Download or read book Pliny the Elder s Natural History written by Trevor Murphy and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2004-03-11 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most important surviving encyclopedia from the ancient world, Pliny the Elder's Natural History is unparalleled as a guide to the cultural meanings of everyday things in first-century Rome. As part of a new direction in classical scholarship, Trevor Murphy reads the work not just for the information it contains, but to understand how and why Pliny collects and presents information as he does. Concentrating on the geographic and ethnographic information in Pliny, Murphy demonstrates the work's political importance. The selection and arrangement of the encyclopedia's material show that it is more than an instrument of reference: it is a monument to the power of Roman imperial society.
Download or read book Pliny s Encyclopedia written by Aude Doody and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-11 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Elder Pliny's Natural History is one of the largest and most extraordinary works to survive from antiquity. It has often been referred to as an encyclopedia, usually without full awareness of what such a characterisation implies. In this book, Dr Doody examines this concept and its applicability to the work, paying far more attention than ever before to the varying ways in which it has been read during the last two thousand years, especially by Francis Bacon and Denis Diderot. This book makes a major contribution not just to the study of the Elder Pliny but to our understanding of the cultural processes of ordering knowledge widespread in the Roman Empire and to the reception of classical literature and ideas.
Download or read book The Shadow of Vesuvius A Life of Pliny written by Daisy Dunn and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2019-12-10 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A wonderfully rich, witty, insightful, and wide-ranging portrait of the two Plinys and their world.”—Sarah Bakewell, author of How to Live When Pliny the Elder perished at Stabiae during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, he left behind an enormous compendium of knowledge, his thirty-seven-volume Natural History, and a teenaged nephew who revered him as a father. Grieving his loss, Pliny the Younger inherited the Elder’s notebooks—filled with pearls of wisdom—and his legacy. At its heart, The Shadow of Vesuvius is a literary biography of the younger man, who would grow up to become a lawyer, senator, poet, collector of villas, and chronicler of the Roman Empire from the dire days of terror under Emperor Domitian to the gentler times of Emperor Trajan. A biography that will appeal to lovers of Mary Beard books, it is also a moving narrative about the profound influence of a father figure on his adopted son. Interweaving the younger Pliny’s Letters with extracts from the Elder’s Natural History, Daisy Dunn paints a vivid, compellingly readable portrait of two of antiquity’s greatest minds.
Download or read book The Letters of The Younger Pliny written by the younger Pliny and published by Lebooks Editora. This book was released on 2024-06-17 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Letters of Pliny the Younger, also known as the Epistles of Pliny the Younger, have been studied for centuries, as they offer a unique and intimate glimpse into the daily life of Romans in the 1st century AD. Through his letters, the Roman writer and lawyer Pliny the Younger (whose full name was Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus) discusses philosophical and moral issues; but he also talks about everyday matters and topics related to his administrative duties. One of these letters, Letter 16 from Book VI, addressed to Tacitus, holds unparalleled historical value. In it, Pliny describes the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, which destroyed the city of Pompeii. Many scholars claim that with his letters, Pliny invented a new literary genre: the letter written not only to establish pleasant communication with peers but also to publish it later. Pliny compiled copies of every letter he wrote throughout his life and published those he considered the best in twelve books. This edition presents selected letters chosen for their various characteristics and covering several books, focusing mainly on Books I, II, and III. The work is part of the famous collection: 501 Books You Must Read.
Download or read book The Elder Pliny on the Human Animal written by and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2005-03-17 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Natural History of Pliny written by Pliny (the Elder.) and published by . This book was released on 1893 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Natural History of Pliny written by Pliny (the Elder.) and published by . This book was released on 1856 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Pliny the Elder and the Emergence of Renaissance Architecture written by Peter Fane-Saunders and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-12 with total page 525 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Naturalis historia by Pliny the Elder provided Renaissance scholars, artists and architects with details of ancient architectural practice and long-lost architectural wonders - material that was often unavailable elsewhere in classical literature. Pliny's descriptions frequently included the dimensions of these buildings, as well as details of their unusual construction materials and ornament. This book describes, for the first time, how the passages were interpreted from around 1430 to 1580, that is, from Alberti to Palladio. Chapters are arranged chronologically within three interrelated sections - antiquarianism; architectural writings; drawings and built monuments - thereby making it possible for the reader to follow the changing attitudes to Pliny over the period. The resulting study establishes the Naturalis historia as the single most important literary source after Vitruvius's De architectura.
Download or read book Pliny s Roman Economy written by Richard Saller and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-15 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive study of Pliny the Elder’s economic thought—and its implications for understanding the Roman Empire’s constrained innovation and economic growth The elder Pliny’s Natural History (77 CE), an astonishing compilation of 20,000 “things worth knowing,” was avowedly intended to be a repository of ancient Mediterranean knowledge for the use of craftsmen and farmers, but this 37-book, 400,000-word work was too expensive, unwieldy, and impractically organized to be of utilitarian value. Yet, as Richard Saller shows, the Natural History offers more insights into Roman ideas about economic growth than any other ancient source. Pliny’s Roman Economy is the first comprehensive study of Pliny’s economic thought and its implications for understanding the economy of the Roman Empire. As Saller reveals, Pliny sometimes anticipates modern economic theory, while at other times his ideas suggest why Rome produced very few major inventions that resulted in sustained economic growth. On one hand, Pliny believed that new knowledge came by accident or divine intervention, not by human initiative; research and development was a foreign concept. When he lists 136 great inventions, they are mostly prehistoric and don’t include a single one from Rome—offering a commentary on Roman innovation and displaying a reverence for the past that contrasts with the attitudes of the eighteenth-century encyclopedists credited with contributing to the Industrial Revolution. On the other hand, Pliny shrewdly recognized that Rome’s lack of competition from other states suppressed incentives for innovation. Pliny’s understanding should be noted because, as Saller shows, recent efforts to use scientific evidence about the ancient climate to measure the Roman economy are flawed. By exploring Pliny’s ideas about discovery, innovation, and growth, Pliny’s Roman Economy makes an important new contribution to the ongoing debate about economic growth in ancient Rome.
Download or read book The Historie of the World written by Pliny (the Elder.) and published by . This book was released on 1601 with total page 746 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Art of Pliny s Letters written by Ilaria Marchesi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-02-21 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book on intertextuality in Pliny the Younger, Professor Marchesi invites an alternative reading of Pliny's collection of private epistles: the letters are examined as the product of an authorial strategy controlling both the rhetorical fabric of individual units and their arrangement in the collection. By inserting recognisable fragments of canonical authors into his epistles, Pliny imports into the still fluid practice of letter-writing the principles of composition and organisation that for his contemporaries characterised other writings as literature. Allusions become the occasion for a metapoetic dialogue, especially with the collection's privileged addressee, Tacitus. An active participant in the cultural politics of his time, Pliny entrusts to the letters his views on poetry, oratory and historiography. In defining a model of epistolography alternative to Cicero's and complementing those of Horace, Ovid and Seneca, he also successfully carves a niche for his work in the Roman literary canon.
Download or read book Pliny the Elder The Natural History Book VII with Book VIII 1 34 written by Pliny the Elder and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-05-21 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pliny the Elder's Natural History is a vast encyclopaedia, surveying natural phenomena from cosmology to biology, medicine to magic. Direct observation, informed speculation and common knowledge are combined to present a key snapshot of ancient thought and the Romans' perspective on the world around them. Book VII of The Natural History provides a detailed examination of the human animal and is crucial to understanding the work as a whole. In Pliny's eyes, mankind 'for whose sake nature was created', represents the basis for which the natural world was founded and structured. As a result, the book provides valuable insight into the extraordinary complex of ideas and beliefs that were current in Pliny's era. One of the most interesting transitions of subject in The Natural History is that from man to animals (between Books VII and VIII) and for this reason the section on elephants at the beginning of Book VIII is included here, to show how Pliny moves on to his account of the animal he considers 'nearest to the human disposition'. This edition provides the full Latin text accompanied by commentary notes that provide linguistic help and explanations, plus vocabulary lists of Latin terms and an index of proper names. The in-depth introduction provides valuable details about the work's historical, scientific and literary context, as well as an overview of the work's legacy and reception.
Download or read book Pliny s Women written by Jacqueline M. Carlon and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-22 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pliny's Women offers a comprehensive consideration of the many women who appear in the letters of Pliny the Younger. Combining detailed prosopography with close literary analysis, Jacqueline Carlon examines the identities of the women whom Pliny includes and how they and the men with whom they are associated contribute both to this presentation of exemplary Romans and particularly to his own self-promotion. Virtually all of the named women in Pliny's nine-book corpus are considered. They form six distinct groups: those associated with opposition to the principate; the family of Pliny's mentor, Corellius Rufus; his own family members; women involved in testamentary disputes; ideal wives; and women of unseemly character. Detailed analysis of each letter mentioning women includes the identity of its recipient and everyone named within, its disposition within the collection, Pliny's language and style, and its significance to our perception of the changing social fabric of the early principate.
Download or read book Awake written by Harald Voetmann and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Harald Voetmann’s eye-opening English debut, Awake, is the first book of his erudite, grotesque, and absurdist trilogy about mankind’s inhuman will to conquer nature In a shuttered bedroom in ancient Italy, the sleepless Pliny the Elder lies in bed obsessively dictating new chapters of his Natural History to his slave Diocles. Fat, wheezing, imperious, and prone to nosebleeds, Pliny does not believe in spending his evenings in repose: No—to be awake is to be alive. There’s no time to waste if he is to classify every element of the natural world in a single work. By day Pliny the Elder carries out his many civic duties and gives the occasional disastrous public reading. But despite his astonishing ambition to catalog everything from precious metals to the moon, as well as a collection of exotic plants sourced from the farthest reaches of the world, Pliny the Elder still takes immense pleasure in the common rose. After he rushes to an erupting Mount Vesuvius and perishes in the ash, his nephew, Pliny the Younger, becomes custodian of his life’s work. But where Pliny the Elder saw starlight, Pliny the Younger only sees fireflies. In masterfully honed prose, Voetmann brings the formidable Pliny the Elder (and his pompous nephew) to life. Awake is a comic delight about one of history’s great minds and the not-so-great human body it was housed in.
Download or read book Pliny the Elder on Science and Technology written by John F. Healy and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Elder Pliny's Natural History provides a wide-ranging account of human achievement in the arts and sciences in the first century AD. This book re-examines Pliny's work for the first time since the 1920s. Modern experiments, simulating the techniques described by Pliny, and an in-depth study of his development of a technical language, confirm his unique contribution to our knowledge of science in early imperial Rome.
Download or read book Historiae Mundi written by Bloomsbury Publishing and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-11-20 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Universal History" is a type of history that attempts to explain the world beyond the immediate surroundings of the author. It reflects a desire to synthesise the mass of written and oral knowledge about the past and to introduce a systematic interpretation. The purpose of this collection is to re-examine the notion of Universal Historiography with a focus on its appearance in the Greek and Roman world and on the legacy that ancient authors offered to later generations. Fifteen new essays by a diverse set of international scholars tackle questions of definition, and illustrate the diversity of its forms, structures, themes and analyses. The collection explores the historical and intellectual contexts which gave rise to universalist thought, and its reputation and reception in antiquity and beyond. This book will appeal to those interested in Graeco-Roman historiography, and those with an interest in the Arabic, Early Christian and modern reception of ancient historiography.
Download or read book Pliny the Elder Themes and Contexts written by Roy Gibson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-04-11 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pliny's Naturalis Historia – a brilliant and sophisticated encyclopaedia of the scientific, artistic, philosophical, botanical and zoological riches of the ancient world – has had a long career in the footnotes of historical studies. This is a phenomenon born of the sense that the work was there to consult, or to ‘use’, as a resource to aid investigation of specific technical issues or passages, of Quellenforschung, or of delimited topic areas. The contributors to the present volume both represent and join a new generation of critics who have begun to try to ‘read’ this monumental text, and – by examining the dominant motifs which give shape and order to the work – to construct frameworks within which we may understand and interpret Pliny’s overarching agenda.
