The Arts of Imitation in Latin Prose

Pliny's Epistles /Quintilian in Brief

Bibliographic Data

ID19922909
AuthorsChristopher Whitton (University of Cambridge, corresponding author)
Year2019
Publication date2019-06-27
Open AccessYes
TypeBOOK
VenueArts of Imitation in Latin Prose (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherCambridge University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1017/9781108688550
OpenAlexW2949895366
Open LibraryOL34735398M
ISBN9781108688550
LanguageEN
Citations received30
References cited337

Imitation was central to Roman culture, and a staple of Latin poetry. But it was also fundamental to prose. This book brings together two monuments of the High Empire, Quintilian's Institutio oratoria ('Training of the orator') and Pliny's Epistles, to reveal a spectacular project of textual and ethical imitation. As a young man Pliny had studied with Quintilian. In the Epistles he meticulously transforms and subsumes his teacher's masterpiece, together with poetry and prose ranging from Homer to Tacitus' Dialogus de oratoribus. In teasing apart Pliny's rich intertextual weave, this book reinterprets Quintilian through the eyes of one of his sharpest readers, radically reassesses the Epistles as a work of minute textual artistry, and makes a major intervention in scholarly debates on intertextuality, imitation and rhetorical culture at Rome. The result is a landmark study with far-reaching implications for how we read Latin literature

Art · Imitation · Intertextuality · Linguistics · Literature · Poetry · Rhetorical question · The arts · Visual arts · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · Organic Chemistry Synthesis Methods · Philosophy · Psychology · Epistularum libri IX (Pliny, the Younger) · History and criticism · Imitation in literature · Institutiones oratoriae (Quintilian) · Latin literature · Pliny, the younger, 62?-113

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