Pliny the Book-Maker: Betting on Posterity in the Epistles
Ilaria Marchesi
Abstract
What did it mean – in terms of social, cultural, and literary negotiations – to publish one’s own work at Rome at the end of the first century CE? What kinds of traces has the author’s work as editor left on the text as we read it? How can we interpret them? What kind of well-choreographed balancing act was needed to ensure immediate availability and success of one’s work with its contemporary audience, while guaranteeing its long-lasting appeal with a hypothetical one? These are all central questions driving the essays collected here, as they take into consideration the paradigmatic case of P ... More
What did it mean – in terms of social, cultural, and literary negotiations – to publish one’s own work at Rome at the end of the first century CE? What kinds of traces has the author’s work as editor left on the text as we read it? How can we interpret them? What kind of well-choreographed balancing act was needed to ensure immediate availability and success of one’s work with its contemporary audience, while guaranteeing its long-lasting appeal with a hypothetical one? These are all central questions driving the essays collected here, as they take into consideration the paradigmatic case of Pliny. We know that Pliny the Younger’s nine-book collection of private epistles is a carefully arranged work, designed to address ultimately (and primarily) that peculiar kind of audience that we have come to conceptualize as posterity. The studies collected in this volume reinforce this notion with philological and interpretive arguments, whilst approaching from different points of view Pliny’s self-editorial strategies, suggesting that in the collected form of the Epistles meaning is produced by the interplay of multiple factors. Immediate context, placement in the book, linkage achieved by way of formal or thematic patterns, recurrence of addressees, happenings, dates – all impact upon individual texts in Pliny’s collection and charge them with sense.
Keywords:
literary,
epistole,
Pliny,
publication,
collection,
audience,
reception,
posterity,
editing
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198729464 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2015 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198729464.001.0001 |
