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The Letters of Symmachus: Remembering a Roman Aristocrat and His Family

By Michele Salzman

As I, and others, have recently argued, the ten books of Symmachus’s letters were published in increments and not in imitation of Pliny’s alleged ten-book epistolary collection. Moreover, Symmachus published Book 1 soon after he left the office of urban prefect in 384. This is one of the first books of letters to have been circulated in the Latin west in the fourth century; and Symmachus published his letters, in my view, to promote his and his family’s prestige and values. Twenty years later, between 402-408, Symmachus’s son, Q.

Pliny’s Tacitus: The Politics of Representation

By Rebecca Edwards

Many scholars, most recently Whitton, have explored the sympathy between Pliny’s Letters and Tacitus’ works. Tacitus looms large in these studies. As Whitton puts it, “For many readers of Tacitus, Pliny is a convenient but disposable witness” (346). But suppose we could push Tacitus the author to the side and look instead at Tacitus the friend of Pliny. Pliny’s letters to Tacitus are especially concerned with binding their literary legacies together, often manifesting in an atmosphere of “friendly competition” (Griffin 142; Ludolph 80-81; Lefèvre 81).

You Can Go Home Again: Pliny Writes to Comum

By Jacqueline Carlon

The function of Pliny’s letters as vehicles for self-representation is now well-traveled scholarly territory, with almost universal consensus that he has his sights set on immortal fame, as he himself readily admits (Ep. 9.3). Achieving and maintaining social and political prominence in Pliny’s time generally required careful balancing of global and local obligations and duties, particularly for elite men who hailed from districts removed from the immediate orbit of Rome.

Master of Letters: Linguistic Competence in Fronto’s Correspondence

By Noelle Zeiner-Carmichael

This paper addresses aspects of epistolarity (Altman 1982) in the letters of Fronto, focusing on one thematic strand, “linguistic competence,” as a form of symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1982). I show how Fronto self-consciously manipulates the flexible, dialogic nature of (didactic) letter-writing to direct the readers’ gaze upon himself as the preeminent, successful tutor (magister) of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus and as the authoritative commander of the Latin language.

“A Sort of Living Dead Man”: Cicero’s Self-Representation in Att. IX-X

By Elizabeth Keitel

In her seminal article “The Ciceronian Bi-Marcus”, Eleanor Winsor Leach perceptively explores the disorientation that Caesar’s policy of clementia produced on Cicero’s sense of self in 46 BCE. In passing, she notes that Cicero experiences “a kind of symbolic death” in the disordered world of Caesar’s dictatorship (Leach 1999: 162). Cicero had already described his exile as a living death or overliving in letters to Atticus and his family.