Natural History (Pliny)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Pliny the Elder's Natural History was still unrevised when Vesuvius erupted in AD 79 and killed its author. The 37 books he left behind became the largest single work to survive from the Roman Empire. Pliny the Younger described the cloud above the mountain as shaped like an umbrella pine, and his uncle went toward it to investigate. The questions his encyclopedia leaves open are not geological. How does an imperial administrator compile the knowledge of the ancient world? What did Rome believe about animals, plants, and the monstrous peoples at the world's edges? And why did this book, crowded with errors and marvels alike, outlast nearly every other written work of classical antiquity?

  13122532

• 2. Working Through the Night

  ›

  Pliny (AD 23-79) held a senior post as imperial administrator for Emperor Vespasian. His scholarly life ran alongside, squeezed into hours most people spent asleep. His nephew, Pliny the Younger, described how Pliny began studying on the Festival of Vulcan, long before daybreak. In winter, he started at the seventh hour of the night. He could fall asleep in the middle of his work and wake to carry on where he had stopped.

  Before sunrise, Pliny visited the emperor, since Vespasian too was a night-worker. Then came official duties. Any daylight that survived the emperor's demands went back to study. A summer meal was always simple and light; afterward, Pliny would lie in the sun with a book read aloud, taking notes.

  Pliny the Younger recalled one pointed exchange. A friend interrupted a reading session to make a reader correct a mispronounced word. Pliny asked whether his friend had understood the meaning; the friend said yes. Then the interruption had cost them more than ten lines.

  The work that came from these sessions was dedicated to Vespasian's elder son, Titus, with whom Pliny had served in the army. He described the night hours not as lost sleep but as an addition to life, and coined a phrase for it: Vita vigilia est, 'to be alive is to be watchful.'

  122535

• 3. Scope and Sources

  ›

  Pliny's preface claimed 20,000 facts gathered from roughly 2,000 books and from 100 select authors. The extant lists of his authorities run to more than 400 names, including 146 Roman and 327 Greek and other writers. His indices auctorum sometimes listed authors he had consulted directly. In other cases, he borrowed names from his immediate sources. Heinrich Brunn's 1856 Disputatio, published at Bonn, established the order in which these authority lists follow each book's subject matter.

  Marcus Terentius Varro was among the most frequently cited. Varro supplied much of the geographical material, supplemented by the topographical commentaries of Agrippa, which Emperor Augustus had completed. For zoology, Pliny drew on Aristotle and on Juba, the scholarly Mauretanian king. Juba he described as studiorum claritate memorabilior quam regno: more famous for his learning than for his kingdom. Pliny translated Theophrastus's botanical writing from Greek into Latin. He also used Herodotus, Thucydides, and the Bibliotheca Historica of Diodorus Siculus.

  Pliny acknowledged his debts openly: 'To own up to those who were the means of one's own achievements.' He described the project's path as 'not a beaten highway of authorship, nor one in which the mind is eager to range.' He used Aristotle's threefold division of nature, animal, vegetable, and mineral, to organize the work. He called it 'a brief excursion under our direction among the whole of the works of nature.'

  211147042

• 4. The Three Kingdoms

  ›

  Book II of the Natural History opens with Pliny surveying the universe. He was scathing about those who claimed there were countless worlds beyond Earth, calling the idea madness. He accepted the four elements, fire, earth, air, and water, and recorded seven 'planets,' Sun and Moon included. Posidonius had estimated the Moon was 230,000 miles from Earth; Pliny passed the figure on. He found Hipparchus's astronomical almanac grandiose for pretending to know how nature worked.

  For zoology, Pliny classified all aquatic life as 'fishes.' He divided them into red-blooded creatures, meaning cetaceans and conventional fish, and those without blood. The bloodless he subdivided into soft fishes such as cephalopods, thin-crusted creatures including crustaceans and sea urchins, and those enclosed in hard shells. Jellies occupied 'a third nature,' somewhere between animal and plant. The murex snail was the prized source of Tyrian purple, and Pliny records the invention of fish farming and oyster farming. Amber he correctly identified as fossilised pine resin; insects sealed inside the material proved this, and he noted that amber exerts a charge when rubbed. Silk production he attributed to a woman named Pamphile, with China left entirely unmentioned.

  Pepper and ginger received special attention in the botanical books. Pliny found pepper's value comparable to gold and silver, while cane sugar was noted only for its medicinal use. He dismissed perfumes as 'the most pointless of luxuries.' Pearls and jewels could be inherited; clothes lasted a while. But perfumes lost their fragrance the moment they were used. The pharmacological sections list over 900 drugs, against Dioscorides's 600, Theophrastus's 550, and Galen's 650. Opium appears, with a note that it induces sleep and can be fatal. Agriculture drew on Cato the Elder's De Agri Cultura and included a description of a mechanical reaper pushed by oxen. Book XVIII, chapter 72, contains the reaper's design; a bas-relief found at Trier depicts it.

  Book VII discussed the human race, ranging from Julius Caesar's greatness to the achievements of Hippocrates and Asclepiades. It also touched on happiness and fortune. The further Pliny's sources reached from Rome, the stranger their reports became.

  6465666910

• 5. Wonders and Rumor

  ›

  An alleged phoenix arrived in Rome in AD 47, presented to Emperor Claudius as a genuine specimen from the East. Pliny included it in his work but conceded it was generally acknowledged to be a fake. Rome's imperial expansion kept delivering novelties: eastern spices, strange animals for the arena, and curiosities from the empire's outer edges. Pliny adopted Aristotle's maxim that Africa was always producing something new. He stated his own principle plainly: nature had always induced him to deem no claim about her incredible.

  The Cynocephali, or Dog-Heads, had canine faces. The Sciapodae possessed a single foot large enough to shade their body when they lay down. The Astomi had no mouths and lived entirely on scents. These figures had circulated since at least the fifth century BC. Herodotus first described them, weaving verifiable history with myths and legends in roughly equal measure. Pliny made them far more widely known to Roman readers.

  His nephew later characterized the encyclopedia as 'as full of variety as nature itself.' Pliny had opened its preface with a prayer that may explain that verdict: 'Hail to thee, Nature, thou parent of all things!'

  7576777811

• 6. Art, Metal, and Stone

  ›

  Gold received Pliny's most sustained examination in Book XXXIII. He described its malleability precisely: one ounce could be beaten into 750 leaves, each four inches square. Fine gold wire could be woven into cloth, though imperial garments usually combined it with natural fibres like wool. Pliny had personally seen Agrippina the Younger, wife of Claudius, at a naval spectacle on the Fucine Lake. She wore a military cloak made entirely of gold. He criticized the use of gold for coinage in the early Republic and told the stories of Midas and Croesus. He noted how emperors displayed looted gold from their campaigns, citing Claudius after the conquest of Britain.

  Spain produced more silver than anywhere else in Pliny's time, many of the mines having been started by Hannibal. One shaft ran two miles into the mountain, with men working day and night draining it in shifts. Mercury, Pliny recorded, is toxic and found in silver mines; it amalgamates with gold, making it useful for refining. Cinnabar, mercury's principal ore, long served as a red pigment. Workers who handled its dust wore face masks of bladder skin. Iron received its own section. Pliny distinguished what is now called steel from the softer wrought iron, and offered a sharp verdict on iron's use in warfare.

  Duris of Samos, Xenocrates of Sicyon, and Antigonus of Carystus survive today almost entirely through Pliny. His chapters on art are nearly the only surviving classical source of their kind. He praised the Laocoön group, then in the palace of Titus, above all paintings and bronzes in the world. He attributed the marble to three sculptors from the island of Rhodes: Agesander, Athenodoros, and Polydorus. In a temple near the Flaminian Circus, he admired the Ares and the Aphrodite of Scopas. They 'would suffice to give renown to any other spot,' he wrote. His knowledge of Greek art criticism came primarily through Varro.

  Diamond took the top position in Pliny's hardness series because it could scratch all other minerals. He described its octahedral crystal form and recorded that gem engravers used diamond dust to cut and polish other stones. A woman had paid 150,000 sesterces for a ladle carved from rock crystal. Nero, learning he was about to be deposed, deliberately smashed two crystal cups to deny their use to anyone else. Pliny records what happened to Nero's colossal bronze statue in the years after his death. Vespasian had its face modified to represent Sol. Later, Hadrian moved it near the Flavian Amphitheatre, a task requiring the architect Decrianus and 24 elephants.

  1516171819

• 7. From Scroll to Page

  ›

  Pliny the Younger published the work after his uncle's death, with minimal time for final revision. He apparently forgot that a tame dolphin and the floating islands of the Vadimonian Lake had already appeared in the Natural History. He described both again as novelties in later writing. The absence of Pliny's final revision left its mark. As early as 1350, Petrarch complained about the text's corrupt state. He blamed copying errors accumulated between the ninth and eleventh centuries.

  Solinus, writing around the middle of the third century, produced an abstract of the Natural History's geographical sections. In the early eighth century, Bede used a partial manuscript of the Natural History for his De natura rerum. He drew on the sections about meteorology and gems, and corrected Pliny on the tides. The oldest surviving substantial manuscript is VLF 4, known as the Leiden Pliny, produced during Bede's lifetime at the School of York. Each of its leaves required an entire animal hide; at least 30 animals went into the complete codex. Despite this, the parchment shows no insect damage, a sign of exceptional workmanship. Through Alcuin's role in the Carolingian Renaissance, this Northumbrian codex is believed to have reached the Frankish court at Aachen around AD 796.

  In 1141, Robert of Cricklade compiled nine books of selections from an ancient manuscript, the Defloratio Historiae Naturalis Plinii Secundi. Some 307 medieval manuscripts of the Natural History survive in total. Detlefsen's critical edition, which spanned 1858-1904, relied on only 17 of them. The work was among the first classical texts to be printed, appearing in Venice in 1469 through Johann and Wendelin of Speyer. A copy of a 1472 Venetian printing by Nicolas Jenson is held in the library at Wells Cathedral. Philemon Holland produced the first influential English translation in 1601; John Bostock and H. T. Riley completed a full translation in 1855. John F. Healy described the 1469 edition as 'distinctly imperfect.' Editors had identified imperfections in the text ever since the first printed copy appeared. Scholars would spend the following centuries arguing not just about the text but about Pliny's judgment.

  4143356162

• 8. A Contested Legacy

  ›

  Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae, composed around AD 600-625, quotes Pliny 45 times in Book XII alone. Three of its books are largely based on the Natural History. Through Isidore, Vincent of Beauvais incorporated Pliny again into the Speculum Maius, completed around 1235-1264. An anonymous fourth-century compilation called Medicina Plinii drew more than 1,100 pharmacological recipes from the Natural History. One twentieth-century scholar argued that Pliny's reliance on book-based knowledge rather than direct observation had stymied the progress of western science. The spread of his work through Isidore and Vincent made that influence vast.

  Niccolò Leoniceno's 1509 De Erroribus Plinii attacked Pliny for lacking a proper scientific method. Leoniceno found him deficient in knowledge of both philosophy and medicine, and unfavorably compared him to his Greek predecessors. Sir Thomas Browne, in his 1646 Pseudodoxia Epidemica, expressed skepticism about Pliny's reliability. He laid part of the blame on credulous readers rather than the author himself. Pliny, Browne noted, 'writes but as he reads' and openly names his sources in his preface. Grundy Steiner of Northwestern University, in a 1955 assessment, described Pliny as 'the compiler of a secondary sourcebook.' The remark, noted Thomas R. Laehn, represented the collective opinion of Pliny's critics.

  Italo Calvino took a different view in his 1991 book Why Read the Classics? He argued that Pliny deserved extended reading not only for facts but for his admiration for all that exists. Calvino praised the measured movement of Pliny's prose. He also compared Pliny's pantheistic identification of God with nature to the theology of Immanuel Kant. Paula Findlen, writing in the Cambridge History of Science, called the Natural History 'loquacious and witty.' She noted that it encompassed art, artifacts, and peoples alongside animals, plants, and minerals. Mary Beagon, writing in 2010 in The Classical Tradition, argued that the Natural History had regained its standing. It was recognized, she wrote, as 'a unique cultural record' of its time.

  Jacob Isager found a guiding principle across the art chapters. Throughout, Pliny expressed a consistent attitude toward human beings as both inventors and potential abusers of what nature provides. He understood 'the function of art in society,' Isager wrote, and used art history 'to express opinions about the ideology of the state.'

  Reeve's 2007 analysis found multiple imperfections in the most recent critical editions. There is currently no fully critical edition of the Natural History. The relationship among its surviving manuscripts remains only partially understood.

  2426223436