In The Shadow of Vesuvius: A Life of Pliny, by Daisy Dunn, publ William Collins 2019, pp xiv + 338, h/b, ISBN 978 0 00 821109 7. £20.00.
I confess to being a late convert to Daisy Dunn, and after reading her absorbing and scholarly Not Far From Brideshead I was directed to this title – no doubt already familiar to many readers of this Broadsheet – by a learned colleague.
Pliny is of course a staple ingredient in exam boards’ set texts, but having been a prep school teacher I’ve not read much of him since university days, when the received wisdom was that he was something of a well-off, self-important bore. D., however, as you would expect, puts him in his proper context. Pliny was a senator, lawyer, consul, governor, vintner and would-be poet, and my sympathies were enlisted on learning of the fearful times he had to endure under Domitian’s reign of terror, when prominent public figures (e.g. Pliny’s regular correspondent Tacitus) found it prudent to keep their heads down. Things got better under Trajan, of course. The book is divided into the four seasons of the year, and skips neatly between Pliny and his uncle, starting off with a detailed reconstruction of the sequence of events of the Vesuvius eruption, which includes a detailed account of the geography of Campania. One of the pleasures of the book are the detailed detours dealing with various topics arising: elephants, oysters, cherry trees, medicine, the natural world and agriculture, and more.
There are three clear maps, eight pages of colour plates, a timeline, a select bibliography and a detailed and helpful index, as well as endnotes on the text. As a minor aside, I see that some publishers these days seem to be doing away with the diacritics on French words used in English; hence, for example, denouement rather than dénouement. Needless to say, the appearance of ‘precised’ on p242 made me think twice…
It’s a good read, even if you’re not a Pliny fan.
I confess to being a late convert to Daisy Dunn, and after reading her absorbing and scholarly Not Far From Brideshead I was directed to this title – no doubt already familiar to many readers of this Broadsheet – by a learned colleague.
Pliny is of course a staple ingredient in exam boards’ set texts, but having been a prep school teacher I’ve not read much of him since university days, when the received wisdom was that he was something of a well-off, self-important bore. D., however, as you would expect, puts him in his proper context. Pliny was a senator, lawyer, consul, governor, vintner and would-be poet, and my sympathies were enlisted on learning of the fearful times he had to endure under Domitian’s reign of terror, when prominent public figures (e.g. Pliny’s regular correspondent Tacitus) found it prudent to keep their heads down. Things got better under Trajan, of course. The book is divided into the four seasons of the year, and skips neatly between Pliny and his uncle, starting off with a detailed reconstruction of the sequence of events of the Vesuvius eruption, which includes a detailed account of the geography of Campania. One of the pleasures of the book are the detailed detours dealing with various topics arising: elephants, oysters, cherry trees, medicine, the natural world and agriculture, and more.
There are three clear maps, eight pages of colour plates, a timeline, a select bibliography and a detailed and helpful index, as well as endnotes on the text. As a minor aside, I see that some publishers these days seem to be doing away with the diacritics on French words used in English; hence, for example, denouement rather than dénouement. Needless to say, the appearance of ‘precised’ on p242 made me think twice…
It’s a good read, even if you’re not a Pliny fan.
