Pliny the Elder: Themes and Contexts Mnemosyne
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Pliny the Elder: Themes and Contexts Mnemosyne Supplements Monographs on Greek and Latin Language and Literature Editorial Board G.J. Boter A. Chaniotis K.M. Coleman I.J.F. de Jong T. Reinhardt VOLUME 329 Pliny the Elder: Themes and Contexts Edited by Roy K. Gibson Ruth Morello LEIDEN • BOSTON 2011 This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pliny the Elder : themes and contexts / edited by Roy K. Gibson, Ruth Morello. p. cm. – (Mnemosyne supplements. Monographs on Greek and Roman language and literature, ISSN 0169-8958 ; 329) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-20234-4 (alk. paper) 1. Pliny, the Elder. Naturalis historia. I. Gibson, Roy K. II. Morello, Ruth. PA6614.P55 2011 500–dc22 2010052744 ISSN 0169-8958 ISBN 978 90 04 20234 4 Copyright 2011 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. CONTENTS Editors’Preface ........................................................ vii ListofContributors.................................................... xiii ChapterOne.PlinytheElder’sAttitudetoWarfare .................. 1 Rhiannon Ash ChapterTwo.TheRoman’sBurden ................................... 21 Andrew Fear ChapterThree.LuxuryandtheCreationofaGoodConsumer...... 35 Eugenia Lao Chapter Four. Imperialism, Mirabilia,andKnowledge:Some Paradoxes in the Naturalis Historia ................................ 57 Valérie Naas ChapterFive.TheCuriousEyeoftheElderPliny.................... 71 Mary Beagon Chapter Six. Philosophy and Science in the Elder Pliny’s Naturalis Historia .............................................................. 89 Ernesto Paparazzo Chapter Seven. The Science and Aesthetics of Names in the Natural History ...................................................... 113 Aude Doody ChapterEight.PlinyonApion ........................................ 131 Cynthia Damon ChapterNine.PlinyandtheEncyclopaedicAddressee .............. 147 Ruth Morello ChapterTen.EncyclopaedicExemplarityinPlinytheElder......... 167 Clemence Schultze Chapter Eleven. Elder and Better: The Naturalis Historia and the Letters oftheYoungerPliny ........................................ 187 Roy K. Gibson vi contents Chapter Twelve. The Vita Plinii ....................................... 207 Michael Reeve Bibliography ........................................................... 223 GeneralIndex.......................................................... 241 IndexofPassages ...................................................... 243 EDITORS’ PREFACE Pliny’s Naturalis Historia—a brilliant and sophisticated encyclopaedia of the scientific, artistic, philosophical, botanical and zoological riches of the world of the first century ad—has had, as one of our own contribu- tors has recently put it, ‘a long career in the footnotes’ of historical studies (broadly understood), a phenomenon born of the sense that the work— as an encyclopaedia—was there to consult, or to ‘use’,as a resource to aid investigation of specific technical issues or passages, of Quellenforschung, or of carefully delimited topic areas (‘the history of art’,‘metallurgy in the ancient world’). However, inspired in great part by John Healy’s impas- sioned advocacy of Pliny as an ‘interdisciplinary writer’ (and even lin- guisticinnovator)whoshouldbeseeninthebroadercontextoftraditions of technical and philosophical inquiry in the ancient world,1 anewgen- eration of critics has begun to try to ‘read’ this monumental text, and—by examining the dominant motifs which give shape and order to the HN— to construct frameworks within which we may understand and interpret Pliny’s overarching agenda. Pliny’s work, of course, is hospitable both to readers who wish to ‘consult’ the text and to those who intend to ‘read’ it, as his prefatory remarks about the value of his table of contents (Book of the HN) reveal. His evidence will not soon lose its value for historians of ancient culture, science, or art history, and the essays in a stimulating recent edited collection on Pliny—published since the conference which gave rise to the present volume—set the irresistible intricacies of detail in Pliny’s text against the background of contemporary Roman culture.2 Nevertheless, although Pliny is pragmatic about the many different typesofreadershemightattract,hedoesarticulateaholisticapproach to his subject matter, announcing in his preface that his book is about ‘nature, that is life’ (HN pref. ), and some of the most influential studies of recent years, especially those of Mary Beagon, have taken him at his word and focused on his distinctive and all-embracing view of the natural world, and of mankind’s place in it.3 Other approaches, including that of 1 Healy (). 2 Bispham and Rowe (eds.) (). 3 Beagon (); Beagon (). viii editors’ preface Sorcha Carey, have taken well-established Plinian topics, in Carey’s case the history of art, and set about re-considering the material within the wider context of the encyclopaedia as a whole.4 Carey also re-interprets Pliny’s history of art (and, by extension, the HN asawhole)as‘acatalogue of Roman empire’, an approach partly shared in by Valérie Naas’s study, Le projet encyclopédique de Pline l’ ancien,andfurtherdevelopedin by Trevor Murphy’s monograph on Pliny the Elder’sNatural History: theEmpireintheEncyclopaedia. In the process of these reconsiderations of Pliny and of the Plinian agenda, all these scholars have begun to think more about Pliny’s genre itself, and about what it means to be a reader of an encyclopaedia, a subject most recently studied in detail by Aude Doody (), Pliny’s Encyclopaedia. The Reception of the Natural History. The present collection seeks to explore the applications (and implications) of these themes further, and to advocate a view of Pliny as a serious (and in many respects even radically innovative) commentator upon the world around him. OurcollectionhasitsorigininaconferenceheldattheUniversityof Manchester in June , where—in collaboration with our colleague Mary Beagon—we brought together leading Pliny scholars from several countries, including France, Italy, Ireland, the USA, and Great Britain, in order to explore wider contexts for this polymathic author, to take Pliny’s monumental text as more than the sum of its parts, and to assess the broader implications of this unusual work. This volume includes a selection of revised papers from that conference, plus some newly commissioned papers on key aspects of Pliny and the reception of his work. We begin with two discussions of Pliny’s approach to war and impe- rialism. Rhiannon Ash examines four aspects of Pliny’s representation of warfare: the use of war as a chronological structuring device in the text, the utility of warfare in facilitating research into the world and its wonders, its potential for the corruption of mankind and its value as a metaphor for describing the activity of the natural world. Andy Fear then opens up the discussion by considering more specifically Pliny’s ‘imperialism’,suggesting that Pliny’s own experience of ‘barbarism’ leads him to emphasise the cultural and beneficent aspect of imperialism (unlike the later Tacitus), and to view Rome’s civilising mission in ways that possess strong parallels with the pronouncements of th-century 4 Carey (). Cf. for a similar approach, Jacob Isager (). editors’ preface ix apologists for British imperialism. Thereafter, Eugenia Lao focuses ona topic closely associated with imperialist ideologies, namely exotic lux- ury goods, their consumption and the dissemination of knowledge about them. She argues that Pliny’s interest in luxury goods is not motivated simply by a desire to voice criticism, but rather ‘by a desire to demonstrate financial ethics and to produce such ethical behavior among the lapsed members of society’. To this end Pliny disseminates practical informa- tion about prices and the purchase of such goods in an attempt to force a financial code on consumers (although this approach is ultimately not without problems for Pliny’s own project of serving up the domain of knowledge as antidote to that of luxury). Valérie Naas then looks more directly at the deep connections between empire and the conquest of knowledge, and examines the ideological implications of Pliny’s inter- est in mirabilia and the relation between the wonders he describes and thepraiseofempire.Farfrombeinganobjectiveinventoryofnature,the Naturalis Historia is an inventory of the resources and the wonders put under the control of the Roman Empire. Yet, as Naas goes on to show, mirabilia also possess the ability to offer a critique of imperialism. Mary Beagon homes in on the question of what Pliny encourages his readers to wonder at. She argues that Pliny, although essentially Stoic in outlook, advocates ‘terrestrial curiosity’ as against the contemplation of the heav- ens or of philosophy which was traditionally regarded as a more