. But the modern insistence on ‘hard’ allusion risks overlooking the fuzzier intertextuality of ideas and concepts that could seem so natural to readers like Wieland and Toland – one reason, perhaps, why no book, or even an article, has yet tried to set Pliny in dialogue with Horace.Footnote 160 Of course, as my footnotes show, Horace has featured from time to time in recent work on Pliny, but scarcely beyond passing comments. The degree to which Toland, a different reader in a different age, drew out the Horatian in the Epistles, is (I suggest) strong reason to suppose that such comments reflect more than scholarly fancy, and a prompt to clearer recognition of Horace's significance not just for Toland's self-portraiture, but for Pliny's too.
‘As like the original as may be’ (Epsom, p. 1). This brief sojourn in Surrey has done partial justice at best to Toland's Description, and barely opened the door to Pliny's Horatianism. Still, I hope it has shed some fresh light on the rich texture of Epsom, on villas in the age of manners, and above all on Toland's most important ‘original’ – the epistolary Pliny himself.
