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.

In his obituary of Silius Italicus (Ep. 3.7), Pliny uses a series of apposite intertextual allusions drawn from a variety of sources (especially from Seneca’s Dialogi and Epistles, Cicero’s Epistulae ad Familiares and Hesiod) which help him denigrate Silius’ posthumous reputation. Pliny evokes several titles of Senecan works and thus virtually creates an epistolary library with a section containing Stoic best sellers. In this letter, Pliny absorbs Seneca’s Stoicism, prompts his readers to evaluate Silius’ character through the lens of Stoic discourses and to notice an inconsistency between Silius’ Stoic death and his un-Stoic way of life, while all the while associating the epic poet with Epicureanism. He has good reasons to undermine Silius’ reputation, since the latter was Pliny’s rival for the title of Cicero’s heir. However, at the same time Pliny differentiates himself from Seneca by rejecting some of his central ideas, as e.g. his idea that human life is not short. The negative insinuations against Silius are further accentuated by intratextual links with other letters addressed to Caninius Rufus.

This chapter argues that Pliny’s description of his Tuscan villa (Ep. 5.6) engages in a complex intertext with Statius’ villa descriptions in the Silvae (1.3 and 2.2). The intertext involves Pliny recognizing and ‘correcting’ Statius’ combinatorial appropriation of Lucretius and Vergil’s Georgics. Statius alludes to the concept of nature in Lucretius and Vergil in order to justify his (polemical) celebration of the domination of nature by positioning it within the didactic tradition. In doing so Statius is able to praise the extravagance of his patrons and their villas. Chinn argues that Pliny acknowledges and elaborates this intertext by ‘correcting’ Statius’ Lucretian allusion and thereby positioning himself as the controller of nature and hence the object of praise.

The chapter explores the anxious cultural construction of women as intergenerational mediators that emerges from several epistles in Pliny’s collection (3.3 and 4.19; 4.2 and 4.7; 2.7 and 3.10). At once expected to be bearers of their father’s imprint and vehicle for the transmission of their husband’s identity, Roman women were the object of a discourse in which notions of biological filiation significantly intersected with issues of artistic reproduction and literary allusion. Building a typology of intra-, inter-, extra-, and alter-textual relations which connect Pliny’s topic and diction to relevant passages in Martial (6.37 and 38) and Tacitus (Dial. 28-29), my argument illuminates some crucial, common semiotic practices in his age.

In letter 1.3 Pliny urges his friend Caninius Rufus to take advantage of the tranquillity of his villa to cultivate literary activity, for which (especially when it comes to poetry) Caninius shows aptitude. This exhortation is reinforced by and embellished with intertextual allusions: in particular Pliny evokes Hor. carm. 3.30. By alluding to this and other texts by Horace, Pliny builds an argument where the subject of posthumous memory is combined with that of the right to property. Unlike material goods – among them the villa – literary works are not passed on to heirs but forever remain the (intellectual) property of their authors.