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...

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...