This book is about what makes Pliny's collection of private correspondence a literary work. While the epistles have previously been studied as a source of historical information, recent critical interest in Pliny has acquired a larger focus. Works such as Hoffer's on the anxieties of Pliny the Younger or the collective endeavor of the Manchester and Menaggio conferences on Pliny and his social, political and cultural worlds have illuminated Pliny's engagement with central issues of his times. These contributions, however, have largely been animated by an interpretation of the epistles that is exclusively instrumental: Pliny's texts have been read, in fact, as a witness to the author's strategic self-fashioning. If this partly new approach has the merit of advancing the critical debate beyond the earlier prevailing interest in his collection as a source of prosopographic evidence, it still insists on casting the epistles as a testimony to the life, however artificially and strategically constructed, of an individual. My work intends to reorient the reading of Pliny's letters by considering them not only as a tool for understanding the author or his times but also as the object to be understood. My central contention is that, while Pliny consciously embeds in his texts the self-portrait of a man of strenuous political activity and incessant cultural commitment, this portrait cannot be separated from the textual corpus that articulates it. Pliny's letters do not merely witness his cultural project; they constitute it.