When Pliny ventures out to publish a selection of his correspondence, he makes sure he has dispelled any doubt about the nature of his literary enterprise. “My letters,” he notes in the dedicatory preface of Book 1, “are not collected according to their chronology – after all, I am not writing history – rather, they appear as each had come to my hands” (Ep. 1.1.1). In Chapter 1 we have observed that this initial disclaimer made available to Pliny alternative models of arrangement, particularly poetic ones. The prominence he assigns to his dismissal of history, however, is significant in itself and bears further examination. Pliny's contrastive association of his collection of letters with historical writing is hardly neutral. Modern editors print the aside neque enim historiam componebam between parentheses. The graphic convention isolates the comment, at the same time downplaying its import and emphasizing its importance. In discussing the interplay of linguistic foundations of psychoanalytical thought, Emil Benveniste has posited that a peculiar feature of any negation in language is its being first and foremost an affirmation: what needs to be undone must be first explicitly said, and a statement of non-existence has the same form as a statement of existence. In declaring that his epistles are programmatically “not-history,” Pliny thus allows the notion of history to surface as he discards it.