Roman Nature: The Thought of Pliny the Elder / Edition 1

by Mary Beagon

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198147268
Publisher:	Oxford University Press, USA
Publication date:	04/28/1992
Series:	Oxford Classical Monographs Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.63(w) x 8.75(h) x 0.83(d)
Lexile:	1390L (what's this?)

Editorial Reviews

"Worthy of attention and praise....Easily the best general treatment that Pliny has every received, sympathetic and clear-headed both. It is a work that belongs in the library of every classicist, yet is accessible to readers from other fields....No reader will come away unimpressed by Beagon's command of Pliny and his age."—Classical Bulletin

"Useful, especially for university students in the history and philosophy of ancient science."—Religious Studies Review

"Beagon's book is focused, well organized, [and] persuasive."—Prudentia

From the Publisher