| This dissertation is concerned with situating the Natural History in the social and intellectual culture of early Flavian Rome. In order to do this I avoid approaching the work as the encyclopedia that it is usually considered, as the generic term was not recognized in antiquity. Instead I treat the work just as a unified literary composition with a complex and sophisticated sense of its own place in literary tradition. From this perspective I examine the question of the Natural History's utility by integrating consideration of the utility that the text imagined itself fulfilling with consideration of the utility that it was able to offer its original audience of educated elite.;After an introductory chapter, the second chapter takes up the practice of artificial memory technique and memory feats. I show how the text engaged with mnemonic practices, and how this engagement was both a self-conscious literary device and potentially practical in its results. Chapter 3 sketches out a social context for exchanging the information contained in the Natural History: dinner-parties. I detail the ways in which the text reproduced the poetics of table conversation, and thus acted as an extension of such face-to-face occasions. My fourth chapter turns to the text's preoccupation with money matters, focusing on its dealings with luxury. I look at passages where Pliny registers the market applications of the information he records, and consider the implications of these passages for his ethical positions. In my final chapter I address the great attention given to agriculture and medicine. The two topics' structural position in the text is significant. I suggest that the text is organized around an image of the ideal home and the hope of reinstating ideal domestic practices. |
