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.
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.
Las enmiendas del Pinciano (Hernán Núñez de Guzmán) a la obra de Plinio el Viejo supusieron en su época una revolución filológica a la que se fueron acogiendo diversos editores. Sin embargo, su ...empleo para las ediciones dista de ser uniforme. Algunas de sus propuestas, hoy aceptadas, cuentan con atribuciones erróneas y permanecen silenciadas, mientras que otras, que pueden proporcionar soluciones plausibles para pasajes controvertidos, cayeron en el olvido a raíz de un uso indirecto e incompleto de las mismas. En el presente artículo ubicamos las Obseruationes in loca obscura aut deprauata historiae naturalis (Salamanca, 1544-1545) en un contexto más amplio de comentaristas y recopilamos una selección de los mayores aciertos que contienen, junto con una relación de nuevas propuestas para replantear el contenido de diversos pasajes.
Pliny's Naturalis Historia is a sophisticated encyclopaedia of the riches of the ancient world. The contributors to the present volume represent and join a new generation of critics who have begun to ...examine the dominant motifs which give shape to the work.
One of the earliest surviving examples of 'art history', Pliny the Elder's 'chapters on art' form part of his encyclopaedic Natural History. This important study reassesses Pliny's discussion of art, ...revealing how art is used to expound the Roman imperial agenda which dominates the work as a whole. - ;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. -.
New evidence about the incunabulum Auct. Q. 1. 2 of the Bodleian Library, containing collations and notes of Angelo Poliziano on the Naturalis Historia of Plinius, confirms the great interest, after ...the death of Politianus, in the texts annotated by him, which were also lent, bought and copied. The Bodleian Pliny is indeed a copy of a lost original, as shown by Lucia Cesarini. It was inherited at the middle of XVII century by the Niccolini family, studied in Florence a century later for the first time by Gian Rinaldo Carli and then by Angelo Bandini on behalf of Carlo Rezzonico, who also tried to involve J. Winckelmann in a collation of Pliny’s dedicatory letter to Titus.
PDF
