Pliny's Naturalis Historia is a sophisticated encyclopaedia of the riches of the ancient world. The contributors to the present volume represent and join a new generation of critics who have begun to examine the dominant motifs which give shape to the work.

Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, with its varied content, enables and expects the reader to employ a complex interpretative technique. One aspect of Pliny’s diction is that he often interrupts the discussions of topics with digressions and begins to address something that seemingly has nothing to do with the subject. The hypothesis suggested by this book is that these digressions that occur in different places and in great number throughout the text of Naturalis Historia should not be regarded as mistakes fragmenting the encyclopedia’s structure. Most of these digressions are anecdotes. Researching the aetiological anecdotes, and those about the life of animals, famous persons from political or intellectual life, and the most important Greek painters and sculptors requires the application of different perspectives. When we approach anecdotes from the perspective of narrative techniques, the role of the stories as exempla becomes clearer, and its further aspects can be spotted. This book also draws attention to Pliny the writer, an aspect of the text that has been contested until very recently.

The relationship between theory and practice, in other words between norms indicated in a text and their extra-textual application, is one of the most fascinating issues in the history and theory of science. Yet this aspect has often been taken for granted and never explored in depth. The essays contained in this volume provide a complex and nuanced discussion of this relationship as it emerges in ancient Greek and Roman culture in a number of fields, such as agriculture, architecture, the art of love, astronomy, ethics, mechanics, medicine, pharmacology. The main focus is on the textuality of processes of the transmission of knowledge and its application in various fields. Given that a text always contains complex and destabilising aspects that cannot be reduced to the specific subject matter it discusses, to what extent can and do ancient texts support extra-textual applicability?

The focus of this volume is on the aesthetics, semantics and function of materials in Roman antiquity between the 2nd century B.C. and the 2nd century A.D. It includes contributions on both architectural spaces (and their material design) and objects – types of 'artefacts' that differ greatly in the way they were used, perceived and loaded with cultural significance. With respect to architecture, the analysis of material aesthetics leads to a new understanding of the performance, imitation and transformation of surfaces, including the social meaning of such strategies. In the case of objects, surface treatments are equally important. However, object form (a specific design category), which can enter into tension with materiality, comes into particular focus. Only when materials are shaped do their various qualities emerge, and these qualities are, to a greater or lesser extent, transferred to objects. With a focus primarily on Roman Italy, the papers in this volume underscore the importance of material design and highlight the awareness of this matter in the ancient world.

The fall of Nero and the civil wars of 69 CE ushered in an era scarred by the recent conflicts; Flavian literature also inherited a rich tradition of narrating nefas from its predecessors who had confronted and commemorated the traumas of Pharsalus and Actium. Despite the present surge of scholarly interest in both Flavian literary studies and Roman civil war literature, however, the Flavian contribution to Rome’s literature of bellum ciuile remains understudied. This volume shines a spotlight on these neglected voices. In the wake of 69 CE, writing civil war became an inescapable project for Flavian Rome: from Statius’s fraternas acies and Silius’s suicidal Saguntines to the internecine narratives detailed in Josephus’s Bellum Iudaicum and woven into Frontinus’s exempla, Flavian authors’ preoccupation with civil war transcends genre and subject matter. This book provides an important new chapter in the study of Roman civil war literature by investigating the multi-faceted Flavian response to this persistent and prominent theme.

The standard view in scholarship is that disease in Lucretius' De rerum natura is mainly a problem to be solved and then dispensed with. However, a closer reading suggests that things are more layered and complex than they appear at first sight: just as morbus causes a radical rearrangement of atoms in the body and makes the patient engage with alternative and up to that point unknown dimensions of the sensible world, so does disease as a theme generate a multiplicity of meanings in the text. The present book argues for a reconsideration of morbus in De rerum natura along those lines: it invites the reader to revisit the topic of disease and reflect on the various, and often contrasting, discourses that unfold around it. More specifically, it illustrates how, apart from calling for therapy, disease, due to its dominant presence in the narrative, transforms at the same time into a concept that is integral both to the poem’s philosophical agenda but also to its wider aesthetic concerns as a literary product. The book thus sheds new light on De rerum natura's intense preoccupation with morbus by showing how disease is not exclusively conceived by Lucretius as a blind, obliterating force but is crucially linked to life and meaning—both inside and outside the text.

The River Nile fascinated the Romans and appeared in maps, written descriptions, texts, poems and paintings of the developing empire. Tantalised by the unique status of the river, explorers were sent to find the sources of the Nile, while natural philosophers meditated on its deeper metaphysical significance. Andy Merrills' book, Roman Geographies of the Nile, examines the very different images of the river that emerged from these descriptions - from anthropomorphic figures, brought repeatedly into Rome in military triumphs, through the frequently whimsical landscape vignettes from the houses of Pompeii, to the limitless river that spilled through the pages of Lucan's Civil War, and symbolised a conflict - and an empire - without end. Considering cultural and political contexts alongside the other Niles that flowed through the Roman world in this period, this book provides a wholly original interpretation of the deeper significance of geographical knowledge during the later Roman Republic and early Principate.

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.

This volume unites scholars of classical epigraphy, papyrology, and literature to analyze the documentary habit in the Roman Empire. Texts like inscriptions and letters have gained importance in classical scholarship, but there has been limited analysis of the imaginative and sociological dimensions of the ancient document. Individual chapters investigate the definition of the document in ancient thought, and how modern understandings of documentation may (mis)shape scholarly approaches to documentary sources in antiquity. Contributors reexamine familiar categories of ancient documents through the lenses of perception and function, and reveal where the modern understanding of the document departs from ancient conceptions of documentation. The boundary between literary genres and documentary genres of writing appears more fluid than prior scholarship had allowed. Compared to modern audiences, inhabitants of the Roman Empire used a more diverse range of both non-textual and textual forms of documentation, and they did so with a more active, questioning attitude. The interdisciplinary approach to the "mentality" of documentation in this volume advances beyond standard discussions of form, genre, and style to revisit the document through the eyes of Greco-Roman readers and viewers.

The present volume offers a systematic discussion of the complex relationship between medicine and paradoxography in the ancient world. For a long time, the relationship between the two has been assumed to be virtually non-existent. Paradoxography is concerned with disclosing a world full of marvels and wondrous occurrences without providing an answer as to how these phenomena can be explained. Its main aim is to astonish and leave its readers bewildered and confused. By contrast, medicine is committed to the rational explanation of human phusis, which makes it, in a number of significant ways, incompatible with thauma. This volume moves beyond the binary opposition between ‘rational’ and ‘non-rational’ modes of thinking, by focusing on instances in which the paradox is construed with direct reference to established medical sources and beliefs or, inversely, on cases in which medical discourse allows space for wonder and admiration. Its aim is to show that thauma, rather than present a barrier, functions as a concept which effectively allows for the dialogue between medicine and paradoxography in the ancient world.