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Pliny The Elder and Man's Unnatural History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

Andrew Wallace-Hadrill
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Extract

Not everybody shares my enthusiasm for the elder Pliny. We all have a nodding acquaintance with the Natural History, but few wish to pursue the relationship to the level of intimacy. Critics who care for the purity of Latin prose take a particularly dim view of him. Eduard Norden's verdict in Die antike Kunstprosa (i.314) is much cited: ‘His work belongs, from the stylistic point of view, to the very worst which we have’. This negative judgement was firmly endorsed by Frank Goodyear in the Cambridge History of Latin Literature:

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , April 1990 , pp. 80 - 96
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1990

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References

Bibliographical Note

Atti del convegno di Como, 27–29 settembre 1979in 4 volumes, Tecnologia, economia e societá nel mondo romano (1980), Plinio il Vecchio sotto il profilo storico e letterario (1982), Plinio e la natura (1982), La cittd antica comefatto di cultura (1983).Google Scholar
The proceedings of the 1985 Nantes conference have been issued twice, as Flint I'ancien, temoin de son temps (Salamanca-Nantes, 1987), and in the journal Helmantica 37 (1986), 8–320 and 38 (1987), 5–322.Google Scholar
French, Roger and Greenaway, Frank (eds.), Science in the Early Roman Empire: Pliny the Elder, his Sources and Influence (1986). Guy Serbat in Aufstieg und Niedergang der romischen Welt II. 32.4 (1986), pp. 2091–7 well reviews recent work.Google Scholar
Locher, A., ‘The structure of Pliny the Elder's Natural History’ in French and Greenaway, pp. 20–29, a good defence of P.'s coherence.Google Scholar
Marchetti, S. Citroni, ‘Iuvare mortalem. L'ideale programmatico della Naturalis Historia di Plinio nei rapporti con il moralismo storico-diatribico’, Atene e Roma n.s. 27 (1982), 124–48; together with ‘Forme della rappresentazione del costume nel moralismo romano’, Sienna Annali FLF 4 (1983), 41–114 on P. and Roman luxury thought.Google Scholar
Sallmann, Klaus, ‘La responsabilite de l'homme face à la natura’ in Pline I'ancien, temoin de son temps (above), pp. 251–66 on P.'s ‘environmentalism’ and Stoic background; cf. P. Grimal, pp. 239—49.Google Scholar
Serbat, Guy, ‘II y a Grecs et Grecs! Quel sens donner au pretendu antihellenisme de Pline?’ pp. 589–98.Google Scholar
Beagon, Mary A., Some Aspects of the Thought of Pliny the Elder (unpublished Oxford DPhil thesis, 1986) on the idea of nature as an organizing principle in the N.H. and on its philosophical background.Google Scholar
For Frank Goodyear's views on P.'s style see Cambridge History of Literature, Vol. ii. Latin Literature (1982), pp. 670–2; contrast J. F. Healy, ‘The language and style of Pliny the Elder' in Filologia e forme letterarie. Studi offerti a Francesco della Corte vol. iv (1987), pp. 3–24. A much more positive evaluation of P. is likely to result from the work of the London (RHBNC) and Oxford Pliny Project under Professor Healy's direction, and his forthcoming Penguin Pliny translation and introduction.Google Scholar
For the conflict of Greek scientific and Roman ‘discourse’, see Beard, M., ‘Cicero and divination: the formation of a Latin discourse’, JRS 76 (1986), 33–46.Google Scholar