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oa Bekende Romeinen
Het mediale zelf van Plinius en Martialis
- Amsterdam University Press
- Source: Lampas, Volume 55, Issue 1, Feb 2022, p. 65 - 85
Abstract
Writing and publishing short texts about oneself, one’s friends, one’s activities and opinions is something everybody does who is active on social media. It was also done by Pliny in his Epistles and by Martial in his Epigrams. Of course, their media do not map exactly onto ours, nor do their norms, values and expectations, but precisely for that reason the comparison may be illuminating. In this article, I discuss how Pliny, in the medium of the letter, and Martial, in the medium of the epigram, constructed and presented their social selves. As the article is primarily meant for Dutch schoolteachers teaching Pliny and Martial for the Central School Exam of 2022, I use, as far as possible, passages that are on the reading list for that exam.1