Bruce Gibson

Managing the Past: Plinian Strategies in the Panegyrici Latini

This paper examines how the presentation of the past in Plinys Panegyricus can inform our understanding of other speeches in the Panegyrici Latini. Readings of PanLat VI(7), IV(10), and III(11) will examine issues such as adoption and co-rulership, the use of the past as a means of commenting on the present, and the role of sincerity and flattery, as well as the treatment of the republican past, and show how the authors of the speeches use and modify Plinian strategies for the treatment of the past in praising emperors.

Introduction: Pliny the Younger in Late Antiquity

History does not record who was pronounced the winner in a poetic contest between the emperor Valentinian and Ausonius, the tutor to his son Gratian. If the contest was prompted by Gratian’s wedding, it would date to about 374, but our knowledge of it is restricted to Ausonius’s cento nuptialis as sent in a letter to his friend Paulus a few years later, complete with prose introduction and epilogue.1 Ausonius’s Vergilian cento is best known for its closing, sensationally pornographic section (101–31), after which he turns again to Paulus, in apologia; Ausonius’s defensive strategy here is essentially to include himself in a catalogue of writers where clear differentiation was required between an author’s publications and their moral conduct (139.1–8 Green):

Causation In Post-Augustan Epic

In this chapter the author wishes to concentrate on a different aspect of causation in epic poetry after Augustus, and considers the topic in the light of historiography. Concern with the origins of events is a major feature of historiographical texts. The complexity of the relationship between poetic and historiographical causation is reflected in the Augustan period by Virgils recasting of the Iliads enquiry as to the reason for divine anger in language that evokes historiography at A. 1.8- 11. The chapter considers various aspects of causation in post-Virgilian epic: the causation of wars, the role of rumours, ideas of moral decline, and the effects of speeches. The author offers some brief observations on examples from Lucan which seems to offer comment on more customary historiographical practice. Keywords: historiographical causation; Lucan; post-Augustan epic; Roman morality