A dual biography of Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger and exploration through their eyes of Rome around the time of the eruption of Vesuvius.
Above the Bay of Naples, Vesuvius is spewing
thick ash into the sky. The inhabitants of nearby villages stand in their
doorways, eyes cast on the unknown. Pliny the Elder, a historian, admiral of the fleet, and author of
an extraordinary encyclopaedia of Natural History, dares to draw closer to the
phenomenon. He perishes beneath the volcano. His 17-year-old nephew, Pliny the
Younger, survives.
The elder Pliny left behind an enormous compendium of knowledge,
his Natural History offering observations on everything, from the moon, to
elephants, to the efficacy of ground millipedes in healing ulcers. Adopted as
his late uncle’s son, Pliny the Younger inherited his notebooks – his pearls of
wisdom – and endeavoured to keep his memory alive. But what became of the young man after the disaster?
The book resurrects the `father and son’ to
explore their beliefs about life, death and the natural world in the first
century AD. It is about both the elder Pliny, who perished in the disaster, and
the younger Pliny, who grew up to become a lawyer, senator, poet, collector of
villas, curator of drains, and personal representative of the emperor overseas.
Counting the historian Tacitus, biographer Suetonius, and poet Martial among
his close friends, Pliny the Younger chronicled his experiences from the
catastrophic eruption through the dark days of terror under Emperor Domitian to
the gentler times of Emperor Trajan.
Interweaving the younger Pliny’s Letters with
ideas and extracts from Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, Daisy Dunn brings
their world back to life. Working from the original sources, she celebrates two
of the greatest minds from antiquity and their influence on the world that came
after them.
http://www.daisydunn.co.uk/books/in-the-shadow-of-vesuvius
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