This impressive book seeks to reclaim imitatio as shorthand for the self-conscious, intricate allusivity we find in Pliny's Epistles, specifically in response to his esteemed teacher and author of the Institutio oratoria, Quintilian. The thesis is tightly spun, with persuasive power firmly directed towards a jury of ‘sceptics’ (p. 44), those lingering – but for W. all too present – acolytes of the ‘smoking gun’ school of classical philology, alongside the ‘epistoliteralists’ (p. 7) resistant to the very notion that Pliny might be poetically complex or self-reflexive. In ten emphatic and elegant chapters W. argues that, despite authors from Horace to Tacitus all playing their part in Pliny's ‘imitative mix’ (p. 42), the real grand design can be mapped in his engagement with the Institutio: Q-imitatio (W.'s term) ‘may be one of the largest and most involved intertextual relationships in Latin prose’ (p. 42), trumping even Livy on Polybius. Inspected for their intertexture, these quotidian little letters strike a pose as ‘miniature masterpieces’ (p. 193), unique (or almost) in their ‘fine-grained attention to detail’ (p. 254), which so rewards the doctus lector on show here, with finesse, in W.'s scholarly ‘weave’ or ‘ballet’ (p. 10). What we have before us is a ‘serious leçon par l'example’ (p. 284) of ‘good Latin imitatio’ (p. 292), a ‘heady mix’ (p. 264) of debt and originality, homage and correction, combination and reworking that stages the Plinian epistle not as networked socio-political document, but rather as intimate penetralia for Bloomian self-fashioning. The big picture comes together slowly but surely: Chapters 1 and 2 are snapshots of the method, tested out on Ep. 1.6, 9.36, 4.11 and 4.13, with a sketch of Quintilian's early reception and an overview of what is meant by imitatio. Chapters 3–8 build what W. calls an ‘inductive argument’ for Quintilian's presence in the Epistles, and we zoom in and out between micro- and macro-structures, covering a convincing variety of letters from multiple books in Chapters 3–5 and 7 and ambling patiently through Ep. 1.20 (in Chapter 6) and 7.9 (in Chapter 8). Chapters 9 and 10 ice the cake (fine dining and jewels are choice figures passim) for the thesis that this is all holistic and systematic; Chapter 11 dilutes the obsessiveness of Q-imitatio by exploring ‘triangulation’ with Cicero and Tacitus, and investigating Tacitus’ own deliberate engagement with Quintilian in the Dialogus, a response itself absorbed by Pliny. Underlying the volume as a whole is the claim that the industry of intertextual studies has neglected Latin prose in favour of poetry, on the assumption that prose is hardly literary at all, but ‘simpler … more transparent’ (p. 21). This is true historically, of course, but a harder sell in the wake, for example, of A. Traina, C. Edwards, G. Mazzoli, J. Henderson, J. Ker et al. on Seneca's Letters, or E. Gunderson on Sallust, R. Gibson on Pliny, J. Connolly on Cicero etc., while as p. 422 admits, ‘Tacitus’ intertextual virtuosity is nowadays well known’.

Yet it becomes clear from early on that ‘imitation’ is an ideological posture, textbook Plinean ethopoeia, a one-word manifesto. Think T. Woodman and D. West, Creative Imitation (1979), G. Lee in G&R 28 (1981) on imitatio as ‘conscious adaptation’, or the ideological (mis)translation of G.B. Conte's Memoria dei poeti as The Rhetoric of Imitation (1986). ‘I won't agonise over intertextuality’, W. writes early on, in brackets (p. 51). Thus S. Hinds's ‘critiques’ (but not their substance) in Allusion and Intertext (1998) only creep into footnotes; more hazardous reading strategies may warrant the intervention of ‘men in white coats’, a learned allusion to D. Fowler's self-deprecating defence of his Virgilian acrostic in CQ 33 (1983), yet Fowler's thinking on constructivism never happened, or is only hinted at, defensively, at p. 261 (‘Unless I have conjured all this out of thin air …’). W. concludes ‘I have tried to address both allusion enthusiasts and intertextual recusants’, yet what is odd for me about this book, which projects the voice of such a talented scholar, is that for new generations of classicists there is no sketch of the debates leading up to this elusive summary, no sense of what being an ‘intertextual recusant’ means, what authority is being rejected, what might be at stake in approaching the dynamic of inter-relation in classical literature in the mode on display here, as, effectively, Quellenforschung (‘Pliny can be very self-conscious about making Quintilian his Quelle’ p. 376). The beginnings of a more nuanced discussion of historical vs literary readers of Pliny surfaces only in a footnote (‘of course the readerly spectrum isn't so stark’, p. 37 n. 86), and the ‘flashy claim’ that Pliny's engagement with Quintilian is on ‘quite a different level’ (p. 42) takes the place of critical dialogue with I. Marchesi's work on Pliny's allusion to Cicero, Horace, Ovid, Seneca and others. For W. allusion is intertext is allusion, and when he sides with ‘the intertextualists’ (p. 38), he means scholars who ‘track down imitatio’ (p. 7): it all comes out in the wash, and what counts is demonstrability, the archaeological ‘excavation’ (p. 173) of what is already present, buried at source by the studious author, those ‘bijoux’ and instances of ‘aesthetic finery’ (p. 173), the ‘sixpence in the pudding’ (p. 438) ready to ‘display in jars’ (p. 473). This is an exercise in ‘sorting the wheat from the chaff’ (p. 52), in ‘certifying’ readings (p. 101) which are not so much interpretations as accounts, while protecting oneself from any ‘charge of frivolity’ (p. 53).

What emerges throughout is that imitation, although crucial in signalling a particular, objectivised agenda, is not an especially useful term after all and must continually be qualified or complicated by other nouns and verbs (incorporation, reworking, remodelling, transformation, correction, adaptation, dialogue etc.). Yet in practice, for W., intertextual relation always retraces a model of relationality defined by either deferential or dominating/disciplinary appropriation. Thus despite the dance metaphors pirouetting through every chapter (from ballet to tango), Pliny is not permitted to jive with Quintilian: the evidence-based, zero-sum game of relation subscribed to here entails no mutual permeability, no co-writing, no play: Q-imitatio can produce no Plinstitutio, no Epistulae oratoriae, even when reading Ep. 1.6 (for instance) in such detail points us towards passages in both Ep. 1.6 and Inst. 10.3 that might afford such readings. In that letter, amidst a collaborative thematisation of the differences between being alone and in company and of continually going back and rewriting, Pliny's wax tablets ‘brought back’ from the woods (siluae = forests/rough drafts, cf. Inst. 10.3.176) embrace and commune with Inst.10.3.31–2, where Quintilian recommends hinged wax tablets with facing uacuae tabellae (cf. si manus uacuas, plenas tamen ceras reportarem, Ep. 1.6) in order that the writer might insert additions, even though new text may end up confusing the old (10.3.32). In response, we might say, Pliny fills up that provocatively empty space (locus, Inst. 10.3.33) in ways that exceed the ‘determined positioning’ (p. 19) W.'s model promotes, re-creating less a ‘Quintilian in brief’, or a corrected Institutio, than a live, revisable text that invites multiple modes of inter-relation. My point is not that more can be said, but rather that W.'s model conceals its own limits in ways that repress the intellectual history of debates and therefore hamstring their future evolution.

There is much to admire about this book, make no mistake. Its sparky, pitch-perfect prose is a delight to read; it is unapologetic in including great chunks of Latin and taking us through each one, patiently, like the best teacher you ever had, and the footnotes alone are a work of art. But I do not think I will be alone in regretting that so much of W.'s fine intelligence goes into winning over ‘sceptics’ who resemble straw men: few today are offended at the notion of an ‘allusive Pliny’. Typically, once W. has made his point, invariably very well, that the text evokes Quintilian and that Pliny is an ‘extremely attentive reader of the Institutio’ (p. 33), there is a sense that the job is done, case closed, when in many ways it is just beginning. We are asked to stand back and appreciate ‘compositional cura’ (p. 99) and are told that ‘this is imitation to be savoured as a fine dish, with or without the condiment of critique’ (p. 191). For this reader at least, it is a pity that examining the assumptions of this statement and the shackles they put on what we can do with Latin literature is not on the menu.