This thread needs more books.
Like, I don't know, part 3 of the momentous Thatcher biography just completed by a British journalist. According to the NYT Book Review it's not the definite biogrpahy (what ever is?), but dfinitely a
Fundgrube for any historian with similar interests..
Or this book on Pliny:
9quote]
THE SHADOW OF VESUVIUS
A Life of Pliny
By Daisy Dunn[/quote]
As the reviewer, a classicist, reminds us,
There were actually two Roman writers named Pliny — the Elder and the Younger, as they were known; an uncle and his nephew — and I could never keep them straight, let alone understand why they were worth studying.
Well, that's were this dual biography comes in.
Pliny the Elder, born around A.D. 24, was a polymath, the sort of person who rarely slept and could never sit still. He was a naturalist and a philosopher, a soldier and an admiral, and a tireless writer, who turned out close to 100 books. Of these, only one survives, “Natural History,” a 37-volume encyclopedia that purported to contain all that was then known about the world. It’s from this magpie-like collection of facts that we get the notion of information “in a nutshell” (Pliny had heard of a complete manuscript of the “Iliad” that could fit in one) and the idea that elephants are afraid of mice.
Now it could be me, but collecting nonsense does not a polymath make - whether he can sit still or not. But anayway, as some of you may know the elder Pliny died trying to investigate the eruption of Vesuvius in the late first century. And we know thsi, because the younger Pliny mentioned it in one of his many letter, some 30 years later, writing to Tacitus. These letters often ended up in anthologies and this is how we today know of them - and do know a lot more about the pedantic lawyer, the younger Pliny than about the supposedly polymathic elder Pliny.
The reason I knew of the younger Pliny is that he was
Appointed imperial legate to
Bithynia, in what is now northern Turkey, Pliny was taken aback by how many Christians were there and decided to round them all up, relying on secret informers, and eradicate them or make them recant. The emperor counseled moderation — punishment maybe, but no informers, no roundups — in part, it seems, because he wasn’t exactly sure what Christians were guilty of.
Except I remember Pliny asking for advice in the matter rather than suggest how to proceed. Which also seems more in line with the fact that he wrote various letters to Trajan (the emperor in question), as well as a highly flattering
Panegyric to the same.And it's these surviving letters that give us some interesting insight in Roman life and the empire around 100 AD.
So was Pliny the elder the more interesting of the two? Who knows, it's the younger Pliny that gives us most of the information we have on both.