Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

PLINY THE ELDER
was both patriotic and gullible. His patriotism sometimes led him into exaggeration
(e.g. 37.201-2) and encouraged him to take second hand from Roman
sources what he could have had first hand from the Greeks. His gullibility led
him into many absurdities (e.g. 7.64—5), but incidentally benefited us: along
with marvels and anecdotes, apparently the staple diet of Roman readers
(cf. Valerius Maximus), he records much abstruse wisdom and mumbo-jumbo,
and thus illuminates obscure areas of folklore, quackery, and superstitition.
Yet elsewhere he is aggressively rationalistic and a sour commentator on
human ineptitude (e.g. 30.1—2). A more singular mixture is hard to imagine.
Norden 1 justly remarked that stylistically Pliny is amongst the worst of
Latin writers, and not to be excused by his subject matter, since Columella
and Celsus, faced with fairly comparable material, wrote •well enough. In truth
Pliny had neither literary skill nor sense of propriety, and he failed to discipline
his thoughts. Instead of adopting the plain and sober style appropriate to
his theme, he succumbs to lust for embellishment. The ornaments he parades
differ somewhat from those employed by his contemporaries, mainly because
they are more crude. But in his concern for instantaneous effect Pliny is wholly
typical. He can be florid in the extreme, accumulating vacuous and picturesque
phrases (e.g. 9.102—3), much as Apuleius was to do; he strings together tedious
patterns of balanced clauses (e.g. 10.81— 2); and he turns out epigrams of
exceptional extravagance and insipidity. Predictably he eschewed Ciceronian
periods, but, unlike Seneca and Tacitus, devised no original sentence-structure
with which to replace them, unless casual parataxis, regular outside the 'purple
passages', should be termed structure. He may be compared with Varro, who
also wrote rapidly and voluminously, and had no gift for elegant expression.
Equally he may be contrasted, since Varro probably cared little about expression
anyway. 2
In an assessment of Pliny the lost works cannot be disregarded. The ' Uncertainties
of expression' had considerable influence on grammatical writings
down to Priscian's time. 'The student', 3 which dealt in part at least with
rhetorical artifices (see Gell. 9.16), accords with and confirms Pliny's evident
addiction to transient scholastic fashion. 'The German wars' and 'Aufidius
Bassus continued' amply justified Suetonius' inclusion of Pliny amongst
notable historians. The latter work is probably the basic common source for
the period from Claudius until and perhaps beyond A.D. 69 which we can
recognize, but not for certain identify, behind Tacitus, Plutarch, Dio, and
(sometimes) Suetonius. 4 Full and detailed, but simplistic in approach, this
source presented ideal material for exploitation and recasting: Tacitus recast,
1 2
1 314.
Laughton (i960) 1—3.
3
Whether the title was studiosus or studios!, and what exactly it meant, is debatable.
4
Townend (1961 and 1964) passim.
671
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008