The careers of Cicero and Pliny the Younger go well together. Or at least so Pliny, who explicitly modelled himself on Cicero, would have hoped. Both were men of equestrian and non-Roman origins, noui homines who rose to the consulship (although Pliny notes at Epist. 4.8.5 that he attained both consulship and augurate while younger than Cicero), masters of eloquence in senate and law court, and recognized practitioners of a wide range of literary genres, including forensic oratory, poetry and epistolography. Pliny of course was well aware of the gulf in talent and, no less important, in political and forensic opportunities under the Principate which separated him from Cicero under the old Republic. Within the context of the present collection, nevertheless, the literary careers of Cicero and Pliny are a productive pairing, inasmuch as they both exhibit a certain indistinctness. However, the reasons for the indistinctness of each author's career differ in meaningful ways. These differences, as will be suggested later in the paper, possess significance in the context of the post-Ciceronian emergence of the ideal of a literary career – associated above all with Virgil – which pursues a trajectory from humbler to higher genres.

One conclusion of the second part of this paper will be to affirm the usefulness of the ‘Virgilian’ literary career as a way of thinking about the careers of other Classical authors.