Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- 1 Pliny's thanksgiving: an introduction to the Panegyricus
- 2 Self-fashioning in the Panegyricus
- 3 The Panegyricus and the Monuments of Rome
- 4 The Panegyricus and rhetorical theory
- 5 Ciceronian praise as a step towards Pliny's Panegyricus
- 6 Contemporary contexts
- 7 Politics and the sublime in the Panegyricus
- 8 Down the Pan: historical exemplarity in the Panegyricus
- 9 Afterwords of praise
- Bibliography
- Index locorum
- General index
1 - Pliny's thanksgiving: an introduction to the Panegyricus
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- 1 Pliny's thanksgiving: an introduction to the Panegyricus
- 2 Self-fashioning in the Panegyricus
- 3 The Panegyricus and the Monuments of Rome
- 4 The Panegyricus and rhetorical theory
- 5 Ciceronian praise as a step towards Pliny's Panegyricus
- 6 Contemporary contexts
- 7 Politics and the sublime in the Panegyricus
- 8 Down the Pan: historical exemplarity in the Panegyricus
- 9 Afterwords of praise
- Bibliography
- Index locorum
- General index
Summary
PRECURSORS AND PREDECESSORS
On 1 September 100 ce, Pliny the Younger rose in the senate to deliver the oration we know as the Panegyricus. This was a gratiarum actio, a ‘vote of thanks’, offered up to the emperor Trajan (98–117). It was given on the occasion of Pliny's attainment of the consulship, the prime goal of regular senatorial ambition and the highest rung, albeit of suffect status, on the normal cursus honorum. Pliny claims as the pretext for his speech a senatus consultum which had recommended that a vote of thanks be rendered to the emperor by the consuls (Pan. 4.1, cf. 90.3; Ep. 3.18.1, 6.27.1). In the speech and in his letters, Pliny immediately subjoins to this recommendation a normative aim: to demonstrate through praise the behaviour and characteristics expected of a good princeps (Pan. 4.1; Ep. 3.18.2). In offering praise to his emperor on this occasion, Pliny was participating in a vibrant rhetorical tradition. Its tropes and themes reflect a vital and continuous contemporary culture, while its roots extended a very long way back into republican culture and politics on the one hand, and on the other into Greek traditions of praise which had been crystallized to a certain extent by Isocrates in the mid-fourth century bce, but had predated him considerably.
Special emphasis falls upon the laudatio funebris, or funeral oration, in Polybius' account of the aristocratic funeral (6.53–4).
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- Pliny's PraiseThe Panegyricus in the Roman World, pp. 1 - 28Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011
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