American Journal of Philology 134 (2013) 101–118 © 2013 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 1 Intertextuality in prose is a relatively marginal subject of study in Classics, but an argument may (and has been) made that comparable dynamics of allusion are at work in prose and poetry, especially in the case of carefully crafted, albeit extended, text. For general orientation on the issue, with no prejudicial judgements against prose, see Conte-Barchiesi 1989, Hinds 1998, Edmunds 2001, Williams 2005 (with a good survey of terminological his- tory). For specific cases close to the present case study, see Finkelpearl 1998 (Apuleius), Woodman 1998 (Tacitus), Bodel 1999 (Petronius), and Marchesi 2008 (Pliny). SILENCED INTERTEXT: PLINY ON MARTIAL ON PLINY (ON REGULUS) ILARIA MARCHESI  IN THE FOLLOWING PAGES, I address a combination of two areas in the study of intertextuality, which remain relatively marginal in the critical discourse of Classicists: intertextuality in prose and diffuse intertexts. 1 To explore these phenomena, which I see as interconnected, I use a particu- larly promising case of textual interference: the silenced and apparently incidental relation between Martial and Pliny, two contemporaries whose works explicitly intersect only once but that may be shown to interfere with one another in a dense cloud of subtler allusions extending to wider areas of their collections. It may be useful to state from the outset the relation I see at work between poetic and prose intertextuality. Prose intertextuality shares with poetic allusive art a number of features and has perhaps some distinctive ones. Whether in prose or in poetry, an allusion involves the recitation of a portion of an older text in a new context, an implied invitation to appreciate similarities or divergences between larger portions of the mobilized texts and a semantic surplus triggered by the intersection of the new with the known. That is, not unlike its poetic counterpart, prose intertextuality generates a new margin of interpretability, both in the vehicle and in the target text. On the other hand, there is an essentially distinguishing feature between intertextuality in prose and in poetry: the relative density of the two media, and the ensuing choice of the vehicle for allusion. While in poetry individual charged words or syntagms, dis- tinctive rhythmical and syntactic configurations, and even simple metrical forms may suffice to trigger an intertextual relation between two poems