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

----- 人类动物的长老普林尼：自然历史书

ISBN: 9780198150657 出版年：2005 页码：538 Oxford University Press

Of the 37 books of Pliny's monumental natural history, book 7 is pivotal. It is entirely devoted to a survey of the human race, for whose sake, in Pliny's words, "nature appears to have created everything else". It is therefore at once crucial to the understanding of Pliny's enterprise as a whole but also relatively self-contained. Both factors made it eminently suitable for scholarly analysis in its own right. It lies at the heart of Pliny's tendency to see the world around him in terms of a symbiotic relationship between man and nature, a notion which, though rooted in Stoicising philosophical thought, had no obvious literary antecedent. The significance of book 7, however, goes beyond its role in the exposition of Pliny's thought. The detail and variety of its material illuminate previously unexplored areas in the intellectual tradition of his era. What emerges is a complex network of beliefs, some indebted to written sources, others more probably related to non-literary traditions of considerable antiquity. Its material has an interdisciplinary appeal, frequently reaching beyond the confines of first century Rome, and offering echoes and parallels for social historians, anthropologists and folklorists of other times and places. The variety, density and obscurity of such material presents a formidable challenge to the researcher. This is the only commentary on book 7 to date in English and the only detailed commentary in any language.