Pliny/Trajan and the Poetics of Empire

Woolf talks about Pliny the Younger's Letters and the poetics of empire. There was a powerful temptation to treat the Letters as the more or less artless reportage of a plain man, an ordinary senator's lightly polished testimony to the social and moral, literary and political preoccupations of his age. Pliny himself, author of the letters and their creation, has emerged as a figure intensely engaged in his self-production, his eyes firmly fixed on his Ciceronian inheritance and the creation of his own posterity. A potent symbol of the New Pliny is the discovery of the most long-range of intratexts and most powerful of closural devices, that the name of the addressee of the final letter of Book 9. Pedanius Fuscus points back to the name of the addressee of Book 1, Septicius Citrus.