Pliny regularly calls the Panegyricus a gratiarum actio, insistently so in the opening sections, and that is pretty certainly its title. Its traditional title, Panegyricus, has no support from Pliny and is too Greek for an occasion which Pliny emphatically presents as an old Roman custom in his opening words (he appeals to maiores and mos in the first two sentences). In Pliny's description of the senatorial decree, his remit was to let good emperors review their actions (quae facerent recognoscerent, 4.1), bad emperors their duty (cf. 75.3). But praise was what was expected and given, and in the published speech, a richly expanded version (spatiosius et uberius, Ep. 3.18.1), praise of the emperor is paramount (e.g. 3.3, 53.6 and 56.1). In a letter, Pliny rejects any advisory role; his aim is to praise the emperor for his excellence (laudare optimum principem, Ep. 3.18.2–3) and present him as a model for any successors. The speech is thus a prime example of classical panegyric and our only extant such speech in Latin from the early imperial period.

Together with invective, encomium constitutes the genre of epideictic, one of the three traditional genres of oratory alongside forensic and deliberative. But unlike them the audience of epideictic does not have to take a decision (a judge or jury to acquit or condemn, a deliberative body to accept or reject a proposal).