Pilate. The Biography of an Invented Man

Wroe, Ann

ISBN 10: 0224059424 / ISBN 13: 9780224059428

Published by Jonathan Cape / Random House, London, 1999

About this Item

First edition, first impression with full number line. Some slight edge wear to top and bottom of jacket and spine, top corners slightly bruised, very slight lean, not price clipped (£17.99), no inscriptions, internally clean and tight, overall a vg+ copy. 381pp. The facts about Pontius Pilate are very few. We don't know when he was born or when he died. We know nothing of his career before he became Govenor of Judea, and nothing of what happened to him after he was recalled by Tiberius. Some say he came from Rome, others from Spain or Germany. Everyone, from the evangelists to the writers of the medieval mystery plays, has his own Pilate, each symbolic of something, each a projection of his own ideas and anxieties. This extraordinary book is all about our Pilates real half real and invented. Some are familiar, some surprising. They have depths and contrasts that are unexpected. They do remarkable things. Among these surprises, perhaps, are the glimpses we get of a man actually walking on a marble floor in Caesarea, feeling his shoes pinch, clicking his fingers for a slave, while the clouds of lasting infamy gather over his head.

Seller Inventory # 009237

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Pilate. The Biography of an Invented Man
• Publisher: Jonathan Cape / Random House, London
• Publication Date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0224059424
• ISBN 13: 9780224059428
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: Jacket after Albrecht Durer
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Printing: 1st Printing
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine

About this title

Synopsis

Very little is known for certain about Pontius Pilate, the man who crucified Christ, but this has not stopped writers in every age from imagining his life. In this extraordinary book, Ann Wroe recounts the lives of all our Pilates, among them the glittering medieval tyrant devoted to gambling; the early-Christian intellectual; the beleaguered Victorian administrator; the Coptic saint, martyred on the cross; the Alpine devil, in league with Satan to claim the souls of mountain climbers; and the wriggling modern pragmatist, whose dilemma over Jesus has been described by Tony Blair as "a timeless parable of political life."

This is also the story, as far as it can be reconstructed from archaeology and from classical sources, of the real Pilate: his likely background, his career, his duties, his failings, his fears, and the attitude he might have had to the various forms of thinking he encountered in Judea. Ann Wroe shows how, in his struggles with fate and free will, Pilate's story has also become the story of ourselves.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

About the Author

Ann Wroe wrote her first book at the age of seven. She received her doctorate in history from Oxford University, and then joined the BBC World Service to cover the last years of communism in Europe. Since 1992 she has been the editor of the American section of The Economist; before that she was its literary editor. Her books include Lives, Lies and the Iran-Contra Affair and A Fool and His Money, an account of a scandal in a French village during the Hundred Years' War. She lives in London with her husband and three sons.