A Busy Day in Rome: Pliny, Epistles 1.9 Satirized by Horace, Satires 1.9

What is it about?

While the satiric representation of city life and particularly Horace’s Satires have been already acknowledged as relevant contexts for Pliny’s Ep. 1.9, its Horatian ‘numerological parallel’, Sat. 1.9, has been left out of consideration so far. This chapter aims at filling in that gap and reading Pliny’s letter 1.9 against the background of Horace’s Sat. 1.9. As it shows, Pliny’s urban interactions go hand in hand with the generic interactions performed by his epistle: while the city forces Pliny to interact with various anonymous interlocutors (ille, ille, and ille) and thus disturbs his otium and undermines his personal autonomy, the Horatian intertext makes the epistle interact with the genre of satire which restricts its literary or generic autonomy. Due to the sinistri sermones (‘unkind insinuations’, and also ‘ominous satire’?, 1.9.5) so typical for the urbs, Pliny’s position gets dangerously close to the roles of both ‘Horace’ and the ‘Bore’ in Sat. 1.9, and his epistle starts to change into a kind of satiric representation of his life in Rome, where everybody is everybody’s ‘bore’. Pliny’s letter 1.9 is thus not only a laudatio of countryside otium, but also an intertextual tour de force that shows us the satirizing effects of urban interactions.

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Photo by Blaz Erzetic on Unsplash

Photo by Blaz Erzetic on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This is an attempt to read a Plinian epistle in a both intertextual and satiric way. It's about imperial Rome, urban everydays, curiosity, real, fictional, and intertextual interactions, and more.

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