|
Gaius Plinius Secundus, known to history as Pliny the Elder, was a Roman author, naturalist, and natural philosopher who lived from AD 23/24 to 79. Pliny's erudition was encyclopedic, and his seminal work, 'The Natural History of Pliny', stands as one of the largest single works to have survived from the Roman Empire to the modern day, aiming to document all human knowledge of the natural world. In this multivolume work, running from Volumes 1 to 6, Pliny attempted to cover a vast array of subjects, including geography, anthropology, medicine, and the arts, representing an invaluable resource for scholars of the ancient world. Distinguished by his tireless curiosity, Pliny's literary style is noted for its exhaustive detail and wide-ranging content, reflecting the author's ambition to compile a compendium of all known facts about the natural universe (Pliny the Elder, 1855). A contemporary of emperors and a commander in the Roman Empire, Pliny's life ended with the same dedication to knowledge that marked his career: he died while investigating the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, an event that famously destroyed the city of Pompeii. Pliny's work provides historians and scholars with an extraordinary glimpse into the breadth of intellectual pursuit in the ancient world and continues to be a subject of study and admiration in the field of classical literature.
|
