Natural History (Pliny) - Appraisal

Appraisal

It is important to acknowledge that Pliny's achievement with Natural History is all the more remarkable when it is remembered that he had written a number of other substantial works which do not survive, and combined his scholarly activities with a busy and successful career as an imperial administrator for the emperor Vespasian. Much of his writing was done at night; daytime hours were devoted to his emperor, as he explains in the dedicatory preface addressed to Vespasian's elder son, the future emperor Titus, with whom he had served in the army. As for the nocturnal hours spent writing, these were seen, not as a loss of sleep, but as an addition to life: for, as he famously states in the preface, Vita vigilia est, "to be alive means to be awake". Pliny's phrase implies more than mere consciousness: drawn from military metaphor, it might better be rendered as "being on the alert", "watchful", and it is in the Natural History, the record of an entire lifetime's watch, rather than in a single episode at the end of it, that the enduring importance of Pliny's intellectual curiosity becomes clear.

Natural History is often described as an encyclopaedia, but this is misleading for a modern reader, who would be hard pressed to locate with any speed what Pliny has to say on the natural history of the chameleon, the medical uses of cabbage or the remarkable effects of goat's blood on diamond. This is not to say that the work lacks structure; on the contrary, Pliny uses Aristotle's division of nature (animal, vegetable, mineral) to recreate the natural world in literary form. Rather than presenting compartmentalised, stand-alone entries arranged alphabetically, as a modern encyclopaedia, Pliny's ordered natural landscape is a coherent whole, through which the reader can undertake a guided tour: "a brief excursion under our direction among the whole of the works of nature..." Unified, yet infinitely varied. "My subject is the world of nature... or in other words, life," he tells Titus.

Nature for Pliny was divine, a pantheistic concept inspired by the Stoic philosophy which underlies much of his thought. But this was a goddess whose main purpose was to serve the human race: "nature, that is life" is human life in a natural landscape. After an initial survey of cosmology and geography, Pliny starts his consideration of animals with the human race, "for whose sake great nature appears to have created all other things". This teleological view of nature was common in antiquity and is crucial to the understanding of the Natural History. The components of nature are not just described in and for themselves, but also with a view to their role in human life. Pliny devotes a number of the books to plants, with a focus on their medicinal value; the books on minerals include descriptions of their uses in architecture, sculpture, painting and jewellery. If Pliny's premise seems remote from modern ecological theories, the result is a compendium of an entire culture.

Pliny's work frequently reflects Rome's imperial expansion which brought new and exciting things to the capital: exotic eastern spices, strange animals to be put on display or herded into the arena, even the alleged phoenix sent to the emperor Claudius in AD 47 — although, as Pliny admits, this was generally acknowledged to be a fake. All these, and many more, feature in the pages of the Natural History as Pliny's unflagging watchfulness and desire for an authoritative comprehensiveness in his work was matched by his compatriots' appetite for novelty. Supply fed expectation: Pliny repeated Aristotle's maxim that Africa was always producing something new. Nature's variety and versatility were infinite: "When I have observed nature she has always induced me to deem no statement about her incredible." It was this conviction and not, as some modern critics have suggested, credulity, let alone mendacity, which led him to recount rumours of strange and startling peoples inhabiting the very edges of the world, the borders of knowledge itself. Many of these monstrous races — the Cynocephali or Dog-Heads, the Sciapodae, whose single foot could act as a sunshade, the mouthless Astomi, who lived on scents — were not strictly new. They had barked, hopped or sniffed their way around the unknown regions since the days of the Greek historian Herodotus in the fifth century BC and even before. It was through Pliny's Natural History, however, that they became embedded in the geographical imagination and were destined to remain there for another 1500 years. For this paragraph's critical references, cf. "Introduction" to N.H. Loeb III-VII, passim.

"As full of variety as nature itself", stated Pliny's nephew, Pliny the Younger, and this verdict largely explains the extraordinary and enduring appeal of Natural History for the best part of two millennia after its author's death during the eruption of Vesuvius, which destroyed the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum in AD 79. Intellectual curiosity, again, had impelled Pliny to investigate the strange cloud — "shaped like an umbrella pine", according to his nephew — issuing from the mountain. The younger Pliny's description of the scientific expedition which turned into a rescue mission was intended to immortalise his uncle. Uncle had, however, already insured his own immortality: the same intellectual curiosity which had inspired his fateful journey had produced his enormous 37-book Natural History. One of the first ancient texts to be printed, in 1469, it had run to over two hundred complete editions by the end of the last century. Translations in various languages had already appeared by the Middle Ages, ensuring Pliny's "treasure house" of knowledge, as he termed it, exercised an influence beyond a scholarly elite. Advances in scholarship and scientific knowledge were slow to displace Pliny as the ultimate authority on nearly everything. Renaissance scholars, encouraged by the rediscovery of ancient Greek scientific and other texts, might subject the Natural History to more critical scrutiny, but travelogues and geographical works could still describe, and illustrate, encounters with Dog-Heads, Umbrella-Feet, Amazons and the rest. The pioneers of New World exploration did not jettison their copies, but consulted them for points of reference and comparison when confronted by new discoveries.