Pliny's encyclopaedia demands a very particular approach from its readers. The key paradox of the genre is that, having gone to the immense effort of gathering together information covering all the branches of human knowledge, it expects its readers not to read it all. The tension between the unifying discourse of complete knowledge and its practical segmentation into digestible chunks requires a certain amount of conceptual shimmying on the part of the reader. How relevant is the surrounding information to the single fact retrieved? In the case of Pliny, the possibility of understanding disembodied sections and facts in isolation is a promise held out to the reader by the book itself: Pliny explicitly gives his blessing in the preface and provides a summarium to aid in the process. This summarium takes up all of Book One of the Natural History, listing the contents of other 36 books, together with the sources Pliny consulted. But although the paratext promotes one model of how to read the Natural History, the text itself is ambivalent; the insistency of linear narrative never quite surrenders to the allure of complete segmentation. There is a logic to the Natural History that only reveals itself to the reader who follows the stream of information from fact to fact, section to section, book to book, subject to subject.

Dining with Domitian could be a trying experience. Dio describes one memorable meal with the emperor:

(Dio 67.9)

The structural formation of Martial's books of epigrams, especially what has been termed the intratextuality of the poems in each volume, has received considerable attention in recent studies of the author. Both Scherf and Merli, for example, in the latest collection of essays on Martial, not only provide useful critical surveys of past scholarship on the issue but propose their own, occasionally more detailed, schemes. The result is a growing recognition of the intricate designs Martial created out of his varied themes and of their importance in helping us to understand the literary purpose of the books.

For the most part, editors and teachers have conspired to ignore the book gatherings in administering their dosage of Pliny (as of Cicero's, or of Seneca's Letters). But Epistles 3.21 is a striking tailpiece which pricks the reader to reflect back over all the book they have been reading. A resounding sequence of letters through the book has been writing up writers when we reach the finale's valediction to Martial. Each time writer and subject of writing share the trait of being writers, this entices readers to play at joining them, and so entertain the experience of reading through their minds' eyes. Attuned empathy is the challenge, though not necessarily in a spirit of congeniality or collegiality; and the cumulative project is to lever us into sharing and appreciating Pliny's ability to represent the fraternity to others, and thereby to communicate his own self, as writer and subject of writing. No half measures: letters mediate, immediate.