In his obituary of Silius Italicus (Ep. 3.7), Pliny uses a series of apposite intertextual allusions drawn from a variety of sources (especially from Seneca’s Dialogi and Epistles, Cicero’s Epistulae ad Familiares and Hesiod) which help him denigrate Silius’ posthumous reputation. Pliny evokes several titles of Senecan works and thus virtually creates an epistolary library with a section containing Stoic best sellers. In this letter, Pliny absorbs Seneca’s Stoicism, prompts his readers to evaluate Silius’ character through the lens of Stoic discourses and to notice an inconsistency between Silius’ Stoic death and his un-Stoic way of life, while all the while associating the epic poet with Epicureanism. He has good reasons to undermine Silius’ reputation, since the latter was Pliny’s rival for the title of Cicero’s heir. However, at the same time Pliny differentiates himself from Seneca by rejecting some of his central ideas, as e.g. his idea that human life is not short. The negative insinuations against Silius are further accentuated by intratextual links with other letters addressed to Caninius Rufus.

This chapter argues that Pliny’s description of his Tuscan villa (Ep. 5.6) engages in a complex intertext with Statius’ villa descriptions in the Silvae (1.3 and 2.2). The intertext involves Pliny recognizing and ‘correcting’ Statius’ combinatorial appropriation of Lucretius and Vergil’s Georgics. Statius alludes to the concept of nature in Lucretius and Vergil in order to justify his (polemical) celebration of the domination of nature by positioning it within the didactic tradition. In doing so Statius is able to praise the extravagance of his patrons and their villas. Chinn argues that Pliny acknowledges and elaborates this intertext by ‘correcting’ Statius’ Lucretian allusion and thereby positioning himself as the controller of nature and hence the object of praise.

The chapter explores the anxious cultural construction of women as intergenerational mediators that emerges from several epistles in Pliny’s collection (3.3 and 4.19; 4.2 and 4.7; 2.7 and 3.10). At once expected to be bearers of their father’s imprint and vehicle for the transmission of their husband’s identity, Roman women were the object of a discourse in which notions of biological filiation significantly intersected with issues of artistic reproduction and literary allusion. Building a typology of intra-, inter-, extra-, and alter-textual relations which connect Pliny’s topic and diction to relevant passages in Martial (6.37 and 38) and Tacitus (Dial. 28-29), my argument illuminates some crucial, common semiotic practices in his age.

In letter 1.3 Pliny urges his friend Caninius Rufus to take advantage of the tranquillity of his villa to cultivate literary activity, for which (especially when it comes to poetry) Caninius shows aptitude. This exhortation is reinforced by and embellished with intertextual allusions: in particular Pliny evokes Hor. carm. 3.30. By alluding to this and other texts by Horace, Pliny builds an argument where the subject of posthumous memory is combined with that of the right to property. Unlike material goods – among them the villa – literary works are not passed on to heirs but forever remain the (intellectual) property of their authors.

Republic opens with S., who will be the sole narrator of the dialogue, recounting how he and Glaucon went to the Piraeus to witness the inaugural festival in honor of the Thracian goddess Bendis and to offer prayers to her. While there they encounter, and are detained by, Polemarchus, who insists that they not return immediately to Athens but remain for further festivities and conversation with Glaucon’s older brother Adeimantus among others. By having S. serve as narrator, P. steers clear of the dramatic form exhibited by such dialogues as Crito and Euthyphro, which might have proved awkward in Books Three and Ten, where the mimetic mode is disparaged. Republic shares this narrative form with Charmides and Lysis, which also open with first-person verbs spoken by S. (Ἥκοµεν and Ἐπορευόµην). Unlike those dialogues, however, in which S. is headed for one of his regular haunts, a palaestra, here he is found in a less familiar setting, the port of Athens. In this regard Republic is comparable to Phaedrus, the rural setting of which prompts S.’s companion to observe that he is unaware that S. ventures outside the city walls at all (230c–d); by taking S.

Κατέβην χθὲς εἰς Πειραιᾶ µετὰ Γλαύκωνος τοῦ Ἀρίστωνος

The primary manuscripts that preserve Plato’s text give to the dialogue that is now his most widely read the title and subtitle Πολιτεία ἢ περὶ δικαίου.1 The title is attested as early as the time of Aristotle, who refers to his teacher’s work by that name on a number of occasions.2 The subtitle, like that for each of Plato’s works, appears also in the catalogue of his dialogues arranged in tetralogies by Thrasyllus in the first century (D.L. 3.57–61), although the practice of affixing subtitles is likely to have originated with booksellers already in the fourth century.3 The standard translation of Πολιτεία in English and other modern languages has been influenced by the title of Cicero’s De re publica, written in emulation of its Greek predecessor. But “Republic” is not an entirely satisfactory rendering of the title of Plato’s dialogue. The word πολιτεία designates that arrangement, whatever form it might take, that a people chooses to adopt in order to live together in a community (which, for a Greek, is a polis). That is the sense the word has when Plato puts it into the mouth of Socrates at the beginning of Timaeus, written some years after Republic. There Socrates refers to a summary of the presentation that he gave to his companions the previous day as “concerned with the political system (περὶ πολιτείας) and its citizenry that seemed to me would be the best.”4 The material covered in the summary includes several of the distinctive ideas for which Republic is most famous: the division of society into classes according to natural ability; the philosophically rigorous program of education for the Guardians, who are to repudiate the possession of private property; the equality of men and women with regard to their capacity to contribute to the state; the abolition of the “nuclear family,” so that spouses, siblings, parents and children are to be considered as common to all those of the appropriate age; eugenic management by the state of mating among the citizens and the production of children; official monitoring of children to determine who is worthy of elevation to, or demotion from, the ranks

As noted in the Introduction, Ashley Tauchert has articulated the dynamic between realism and romantic motifs in Austen's completed novels: ‘Austen is working her extraordinarily plausible realism through the magical framework of romance’, in that she deploys ‘aspects of a romance narrative paradigm to structure and to finally resolve, her “realist” representational content’. We know that we are eventually ‘hastening together to perfect felicity’, as the ending of Northanger Abbey points out. Moreover, Tauchert argues, this ending is effected, to a greater or lesser extent, by a significant change in the heroine's understanding of her love interest, and thus her understanding of herself. However these processes play out – and of course they vary among the novels – and there is a strong focus on the heroine's internal life.

What happens in the unfinished texts discussed here is that this development fails to happen and may not be in the offing. In ‘Catharine’, for example, it is not clear that the heroine's eventual husband has yet appeared in the story, while in Sanditon, if he has, then he has been only lightly sketched in. In The Watsons, there are three suitors, one of whom seems upright and intelligent; another, by contrast, is socially inept and self-centred but demonstrates signs of being able to change for the better. But in this latter case, it is not clear what purpose this promising trait serves if he is not to wed the heroine. As far as Lady Susan is concerned, the story's focus is not really on any young marriageable couple, but on the schemings of the charismatic central character, Lady Susan herself. That this tendency is disquieting is shown by the way a couple of recent completions of the text restore the conventional structure: either putting the young woman at the centre of the text (Phyllis Ann Karr) or making the scheming older woman a more noble and thus heroine-like figure (Jane Rubino and Caitlin Rubino-Brodway).

What these characteristics of the unfinished works highlight, in fact, is the arbitrariness of our expectations when we approach these texts with a knowledge of the six completed novels. We expect one figure to emerge clearly, albeit not necessarily early, as the suitable husband for the heroine, and assume that other contenders will be found wanting.