... immensely readable ... Dunn has deeply researched (her endnotes and bibliography extend to over 60 pages, and most of the book’s translations from Greek and Latin are her own), and her book serves both as a fascinating dual biography and as a detailed look at the broader Roman world ... starts with the eruption of a famous volcano and then looks forward and backward in time with equal skill, bringing alive both the old Flavian world the elder Pliny navigated with such skill and the new world of Trajan that Pliny the Younger did more than anybody to preserve. Both those worlds – and their respective Plinys – get a vigorous new history here.
If only Daisy Dunn’s book had been around back when I was an aspiring classicist. There were actually two Roman writers named Pliny — the Elder and the Younger, as they were known; an uncle and his nephew — and I could never keep them straight, let alone understand why they were worth studying. Dunn makes a persuasive case for both. Her ostensible subject is the Younger, about whom more is known, but she toggles back and forth between the two, and, perhaps without her intending it, the uncle even steals the show for a while. How do you compete with someone so intrepid that he dies while trying to inspect an active volcano? ... This occasionally results in awkward transitions of the 'Oh, and that reminds me' sort, and for some out-of-nowhere digressions of a kind that would have pleased the elder Pliny ... But Dunn is a good writer, with some of the easy erudition of Mary Beard, that great popularizer of Roman history, and her translations from both Plinys are graceful and precise. Ultimately her enthusiasm, together with her eye for the odd, surprising detail, wins you over, and the younger Pliny gradually emerges as a mostly sympathetic character, interesting for his ordinariness and for the ways he resembles us today. He almost seems familiar, in a way the elder Pliny could never be.
The book really should be called In the Shadow of My Uncle...since the younger Pliny, a lawyer, frustrated poet and writer of hundreds of letters, emerges as a bit of a bore. Dunn knits their lives together well and analyses the influence that they would have later on scholars from the Italian Renaissance to the English Romantic poets, but the finger flicks more speedily through the pages when her focus is on the younger one.
Dunn has no scoops, and she knows it. Furthermore, she is trying to be faithful to Pliny’s account, but, as she notes, he made a point, when he published his correspondence, of excising all the dates and arranging the letters, as he put it, 'however they came to hand' ... The letters have a weirdly drifting quality, as if these people woke up, went to the law courts, sentenced some people to death, burned a few Christians, and then went home to dinner. With such a source, it is no surprise that Dunn’s book contains a number of challenges to our understanding ... No matter how distant you feel from the morals of imperial Rome, you can’t quite figure this out, and Dunn doesn’t help us much ... she does succeed in making Pliny, whom she clearly considers a sort of dry stick, a poignant character, the kind of person who has to do the dirty jobs of an empire and, having done them, gets no compliments.
A reader is not going to get very far with Daisy Dunn’s new biography — the opening four lines, in fact — without a sinking sensation that the author has landed herself with the wrong Pliny. It feels very much as though this book was originally conceived as a dual biography; and even in its finished form, the figure of Pliny the Elder — soldier, administrator, admiral, naturalist, inexhaustible encyclopaedist and most famous victim of Vesuvius — looms large enough in the background to make his decent, rather timid and mildly self-congratulatory lawyer of a nephew seem pretty dull fare ... the book is full of sharp, well-made judgments — but if this biography cries out for one thing it is for a bit of good old-fashioned pedantry. In her preface Dunn writes that she has followed ‘the spirit of both Plinys’ in eschewing a strict chronology; but it might be truer to say that what she has eschewed is the measured and carefully edited tone of the Younger for the scatter-gun digressions, abrupt shifts and free-range curiosity of the uncle ... Dunn is a trained classicist, knows her subject inside out and is equally at home with the letters or the Renaissance cult of the Plinys — but that is in a sense the problem. It is possible that Pliny specialists could successfully navigate these waters, but for general readers who, at any point in the book, are likely to find themselves swept up on a tide of associative ideas that might range in just a handful of pages from a Pliny dinner party and the prophylactic powers of lettuce to Cowper, Montaigne, Hadrian’s Wall, Hadrian’s wife, Suetonius, giant oysters and Sigmund Freud, there is a real danger of feeling not just at sea but heading towards Pompeii on a particularly bad day in AD 79.
... clever, engaging ... Dunn recounts [Pliny's] afterlife with gusto, from the unlikely embrace of pious Renaissance scholars and dueling views on the location of the Plinys’ birthplaces (Verona and Como) to his 19th-century appeal for Mary Shelley. To Tacitus, Pliny lionized 'those men with a god-given gift for doing what deserves to be written about or writing what deserves to be read—and very lucky are those who can do both. Through his own books and yours, my uncle will be one of these.' Dunn’s book, too, deserves to be read.
...a complex and intriguing book that weaves together the careers and writings of the two figures to create a tapestry of life in imperial Rome. As fortunate as we are to have the writings of this pair, it is unlucky, for Ms. Dunn, that they share a name ... The problem that this shared name presents for Ms. Dunn is signaled by her subtitle, 'A Life of Pliny.' Those familiar with the era might wonder which Pliny is meant; the answer turns out to be both. Ms. Dunn, an independent historian who has written a biography of the Roman poet Catullus, treats the combined 'life' of the two men as a kind of continuum and juxtaposes their writings and thoughts wherever she can. It’s an ingenious plan but requires that readers keep close track of which Pliny is under discussion, a task that proves demanding at times ... Still, the potential for confusion is not fatal, and even if, in the worst case, readers conflate the Plinys or lose track of chronology—Ms. Dunn moves freely back and forth in time—they will find much to enjoy in this clever, engaging book. Part of Ms. Dunn’s design is to escape linearity in favor of the pleasure of miscellany ... Though the Pliny that emerges from this book is not an appealing figure, and Ms. Dunn is less than candid about his flaws, her exploration of his life and times, and that of his uncle, has much to offer to readers, with its ground-up, kaleidoscopic view of a nine-decade span of Roman history.
Classicist Dunn...has written a delightful biography, interweaving extracts from the Elder’s Natural History with the Younger’s letters, speeches, and poetry into an insightful portrait of the men, their world, and their influence on people such as Giorgio Vasari, Frances Bacon, and Percy and Mary Shelley ... This is a rich, entertaining dual biography of two fascinating men, a revealing portrait of ancient Rome, and a celebration of nature that will appeal to fans of Mary Beard.
