Variety: The Life of a Roman Concept by William Fitzgerald (review)

The student or scholar toiling at the coalface of Latin literary studies, including one mining the far-reaching veins of the classical tradition, need only to be reassured that Fitzgerald’s Variety really is about varietas to know that it is a crucial addition to the classics bookshelf. Variety, in other words, leads Fitzgerald to aesthetic questions that are almost always both high (that is, about art) and low (about the basic principles of human perception and of the world that assails its sense organs). On the one hand, variety could rise to the level of a virtue, or at least of a principle by which to plot a life well lived. [...]Fitzgerald argues, a charitable reading of the letters of Pliny the Younger extracts the lesson that “we cannot, and should not, focus our lives about one center” (99).