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8
A Portrait of the Elder as a Young Pliny
1.
In his Letter 6, XVI, 1, C. Pliny the Younger (hereafter the Younger) writes to Tacitus about the death of his uncle Pliny the Elder (hereafter the Elder), who perished during the eruption of Vesuvius at Pompeii, 79 A.D.
The letter is written to provide Tacitus with material for his Historiae. As can be understood from the letter, the Younger had firsthand evidence of the first part of the events and firsthand reports about the circumstances of the death of his uncle. This fact is very important for the purpose of the following analysis: at the beginning of the letter there is an implicit Ego (the Younger) writing presumably around 104 A.D. to his addressee, and the only true proposition one could identify in this text is I, Pliny, am writing in this moment to you Tacitus saying p. The whole set of propositions labeled as p should be referentially opaque. But the letter implies a sort of performative mode, as if it said: I swear that p is true. There is a sort of authentication agreement (Greimas [1979] would say contract de veridiction) between the Younger and Tacitus, by force of which Tacitusand any other possible addressee of the lettermust take p as pure matter of fact. Besides, Tacitus asked the
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A first version of this chapter was presented at the Symposium Synopsis 2: Narrative Theory and Poetics of Fiction, Porter Institute, Tel Aviv-Jerusalem, June 1979, and subsequently published under the same title as this chapter in VS 35 / 36 (1983). The translation is reproduced from Pliny 1969. I have eliminated the footnotes and stressed with italics certain relevant expressions for purposes of analysis.

 
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