The Poetics of Space in Pliny’s Tuscan Villa

Erika J. Nesholm (Georgetown University)

Pliny’s Tuscan villa is presented as a literary space.  In a letter to Domitius Apollinaris (5.6), Pliny sets out to allay his concerns about spending the summer there with a lengthy description of the villa, its setting, and its grounds.  Throughout the collection, villas are presented as settings for literary production (Hoffer 1999); here, the location he associates with producing literature becomes itself a literary production.  The letter’s statues as ekphrasis, the identification of the villa’s setting as a locus amoenus, and the conflation of the visual and the literary combine to create a commentary on the nature of literary production and epistolary discourse.

In this paper, I first examine the ways this letter fits into the ekphrastic tradition.  I then turn to the ways this description includes elements of the locus amoenus.  Finally, I argue that Pliny rhetoricizes his own project as he explicitly situates this letter within the broader context of literary tradition.

Pliny sets out his purpose in this letter as giving an account of temperiem caeli regionis situm villae amoenitatem (3).  Drawing on discussions of ekphrasis (Laird 1999), I argue that, as Pliny takes his reader on a tour of the property, this letter engages the generic expectations of a set-piece description: emphasis on visual details, linear narration of three-dimensional space, claim to pictorial realism and accuracy, blurring of natural and artistic production.  The frequent invitations to the addressee to view the location (e.g. 13, 44) reveal a self-conscious engagement with the relationship between the visual and the literary (cf. Hinds 2002). 

Pliny’s description of his villa’s setting bears numerous similarities to the traditional locus amoenus.  The temperate climate with pleasant breezes (5), abundant trees and flowers (8, 10), flowing streams (11) combine to make this an idealized, timeless setting (Hoffer 1999).  Pliny thereby aligns his villa with the tradition of similar poetic and mythical settings, which are often associated with literary production.

Pliny rhetoricizes his own project in this letter and situates it within the larger literary context.  Comparison to Homeric and Vergilian descriptions of armor to account for the proper scope of his letter (43) explicitly links this letter to ekphrasis.  Pliny conflates the literary and the visual as he applies terms of rhetorical composition to the visual scene represented (varietas, descriptio: 13).  The letter itself becomes an artistic production to be appreciated in much the same terms as the space it describes.  He relates the proportions of the letter to those of the space it defines and the reading of the letter to moving around the space it represents (41).  This aligns the literary aesthetic project of this ekphrasis with epistolary discourse, characterized by a collapse of temporal and spatial boundaries and a construction of textual presence (Altman 1982).  The invitation to the addressee to enter into a textual relationship in letters is conceptually linked with the invitation into the textual space constructed in his epistolary ekphrasis.