Pliny and the Dolphin, a Story about Storytelling

The younger Pliny’s letter about an amazing dolphin (Ep. 9.33) may be read as inviting a literary reading which indeed it richly repays. Addressed to the poet Caninius Rufus, the letter goes beyond the ordinary self-awareness of Pliny’s epistolarity to signal its status as an experiment in especially artful prose. Although the letter claims to offer only ‘raw material’ (materia) to be rendered into poetry by Caninius, it also presents itself as already a poetic telling: its evocative frame thematizes issues of authorship, authenticity, and genre, and combines with allusions to the elder Pliny’s earlier and much sparer version of the story (N.H. 9.8.26) to emphasize by implied contrast the younger Pliny’s decisions in areas like structure, perspective, diction, and tone. As only one example of this literary artistry, the story’s ending may be singled out for how it helps to turn a simple account of animal behavior, however amazing, into something approaching a sort of gothic sublime. All of this encourages a rather literary re-reading of Pliny, an author perhaps appreciated more as a source for social history, malgrι lui, than as an artist deeply interested, and deeply invested, in the theory, practice, and playful possibilities of storytelling.