The Cro-Magnon documentarian who made this horse wall painting from the Cave at Lascaux, France, may be the Ur-blogger.
Who's the blogogenitor of us all? Ambivalog [via Ann Althouse] suggests E.B. White, "whose monthly column in Harper's, beginning in 1938, was called 'One Man's Meat.' Couldn't every blog be called that? (Well, half of 'em, anyway.)" She's on the right track but too late by about a millennium and a half . Ann herself suggests Michel de Montaigne (1533-92), the "great French Renaissance thinker who took himself as the great object of study in his Essays." Excellent suggestion, and surely a protoblogger of his day, but still no cigar.
With a nod towards our Cro-Magnon forebears who painted those evocative images of wild animals on the walls of the cave at Lascaux (15,000-13,000 BC) and such, we're nominating Pliny the Younger, (Caius Plinius Caecilius Secundus 63 - ca. 113), "the initiator of a new particular genre, the letter written for publication."
We happened to bump into the young fellow -- nephew to the great Roman Imperial natural historian Pliny the Elder -- during our landscape architectural history studies years ago. Among PTY's letters written for publication were lavish descriptions of his mountain and seaside villas promoting the intellectual and emotional benefits of the properly sited, properly laid out and properly appointed retreat. Pliny's letters -- through what Witold Rybczynski calls "the great winnowing process of history" -- are among the few surviving documents of his day to open a window upon the upperclass life and landscape of the times. As we wrote back when:
Most writers on the subject agree that Renaissance architects and their clients were influenced in their thinking about garden design by the writings of one man more than any other: The late-first-century author and administrator Pliny the Younger. His specialty was a genre called litterae curiosus scriptae, carefully written -- and rewritten [And he couldn't just select, delete and retype -- ed] -- letters intended for eventual republication.
Pliny's tone is that of a learned and magnanimous man of the world, who studiedly observes that the best thing about country life is the opportunity it gives him to "cultivate not the fields . . . but my mind."
A worthy ancient diarist upon whose shoulders bloggers stand today?
Interesting. I read Pliny's letters to Tacitus when I was reading about Vesuvius. He really was like a blogger.
Posted by: Tom Carter | February 23, 2005 at 08:37 PM