Articles

Empire and invention: the Elder Pliny's heurematology ("Nat." VII 191–215)

Published:
2020-07-12
Author
View
Keywords
License

Copyright (c) 2018 Acta Classica Universitatis Scientiarum Debreceniensis

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

How To Cite
Selected Style: APA
Mistrella, M. R. (2020). Empire and invention: the Elder Pliny’s heurematology ("Nat." VII 191–215). Acta Classica Universitatis Scientiarum Debreceniensis, 54, 123–135. https://doi.org/10.22315/ACD/2018/7
Abstract

This paper focuses on the catalog of inventions and inventors that concludes book VII of Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia (Nat. VII 191-215). While the list is certainly a fundamental source for the largely lost tradition of Greek invention-catalogs, the literary, rhetorical, and intellectual-historical importance of Pliny’s heurematography has, to date, rarely been appreciated for its own merits. I argue that, in spite of the seemingly irregular and heterogeneous character of the catalog, the underlying rhetorical strategy of Pliny’s heurematography allows the list to become a teleological narrative. As I argue, Pliny’s main goal is to show the Romans’ historical merit in unifying the whole Mediterranean world through the appropriation of its cultural and technological patrimony.