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

Description

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.

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 Koenig, Cambridge, 2018).

'This original and learned book, written in sparkling and stylish prose, makes a fundamental contribution to our appreciation of Pliny the Younger's artistry. Christopher Whitton shows that there is much more Quintilian in Pliny's Epistles than anyone had realised - and that recognising Quintilian's presence is of vital importance for understanding Pliny's literary project. With complete control of the sources, Whitton takes the reader on an unexpectedly fascinating tour of Quintilian's earliest reception, and along the way sheds new light on Latin prose intertextuality and the quintessentially Roman practice of imitatio.' Tom Keeline, Washington University, St Louis