The Elder Pliny on the Human Animal:Natural History Book 7

The Elder Pliny on the Human Animal:Natural History Book 7 PDF Author:
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 9780198150657
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 536

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Book Description
As a detailed study of the human animal, described by its author as the raison d'etre of nature, Book Seven of the elder Pliny's Natural History is crucial to the understanding of the work as a whole. In addition, however, it provides a valuable insight into the extraordinary complex of ideas and beliefs current in Pliny's era, many of which have resonances for other eras and cultures. The present study includes a substantial introduction examining the backgroundto Pliny's life, thought, and writing, together with a modern English translation, and a detailed commentary which emphasizes the importance of Book Seven as possibly the most fascinating cultural record surviving from early imperial Rome.

The Elder Pliny on the Human Animal:Natural History Book 7

The Elder Pliny on the Human Animal:Natural History Book 7 PDF Author:
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 9780198150657
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 536

Get Book Here

Book Description
As a detailed study of the human animal, described by its author as the raison d'etre of nature, Book Seven of the elder Pliny's Natural History is crucial to the understanding of the work as a whole. In addition, however, it provides a valuable insight into the extraordinary complex of ideas and beliefs current in Pliny's era, many of which have resonances for other eras and cultures. The present study includes a substantial introduction examining the backgroundto Pliny's life, thought, and writing, together with a modern English translation, and a detailed commentary which emphasizes the importance of Book Seven as possibly the most fascinating cultural record surviving from early imperial Rome.

The Elder Pliny on the Human Animal

The Elder Pliny on the Human Animal PDF Author:
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191518352
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 538

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Book Description
As a detailed study of the human animal, described by its author as the raison d'etre of nature, Book Seven of the elder Pliny's Natural History is crucial to the understanding of the work as a whole. In addition, however, it provides a valuable insight into the extraordinary complex of ideas and beliefs current in Pliny's era, many of which have resonances for other eras and cultures. The present study includes a substantial introduction examining the background to Pliny's life, thought, and writing, together with a modern English translation, and a detailed commentary which emphasizes the importance of Book Seven as possibly the most fascinating cultural record surviving from early imperial Rome.

The Elder Pliny on the Human Animal

The Elder Pliny on the Human Animal PDF Author: Pliny (the Elder)
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780191838248
Category : Human physiology
Languages : en
Pages : 515

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Book Description


Looking at Animals in Human History

Looking at Animals in Human History PDF Author: Linda Kalof
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 9781861893345
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Taking in a wide range of visual and textual materials, Linda Kalof in Looking at Animals in Human History unearths many surprising and revealing examples of our depictions of animals.

Animals in Greek and Roman Thought

Animals in Greek and Roman Thought PDF Author: Stephen T. Newmyer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136882634
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Although reasoned discourse on human-animal relations is often considered a late twentieth-century phenomenon, ethical debate over animals and how humans should treat them can be traced back to the philosophers and literati of the classical world. From Stoic assertions that humans owe nothing to animals that are intellectually foreign to them, to Plutarch's impassioned arguments for animals as sentient and rational beings, it is clear that modern debate owes much to Greco-Roman thought. Animals in Greek and Roman Thought brings together new translations of classical passages which contributed to ancient debate on the nature of animals and their relationship to human beings. The selections chosen come primarily from philosophical and natural historical works, as well as religious, poetic and biographical works. The questions discussed include: Do animals differ from humans intellectually? Were animals created for the use of humankind? Should animals be used for food, sport, or sacrifice? Can animals be our friends? The selections are arranged thematically and, within themes, chronologically. A commentary precedes each excerpt, transliterations of Greek and Latin technical terms are provided, and each entry includes bibliographic suggestions for further reading.

The Animal and the Human in Ancient and Modern Thought

The Animal and the Human in Ancient and Modern Thought PDF Author: Stephen T. Newmyer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135042845
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Ancient Greeks endeavored to define the human being vis-à-vis other animal species by isolating capacities and endowments which they considered to be unique to humans. This approach toward defining the human being still appears with surprising frequency, in modern philosophical treatises, in modern animal behavioral studies, and in animal rights literature, to argue both for and against the position that human beings are special and unique because of one or another attribute or skill that they are believed to possess. Some of the claims of man’s unique endowments have in recent years become the subject of intensive investigation by cognitive ethologists carried out in non-laboratory contexts. The debate is as lively now as in classical times, and, what is of particular note, the examples and methods of argumentation used to prove one or another position on any issue relating to the unique status of human beings that one encounters in contemporary philosophical or ethological literature frequently recall ancient precedents. This is the first book-length study of the ‘man alone of animals’ topos in classical literature, not restricting its analysis to Greco-Roman claims of man’s intellectual uniqueness, but including classical assertions of man’s physiological and emotional uniqueness. It supplements this analysis of ancient manifestations with an examination of how the commonplace survives and has been restated, transformed, and extended in contemporary ethological literature and in the literature of the animal rights and animal welfare movements. Author Stephen T. Newmyer demonstrates that the anthropocentrism detected in Greek applications of the ‘man alone of animals’ topos is not only alive and well in many facets of the current debate on human-animal relations, but that combating its negative effects is a stated aim of some modern philosophers and activists.

Man and Animal in Severan Rome

Man and Animal in Severan Rome PDF Author: Steven D. Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139992465
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
The Roman sophist Claudius Aelianus, born in Praeneste in the late second century CE, spent his career cultivating a Greek literary persona. Aelian was a highly regarded writer during his own lifetime, and his literary compilations would be influential for a thousand years and more in the Roman world. This book argues that the De natura animalium, a miscellaneous treasury of animal lore and Aelian's greatest work, is a sophisticated literary critique of Severan Rome. Aelian's fascination with animals reflects the cultural issues of his day: philosophy, religion, the exoticism of Egypt and India, sex, gender, and imperial politics. This study also considers how Aelian's interests in the De natura animalium are echoed in his other works, the Rustic Letters and the Varia Historia. Himself a prominent figure of mainstream Roman Hellenism, Aelian refined his literary aesthetic to produce a reading of nature that is both moral and provocative.

Pliny the Elder: Themes and Contexts

Pliny the Elder: Themes and Contexts PDF Author: Roy Gibson
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004210075
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Pliny's Naturalis Historia – a brilliant and sophisticated encyclopaedia of the scientific, artistic, philosophical, botanical and zoological riches of the ancient world – has had a long career in the footnotes of historical studies. This is a phenomenon born of the sense that the work was there to consult, or to ‘use’, as a resource to aid investigation of specific technical issues or passages, of Quellenforschung, or of delimited topic areas. The contributors to the present volume both represent and join a new generation of critics who have begun to try to ‘read’ this monumental text, and – by examining the dominant motifs which give shape and order to the work – to construct frameworks within which we may understand and interpret Pliny’s overarching agenda.

Pliny the Elder on Science and Technology

Pliny the Elder on Science and Technology PDF Author: John F. Healy
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 9780198146872
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 498

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Book Description
The Elder Pliny's Natural History provides a wide-ranging account of human achievement in the arts and sciences in the first century AD. This book re-examines Pliny's work for the first time since the 1920s. Modern experiments, simulating the techniques described by Pliny, and an in-depth study of his development of a technical language, confirm his unique contribution to our knowledge of science in early imperial Rome.

Pliny's Defense of Empire

Pliny's Defense of Empire PDF Author: Thomas R. Laehn
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136676317
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
Despite perennial interest in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, the world’s first encyclopedia, as a record of the prodigious, the quotidian, and the useful in Rome in the first century AD, for centuries Pliny has been derided as little more than an inept compiler of facts and marvels intellectually incapable of formulating a cogent argument supported through the selective marshaling of his materials. In Pliny’s Defense of Empire, Laehn offers a radical reinterpretation of the architecture of Pliny’s encyclopedia, exposing fundamental errors in the inherited understanding of the text traceable to its initial reception in ancient Rome. Recognition of the text’s true structure reveals that Pliny’s encyclopedia is in fact a first-rate work of political philosophy constituting an apology for Roman imperial expansionism grounded in a sophisticated account of human nature. Correcting the accreted errors and prejudices of nearly 2,000 years of faulty Plinian scholarship, Laehn critically examines one of the most persuasive apologies for the Roman Empire ever written and succeeds in rehabilitating the Elder Pliny as one of the world’s greatest political thinkers. An excellent resource and a must read for scholars in political theory, philosophy, and classical studies.