Descrizione

From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - Slightly rubbed jacket, otherwise very good and clean. / Leicht beriebener Umschlag, sonst sehr gut und sauber. - Dear Reader, Pliny�s ten nice books of letters belong to the same world of imperial Rome around 100 CE as Statius� sweet Siluae and Juvenal�s nasty Satires, so this book makes the third instalment�featuring Pliny�s third book�in an Exeter trilogy, to accompany Figuring Out Roman Nobility: Juvenal�s Eighth Satire (1997) and A Roman Life: Rutilius Gallicus On Paper and In Stone (1998), which celebrates Statius, Siluae 1.4. The Juvenal is about names and naming in Roman culture. Rutilius matches an honorary inscription charting the trajectory of a successful career to a literary mythologization of a high-profile Roman life. In Pliny�s Statue, the centrepiece is the promise to dedicate an image with Pliny�s name and career highlights incised on the pedestal below. This composite image makes a powerfully condensed icon for the whole edifice of the Letters as a monument to self-mythologization. This time the Latin is in prose, not verse. And Pliny�s firmly monitored prose shies away�insists that it shies away�from any epical bloating or lyric blossoming. The Letters write us irresistibly close to life at the epicentre, but their portrayal of Rome in its heyday means to do far more than yield up the coordinates and configurations of their take on �te, courtly, metropolitan, Italian, and provincial, imperial culture. This take itself is what excites today�s cultural historians, who find in Pliny�s modelling of the exemplary insider a prime instance of expert practice of our chosen object of analysis. Pliny now reads as the arch exponent of critique and theorizing about culture, and, so carefully does he work his pitch, he can even convince us that his sketching applies theoretically informed cultural criticism to his milieu of the imperi; capital. This is not how he has generally been regarded; rather, the info mation paraded in the course of the Letters has added up to a incomparably valuable databank for the detail and texture of social lift This is, no doubt, a matter of emphasis. The most pressing issue however, is that, because the Latin comes in pretty manageable chunk of neatness, Pliny�s Letters are perennially favourite texts for intre ducing fresh converts to classical antiquity. - John Henderson is Reader in Latin Literature, University of Cambridge and Fellow of Kings College Cambridge. He is the author of many books, including Figuring Out Roman Nobility: Juvenal�s Eighth Satire (1997) and A Roman Life: Rutilius Gallicus on Paper and In Stone (1998), both published by University of Exeter Press. ISBN 9780859897204