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

A landmark study of Latin prose intertextuality, radically reinterpreting Pliny's Epistles as a brilliant transformation of Quintilian..

Christopher Whitton (Author)

9781108476577, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 27 June 2019

574 pages, 1 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.7 x 3.4 cm, 0.95 kg

'The Arts of Imitation in Latin Prose is a very useful addition to Plinian scholarship and, more generally, a milestone for all those concerned with intertextuality.' Lorenzo Vespoli, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

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.

Subject Areas: Classical history / classical civilisation [HBLA1], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB]