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This book provides a new understanding of Pliny's letters by combining historical analysis of the social pressures that shape Pliny's authorial pose with close literary analysis of the letters themselves. It demonstrates how ruling-class ideology is disseminated and how it shapes the literary persona and personal identity of a ruling-class member. The powerful heuristic tool of examining the interplay between confidence and anxieties in the letters will help restore Pliny's relatively neglected masterpiece to a more prominent place in undergraduate Latin and Roman Civilization courses.
Pliny the Younger who lived c. 100 AD, left a large collection of letters, thanks to which we know him better than almost any other Roman. He is best known as witness to the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 that destroyed Pompeii, and for his dealings with the early Christians when a regional governor. He was not an emperor or general, but a famous lawyer of his time specialising in private finance and later a senior state official specialising in public finance. His life straddled both a 'bad'; emperor (Domitian) and a 'good'; emperor (Trajan), so his life and letters are relevant to perennial political questions like how an honourable man could serve an absolute autocracy such as Rome, and how justice could live alongside power. His letters also give a unique insight into social, literary and domestic life among the wealthy upper classes of the empire. He knew most of the famous writers of his time, and wrote love letters to his wife. But there are serious controversies about how honest and truthful a man he was - did he use his letters to rewrite history (his own history) and cover up questionable aspects of his career? This general biographical account of Pliny is the first of its kind and covers all aspects of his life in a systematic way. This accessible title tackles key issues including his political anxieties and issues, his relationship with women and his literary style in a roughly chronological order. It covers his life as a lawyer, both in private practice and in state prosecutions, his literary circle, his career in state office and his working relationships with two very different emperors, his background, his property and his family life.
This is the first general introduction to Pliny's Letters published in any language, combining close readings with broader context and adopting a fresh and innovative approach to reading the letters as an artistically structured collection. Chapter 1 traces Pliny's autobiographical narrative throughout the Letters; Chapter 2 undertakes detailed study of Book 6 as an artistic entity; while Chapter 3 sets Pliny's letters within a Roman epistolographical tradition dominated by Cicero and Seneca. Chapters 4 to 7 study thematic letter cycles within the collection, including those on Pliny's famous country villas and his relationships with Pliny the Elder and Tacitus. The final chapter focuses on the 'grand design' which unifies and structures the collection. Four detailed appendices give invaluable historical and scholarly context, including a helpful timeline for Pliny's life and career, detailed bibliographical help on over 30 popular topics in Pliny's letters and a summary of the main characters mentioned in the Letters.
"This volume places the New Testament letters squarely in the middle of all the important letter corpora of antiquity. Chapters cover the basic letter formula, papyrus and postal delivery, non-literary and diplomatic correspondence, Greek and Latin literary letters, epistolary theory, letters in early Judaism, and all the letters of the New Testament. Part I of each chapter surveys each corpus, followed by detailed exegetical examples in Part II. Comprehensive bibliographies and 54 exercises with answers suit this guide to student and scholar alike."--Publisher's website.
The Letters of Pliny the Younger, also known as the Epistles of Pliny the Younger, have been studied for centuries, as they offer a unique and intimate glimpse into the daily life of Romans in the 1st century AD. Through his letters, the Roman writer and lawyer Pliny the Younger (whose full name was Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus) discusses philosophical and moral issues; but he also talks about everyday matters and topics related to his administrative duties. One of these letters, Letter 16 from Book VI, addressed to Tacitus, holds unparalleled historical value. In it, Pliny describes the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, which destroyed the city of Pompeii. Many scholars claim that with his letters, Pliny invented a new literary genre: the letter written not only to establish pleasant communication with peers but also to publish it later. Pliny compiled copies of every letter he wrote throughout his life and published those he considered the best in twelve books. This edition presents selected letters chosen for their various characteristics and covering several books, focusing mainly on Books I, II, and III. The work is part of the famous collection: 501 Books You Must Read.
Images in medieval and early modern treatises on medicine, pharmacy, and natural history often confound our expectations about the functions of medical and scientific illustrations. They do not look very much like the things they purport to portray; and their actual usefulness in everyday medical practice or teaching is not obvious. By looking at works as diverse as herbals, jewellery, surgery manuals, lay health guides, cinquecento paintings, manuscripts of Pliny's Natural History, and Leonardo's notebooks, Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History, 1200-1550 addresses fundamental questions about the interplay of art and science from the thirteenth to the mid-sixteenth century: What counts as a medical illustration in the Middle Ages? What are the purposes and audiences of the illustrations in medieval medical, pharmaceutical, and natural history texts? How are images used to clarify, expand, authenticate, and replace these texts? How do images of natural objects, observed phenomena, and theoretical concepts amplify texts and convey complex cultural attitudes? What features lead us to regard some of these images as typically 'medieval' while other exactly contemporary images strike us as 'Renaissance' or 'early modern' in character? Art historians, medical historians, historians of science, and specialists in manuscripts and early printed books will welcome this wide-ranging, interdisciplinary examination of the role of visualization in early scientific inquiry.
The distinguished classicist William Fitzgerald examines the concept, value and practice of variety in Latin literature and its reception. He argues that variety was an important value in ancient aesthetic discourse and played a significant role in thinking about, among other things, nature, rhetoric, pleasure and empire. Fitzgerald explains how a discourse of variety passed from Latin writers into the post-classical world up to the modern age, in which words like choice and diversity have taken over its work, though with associative meanings that are much different."
Pliny's Women offers a comprehensive consideration of the many women who appear in the letters of Pliny the Younger. Combining detailed prosopography with close literary analysis, Jacqueline Carlon examines the identities of the women whom Pliny includes and how they and the men with whom they are associated contribute both to this presentation of exemplary Romans and particularly to his own self-promotion. Virtually all of the named women in Pliny's nine-book corpus are considered. They form six distinct groups: those associated with opposition to the principate; the family of Pliny's mentor, Corellius Rufus; his own family members; women involved in testamentary disputes; ideal wives; and women of unseemly character. Detailed analysis of each letter mentioning women includes the identity of its recipient and everyone named within, its disposition within the collection, Pliny's language and style, and its significance to our perception of the changing social fabric of the early principate.
In this book on intertextuality in Pliny the Younger, Professor Marchesi invites an alternative reading of Pliny's collection of private epistles: the letters are examined as the product of an authorial strategy controlling both the rhetorical fabric of individual units and their arrangement in the collection. By inserting recognisable fragments of canonical authors into his epistles, Pliny imports into the still fluid practice of letter-writing the principles of composition and organisation that for his contemporaries characterised other writings as literature. Allusions become the occasion for a metapoetic dialogue, especially with the collection's privileged addressee, Tacitus. An active participant in the cultural politics of his time, Pliny entrusts to the letters his views on poetry, oratory and historiography. In defining a model of epistolography alternative to Cicero's and complementing those of Horace, Ovid and Seneca, he also successfully carves a niche for his work in the Roman literary canon.
“A wonderfully rich, witty, insightful, and wide-ranging portrait of the two Plinys and their world.”—Sarah Bakewell, author of How to Live When Pliny the Elder perished at Stabiae during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, he left behind an enormous compendium of knowledge, his thirty-seven-volume Natural History, and a teenaged nephew who revered him as a father. Grieving his loss, Pliny the Younger inherited the Elder’s notebooks—filled with pearls of wisdom—and his legacy. At its heart, The Shadow of Vesuvius is a literary biography of the younger man, who would grow up to become a lawyer, senator, poet, collector of villas, and chronicler of the Roman Empire from the dire days of terror under Emperor Domitian to the gentler times of Emperor Trajan. A biography that will appeal to lovers of Mary Beard books, it is also a moving narrative about the profound influence of a father figure on his adopted son. Interweaving the younger Pliny’s Letters with extracts from the Elder’s Natural History, Daisy Dunn paints a vivid, compellingly readable portrait of two of antiquity’s greatest minds.