Pliny S Catalogue Of Culture

This title argues that Pliny's encyclopaedic "Natural History" offers a sophisticated account of the world as empire, in which art can be used to expound a Roman imperial agenda. This text considers how the medium affects Pliny's presentation and uses of art in this context.

One of the earliest surviving examples of 'art history', Pliny the Elder's 'chapters on art' form part of his encyclopaedic Natural History, completed shortly before its author died during the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. This important new work argues that the Natural History offers a sophisticated account of the world as empire, in which art as much as geography can be used to expound a Roman imperial agenda. Reuniting the 'chapters on art' with the rest of the Natural History, Sorcha Carey considers how the medium of the 'encyclopaedia' affects Pliny's presentation of art, and reveals how art is used to explore themes important to the work as a whole. Throughout, the author demonstrates that Pliny's 'chapters on art' are a profoundly Roman creation, offering an important insight into responses to art and culture under the early Roman empire.

Classifying Christians investigates late antique Christian heresiologies as ethnographies that catalogued and detailed the origins, rituals, doctrines, and customs of the heretics in explicitly polemical and theological terms. Oscillating between ancient ethnographic evidence and contemporary ethnographic writing, Todd S. Berzon argues that late antique heresiology shares an underlying logic with classical ethnography in the ancient Mediterranean world. By providing an account of heresiological writing from the second to fifth century, Classifying Christians embeds heresiology within the historical development of imperial forms of knowledge that have shaped western culture from antiquity to the present.

Despite perennial interest in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, the world’s first encyclopedia, as a record of the prodigious, the quotidian, and the useful in Rome in the first century AD, for centuries Pliny has been derided as little more than an inept compiler of facts and marvels intellectually incapable of formulating a cogent argument supported through the selective marshaling of his materials. In Pliny’s Defense of Empire, Laehn offers a radical reinterpretation of the architecture of Pliny’s encyclopedia, exposing fundamental errors in the inherited understanding of the text traceable to its initial reception in ancient Rome. Recognition of the text’s true structure reveals that Pliny’s encyclopedia is in fact a first-rate work of political philosophy constituting an apology for Roman imperial expansionism grounded in a sophisticated account of human nature. Correcting the accreted errors and prejudices of nearly 2,000 years of faulty Plinian scholarship, Laehn critically examines one of the most persuasive apologies for the Roman Empire ever written and succeeds in rehabilitating the Elder Pliny as one of the world’s greatest political thinkers. An excellent resource and a must read for scholars in political theory, philosophy, and classical studies.

As a detailed study of the human animal, described by its author as the raison d'etre of nature, Book Seven of the elder Pliny's Natural History is crucial to the understanding of the work as a whole. In addition, however, it provides a valuable insight into the extraordinary complex of ideas and beliefs current in Pliny's era, many of which have resonances for other eras and cultures. The present study includes a substantial introduction examining the background to Pliny's life, thought, and writing, together with a modern English translation, and a detailed commentary which emphasizes the importance of Book Seven as possibly the most fascinating cultural record surviving from early imperial Rome.

Pliny and the Eruption of Vesuvius is a forensic examination of two of the most famous letters from the ancient Mediterranean world: Pliny the Younger’s Epistulae 6.16 and 6.20, which offer a contemporary account of the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. These letters, sent to the historian Tacitus, provide accounts by Pliny the Younger about what happened when Mt Vesuvius exploded, destroying the surrounding towns and countryside, including Pompeii and Herculaneum, and killing his uncle, Pliny the Elder. This volume provides the first comprehensive full-length treatment of these documents, contextualized by evidence-rich biographies for both Plinys, and a synthesis of the latest archaeological and volcanological research which answers questions about the eruption date. A new collation of sources results in a detailed manuscript tradition and an authoritative Latin text, while commentaries on each letter offer copiously referenced insights on their structure, style, and meaning. Pliny and the Eruption of Vesuvius offers a thorough companion to these letters, and to the eruption, which will be of interest not only to those working on Vesuvius, Pompeii, and Herculaneum, and the works of Pliny but also to general readers, Latin students, and scholars of the Roman world more broadly.

This volume tries to map out the intriguing amalgam of different, partly conflicting approaches that shaped early modern zoology. It demonstrates that theology and philology played a pivotal role in the complex formation of this new science.

The first modern literary commentary on Pliny the Younger's Epistles II, essential reading for students and scholars of Roman literature.