This chapter examines Ep. 2.20’s intertextual engagement with Demosthenes’ De Corona and Cicero’s In Verrem. By analysing these ‘allusions’, we can determine that Pliny self-identifies with his famous oratorical predecessors. More specifically, Pliny’s feud with Regulus recalls Demosthenes’ rivalry with Aeschines and Cicero’s oratorical competition with Verres. Pliny casts himself as a successor of this tradition and, like his great forebears, can overcome his nemesis. Yet the letter also has a more poignant political point about Pliny’s civitas (community). Demosthenes claims that some individuals who were involved in Greek political affairs were bribed by Philip. Aeschines was therefore symptomatic of a wider failing among the Greek political elite. Similarly, Cicero claims that high ranking senators support men such as Hortensius so long as it benefits their own careers. By bringing Cicero and Demosthenes to mind, then, Pliny suggests that his own political elite community reward wicked men such as Regulus in much the same way. In fact, Pliny’s letter seems to suggest an even gloomier future, where his own civitas are worse than the precedent of the past. These intertextual allusions, then, can challenge common scholarly pre-conceptions about Pliny’s view of Rome’s future under the Trajanic principate.

This chapter analyses how Pliny absorbs the consolatory philosophy of Seneca. It focuses on his intertextual use of two of Seneca’s epistles (98 and 99) that treat death, arguing that Ep. 98 looms behind Corellius Rufus’ decision to die (1.12), and that Regulus’ display of grief following the death of his son (4.2) echoes Seneca’s condemnation of improper mourning practice in Ep. 99. The allusions reveal Pliny’s opportunistic engagement with Seneca’s philosophical consideration of grief, agreeing and disagreeing with his epistolary predecessor depending upon the specific circumstances of the bereavement. Both his absorption and rejection of Seneca’s arguments show that he could engage and apply philosophical concepts to express his own grief or criticise other’s.

In De Officiis, Cicero undertakes sustained engagement with Roman exemplary ethics. He uses dozens of different exempla to serve a variety of functions including as inspirational paradigms as means of illustrating abstract concepts and to communicate the important principle of situational variation. In addition he reflects upon some of the challenges of exemplary ethics when viewed within the Stoic context and also develops new techniques for utilising exempla and exemplary modes within a Stoic framework. He achieves this partly by incorporating into his philosophical discussion some key features of Roman exemplary ethics including a sense of particularity and historical specificity emotional charge and injunction and indeterminacy. De Officiis anticipates to some extent ideas later developed more explicitly by Seneca; identifying these enables us to better appreciate the unfolding dialogue between Stoicism and exemplary ethics.

Before their seminal distinct distances paper, Guth and Katz wrote another paper that introduced a new polynomial method. In this chapter, we study one of the two problems that were resolved in that paper: the joints problem. The solution to this problem relies on a simple polynomial technique, which is based on polynomial interpolation. This is also a good warm-up for working in spaces of dimension larger than two.

We use the polynomial interpolation technique to study two additional problems. First, we study the sets in R^3 that are formed by the union of all lines that intersect three pairwise-skew lines. We then use the degree reduction technique to study polynomial interpolation of lines.

Chapter 5 addresses four more substantial liaisons, all involving ‘window imitation’. Epistles 5.8 (on writing history) works closely with Institutio 10.1, and reaches through it to Thucydides’ preface. Epistles 3.13 (on the style of the Panegyricus) combines Quintilian’s attack on ‘naturalists’ (Institutio 2.11–12) with his remarks on style (Institutio 8.3) and his own point of reference in Cicero’s De oratore. Epistles 4.7 attacks Regulus as immoral orator with help from Institutio 12.5 and its model passage in De oratore. Finally and most curiously, Epistles 2.14 (attacking degenerate advocates and audiences) combines Quintilian on ‘sing-song’ performance (Institutio 11.3) with other passages from the Institutio and Cicero’s Orator in an abstruse display of wit.