Pliny and the Art of Saying Nothing
By Ruth Morello
Abstract: This paper examines Pliny’s habit of “evasive display,” a practice which exploits the recusatio to the full and produces the sense of endless deferral in the letters. Letters are generically fluid, covering a broad spectrum in style, content, length, and function. Social constraints, however, are considerable, since letters, both as physical objects and as intellectual artifices, form part of the currency of amicitia , to be exchanged with correspondents as (and with) gifts and representations of the absent friend. The social constraints help to generate, in Stanley Hoffer’s word (1999), the “anxieties” of the letters, as Pliny must establish the value of his currency in a literary market in which the “gold standard,” so to speak, is still set by the Ciceronian letter collections.
The paper looks first at the two letters which most clearly articulate this anxiety, 9.2 and 3.20, in which Pliny contrasts the paucity of his own material with the richness of Cicero’s and develops strategies for successful trading even in a debased currency. The second part of the paper focuses on a type of letter with which Pliny participates most explicitly in reciprocal gift-exchanges: the “cover letters” sent to friends with copies of his speeches or poems. Many are remarkably uninformative, and this paper asks why they are so reticent about the literary works they accompany and examines their contribution to Pliny’s activities in the amicitia market.
Article in Arethusa Vol. 36, No. 2, Re-Imagining Pliny the Younger, p187-209. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.