Pliny the Younger, Epistle 5.6

Abstract

The epistle 5, 6, one of Pliny’s longiest, adressed to ex-consul Domitius Appolinaris, there is a description, an ekphrasis, of his villa in Tuscia by which Pliny intends to prove that the land is not unhealthy, but rather salubrious. Before the Portuguese translation with notes, I briefly point out the way Pliny deliberately manages ekphrasis, first as the rhetoric trope of euidentia or enárgeia and then as a poetic trope, i.e., that typical ingredient of hexametric epic poems – whose most notorious examples are the descriptions of Achilles’ and Aeneas’ shields in the Iliad (18. 468–613) and in the Aeneid (8. 617–718), both mentioned in the epistle. The transition from rhetoric to poetic level correlates not only to the changing of aim – from the intention of convincing (mouere) to the intention of pleasing (placere) – but it also correlates the mutation of a persuasive argument into a pleasurable ornament. A final and cumuative result is that Pliny, just for a moment, shows himself as potential epic poet, even if it is in the interregnum of digression, a conditon every ekphrasis afterall possess, as he himself states.