History Catalogue 2022

6

Classical Texts

Paul T. Keyser

James Richardson

Recovering a Late-Antique Edition of Pliny’s Natural History

Kings and Consuls

New York, 2020. XII, 282 pp., 13 tables. hb. • ISBN 978-1-4331-6826-0 CHF 98.– / €D 84.95 / €A 87.10 / € 79.20 / £ 64.– / US-$ 94.95 eBook (SUL) • ISBN 978-1-4331-6827-7 CHF 98.– / €D 94.95 / €A 95.– / € 79.20 / £ 64.– / US-$ 94.95

Half a dozen authors quote a total of over forty extracts from Pliny’s Natural History that are absent from our manuscripts of Pliny. These extracts have been virtually ignored by scholars, and never studied systematically. This book demonstrates that the halfdozen sources, Latin writers of the fifth to thirteenth centuries CE, are reliable, and argues that their extracts should be received as good evidence of a hitherto unsuspected augmented edition of Pliny, probably produced around 300 to 350 CE. Greek writers of the same era produced augmented versions of scientific texts to update, expand, and “complete” the work of the original authors. Pliny’s own work is composed in such a way as to invite augmentation. Paul T. Keyser’s efforts to recover the augmented Natural History suggest that lateantique Latin writers were also renovators of their scientific literature. The unknown augmentor, Keyser argues, was aiming to “complete” Pliny with new data, and to organize Pliny’s sometimes scattered presentations, all with the aim of making Pliny’s work more useful. The evidence shows that even in unfavorable times, some Latin writers were able to continue practicing science.

Eight Essays on Roman History, Historiography, and Political Thought Oxford, 2020. X, 238 pp. pb. • ISBN 978-1-78997-386-0 CHF 62.– / €D 52.95 / €A 54.40 / € 49.40 / £ 40.– / US-$ 60.95 eBook (SUL) • ISBN 978-1-78997-415-7 CHF 62.– / €D 52.95 / €A 54.40 / € 49.40 / £ 40.– / US-$ 60.95

From the beginning, kings ruled Rome; Lucius Brutus established freedom and the consulship. So wrote the Roman historian Tacitus in the second century AD, but the view was orthodox. It is still widely accepted today. But how could the Romans of later times have possibly known anything about the origins of Rome, the rule and subsequent expulsion of their kings or the creation of the Republic when all those events took place centuries before anyone wrote any account of them? And just how useful are those later accounts, those few that happen to survive, when the Romans not only viewed the past in light of the present but also retold stories of past events in ways designed to meet contemporary needs? This book attempts to assess what the Romans wrote about the early development of their state. While it may not, in the end, be possible to say very much about archaic Rome, it is certainly possible to draw conclusions about later political ideas and their influence on what the Romans said about their past, about the writing of history at Rome and about the role that stories of past events could play even centuries later.