Pliny the Younger

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of Pliny the Younger, famous for his letters. A prominent lawyer in Rome in the first century AD, Pliny later became governor of the province of Bithynia, on the Black Sea coast of modern Turkey. Throughout his career he was a prolific letter-writer, sharing his thoughts with great contemporaries including the historian Tacitus, and asking the advice of the Emperor Trajan. Pliny’s letters offer fascinating insights into life in ancient Rome and its empire, from the mundane details of irrigation schemes to his vivid eyewitness account of the eruption of Vesuvius.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Catharine Edwards 9 episodes
  Professor of Classics and Ancient History at Birkbeck, University of London
• Roy Gibson No other episodes
  Professor of Latin at the University of Manchester
• Alice Konig 2 episodes
  Lecturer in Latin and Classical Studies at the University of St Andrews

Reading list

• Pliny's Women: Constructing Virtue and Creating Identity in the Roman World
  Jacqueline Carlon (Cambridge University Press, 2009) Google Books →
• Reading the Letters of Pliny the Younger: An Introduction
  Roy Gibson and Ruth Morello (Cambridge University Press, 2012) Google Books →
• Pliny's Statue: The Letters, Self-Portraiture and Classical Art
  John Henderson (Liverpool University Press, 2002) Google Books →
• The Anxieties of Pliny the Younger
  Stanley Hoffer (Oxford University Press, 1999) Google Books →
• Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study of Elite Communities
  William Johnson (Oxford University Press, 2010) Google Books →
• The Art of Pliny's Letters: A Poetics of Allusion in the Private Correspondence
  Ilaria Marchesi (Cambridge University Press, 2009) Google Books →
• Ancient Letters: Classical and Late Antique Epistolography
  Ruth Morello & A. D. Morrison (eds.) (Oxford University Press, 2007) Google Books →
• The Complete Letters
  Pliny the Younger, P. G. Walsh (trans.) (Oxford University Press, 2009) Google Books →
• Epistles Book II
  Pliny the Younger, Christopher Whitton (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
• Pliny: Correspondence with Trajan from Bithynia (Epistles X)
  Pliny the Younger, Wynne Williams (ed.) (Aris & Phillips, 1990)
• Vesuvius: A Biography
  Alwyn Scarth (Terra Publishing, 2009) Google Books →
• Pliny: A Life in Roman Letters
  Rex Winsbury (Bloomsbury, 2013)

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Programme ID: b03kv0cl

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03kv0cl

Auto-category: 870 (Latin literature)