Abstract

In this engagingly complex discussion of Pliny Books 1–9, Marchesi, like her Pliny, shows a facility in manipulating a multifarious network of allusions and readerly expectations. In the process she delivers one of those rarities, the academic page-turner. Marchesi finds, in Pliny, an acutely self-conscious and highly literary subject and sets out her agenda clearly in two opening sections ; we should expect to find that "Pliny's epistolary corpus emerges as a carefully organised work that experiments with the boundaries of its own genre by allusively evoking and interacting with a variety of its literary antecedents".