Pliny The Elder and Man's Unnatural History

Abstract

Not everybody shares my enthusiasm for the elder Pliny. We all have a nodding acquaintance with the Natural History , but few wish to pursue the relationship to the level of intimacy. Critics who care for the purity of Latin prose take a particularly dim view of him. Eduard Norden's verdict in Die antike Kunstprosa (i.314) is much cited: ‘His work belongs, from the stylistic point of view, to the very worst which we have’. This negative judgement was firmly endorsed by Frank Goodyear in the Cambridge History of Latin Literature :