Calpurnia of Comum and the Ghost of Umbria: Marriage and Regional Identity in the Epistulae of Pliny

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The Epistulae of Pliny feature two wives: the young bride Calpurnia from Pliny’s hometown of Comum in northern Italy and a deceased and unnamed earlier wife, the daughter of Pompeia Celerina, from the Umbro-Etruscan regions in central Italy, who is erased from most of the correspondence (she is unmentioned until the 9th book). Calpurnia effectively plays the role of Vergil’s Lavinia to the Creusa of the deceased earlier wife: the new bride Calpurnia represents Pliny’s (north) Italian future, overwriting the decades that Pliny spent embedded in the Umbro-Etruscan aristocracy. Calpurnia brings the antique values of the Transpadana with her to Rome. She encapsulates Pliny’s renewed commitment to his virtuous northern Italian home through marriage at the beginning of the new era after the assassination of Domitian and the opportunities offered and exigencies furnished for the moral re-definition of the self. Pliny implies a link between his yearning for faraway Comum and his yearning for the absent Calpurnia: the town and the bride are closely linked.