Pliny’s Letters and Martial’s Epigrams

Working Papers in Nervan, Trajanic and Hadrianic Literature 1.24 (4/8/14)

At non erunt aeterna, quae scripsit’: Pliny’s Letters and Martial’s Epigrams ’                                                                                            Margot Neger, 4th August, 2014

This working paper is a first draft of a paper on Pliny’s interaction with Martial’s epigrams and vice versa. It investigates how Pliny and Martial functionalize each other for their literary self-characterisation in Epist. 3.21 and Mart. 10.20[19]. Moreover, Martial’s Trajanic Book 10 seems to have been of special interest to Pliny; apart from Martial’s prose-prefaces, which are shaped as letters, Pliny also alludes to epigrams which play with the conventions of epistolarity. Thus, Martial seems to rival Pliny not only as a writer of small-scale poetry in the tradition of Catullus but also as someone experimenting in the field of epistolography.

Pliny’s Letters and Martial’s Epigrams