If Pliny's involvement in the composition and publication of light, neo-neoteric, Catullan poetry may have come as a surprise to modern readers, as it certainly did to some of his contemporaries, all the more so should the apparent absence of his voice from the vibrant debates on oratory that were taking place in his day. While it is due to the sometimes capricious (and sometimes judicious) accidents of philology that but a handful of fragments witnessing Pliny's poetry has come down to us, the reason why we have no contribution by him on oratory is simply because he never published anything specifically on the subject. The unexpected absence from Pliny's résumé of any discussion, either as systematic as Quintilian's Institutio or as idiosyncratic as Tacitus’ Dialogus de oratoribus, does not mean, however, that he did not partake in the debates. It only means that he did so through the heterogeneous and indirect medium of his letters, a corpus at which we have perhaps not looked closely enough. Pliny's correspondence contains, in fact, a small but crucial sample of letters that are allusively devoted to a discussion of oratory: they are predominantly addressed to Tacitus and engage in a stringent dialogue with his texts, in particular his Dialogus.