The Art of Writing (and Collecting) Letters: the Case of Pliny’s and Symmachus’ Ep. 7.9

Although the Roman senator Q. Aurelius Symmachus (ca. ad 340-402) bequeathed a collection of over 900 letters, the search for allusions to earlier letter-writers in his letters has never been very successful. Although scholars used to argue that his collection of ten books was a deliberate imitation of Pliny’s collection, most scholars have now rejected this hypothesis. It is now accepted by most scholars that Symmachus published a first book and likely planned to publish another six books, which were posthumously published by his son Memmius.1 To this original collection of seven books, later generations added another three books to bring the number up to ten, which might indeed have been done in imitation of Pliny’s collection.2 It has long been recognized that Symmachus must have had some knowledge of Pliny’s letters, but the evidence is scarce. In his 1891 doctoral dissertation on Symmachus’ letters, Wilhelm Kroll listed all the resemblances that he could find between Pliny’s and Symmachus’ letters, but, as Gavin Kelly has demonstrated, only a few are convincing allusions.3 Kroll’s clearest finding of intertextuality, ep. 2.35 alluding to Pliny’s epp. 3.20 and 9.2, has been discussed by Alan Cameron in some