Roman Nature the Thought of Pliny of Elder

ISBN-13: 9780198147268 / Angielski / Twarda / 1992 / 272 str.

Mary Beagon

Opis

Pliny's Natural History has too often been regarded as simply a quarry for quaint stories--a view which has tended to overshadow its overall structure and purpose. In this book, Beagon redresses the balance and illuminates the Natural History as the work of an author with an identifiable mode of thinking and a coherent attitude toward his clearly-stated theme, Nature. Taking its cue from Pliny, the book examines his cosmology and in particular his portrayal of the relationship between nature and what he considered nature's greatest creation, Humankind. Author and work are also placed in their wider literary and historical context. Pliny himself emerges no longer as a faceless compiler but as a character with a valuable contribution to make to an understanding of intellectual attitudes in the first century A.D. A more typical Roman than most of the intellectual authors studied today, he can offer a much more accurate picture of the Roman in his "natural" setting.

Recenzje

Much of her success is due to the clear arrangement of her thoughts into self-contained units, each dealing with a different relationship between man and the natural world ... The combination of thorough scholarship and interesting ideas has made accessible a work whose sheer scale can be daunting. B.'s bibliography is varied and excellent, and the book is easy to refer to ... It represents an important elucidation of a piece of intellectual history, fully supported by a strongly text-based approach.

O autorze

Teacher and researcher