Abstract
Abstract: The Epistles of Pliny the Younger confound his readers: some read like genuine correspondence, written to transmit information, others like careful literary pieces. Pliny’s description of his Tuscan villa, in Epistulae 5.6, seems to fall into the latter category. This letter, the longest of the corpus, has Pliny taking his addressee, Domitius Apollinaris, on a virtual walking tour, and describing what he sees. But Pliny’s villa, as described, seems mostly empty and lacks expected features if it were inhabited. The villa’s emptiness, however, provides nooks and crannies for practicing the rhetorical Memory Palace technique. By using this space for rhetorical exercise, Pliny, like his uncle, spent his otium wisely.