The volume under review was produced by the St Andrew's-based LINTH (Literary Interactions under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian) group, which has conducted some interesting literary interactions of its own since 2011. For a record of various proceedings and working papers, as well as a backstage view of the gestation of this volume, visit LINTH's well-maintained website: https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/literaryinteractions/. In addition to an introduction by the editors, an afterword by the volume's dedicatee John Henderson and two indexes, eighteen chapters dealing with Rome-centred literary interactions have been selected primarily from papers given during two conferences in 2013–14. It precedes a second forthcoming volume with selections from two later conferences, focusing on multicultural interactions.
The editors first task themselves with explaining the collection's title, periodisation and methodology in a well-developed introduction. As they freely admit (pp. 14–16), and as a tendency in several chapters to look to Domitian and ignore Hadrian further indicates, periodisation presents problems, particularly when dealing with post-Flavian regimes. Yet, while their termini are sometimes slippery, their general argument and most contributors’ demonstration of it – that a distinctive culture existed from ad 96–138 – is convincing. Their second and additionally difficult task is defining ‘interactions’ and the methods deployed in analysing them. Again, one encounters some understandable slipperiness in terms, but will find under the umbrella of interaction Kristevan intertextuality (read ‘allusion’), interdiscursivity (read ‘independent thematic convergence’) and extratextuality (read ‘shared oral culture’). Perhaps the best sense of such ‘interaction’ is offered not in the introduction, but by J. Uden's chapter: ‘how texts seem to act, how they mobilise similar tropes and ideas in response to shared cultural and political stimuli. Interaction on this model is a dynamic process, made possible by the exchange of ideas in recitations, by the oral culture of anecdotes and exempla, by the circulation of texts between literary centres and throughout the Empire, by the resources of a shared fund of “classical” knowledge, and by translation and constant adaptation’ (p. 387).
While some might find the critique of ‘tralatitious models of reference and allusion’ (p. 12) in the introduction and some subsequent chapters unnecessarily hostile, the aim of exploring beyond intertextuality in order ‘to expand interdisciplinary dialogue between literary and sociohistorical studies of the High Empire’ (p. 13) is very much worth the effort and effectively achieved throughout the volume. König and Whitton close the introduction with a well-chosen example of how interactions can be read in Pliny, Ep. 9.19 and a nicely crafted summary of the chapters.
The volume is organised into three sections, but selective reading will also bear fruits, and most contributors carefully cue the reader to adjacent discussions. The first section, ‘Bridging Divides: Literary Interactions from Quintilian to Juvenal’, as its title suggests, brings the reader from Domitianic Rome into the period of focus with several readings of responses to imperial regimes: exchange of memory and forgetting in Martial's Epigrams 10 and Tacitus’ Agricola (V. Rimell), reverse-reader response to heroism in Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica and Tacitus’ Histories and Agricola (E. Buckley), imperial associations with mirabilia in Martial, Pliny and Juvenal (R. Ash) and window reference as Suetonian corrective to Pliny on Domitianic and Trajanic succession (P. Roche). Not all interactions, however, are politicised, as G. Kelly demonstrates with a reading of metapoetics and exchange from Martial to Juvenal.
Worth particular mention in this section are chapters by Whitton and W. Fitzgerald. Whitton begins the volume with a challenging treatment of triangulated interactions between Quintilian, Pliny and Tacitus that, as he convincingly illustrates, were no less intense even when they were far from obvious. His reading of Tacitus’ engagement with Quintilian via the Dialogus offers a fine analysis of the complexities of characterisation and allusion that have been overly simplified in much of the scholarship preceding C. van den Berg's 2014 monograph (The World of Tacitus’ Dialogus de Oratoribus). More broadly, Whitton presents a strong case for the wellspring of allusion and intertextuality discoverable in prose texts.
Fitzgerald offers an example of how interaction that lacks explicit intertextuality can be substantive, as he applies Jacques Lacan and his ‘les non-dupes errent’ to Pliny's ideology of advantageous acceptance of fiction, lies and misinterpretation (often underlying his use of tamquam). Martial, conversely, rejects face-value interpretations to such an extent that his panegyric of Nerva in Epig. 10.72 paradoxically extols the prudent emperor's recall of the obscenity once banished by Domitian. For Martial, unlike Pliny, every apparent virtue disguises a vice. As Fitzgerald remarks, Martial and Pliny are likely taking their respective cynical and earnest positions not in conscious dialogue with one another, but nonetheless in an interactive response to shared political and social circumstances.
The second section, ‘Interactions On and Off the Page’, includes several chapters that examine beneath or beyond the text and, in so doing, share similar methodologies with first-section chapters by Rimell, Buckley and Ash. Points of discussion include Domitius Apollinaris as a pivot point for self-promotion by Martial and Pliny (S. Mratschek), Frontinus’ quiet centrality amidst political and social changes under Nerva and Trajan (König) and the failure of Republican exemplarity as presented by Martial and Pliny (R. Morello).
Also included in this section are two enlightening discussions of Pliny's Epistles and their relationship to legal epistulae and imperial correspondence. J. Harries points out that Pliny's correspondence with Trajan follows a quaestio–responsum format typical of juridical letters. Yet, Pliny's relationship with jurists is complicated by the fact that he ultimately positions himself and Trajan as complex legal interpreters, while elsewhere either painting ambivalent portraits of jurists or ignoring them altogether. M. Lavan follows Harries in warning readers from privileging texts based on literary/non-literary and extant/ephemeral dichotomies, but also cautions against extra-politicised readings of Plinian stylistics in Epistles 10. Intimacy between emperor and subject and single-topic letters, Lavan demonstrates, are not unique to Pliny's imperial correspondence.
The section is book-ended by two chapters that lucidly discuss some of the ‘off the page’ interactions that seem to foreground several co-contributors’ approaches elsewhere in the volume. Using Martial, Pliny and Juvenal, M. Roller addresses two apparent paradoxes in recitation culture, namely that it was both cooperative and competitive and at once a place for otium and negotium. In drawing out one's recitation obligations (recite, attend recitations, provide appropriate feedback), Roller also reminds us that fluid oral-to-textual editorial processes probably account for many of the interactions addressed throughout the volume. R. Langlands reads Suet. Otho 10 and Tac. Hist. 3.54 as ‘floating anecdotes’ (Ash 1999) along with an interesting modern parallel from 1914, while explaining how ‘extratextuality’ – viewing ‘allusion to a referent that is not in textual form, that reaches beyond intertextuality’ (p. 331) – will enrich our understanding of these (and other) texts.
The third section, ‘Into the Silence: the Limits of Interaction’, is in some ways a misnomer. While the four chapters in this section astutely read silence, none seems to suggest that it is limiting; quite the opposite, as T. Geue, for example, considers the ways in which neglect, rewriting and erasure can reveal interactions that concrete verbal echoes do not. While some will find Geue's style distracting, he cleverly reads Juvenal's quietly competitive play with Tacitus and Pliny. Especially interesting is his suggestion that recitation culture may have placed Juvenal in the position of offering allusive and pre-emptive correctives to Tacitus and historiographers writ large. I. Marchesi returns to the well-worn Regulus connection between Martial and Pliny, but refreshes the discussion by presenting Lucan (or absenting him, as the case is with Pliny) en route to illustrating how socio-political interaction can affect reader interpretation and, in turn, silence potential literary interactions.
Uden and R. Gibson feature the only Greeks of the volume, introducing Plutarch and ps.-Plutarch. Uden lights upon an essential, yet undervalued, subject for studies of interaction: education. He shows that the educative values of ps.-Plutarch, Quintilian and Juvenal are indisputably and significantly at odds with one another. Yet, in addition to some shared approaches to the discussion (e.g. agricultural metaphor or satirical bite), these authors take positions on cultural conflicts, for example parochialism vs cosmopolitanism, and thus interact with one another without direct dialogue. Gibson closes the section by taking a cue from Tom Stoppard and making literary figures talk. With a faux-Tacitean dialogue ‘penned’ by Fundanus to Suetonius, ‘describing’ a discussion between Pliny and Plutarch, Gibson makes the case for fictional dialogue writing ‘in all seriousness, as a potential new methodology for engaging the imagination and the intellect in otherwise conceptually difficult or aesthetically challenging subject areas’ (p. 418). Of course, no sure answers will be had via this method, but readers will likely be entertained and practitioners will likely provoke an idea or two.
As I hope this modest and selective summary illustrates, the volume offers a diverse array of methods and approaches to literary (and non-literary) interactions under Nerva, Trajan and, to some extent, Hadrian. For better or worse, the authorial balance tilts heavily towards Pliny and Martial (12 and 10 studies, respectively, include them, compared to six on Juvenal, five on Tacitus, three on Suetonius and one on Frontinus). Many of the contributors betray an awareness of their own interactions among the LINTH group and offer some meta-scholarship, which I found to be refreshingly entertaining; but the practice could alienate some readers at times.
As with collected volumes, readers will certainly value some chapters more than others, but each contribution offers something worthwhile, and, on the whole, the volume will repay the reading for several reasons. First, as the editors point out, this culturally and literarily rich period has lacked the wide and cohesive study that it deserves. Second, the collection successfully eschews many of the weaker tendencies of some handbook, companion and conference volumes and offers provocative calls to new methodologies. Third, in spite of the fact that the majority of chapters were formulated at least five years ago, discussions and bibliographies have, for the most part, been updated at least to 2016. Fourth, the volume has been very carefully written, edited and prepared, leaving hardly even the most trivial error.
While the volume is not inexpensive, it belongs in the collections of all respectable university libraries and those interested in Roman politics ranging from Domitian to Trajan, intertextuality and novel supplements to it, and socio-literary approaches to Martial, Pliny, Juvenal and Tacitus, especially, will want to read and return for further consultation. There is good reason to concur with J. Henderson's conclusion of the epilogue: ‘we await the LINTH collective's next publication’ (p. 427).
