A Guide to the Geography of Pliny the Elder
A Guide to the Geography of Pliny the Elder

Author: Duane W. Roller

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-07-28

Total Pages: 633

ISBN-13: 1108595928

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This is the first thorough English commentary on the geographical books of Pliny the Elder, written in the AD 70s. Pliny's account is the longest in Latin, and represents the geographical knowledge of that era, when the Roman Empire was the dominant force in the Mediterranean world. The work serves both cultural and ideological functions: much of it is topographical, but it also demonstrates the political need to express a geographical basis for the importance of the Roman state. In five books, Pliny covers the entire world as it was known in his era and includes some of the first information on the extremities of the inhabited region, including Scandinavia and the Baltic, eastern Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. The commentary provides a detailed analysis of all the points Pliny raises: his sources, toponyms, and understanding of the place of the earth in the cosmos.

Pliny the Elder's Natural History
Pliny the Elder's Natural History

Author: Trevor Murphy

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2004-03-11

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 0191532339

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The most important surviving encyclopedia from the ancient world, Pliny the Elder's Natural History is unparalleled as a guide to the cultural meanings of everyday things in first-century Rome. As part of a new direction in classical scholarship, Trevor Murphy reads the work not just for the information it contains, but to understand how and why Pliny collects and presents information as he does. Concentrating on the geographic and ethnographic information in Pliny, Murphy demonstrates the work's political importance. The selection and arrangement of the encyclopedia's material show that it is more than an instrument of reference: it is a monument to the power of Roman imperial society.

Natural History
Natural History

Author: Pliny the Elder

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 1991-12-03

Total Pages: 606

ISBN-13: 0140444130

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Pliny’s Natural History is an astonishingly ambitious work that ranges from astronomy to art and from geography to zoology. Mingling acute observation with often wild speculation, it offers a fascinating view of the world as it was understood in the first century AD, whether describing the danger of diving for sponges, the first water-clock, or the use of asses’ milk to remove wrinkles. Pliny himself died while investigating the volcanic eruption that destroyed Pompeii in AD 79, and the natural curiosity that brought about his death is also very much evident in the Natural History — a book that proved highly influential right up until the Renaissance and that his nephew, Pliny the younger, described ‘as full of variety as nature itself’. John F. Healy has made a fascinating and varied selection from the Natural History for this clear, modern translation. In his introduction, he discusses the book and its sources topic by topic. This edition also includes a full index and notes. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Geographical Guide of Ptolemy of Alexandria
The Geographical Guide of Ptolemy of Alexandria

Author: Duane W. Roller

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-12-15

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 1000992411

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This volume offers a detailed study of Ptolemy of Alexandria’s Geographical Guide, whose eight books contain a wealth of geographical information unavailable elsewhere and represent the culmination of the Greco-Roman discipline of geography. Written near the middle of the second century ad, the Geographical Guide is the most anomalous of the surviving works of ancient geographical scholarship but offers a vivid record of the expansion of geographical knowledge in antiquity. Roller examines this peculiar text, which offers unique data about explorations in the far reaches of the inhabited world, from Thoule and Hibernia in the northwest to Kattigara in the southeast, and from Serike in northeastern Asia southwest into central Africa. He positions the Guide within the tradition of ancient geography and gives close attention to the reason why Ptolemy wrote the guide and how it contributes to the genre of geographical scholarship. There is also an emphasis on the topographic and ethnic material within the Guide that is new or unique, especially explorations in sub-Saharan Africa and knowledge of the world beyond India. Because the Guide was written over half a century after the previous extant geographical work—the first books of Pliny’s Natural History—the book also assesses how knowledge of geography changed during this period. This work is an essential text for students and scholars of ancient geography, and is also of interest to anyone working on the cultural history of the Roman Empire during this period.

A Historical and Topographical Guide to the Geography of Strabo
A Historical and Topographical Guide to the Geography of Strabo

Author: Duane W. Roller

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-01-11

Total Pages: 1188

ISBN-13: 1316853152

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Strabo's Geography, completed in the early first century AD, is the primary source for the history of Greek geography. This Guide provides the first English analysis of and commentary on this long and difficult text, and serves as a companion to the author's The Geography of Strabo, the first English translation of the work in many years. It thoroughly analyzes each of the seventeen books and provides perhaps the most thorough bibliography as yet created for Strabo's work. Careful attention is paid to the historical and cultural data, the thousands of toponyms, and the many lost historical sources that are preserved only in the Geography. This volume guides readers through the challenges and complexities of the text, allowing an enhanced understanding of the numerous topics that Strabo covers, from the travels of Alexander and the history of the Mediterranean to science, religion, and cult.

Ancient Geography
Ancient Geography

Author: Duane W. Roller

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2015-08-27

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0857725661

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Before Columbus there was Eratosthenes: 'inventor' of the discipline of geography as it is known today. There was Alexander the Great: the man who sought to reach the very ends of the known world and whose empire spanned three continents. And there was Strabo: author of the Geographica, a 17-volume encyclopaedia of geographical knowledge which expounded the definition, history and mathematics of geography. In this, the first major study of ancient geography and geographers to be published in English for over 60 years, Duane W. Roller offers a comprehensive account of these, and the many other, ancient pioneers and the frontiers that defined their world. Ranging from the Bronze Age to Late Antiquity, Ancient Geography: The Discovery of the World in Classical Greece and Rome is the definitive guide to how the triumphs and the errors of antiquity laid the foundations for millennia of voyaging and exploration.

Leonardo's Library
Leonardo's Library

Author: Paula Findlen

Publisher:

Published: 2019-05

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 9780911221633

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Illustrated catalogue published in conjunction with the exhibition "Leonardo's Library: The World of a Renaissance Reader," Stanford University Libraries, Green Library, May 2 - October 13, 2019.

Man of High Empire
Man of High Empire

Author: Roy K. Gibson

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0199948194

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Pliny the Younger (c. 60-112 C.E.)--senator and consul in the Rome of emperors Domitian and Trajan, eyewitness to the eruption of Vesuvius in 79, and early 'persecutor' of Christians on the Black Sea--remains Rome's best documented private individual between Cicero and Augustine. No Roman writer, not even Vergil, ties his identity to the regions of Italy more successfully than Pliny. His individuality can be captured by focusing on the range of locales in which he lived: from his hometown of Comum (Como) at the foot of the Italian Alps, down through the villa and farms he owned in Umbria, to the senate and courtrooms of Rome and the magnificent residence he owned on the coast near the capital. Organized geographically, Man of High Empire is the first full-scale biography devoted solely to the Younger Pliny. Reserved, punctilious, occasionally patronizing, and perhaps inclined to overvalue his achievements, Pliny has seemed to some the ancient equivalent of Mr. Collins, the unctuous vicar of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Roy K. Gibson reveals a man more complex than this unfair comparison suggests. An innovating landowner in Umbria and a deeply generous benefactor in Comum, Pliny is also a consul who plays with words in Rome and dispenses summary justice in the provinces. A solicitous, if rather traditional, husband in northern Italy, Pliny is also a literary modernist in Rome, and--more surprisingly--a secret pessimist about Trajan, the 'best' of emperors. Pliny's life is a window on to the Empire at its zenith. The book concludes with an archaeological tour guide of the sites associated with Pliny.

Reading the Letters of Pliny the Younger
Reading the Letters of Pliny the Younger

Author: Roy K. Gibson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-03-22

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 110737703X

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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.