The Arts of Imitation in Latin Prose Pliny's Epistles/Quintilian in Brief

Imitation was central to Roman culture, and a staple of Latin poetry. But it was also fundamental to prose. This book brings together two monuments of the High Empire, Quintilian's Institutio oratoria ('Training of the orator') and Pliny's Epistles, to reveal a spectacular project of textual and ethical imitation. As a young man Pliny had studied with Quintilian. In the Epistles he meticulously transforms and subsumes his teacher's masterpiece, together with poetry and prose ranging from Homer to Tacitus' Dialogus de oratoribus. In teasing apart Pliny's rich intertextual weave, this book reinterprets Quintilian through the eyes of one of his sharpest readers, radically reassesses the Epistles as a work of minute textual artistry, and makes a major intervention in scholarly debates on intertextuality, imitation and rhetorical culture at Rome. The result is a landmark study with far-reaching implications for how we read Latin literature.

1. Two scenes from the life of an artist; 2. Setting the stage; 3. Brief encounters; 4. Dancing with dialectic; 5. Through the looking-glass; 6. On length, in brief (Ep. 1.20); 7. Letters to Lupercus; 8. Studiorum secessus (Ep. 7.9); 9. Docendo discitur; 10. Reflections of an author; 11. Quintilian, Pliny, Tacitus; 12. Beginnings.

Christopher Whitton is Senior Lecturer in Classical Literature at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. His publications include a commentary on Pliny the Younger: 'Epistles' Book II (Cambridge, 2013), The 'Epistles' of Pliny (co-edited with Roy Gibson, 2016) and Roman Literature under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian: Literary Interactions, AD 96–138 (co-edited with Alice König, Cambridge, 2018).