Laudator Temporis Acti

Ronald Syme, review of M. Durry, Pline le Jeune: Panégyrique de Trajan, in his Roman Papers, I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 76-87 (at 76):

The solitary speech surviving from three whole centuries of post-Ciceronian Latin oratory has had a long time to wait for an adequate commentator. Monstrous neglect, one might think. Yet there is some excuse. Many scholars have expressed a marked and personal distaste for Pliny's masterpiece. 'Ein höchst unerfreuliches Produkt', says the grave and judicial Schanz; and Schiller spoke of 'Bombast und fast byzantinische Kriecherei'. Not only is the subject repulsive—an official theme with repetitive and ingenious praise of the head of the government: the style of the orator, technically perfect and palatable in small doses, soon becomes tedious through preciosity and unrelenting pursuit of the pointless epigram and forced antithesis.

[....]

The Panegyricus is an example of a definite literary type, namely the actio gratiarum of a consul. Pliny spoke his thanks when entering office on 1 September, A.D. 100....As it stands, the Panegyricus would take three hours to declaim. That is terrible. As F.A. Wolf observed long ago, 'enecuisset principem novus consul si ita dixisset ut scripsit.'

Id. (at 80):

The evidence of coins could be more copiously invoked to illustrate the official meanings of words and the nature of the programme advertised by the government. Mattingly, by his frequent quotation of the Panegyrictts when discussing the coinage of Nerva and Trajan, shows how effectively the two sources can be combined (BMC, R. Emp. iii (1936)). Indeed, many chapters in Pliny's speech could be given coin-legends for their headings.

Id. (at 86):

To sharpen the necessary contrast between good emperors and bad, no device was too trivial, no sophistry too transparent. Domitian abolished pantomimes: permitted again by Nerva, they were forbidden by Trajan. Pliny was equal to the theme—'utrumque recte; nam et restitui oportebat, quos sustulerat malus princeps, et tolli restitutos' (Pan. 46, 3). The government is always right.

Id. (at 87):

The Panegyricus may perhaps be regarded not merely as the heir of a long tradition but as a herald and symbol of the intellectual and spiritual poverty of the period that was to follow, a condition not solely due to despotic government or to any repression of free speech: there was nothing worth writing about. Pliny was alarmed at the state of contemporary youth, observing rebelliousness and dangerous originality—'statim sapiunt, statim sciunt omnia, neminem verentur, imitantur neminem atque ipsi sibi exempla sunt' (Ep. viii 23, 3). He need not have worried. These dynamic young men (if they really existed) were soon to become dreary and representative figures, leaders of state and society in a dead season, the blessed Age of the Antonines.