In her earlier monograph, Plinio il Vecchio e la tradizione del moralismo romano (1991), C.M. studied the relationship between the work of Pliny the Elder and the Roman moralistic tradition. In this work, her focus encompasses two further topics: (1) the relationship between the Naturalis historia and its audience, i.e. Roman society, generally speaking, in the age of the Flavians, and (2) the position gained by Pliny within the cultural, rhetorical and philosophical traditions which he might have been in contact with.
First, C.M. aims to show how Pliny's perspective on the natural world is moved by what she calls a ‘sensibilità socializzata’ in which Pliny, while fielding and aestheticising his own subjectivity, triggers textual mechanisms of implicit sharing with a wider audience, whose approaches, attitudes and ways of thinking he reproduces.
Second, the work is an addition to the studies to which she – along with M. Beagon (Roman Nature: the Thought of Pliny the Elder [1992]) – has contributed since the early 90s of the last century, extensively re-evaluating Plinian work. On the one hand C.M. emphasises the close relationship to the many traditions of thought that lurk behind every stance in the NH, whereas on the other hand, despite scholarly views on Pliny's chaotic management of sources, she aims to show how these positions are often selected with care by Pliny himself, in order to trigger significant shifts within an authorial perspective which is mostly original and unitarian.
The volume comprises an introduction, twelve chapters and a note by the author, and closes with an extensive bibliography and an index locorum. Chapters 1, 11 and 12 appear here for the first time, and the remaining chapters, published previously, are partly revised.
The first five chapters focus on the mechanisms of subjectivation that underpin Pliny's utilitarian ideology expressed in the NH's praefatio. According to C.M., this perspective is to be read in parallel with respect to the models of good governance developed by authors such as Plato (see e.g. Leg. 7) and Cicero (see Rep. praef.). Despite the intertextual influences that may be discovered, Pliny no longer conjugates these models in an aristocratic key, but places them within a multisocial, humanitarian and, at the same time, aestheticised perspective.
Chapter 6 examines the complicated relationship between Pliny and Anaxagoras. C.M. believes that the positions expressed in NH 2.149–50 are determined not only by a generic Roman ethnocentrism, but also by a profound knowledge – as attested by Pliny's commentary on meteorites – influenced, probably indirectly, by the theories of Anaxagoras.
The two following chapters look at Plinian attitudes towards money and luxury goods from a new perspective. The analysis of Pliny's version of the story of the tyrant Polycrates of Samos and, more generally, of NH's position on economic exchange allows us to see the originality of the authorial stances. Whereas Seneca considers coins, trading systems, certificates, bills and deposits as the apex of illusion and immorality (cf. Ben. 7.9.2ff.), in Pliny, money becomes a measure of the objective value and the consistency of goods, natural resources and artefacts.
The last four chapters form a compact thematic block, since they deal with issues related to zoo-anthropology of the ancient world, a fertile field of research which has been enriched in recent years by the contributions of Italian scholars.Footnote 1
C.M. analyses the way in which Pliny re-interprets the topos of dolphin philanthropy (Chapter 9), the Folk-Motif that binds the simultaneous appearance of two snakes to the conjugal destiny of a regal couple (Chapter 10), and the problem of the moral and cosmological relationship between humans and animals in the NH and, more generally, in ancient tradition and in Erasmus of Rotterdam (Chapters 11 and 12).
C.M.'s monograph bears comparison with her 1991 volume and makes an important contribution to a deeper understanding of the NH, revealing the originality of Plinian perspectives in contexts traditionally overlooked. In highlighting the traditions that may have nurtured and influenced Pliny's work, C.M. gives prominence to the often conflictual relationship with Plato's model, on the one hand, and with the ideological link to Cicero, on the other, whose presence in the NH has often been neglected in favour of that of Varro. What emerges is that, even when Pliny seems to be mechanically reproducing the thoughts and information deriving from other authors, C.M. shows that the traditions addressed by him always emerge as changed and revitalised in his work.
The most interesting and original parts are Chapters 7, 8 and, above all, the zoo-anthropological section, where C.M. reaches sophisticated and convincing conclusions. In each case analysed, she avoids flattening the positions of the NH to that of a generic ancient thought and, while reflecting on areas of convergence and on the traits that help to create a family resemblance, is able to bind the perspectives of the individual authors treated by Pliny to their own cultural and historical contexts, and to discover, even in unexpected places, the originality of the authorial stance.
