Letters as Literature

About the lecture

In this lecture we think about Pliny’s letters not as historical documents but as literature, focusing in particular on: (i) Pliny’s life, political career and literary output; (ii) Pliny’s Letters: its size, structure and arrangement, its key preoccupations, and the idea of the collection as a kind of autobiography in fragments; (iii) the influence of previous letter collections, including Cicero’s Letters, Seneca’s Epistulae Morales, Horace’s Epistles, and Ovid’s Heroides, Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto; (iv) the extent to which Pliny’s Letters should be read as genuine correspondence; and (v) the intended audience for Pliny’s Letters.

About the lecturer

Christopher Whitton is Professor of Latin Language at the University of Cambridge. He works on Latin literature of the early Roman Empire, especially Pliny the Younger and Tacitus, with particular interests in prose style, intertextuality and the intersection of literature and history. His main research projects at the moment are a 'green and yellow' commentary on Tacitus Annals 14 and a monograph provisionally entitled Tacitus Revoiced: Reading the Histories with Pliny the Younger.