Coming to Grips with Ellipsis (A Pliny Appreciation Guide, Part 3)
Many people reading Pliny for the first time are struck with a question: “Why is Pliny the way that he is?” If you’re wondering why Pliny is so whiny and sycophantic, I don’t have an answer for that and won’t try to justify or defend him on that account. But if you’re wondering why he so often uses ellipsis—that is, why he likes to omit certain words such as forms of esse—I might be able to explain. Of course, these are letters, and letters are supposed to be brief. But it goes deeper than that.
Consider two facts: firstly, that Roman letters “purport to be conversation,”[1] and secondly, that ellipsis is considered “a genuine feature of actual conversation.”[2] For this reason, a letter-writer can use ellipsis to create a sense of intimacy and signal their friendship with the recipient. Cicero, whose letters are even more liberal with ellipsis than Pliny’s, uses it the most when writing to his closest confidants: his brother Quintus, Atticus, Paetus, Trebatius, Caelius, etc. On the other hand, when writing to people outside his inner circle of friends, Cicero uses less ellipsis to strike a more formal tone, especially if they are men of great auctōritās.[3] Interestingly, he also uses it less in letters to his wife Terentia.[4]
I was not able to find a study of how Pliny’s language changes based on the recipient, but we can use the AP passages to give us some ballpark numbers. In the two letters to Tacitus—one of Pliny’s closest friends and most frequent correspondants—34% of his sentences have at least one ellipsis of a verb. However, in his letter to Sura, he omits verbs much less often (20% of his sentences).[5] Though Pliny counts Sura as a friend and addresses him as
It’s hard to draw conclusions without a larger sample size or a more comprehensive study, but based on these limited data points, Pliny does seem to vary his use of ellipsis depending on his relationship with the recipient. It’s also worth noting that Pliny omits no verbs in 6.4 or 6.7 (the two letters to his wife Calpurnia on the AP syllabus), just as Cicero uses less ellipsis in his letters to Terentia. His letters to Trajan also seem to be light on ellipsis, which would also fit this trend (though Book 10 is in many ways different from the others). The point is that Pliny’s love of ellipsis is well-known, but it’s not arbitrary, nor is it even simply a matter of brevity. Pliny uses ellipsis to subtly tailor his letters to the recipient in order to fit a more formal or casual register of language.
Filling in the Gaps: Teaching with Ellipsis
Among AP teachers, much has been said about Pliny’s penchant for ellipsis. (Even I once joked that the reduced word count on the new AP syllabus was only the result of Pliny’s missing esse’s.) But this quirk is a frequent target for complaints from teachers, who lament that Pliny is not as easy for students to sight-read as Caesar, because (as one AP teacher noted) “there's too much ellipsis, if nothing else, to allow that.”
And yet. When I taught the old IB syllabus, the option I chose contained a passage from Sallust’s Bellum Catilīnae. In it was this description of Catiline:
I read this passage with my students for a number of years, and aside from the Sallustian weirdness of
But it’s not necessary for teachers to change their entire pedagogy in order to read Pliny. I hope to show two things with this post: that, by and large, Pliny’s ellipses are (a) not that unusual and (b) not that challenging. Sometimes, they may be a bit more challenging—but these cases are standard across most authors, and students are bound to run into them no matter which author they read. Sometimes, they may be a bit more unusual, in that you wouldn’t find them in Caesar’s Latin—but these sentences are generally approachable or even readable, and teachers can give their students easy strategies to approach them. Let’s look at the different situations where we typically find ellipsis when reading Pliny.
Ellipsis of esse: Main Clauses
The omission of certain forms of esse, especially est, sunt, and esse, is hardly unique to Pliny. Leumann identifies a few situations in which ellipsis of esse is liable to occur in all eras of Latin: in sententiae, in lists, in descriptions or characterizations (such as the Sallust quote above), and in questions, exclamations, or negative sentences.[7]
In the AP readings, I counted 22 sentences where Pliny omits a form of esse in a main clause. Five of them are omissions of est with a perfect passive participle, which is a perfectly normal ellipsis found throughout Latin literature. In a study of word order in Caesar, Cicero, and Sallust, a researcher found that esse was omitted from these constructions over a quarter of the time.[8]
Of the remaining 17, there are 14 that fall into a single category. Pliny tends to drop esse when it has a non-referential or impersonal subject, usually translated into English as “It was…” or “There was…” This ellipsis is acknowledged by at least one grammarian to be fairly common.[9]
Because the vast majority of his ellipses fall into a predictable pattern, this makes teaching Pliny’s ellipsis easy. Simply tell students, “If you can’t find a verb, then look for a nominative subject and start your translation as ‘There was X’ or ‘It was X.’” Or, as A. N. Sherwin-White put it, “When in doubt supply the verb ‘to be.’”[10] It really doesn’t need to be more difficult than that!
On the AP syllabus, there are two times when Pliny omits a first-person form of esse. This ellipsis sets him apart from earlier authors, who mostly restricted themselves to est, sunt, and esse. But these are also easy to spot, since in these sentences Pliny will obviously have to use ego to mark the subject. So if this comes up, students can learn to recognize that there is an ego without a verb, and supply sum, eram, etc.
The only AP example of ellipsis of esse in a main clause that does not fit into one of the above paradigms is the one at the end of this sentence, where the missing esse is used with an adjective. But given the more usual ellipses with perfect participles earlier in the sentence, it’s not hard to figure out. (Alternatively, it could be considered as a nominative phrase in apposition to the previous clause.)
Ellipsis of esse: Indirect Statements
Pliny often omits esse with indirect statements involving a perfect passive infinitive, but this ellipsis is not at all unusual. Readers of Caesar will be accustomed to seeing it: over the seven books of Dē Bellō Gallicō, Caesar uses 98 perfect passive infinitives, omitting esse in 74 of them (75.5%). This figure is comparable in Cornelius Nepos (73.0%) but considerably lower in Cicero’s speeches (25.2%).[11] I don’t have the data for all of Pliny, but for the seven perfect passive infinitives on the AP syllabus, he seems to omit esse in five of them, which amounts to 71.4%.
As for omitting esse with a future active participle, this is an unambiguously standard ellipsis across authors, eras, and genres. Pliny leaves off esse 90.1% of the time, but these figures are even higher in Dē Bellō Gallicō: 93.1% of Caesar’s future infinitives use ellipsis with esse, while Aulus Hirtius (who wrote Book 8 of DBG) never once uses esse with a future infinitive.[12]
On the AP syllabus, there are four examples of ellipsis in indirect statements that do not involve participles, but omission of esse in indirect statement is neither unusual (Livy does it over 1,000 times, for example)[13] nor especially challenging for students. Carlon’s textbook lets three of these sentences pass without comment, apparently judging that students should have no problems figuring them out. (These are 6.20.16, 6.20.20, and 7.27.2. The one she does mention is at 6.20.15.)
Ellipsis of esse: Subordinate Clauses
Pliny can even omit esse in subordinate clauses, which was not the norm for earlier generations of authors.[14] Even so, his ellipses are predictable: teachers only have to reiterate that the same rules given for main clauses apply to subordinate clauses. For example, he sometimes omits est if it goes with a perfect participle. On the AP syllabus we see him doing this with quia, ubi, and relative clauses.
He also leaves off the esse if the subject is non-referential or impersonal, just as he does in main clauses:
Other times, he omits esse in the subordinate clause if esse is omitted in the main clause as well. I view this as a form of gapping: both sentences rely on the phantom esse as their verb.
The last comment to make is on how Pliny uses quamquam. There are times when Pliny seems to use ellipsis of esse in a quamquam-clause:
However, in other sentences, he puts an ablative absolute inside a quamquam-clause, where it would not make sense to supply an esse:
In these situations, I think it best to consider quamquam as an adverb rather than as a conjunction. This is an attested use from Cicero on, as attested in Lewis and Short (s.v. “quamquam”, def. γ) and the Oxford Latin Dictionary (s.v. “quamquam”, def. 4). Fun fact: Caesar never uses quamquam at all!
Ellipsis of other verbs
In the AP selections, leaving aside verbs omitted because they were used elsewhere in the sentence (i.e. gapping), there are two places where Pliny uses ellipsis with other verbs: dīcō at 6.20.12, and pertinet at 6.16.21). Both of these are ordinary: it is common to drop verbs of speech, and Nihil ad X is a common idiom.
Notes
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