Minerva on the Surrey Downs: Reading Pliny (And Horace) With John Toland

Abstract

John Toland's Description of Epsom (1711) is one of the most remarkable creative responses, ancient or modern, to Pliny's Epistles. Drawing on the villa letters and the collection as a whole for both topographical description and self-styling, Toland moulds himself after an intensely ruralist – and strikingly Horatian – Pliny. This article reads Epsom together with Toland's translations from the Epistles (1711–12) as a case study in reception which can also shed fresh light on Pliny's own epistolary self-portraiture.