Pliny's epistles have long suffered from a double critical misfortune. Their author was the practitioner of prose-epistolography, an understudied, because allegedly sub-literary, genre; and he was active during a traditionally devalued period, the disparagingly labeled Silver Age (now, in times of political correctness, known as the post-Augustan era). The situation, however, has recently changed. Not only have the chronological and generic confines of the Latin canon been expanded to include Pliny's times and genre of choice, but his works have also become the object of renewed critical interest. Two international conferences were held in 2002 in Europe. The 2003 issue of Arethusa contains the proceedings of the international conference called Re-imagining Pliny The Younger, organized at the University of Manchester; while the volume Plinius der Jüngere und seine Zeit presents the results of an Italo-German conference held on Lake Como. The two meetings differ in their approach – the former was experimental and bent on challenging received wisdom, the latter was more traditional and summative – and have produced different results. A glance at their titles suffices to show that a widening gap exists between Anglo-American literary criticism, interested in the literary and cultural interpretation of Pliny's texts, and an Italo-Germanic block of socio-historically oriented critics, mostly concerned with their reverbalization. Regardless of their specific contributions, however, it is important that both meetings made Pliny their central focus and attempted a global re-evaluation of his work.