SOURCE: Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, "Pliny the Elder and Man's Unnatural History," in Greece and Rome, Vol. XXXVII, No. 1, April, 1990, pp. 80-96.

[In the essay that follows, Wallace-Hadrill defends Pliny against his detractors by arguing that his words must be read within the context of Roman civilization and that his writings offer valuable insight into the role of science and social status in imperial Rome.]

Not everybody shares my enthusiasm for the elder Pliny. We all have a nodding acquaintance with the Natural History, but few wish to pursue the relationship to the level of intimacy. Critics who care for the purity of Latin prose take a particularly dim view of him. Eduard Norden's verdict in Die antike Kunstprosa (i. 314) is much cited: 'His work belongs, from the stylistic point of view, to the very worst which we have.' This negative judgement was firmly endorsed by Frank Goodyear in the Cambridge History of Latin Literature:

Pliny is one of the prodigies of Latin literature, boundlessly energetic and catastrophically indiscriminate, wide-ranging and narrow-minded, a pedant who wanted to be a popularizer, a sceptic infected by traditional sentiment, and an aspirant to style who can hardly frame a coherent sentence.

Not that Goodyear would have us ignore him. On the contrary, he serves as a deterrent exemplum of all that is frightful in Latin prose:

Students of Latin language and style neglect Pliny at their peril. Here, better than in most other places, we may see the contortions and obscurities, the odd combinations of preciosity and baldness, and the pure vacuity to which rhetorical prose, handled by any but the most talented, could precipitously descend and would indeed often descend again.

I must confess myself dismayed by the vision of Latin literature as a sort of Madame Tussaud's: a series of heroes and villains of yesteryear, to be admired or repudiated for their stylistic merits. To me, Pliny's encyclopedia is fascinating. Because I am concerned with Roman cultural history, and particularly with the reception of Greek culture at Rome and the process of assimilation, I find myself drawn to Pliny as a prime source. My first guide in this was Friedlaender. From his Sittengeschichte, and specifically from his chapter on Roman Luxury, I learnt that precious and precise information about Roman life pervades the Natural History from beginning to end. On the other hand, though Friedlaender ransacked Pliny with great efficiency, he gave no account of the author. He made no attempt to analyse his thought and attitudes, to try to explain why an encyclopedia of natural science should be so crammed with what appear to many to be irrelevant, if informative, excursuses on Roman life and manners, and why the objective reporting of the scientist is overlaid with chauvinistic moralizing.

It is this apparent dichotomy that underlies the stylistic objections to Pliny. As Norden put it, the subject matter was not responsible for his 'bad' style: 'Man darf nicht sagen, dass der Stoff daran schuld war.' One can perfectly well envisage an encyclopedia with a dry, informative, and unpretentiously businesslike style. But the whole point is that Pliny will not content himself with being informative. He insists on rhetoric:

Frequently Pliny is carried away (complains Goodyear) into bombast by enthusiasm for his theme, indignation, or a maudlin brand of moralizing … He drew no clear line between report and comment …

Pliny's rhetoric is seen as a form of lack of self-control, an inability to restrain urges which the proper scientist resists. We assume that rhetoric is out of place in a work on science. We treat it almost as a moral failing:

Instead of adopting the plain and sober style appropriate to his theme (protests Goodyear), he succumbs to lust for embellishment.

Lust indeed! Has Goodyear caught the disease of Plinian moralization? Or is it that Goodyear, like Pliny, is trapped in the cultural categories of his day? Our cultural rules set up a sharp cleavage between scientific analysis, and the passion of rhetoric, persuasion, moralization. But Pliny's obviously did not, and it is this cultural contrast I want to focus our attention on. The place of science in Roman culture was quite different from that of science in contemporary culture. In our terms Pliny is rotten rhetoric, and worse science (though as scholars start to examine his technical details seriously, respect for his science grows apace). But, beyond controversy, he casts a flood of light on the cultural world of early imperial Rome, and it is from this angle that I think there are some things worth saying about him.

Despite its monumental extent and its apparently rambling structure, the Natural History has a coherence, indeed a passionate single-mindedness of purpose, that is reminiscent of, and parallel to, that of Lucretius. Pliny's subject, clearly stated, and frequently reiterated, is Nature. But it is Nature in a context, or perhaps rather Nature as a context: the natural world stands in contrast to and in relationship with the human world. The history of Nature is thus simultaneously a history of Culture. The Natural History of the earth is by inversion the Unnatural History of Man.

My task is made much easier by the fact much of the groundwork has been done. The eighties have seen a surge of interest in the author, with no less than three conferences, organized respectively at Como (a massive occasion, which resulted in the publication of four volumes of Proceedings), at Nantes, and at London. 1986, the annus mirabilis of Plinian study, saw the publication of two volumes of conference proceedings (the London one as Science in the Early Roman Empire edited by French and Greenaway, the Nantes one as vol. 37 of the journal Helmantica), together with a fine survey article in Aufstieg und Niedergang by Guy Serbat, and an interesting Oxford doctoral thesis by Mary Beagon on Nature in Pliny. On all these I draw gratefully.

I. Nature and Culture

Let me start by exploring in greater depth the antithesis of nature and culture, for it lies at the heart of the Natural History. Pliny makes clear that the scope of his work is his own idea. Not only is he, as he boasts in his preface, the only Roman to have tackled the subject; he is also without precedent among the Greeks, none of whom had brought together all the subjects he covers (Pr. 14). The subject is of his own choosing, and it is important to pay attention to the way he chooses to define it. From the outset, his definition is offered not in neutral, 'scientific' terms, but in the language of enthusiasm, passion, and religious adoration. True, in the Preface he offers something closer to what we might expect: sterilis materia, rerum natura, hoc est vita, narratur, and he apologizes for the language in which this dry material must be presented, the technical vocabulary of countrymen, foreigners, and even barbarians. But even in this passage we may detect a Plinian irony. The idea of nature, hoc est vita, as sterile, is a self-conscious paradox. There is an implicit antithesis between the writing on Natural History and that of human history (on which, as he explains in the same preface, he had also been secretly engaged); digressions, speeches, and dramatic turns of fortune, the conventional topoi of the historian, have no place here. The same irony which Tacitus employs to characterize his Annals as dry stuff, nobis in arto et inglorious labor, here is deployed to suggest that Natural History is neither sterile nor remote from conventional human history.

The text proper opens (in book 2) with a declaration of the divinity of the subject. The universe (mundus) is fairly considered a numen, eternal, immense, not begotten or created, beyond the conjecture of the human mind; both finite and infinite; both the product of rerum natura and itself rerum natura. He goes on to expound a striking if obscure theology: God, if there is any god, cannot be grasped or measured by the human mind. Pliny rejects the conventional pantheon as the creation of human frailty, and repudiates mythology and its immoralities: God is helping your fellow man, deus est mortali iuvare mortalem, of which Vespasian is an example, and worship is a form of gratitude for benefaction (2.14-19). These thoughts underpin Pliny's own conception of what he is doing: he is both performing an act of worship, of gratitude in describing the works of nature, and at the same time, we may suspect, he is himself aspiring to the divine by helping his fellow mortals. The idea of gratitude recurs later in the same book in his lyrical description of the earth (Terra) as the part of Nature uniquely deserving of human veneration: she alone is always beneficial to Man, and nothing that she generates, not even poison, is noxious to Man (poison is provided for painless suicide) and it is only human abuse that turns the gifts of Nature to weapons of destruction. And yet we repay the earth with ingratitude: and among the signs of our ingratitude is that we ignore its nature (154-9). The Natural History is an attempt to rectify that ingratitude by a scientific appreciation of what the earth offers.

Similar thoughts are recurrent throughout the work, particularly in the introductory chapters of individual books. Nature is the great benefactor, on whose works we must look with wonder and gratitude. Consideration of the gifts of nature and the earth enumerated so far, he declares at the start of book 22, is enough to fill the reader with wonderment, miraculum sui, that there could be so many different types of plant created for the needs and pleasures of mankind. He will continue with his enumeration to prove that nothing in nature is born without some deeper hidden cause (22.1). That is to say, the whole natural world is there to serve man; our only job is to try to discover the beneficial purpose for which each thing has been created. Nor should the scientist try to engross credit for the 'discovery'. He is full of admiration for the ancients who discovered herbal medicine, and would say that they had surpassed nature's own bounty, rerum naturae ipsius munificentia, if the discovery was the work of man. But it is obviously the work of the gods, and nature as mother of all has both given birth to all these things and pointed out their use (27.1-2). People may laugh at and scorn Pliny for his collection of trifles, but, he consoles himself, it is Nature they are scorning. For Nature puts healing powers even in the plants men spurn, like those with thorns. Such is her providence that she make them prickly and nasty to look at in order to put off browsing animals and birds, and preserve them as remedies (22.15-17).

It is in small details that the providential power of nature is seen most vividly. Consider the sheer workmanship with which nature has made insects: in his tam parvis atque tam nullis quae ratio, quanta vis, quam inextricabilis perfectio! Insects show nature's workmanship much better than elephants and tigers, and Pliny begs the reader not to scorn what he has to say about such little things, for in the contemplation of nature nothing can be superfluous (11.1-4). Of course, people find it easier to see the sum perfection of nature in a gem (37.1). It is in the improbable coincidence that you can see that careful design underlies the beneficial order of nature. Take the extraordinary 'fact' that diamond, the hardest of all substances, can be split by goat's blood. It is no good giving the credit for this discovery to science: how on earth could anyone have guessed that something so priceless could be treated with the product of the foulest of animals? It must therefore be a divine revelation, numinun inventio and the logic is to be sought in voluntas, a divine will underlying creation (37.59-60).

These reflections do not strike us as very scientific. Quite apart from the unreliability of the observations (of course goat's blood has not the slightest effect on a diamond), the special pleading is transparent—if all plants are beneficial to man and designed for his use, why are only some equipped with thorns to deter animals and birds? If poisons are only designed to aid man to commit suicide painlessly, why are some more slow-acting and painful than others? And so on. To us it would seem pretty obvious that Pliny's science is flawed from the start because based on untenable hypotheses. The hypothesis that creation is designed purely to aid mankind does not assist in the explanation of phenomena: it only makes it more difficult, and provokes the expenditure of ingenuity on the sort of sophistries Pliny has to offer. But all this is obvious to us because we are accustomed (even if not ourselves scientists) to a science based on quite different hypotheses. What is interesting to the cultural historian is not whether Pliny got it right, but where he was starting from and why.

Philosophically, Pliny's science is squarely based on the sort of Stoic ideas fashionable in Rome at this period, and particularly associated with Posidonius. The Posidonian doctrine of cosmic sympathy is explicitly invoked, and indeed the stuff about diamonds and goat's blood is supposed to prove it: 'throughout these whole volumes I have tried to teach about the discord and concord of things, which the Greeks call antipathia and sympathia' (37.59, cf. 24.1-3).

Pliny's debt to Stoicism has already been well-charted, and I do not wish to pursue the question now. What I do want to emphasize is that the conception of a providential and beneficial nature from which Pliny moves rules out from the start the sort of dry, 'scientific' approach which his critics assume would have been stylistically appropriate. We cannot ask him to be purely descriptive, to separate fact from comment, when for him the whole meaningfulness of the facts he assembles lies in their persuasive value: they prove that the world was built with a purpose. If he had nothing else in mind than to collect 20,000 facts, however trivial, we might justly accuse him of a mindless waste of labour. But he is well aware both of the potential consumer resistance to trivial information, and of the vast labours he himself has had to expend in gathering it. His conception of a providential nature gives sense and meaning to his whole enterprise: the magnitude of his labours is justified because, like those of Hercules, they benefit mankind.

This is where the parallel with Lucretius is illuminating. Lucretius' exposition of physics, far from being pure science, serves a moral and philosophical purpose, to free mankind from superstition and false aims in life. Like Lucretius, Pliny is a crusader, with a passionate mission: by showing how nature is designed for man, to persuade man how properly to make use of his natural environment. This underlying crusading zeal has direct consequences for his style and his choice of subject matter. If the purpose of nature is to benefit man, the ways man uses and abuses nature are an essential part of the subject matter. And if Pliny's purpose is to persuade, and direct man towards a right use of nature, then rhetoric is a proper tool, not a form of grotesque and tasteless ornamentation. In Lucretius we can distinguish two modes, one expository and one persuasive; the second, with its rich range of tones from the satirical to the lyrical, strikes us as unscientific, but is essential to the purpose of the poem. Pliny too has both expository and persuasive modes, and I suggest that his persuasive mode, and consequently his whole use of excursuses and purple passages, is equally legitimate.

II. Luxury

But what exactly is Pliny trying to persuade us of? It is a little bit tempting to represent him as a sort of proto-environmentalist. Certainly there is at points an unmistakeably green tinge to his ideas. He squarely accuses man of poisoning his environment. His contemplation of the variety of plants, their number, flowers, colours, scents, and juices, leads him to champion the cause of Nature. Are not poisons a design fault of Nature? But it is man who discovered poisons. Animals use their natural weapons (tusks, etc.), but only man uses poison. We poison our arrows, we poison our rivers and the very elements of nature, we turn the means of life to destruction (18.1-3). Even worse than the abuse of poison, in Pliny's view, is mining.

We excavate every fibre of the earth, and live above the cavities. Can we be surprised if it occasionally gapes open and quakes? As if this couldn't be a sign of indignation expressed by our sacred parent. (33.1)

Or again, he contrasts the rest of the natural world, which has been created for the sake of man, with the mountains, which nature created for her own sake, as a framework to give solidity to the guts of the earth, and to control the force of rivers and seas. yet man by mining quarries away this protective frame (36.1).

Environmentalism is a useful analogy. It serves to remind us that the issue of man's relationship with nature is one which may properly engage a scientist, and which may indeed fuel some of the passion behind his work. But the Plinian framework is different. Pollution is not the issue, the ozone layer is not under threat. And though in part the antitheses are the same, of the natural balance of a self-regulating ecological system versus human greed, profit-making, and abuse, the key element in Pliny's equation is one of little importance to us, namely luxury.

It is normal, as we have seen, to treat the Plinian moral diatribe as an uncontrolled spontaneous outburst; as if the Roman chauvinist in Pliny simply came bubbling up and pushed aside the man of science. He is 'carried away into bombast', he 'cannot resist the opportunity to pillory the luxury of his times', he cannot hold back the 'declamations against luxury he had learnt in the schools'. It is essential to the success of Plinian indignatio, like that of Juvenal, that it comes spontaneously from the heart. But that does not mean that it is superfluous. The idea of man's luxuria is as central to the purpose of the Natural History as that of Nature's providence. For the whole work is underpinned by the simple idea that Nature supplies, unasked and ungrudgingly, everything man needs, but that man, blinded by luxuria, abuses nature and turns it into the tool of his own destruction; the function of science is to reveal the proper use of nature and so save mankind.

The passages on luxury, as Friedlaender appreciated, are pervasive. The word luxuria alone occurs in over 60 passages, and there are a host in which he uses other favoured words like deliciae, luxus, or expressions for the decline of morals (lues morum, etc.). The theme is introduced in book 2, in the lyrical description of the beneficence of the earth. Benign, gentle, indulgent, she gives man all he needs: but we repay her with ingratitude. What indulgences (deliciae) and abuses does she not have to serve for man? She is dug away and hurled into the sea, tortured with iron, fire, and stone; we dig into her entrails in pursuit of precious metals and gems, and all for a gem for a single finger. If there were any gods below, they would have been frightened off long since by the tunnels of our avarice and luxury.

The internal coherence of this stream of thought depends on the Stoic definition of luxuria as the unnatural, as failing to live according to nature. Pliny has no need to argue the philosophical position, already abundantly argued by Seneca; his function is to work it out in detail on the ground. To us the inherent difficulty of the position lies in the definition of what is natural and what is not. To Pliny it is self-explanatory. Gold, silver, gems, purple dyes, pearls, and oysters are among the worst of luxuries: and all are procured by an inversion of the natural order, by plunging to the depths of the sea and burrowing to the centre of the earth to expose what nature has carefully hidden away.

What destroys us, what sends us to the underworld [in two punning senses] are the things she hid away and drowned … How innocent, how blessed, how indulgent (delicata) life would be, if it coveted nothing that does not originate from above ground level! (33.3)

The use of rhetorical point and ingenious conceit serves to drive home the message that luxuries are against the natural order. A nice example is the extended attack on the abuse of shellfish, particularly, in ascending order of awfulness, the purpura and the conchyle (both sources of purple dye), and the pearl. Of all parts of nature, the sea is the most damaging to the belly—because of its multiple potential for food poisoning. Here we have the thought that what is hidden in the sea is unnatural, proved by its deleterious effects, since nature is always beneficial to man. But the argument goes further. Not content with assaulting our bellies with shellfish, we assault our hands, ears, and whole heads—by dying clothes purple and wearing pearls.

What has the sea to do with clothes, or the waves and billows to do with woollen fleece? This rerum natura (i.e. the sea) does not properly receive us unless we are naked! (9.105)

Because the natural way to swim is without clothes on, it is manifestly unnatural to use the products of the sea to dye our clothes. A point like this may strike us as incredibly far-fetched: but that is because we cannot accept the premises on which it is based. For Pliny, it is one of numerous examples of the unnaturalness of mixing up the elements which nature has separated. The use of snow to chill food and drink outrages Pliny: for instance, luxuria actually serves oysters in snow, so confounding the products of the depths of the sea with that of the mountain tops (33.64), both domains in which man is trespassing.

Any sort of compound is regarded by Pliny as unnatural and luxurious. The products of nature are absolute and perfect in themselves. To collect up and mix by the scruple their potency is not a matter of human ingenuity, it is impudentia. It is bad enough to mix up perfumes for luxury, but to mix medical drugs is outrageous (22.118). The natural herbal medicines which Pliny advocates at such length are characterized by their natural simplicity: they are cheap and easy to prepare. It is human fraud and misplaced ingenuity that invented the workshops where compounds are prepared, with far-fetched and catastrophically expensive ingredients from the East and India (24.4-5). A shocking example of such a compound is Mithridates' theriake, a compound of 54 ingredients, none of them of the same weight, some in such minute proportions as 1/60th of a denarius. How on earth could something so complex and minutely ingenious be natural (29.23-24)?

The idea of the natural is thus intimately linked with simplicity, cheapness, and accessibility. The further you have to go for it, whether underwater, underground, or to the far east, and the more it costs, the less natural it can be. Luxury, by contrast, is characterized by superfluity. It is always excess to requirements. It is wasteful and destructive. Successively dipping cloth in two different shades of purple dye, or staining tortoiseshell to look like wood are typical examples of luxurious waste (9.139, 16.232). Perfumes, already objectionable because formed by compounding natural odours (13.1), are the supreme example of waste. The Persian 'royal perfume' consists of 25 different odours, and not a single one native to Italy and western Europe (13.17). At least you can say of pearls that they last, and can be passed down to your heirs; perfumes evaporate on the spot (13.20). But then there is that supreme example of wanton waste, by Cleopatra, who, per impossibile, dissolved her pearl earring in vinegar, to prove that she could consume 10 million sesterces in a single course. Antony had to admit himself beaten—a bad omen for a man on the eve of the battle of Actium (9.120).

The relationship between natura and luxuria is close and ambiguous. Luxury stands in competition with nature, trying to outdo her at her own game. In perfumes and colours, luxury competes with the breathtaking variety of nature. It is like a gladiatorial fight.

These days luxury and nature are matching their pairs for the fight—paria nunc componuntur et natura et luxuria depugnant. (21.46)

For nature herself is luxurious. Thus on trees in blossom:

Blossom is the sign of full spring and the rebirth of the year, blossom is the joy of the trees; then they put on a new and different appearance, and painted in varied colours, they luxuriate in rivalry—in certamen usque luxuriant. (16.95)

Obviously this sort of luxuriation by natura ludens is not bad. But nature can also damage herself by luxury. Vines have a strong tendency to grow too luxuriously, which needs to be controlled by pruning and even root trimming.

Nature's characteristic is to prefer fruition to survival … But the vine prefers its own survival to fruition, because the fruit is perishable: so it luxuriates ruinously (perniciose luxuriat), and exhausts itself instead of multiplying. (17.178)

Luxury is also a fault in corn, since excessive fertility makes the heads collapse under their own weight (18.154), and like human luxury it needs castigation—in this case by letting in grazing flocks when the corn is still in blade (161).

But what of man himself? Is not his own behaviour the result of nature? Pliny half acknowledges that there is a problem here, but he does not let it upset his scheme. Book 7 is dedicated to man as the one of nature's creations for whose benefit all else was created. And yet here another face of Nature is seen, the spiteful stepmother rather than the generous mother. For man is born naked and weeping—you must wait 40 days for the first smile. Man is born weak and defenceless, with a throbbing medulla, whereas animals are provided with the means of their own protection. Man has only doctrina, the ability to learn. On the debit side, man only is hampered by a string of weaknesses, grief and luxury, luctus and luxuria (a typical piece of Plinian wordplay), together with ambition, avarice, superstition, and fears about life after death. Lust, fear, and rage are particularly acute in man, and alone of all animals man is savage to his fellow man (7.1-5). Man's luxury is thus a natural failing; but that is no excuse. The scientific contemplation of nature should teach him to overcome this flaw.

I hope I have said enough to show that Pliny's declamations on luxury cannot be treated as excrescences in the Natural History. They form an essential part of the argument, the underpinning and justification for his scientific labours. I would now like to explore a little further the question of why luxury mattered so passionately to Pliny, and why he gave it this crucial strategic role in his argument. Our own difficulties with taking Roman protests against luxury seriously are marvellously summed up in Friedlaender's chapter on Roman luxury. In large part, the chapter is a catalogue not of Roman luxury, but of modern, that is to say eighteenth- and nineteenth-century, luxury; he sets out to demonstrate, and very convincingly, that in table luxury, dress, housing, furniture, and almost everything except the use of slaves, the wealth of the modern world allows it to outstrip the ancient. Two examples sum up the modesty of Roman standards.

Pliny protests at the way officers on the German frontier sent their troops to gather goose feathers for their luxurious feather beds (10.54): the Romans were unaware of the much softer eiderdown from Scandinavia. And Pliny declaims against the use of snow for cooling drinks, a blatant inversion of the natural order, making winter of high summer ('nihil homini sic quomodo rerum naturae placet', 19.55). Friedlaender draws attention to the massive scale of the export of ice from America, and its widespread use throughout Europe, and goes on (already in the 5th edition of 1881) to predict that 'probably refrigerators will soon be an indispensable household article' (p. 142).

It is nice to see things in perspective. By late twentieth-century standards, as Friedlaender might have foreseen, Roman luxury is incredibly primitive. But to say this does nothing to help understand what fuelled Roman indignation. To cast light on what I have called the strategic role of luxury in the Natural History, I want to offer observations on two issues: the relationship of luxury and social status at Rome, and the problem of establishing Roman cultural identity in a work of Greek science.

III. Luxury and Social Status

If we ask Pliny what is wrong with luxury, his answer is clearly that it is against the natural order. Yet we may suspect that this is a rationalization. His shopping list of articles of luxury is highly traditional, and agrees with the monotonous complaints of Romans from the elder Cato to Juvenal. What Pliny is doing is not using his science to reveal what is unnatural, and therefore luxurious, but using his science, with considerable ingenuity, to legitimate the list of what the Romans rejected on moral grounds. On the other hand, he makes some revealing remarks about the social function of luxury.

Like others, Pliny lays part of the blame for luxury on greed, avaritia. The belly is the organ which gives man most trouble, and consequently which most preoccupies doctors. For its sake avaritia seeks far and wide, and luxuria seasons things, for it ships sail to the Phasis, and the depths of the sea are explored (26.43). But even in the area of table luxury, greed explains very little—and certainly not the dissolution of pearls in vinegar. The real importance of luxury lies in its ability to mark social distinctions. Everything that makes luxuries 'unnatural'—their lack of ready availability, the rarity, expense, difficulty of procurement and foreignness, their distance from the ordinary, the everyday, the sheer ingenuity of their manufacture, their superfluity and wastefulness—gives them potency as social symbols. The absolute level of luxury, which concerned Friedlaender, is irrelevant; what matters is the contrasts within a society created by luxury. The social diffusion of the refrigerator now, or the commonness of gelati, has no bearing on the social exclusiveness of Nero's decoctum—distilled water chilled with snow (31.40)—a luxury which few but an emperor could afford. Prodigal wastefulness acquires meaning as a social gesture: the dissolution of pearls, the use of perfumes with 25 non-Italian ingredients, the expenditure of 8,000 HS on a single mullet (9.67), the burning of a year's production of incense at Poppaea's funeral (12.82), the literal trampling underfoot of wealth by sewing pearls to slippers (9.114). The social potency of luxury is both the driving force behind its spread, and the reason for protest. Pliny is well aware of the social implications, as one might expect of an author who thought he was writing, not just for the elite of literati, but for farmers and craftsmen (Pref. 6).

Pearl earrings of the type called crotalia, 'castanets', a cluster of two or three pearls tinkling together, had become so popular that even the poor desired them; the justification offered by women was that a pearl is a woman's lictor in public (9.114). Women wore gold even on their shoes. Pliny protests: is this to become a symbol that will create a third equestrian order between the plebs and the stola (here stola is apparently a symbol of senatorial rank, 33.40)? Purple is a luxury; but here Pliny is in some embarrassment, because it is a traditional Roman status symbol:

it distinguishes the senate from the equestrian, it is used in sacrifice … it is shot with gold in triumphal robes. For this reason we must excuse, the madness for purple—but that is no justification for the use of conchylia. (9.127)

An extended reflection on luxury status symbols comes in a passage on the use of the gold ring (33.29ff.). It is familiar to historians because of its bearing on the question of the definition of the ordo equester, yet for this purpose it proves curiously confused and frustrating. His exposition leaves it obscure whether the new definition of the equester ordo goes back to Gaius Gracchus' judiciary laws, to Cicero's propaganda, or to the new law of A.D. 22 which restricted the wearing of the anulus aureus to third generation free-born Romans worth 400,000 HS, and entitled to sit in the front stalls at the theatre. No matter. What is clear is that Pliny thinks that the use of the gold ring created a new division within Roman society, a tertius ordo between senate and plebs, and that the effects were regrettable—the law merely generated a vast volume of applications for the right to wear the ring, and paradoxically an upsurge in the number of freedmen sporting gold rings (32-33). An eques himself, Pliny no more approves of this than he does of the divisive use of gilded sandals by women.

Pliny's position is clear: he does not accept that wealth and luxury should define social dignity. He spells this out in his reflections on the corona graminca, the grass crown awarded to whoever saves the lives of a whole Roman army, of which Augustus in 30 B.C. was the latest recipient (22.5ff.). Instead of assigning auctoritas to luxuries like purple, it should be given to ignoble herbs (5). The grass crown is the highest military award, higher than gemmed or gold crowns (6). No particular grasses are used for this honour, but whatever grows on the spot, quamvis ignobiles (14). The fact leads Pliny to reflect on moral corruption—quis non mores iure castiget? Nature has endowed the herbs men so despise with life-saving medicinal powers, and the justification of his own vast scientific labours is that he reveals the value of what men despise (15-17). As often Pliny's thought appears to leap around illogically, yet in his own terms he is coherent. We have two competing social value-systems: one that of luxuria by which social standing is generated by flouting the natural order; the other prescribed by nature, and in which the traditional Roman valuesystem is firmly rooted.

The finest of his reflections to this effect is his excursus on the Roman market garden (19.49ff.). Here he champions the cause of the poor and protests against social differentiation in a manner worthy of Juvenal. The hortus was once the poor man's plot, and the plebs had no need of the macellum with all its fancy imported luxuries. Apart from all the things the poor man cannot buy, even the different types of bread set a gulf between the classes, alio pane procerum, alio volgi, with so many types graded down to the lowest of the low, ad infimam plebem. Cabbages and asparagus are beyond the purse of the poor—to think that thistles, cattle-fodder, should be unavailable to the plebs. Even water creates class-distinctions: the poor cannot afford snow (52-56). Cato is then invoked, the enthusiastic champion of cabbages: in his day herbs were used for condiments, and there was no need of pepper imported from the Indies. Yet an image remains of the happy old days: the plebs urbana used to grow window-boxes, to remind them of the countryside, until overcrowding and burglary finally cut out the view (59).

Roman protest against luxury is rooted in unease about untraditional ways of marking social status, and so of defining the social hierarchy. The real objection to luxury is that it upsets the social order. By offering new symbols to define social dominance, luxury threatens to redefine the social structure. In asserting a 'scientific' basis for Roman condemnations of luxury, Pliny seeks to convey an absolute validity, rooted in the natural and divine world order, on culturally specific Roman values. He uses his science to legitimate a traditional social ethic. What goes against the social order also goes against the natural order.

IV. Greek and Roman

There is one final angle from which I would like to consider Pliny's nature/luxury antithesis, and this is in relation to the tension between Greek and Roman culture. The chauvinism of Pliny's attitude to the Greeks is well-known. For him as for other Romans, the idea of luxury was closely linked with the idea of the sapping of traditional Roman morality by contact with Greek culture. The Greek East is identified as the continuing source of progressive moral decline. Lucius Scipio first brought luxury from Asia in his triumph of 189 B.C.; the conquest of Achaea in 146 was a further turning point in moral decline, compounded by the destruction of Carthage; Attalus' gift of Asia in 132 afflicted mores even more seriously (33.148-9). Eastern triumphs continued to spread corrupting fashions: as Scipio's brought in chased silver and bronze dining couches, and Mummius' Corinthian bronze and paintings, Pompey's brought the fashion for pearls and gems (37.12), and also for fluorspar cups (18). Here Pliny stands in a tradition going back to the earliest Roman annalists.

He leans particularly heavily on the elder Cato, as the touchstone of traditional Roman morality, and the virulent enemy of Hellenism. The locus classicus is his use of Cato's views on medicine (all Greek doctors have taken an oath to murder all Italians, but not before fleecing them for overpriced drugs) both to damn all Greek medicine in contrast to his own herbalism, and to generalize this into a warning of the corrupting effect of Greek literature and culture (29.14). Cato is elevated to the status of the prophet who foresaw it all: how practices recommended by doctors, such as using wrestlers' ointments, hot baths, and vomiting have ruined the morals of the empire. Medicine is the greatest cause for the lues morum, and Cato's words were oracular: satis esse ingenia Graecorum inspicere, non perdiscere—it was enough to browse through the works of Greek genius, without taking them to heart (26-27).

Such major and unambiguous onslaughts are reinforced by a constant stream of minor digs at the Greeks. The Greeks invented the use of olive oil for wrestling: those fathers of all vices (15.19). They thought of fertilizing earth by marl—what have the Greeks not tried (17.42)? The barbarian Persians not the Greeks invented the odious arts of magic: but did the Greeks have to make these arts their own (28.6)? Osthanes started a positive craze for magic in Greece (30.8). Greek science in general is characterized by misplaced ingenuity and vanity. What a pleasure it is, Pliny exclaims, to expose the lies of Greek vanity in Democritus' book on the chamaeleon, to which he ascribes absurd magical properties (28.112-8). There are endless names for gemstones, thanks to Greek vanity, and Pliny has no intention of enumerating them (37.195). But finest of all is the long chapter on the origins of amber. Here Pliny rubs his hands over the opportunity to expose the vanity of the Greeks, who have proposed a dazzling variety of explanations for amber, ranging from the tears of the sisters of Phaethon to the solidified urine of the lynx (37.31-41). The penetration of Roman military power to the Baltic has refuted them all, and Pliny has, thanks in particular to the Neronian procurator Julianus who brought back a considerable quantity of amber for the imperial games, a clear and accurate account to give (42-46).

There is more to this than the petty one-upmanship of a scholar scoring a point over his predecessors. The natura/luxuria antithesis which lies at the heart of the Natural History emerges as simultaneously a Roman v. Greek antithesis. The Romans, with their simple ancestral lore of herbalism, know how to live according to nature; the Greeks, with their misplaced scientific ingenuity devoted to the manufacture of noxious compounds, are the inventors of luxuria and the enemies of nature. This is all very well. But let us reflect for a moment: Pliny is writing a work of science, the first (he claims) in Latin, a Greek branch of learning, and based on an extensive reading of Greek sources, which he spells out proudly in the contents summary in book 1. Moreover, his guiding idea of the providential organizing of nature for man's benefit, is directly and with acknowledgement derived from Greek philosophy. Doesn't that make his attitude to the Greeks hypocrisy as well as chauvinism?

Of course it does. And the same is true for much of the Roman moralizing tradition of literature from Cato, through the antiquarians like Varro, Nepos, and Fenestella to whom Pliny owes so much, to Seneca and Juvenal. But it is worth asking why this is so. Almost all serious Latin prose literature, particularly of a philosophical and scientific nature, was confronted with the problem of reconciling two radically different intellectual and cultural traditions, or 'modes of discourse'. This has recently been illuminatingly discussed by Mary Beard in the case of Cicero's De Divinatione. His problem was to reconcile a Greek philosophical and scientific way of thinking and talking about the gods with a traditional Roman one. There was no real meeting point between the two discourses, and as a result, the dialogue splits into two contrasting books: one, in the mouth of Quintus Cicero, championing the Roman tradition of augury and divination by reference to Roman historical exempla, the other, in Marcus' mouth, representing the Greek philosophical arguments against predicting the future.

Pliny too faced a major problem in reconciling Greek scientific discourse with Roman ways of thought. Just how serious the problem was he reveals not only in the defensive remarks about those who despised his work on natural science as frivolous (above on 22.15), but from his awareness of the Roman failure to exploit the unparalleled opportunities which the Roman Empire opened up to science. The 'immense majesty of Roman peace' has opened the world to discoveries, and the Romans are a divine blessing to the world (27.3). Access to the Baltic source of amber is a fine example. And yet science does not flourish under Roman rule. More than twenty Greek authors had published studies of meteorology in the days when the world was torn apart with wars; but now that there is peace, and an emperor who actively promotes literature and studies, there is no more original research, and even what had been known is becoming forgotten (2.117). (Curiously, the remark ignores the recent publication of Seneca's Natural Questions.) Pliny blames moral decline: mores have grown old, and despite all the immense multitude who sail the seas, their pursuit is profit, not science (118). Pliny himself is the glowing exception to the rule: and of course he died in the cause of scientific observation.

What Pliny does not admit is that the failure of the Romans to make progress in science was the product of a profound lack of interest in and sympathy for scientific modes of thought. In the Roman mind, any scientific thought seems to have run up against the objection, Is it useful and beneficial? One example will suffice. Seneca in his Natural Questions (a closely parallel attempt to reconcile Greek science with Roman thought) is discussing the causes for the formation of snow. 'But,' objects an interlocutor, 'why are you wasting your labours on these trivia which do nothing to improve the reader? It is much more to the point for you to tell us why snow ought not be bought.' Seneca then launches into a Plinian diatribe against the use of snow, arguing that his scientific analysis does prove how shocking the purchase of snow is, since it consists more of air than of water: even the sale of water is shocking, let alone of air! Behind Pliny's back is always that Roman interlocutor, asking whether his science is relevant.

This is why I see Pliny's use of the nature/luxury antithesis as a strategy. He is a crusader, attempting to sell science to a highly resistant Roman audience. Why should they waste time in the trivial excogitations of Greek scientific ingenuity? Pliny approaches his task with Lucretian fervour. Science does matter, he believes, and he can demonstrate that it does fit in with Roman traditional thought. He needs to establish the Romanness of natura and interest in natura. He believes it to be profoundly useful and beneficial, a guide to the proper Roman way of life, in accord with nature. And by identifying the Greeks with luxuria, by demonstrating the superior morality and wisdom of Roman science, whether in accounting for amber or in using herbal medicine, he stands a chance of selling science to the Romans as something other than an unRoman activity.

Neither Pliny's moralizing nor his use of rhetoric, in my view, was out of place. Whether we wish to rate them as effective is another matter. Pliny seems to have failed in his central purpose: Roman science never did take off. But is he to blame for that?

Atti del convegno di Como, 27-29 settembre 1979 in 4 volumes, Tecnologia, economia e societia nel mondo romano (1980), Plinio il Vecchio sotto ilprofilo storico e letterario (1982), Plinio e la natura (1982), La citta antica come fatto di cultura (1983).

The proceedings of the 1985 Nantes conference have been issued twice, as Pline l'ancien, temoin de son temps (Salamanca-Nantes, 1987), and in the journal Helmantica 37 (1986), 8-320 and 38 (1987), 5-322.

Roger French and Frank Greenaway (eds.), Science in the Early Roman Empire. Pliny the Elder, his Sources and Influence (1986).

Guy Serbat in Aufstieg und Niedergang der romischen Welt II. 32.4 (1986), pp. 2091-7 well reviews recent work.

Of particular relevance to my argument are:

A. Locher, 'The structure of Pliny the Elder's Natural History' in French and Greenaway, pp. 20-29, a good defence of P.'s coherence.

S. Citroni Marchetti, 'Iuvare mortalem. L'ideale programmatico della Naturalis Historia di Plinio nei rapporti con il moralismo storico-diatribico', Atene e Roma n.s. 27 (1982), 124-48; together with 'Forme della rappresentazione del costume nel moralismo romano', Sienna Annali FLF 4 (1983), 41-114 on P. and Roman luxury thought.

Klaus Sallmann, 'La responsabilite de l'homme face a la natura' in Pline l'ancien, temoin de son temps (above), pp. 251-66 on P.'s 'environmentalism' and Stoic background; cf. P. Grimal, ibid., pp. 239-49.

Guy Serbat, 'II y a Grecs et Grecs! Quel sens donner au pretendu antihellenisme de Pline?', ibid., pp. 589-98.

Mary A. Beagon, Some Aspects of the Thought of Pliny the Elder (unpublished Oxford DPhil thesis, 1986) on the idea of nature as an organizing principle in the N.H. and on its philosophical background.

For Frank Goodyear's views on P.'s style see Cambridge History of Literature, Vol. ii. Latin Literature (1982), pp. 670-2; contrast J. F. Healy, 'The language and style of Pliny the Elder' in Filologia e forme letterarie. Studi offerti a Francesco della Corte vol. iv (1987), pp. 3-24. A much more positive evaluation of P. is likely to result from the work of the London (RHBNC) and Oxford Pliny Project under Professor Healy's direction, and his forthcoming Penguin Pliny translation and introduction.

For the conflict of Greek scientific and Roman 'discourse', see M. Beard, 'Cicero and divination: the formation of a Latin discourse', JRS 76 (1986), 33-46.