SOURCE: Nicholas Phillies Howe, "In Defense of the Encyclopedic Mode: On Pliny's Preface to the Natural History," in Latomus: Revue d'etudes Latines, Vol. 44, No. 3, July-September, 1985, pp. 561-76.

[In the following essay, Howe analyzes Pliny's vision of his own work as found in the Preface to Natural History, concluding that Pliny's defensive explanations of his historical recordings illustrate his lack of faith in the future.]

The study of Pliny's Natural History has been confined for the most part to assessing the accuracy of its contents and to tracing its sources. As if taking their cue from its shapelessness, most scholars of the Natural History seem more concerned with selected passages than with the work as a whole. The narrow focus of most Pliny scholarship is understandable, but it has led to certain regrettable omissions. For rarely are the larger questions asked: to what end did Pliny collect all of his facts? And more important, in what way did he envision the nature of his work? Although the answers to these questions may seem obvious, they were not equally so to Pliny, for he devotes considerable attention to them in his Preface¹.

Pliny deserves to be studied with a greater intellectual seriousness, one which responds more directly to his ethical and moral concerns. No doubt he was a compiler of extracts driven by a pedantic need to master his subject, but he was not like Melville's "Sub-Sub-Librarian" who collected his "extracts" for no appreciable reason. That his encyclopedia had for Pliny a higher purpose is evident after a careful reading of the Preface. Unlike most of his later readers, Pliny did not view the History merely as a repository of information, but rather as a didactic work necessary for the reformation of Rome. He was in this sense a man of deep convictions and prejudices rather than a disinterested naturalist. From his comments in the Preface on other Roman writers, both of prose and poetry, one may deduce these opinions and thereby better understand his reasons for writing an encyclopedia. In doing so, one may also elicit the relation of Pliny to his age as well as the ethical implications of his devotion to learning.

If viewed in its true genre, as an explanation and defense of the encyclopedic mode, Pliny's Preface is a work of high interest, for it is virtually unique in the history of the Latin encyclopedia during antiquity and the middle ages. In no comparable work do we find the encyclopedist considering the idea of his work with such anxiety. The Preface is deeply problematical because it is shaded throughout by Pliny's elaborate self-deprecation and defensive irony, directed towards his own competence and the place of his work in the Roman literary world. To some degree, these are the expected features of any Latin prose preface, but Pliny adopts them skillfully to suggest his own conservative ideals as well as his hostility towards imaginative literature².

These features of the Preface are best considered not in relation to other Latin prose prefaces but rather in relation to the literary world surrounding Pliny. He writes with the sense of a man who knows that his work does not accord with contemporary taste. As an encyclopedist, he had the misfortune to live in a thriving literary culture which valued the poet above all other writers. No doubt Pliny relegated himself to a peripheral position by choosing to compile an encyclopedia, but his austere choice exacted a certain price, that his work would not immediately command widespread readership and respect³. Several centuries after Pliny's death, such later encyclopedists as Cassiodorus Senator and Isidore of Seville encountered no such rival in imaginative literature; to the contrary, the impoverished literary culture of Ostrogothic Italy and Visigothic Spain drove these men to compile their summae. But Pliny lived in a learned age that included Columella, Celsus and Mela. Towards such writers, Pliny expresses no hostility in the Preface, nor had he reason to do so. He knew that his own "compilation far surpassed all others extant in its range"⁴. On his chosen ground, then, Pliny was master, but as the example of the poets demonstrated, not all writers chose his as the common ground. The poets may have crowded the didactic writers to the edge of the literary world, but Pliny recognized that it had not always been so. By seeking his ideal writer from the earlier days of Rome rather than from the Golden Age, Pliny asserts the primacy of the prose writer over the poet in both time and honor. In the Preface, he reveres Cato and Varro, he acknowledges Livy, and all but ignores Virgil. Even for its time, this was not a wholly successful revision of Roman literary history: the poets were not to be displaced quite so easily. As Tore Janson has noted, it was acceptable for members of the Roman upper classes, following the example of Cato, "to write and publish, but only about such things as could be said to further, directly or indirectly, the interests of the community"⁵. It is in this tradition that Pliny places himself, and in his Natural History the earlier Roman conception of the useful work—whether as treatise or, more modestly, as handbook—found its fullest expression.

This belief that the writer must devote himself to the public good is affirmed by Pliny most forcefully in this passage from the Preface: Equidem ita sentio, peculiar em in studiis causam eorum esse, qui difficultatibus uictis utilitatem iuuandi praetulerint gratiae placendi, idque iam et in aliis operibus ipse feci et profiteor mirari me T. Liuium, auctorem celeberrimum, in historiarum suarum, quas repetit ab origine urbis, quodam uolumine sic orsum: iam sibi satis gloriae quaesitum, et potuisse se desidere, ni animus inquies pasceretur opere (Pref 16)⁶. Pliny chides Livy, however, for his motive in writing the History of Rome, stating that he should not have sought to quell his restless mind, but rather should have rendered himself useful to the Roman ciuitas. By distinguishing here between works of didactic, communal value and works of pleasure, Pliny defines his personal criterion for valuing a given author. This criterion is not subtle or imaginative, but to the contrary, may well seem merely self-serving. What draws our attention is less the nature of the criterion than the rigor with which Pliny upholds it—even to chastizing Livy, that most celebrated of authors, for his statement of purpose.

Of those writers who shared his conception of the world and of the writer's place in it, Pliny was drawn most obviously to Varro. By paying him a gracious, if subtle, compliment in the Preface, Pliny acknowledges his debt to Varro and locates his own work in the proper tradition. Varro was for Pliny, as he was later for Cassiodorus, "the greatest of Latin writers in practical knowledge"⁷. Moreover, as Pliny knew well, there runs through Varro's work a troubled awareness of being a citizen during the crisis of the Roman Republic. His work on agriculture, De Re Rustica, places him firmly in the tradition of the citizen-farmer. His treatise does contain much valuable advice on the subject derived, as he explains, from three sources: quae ipse in meis fundis colendo animaduerti, et quae legi, et quae a peritis audii⁸. But Varro also intended his work as a moral allegory, in which the farmer becomes the ideal standard for the Roman ciuitas. Fritz Saxl has described the ideology of Varro's work as belonging to that of a "Roman antiquarian looking at his world"⁹. Varro shared with other conservative Romans a distrust of literature because it encouraged a Greek decadence antithetical to the Roman uir bonus. Quite fittingly, Varro himself became for later writers an image of the uir bonus standing against the corruption of his time. This conviction that a writer must devote himself to the common good was Varro's most valuable philosophical legacy to Pliny. It allowed Pliny to elevate the study of the natural world above the realm of mere curiousity to that of moral statement¹⁰.

In a less exalted fashion, Pliny was indebted to Varro as well for much of the substance of the Natural History. Of the numerous authorities cited by Pliny in Book I, Varro's name appears most frequently. Pliny drew on him for each of the thirty-six substantive books of the History, except Books IX, XXIV, XXV, XXVII and XXXII¹¹. Given the virtually universal compass of Pliny's encyclopedia, this reliance on Varro is striking evidence that both in idea and fact Varro became for Pliny the image of authority¹².

Listed as an authority for only fourteen books, Cato does not approach Varro in number of citations. Yet he is the authority who lies in turn behind Varro¹³. At several points in the Preface, Pliny seems at pains to praise Cato although the context does not demand it. In Preface 9, he refers to Cato as that illum ambitus hostem. More specifically, Pliny establishes Cato as the model author, for he did not deign to respond to his critics when his treatise on military discipline was attacked (Pref. 30). Pliny employs with pleasure and considerable flourish Cato's term—uitilitigatores—for those critics who seek to win glory by savaging another man's writing (Pref. 32). For Pliny, Cato's attitude was proper and modest. Having learned his soldiering under Africanus and Hannibal, Cato was the authority on the subject and hence could rise above the attacks of petty critics. Coming at the conclusion of the Preface, this allusion to Cato signals Pliny's own sense that he has become an authority himself. It suggests too the aloof response that he wished to display towards hostile readers¹⁴.

Although Pliny's literary models were drawn for an earlier Rome, he should not be made into a faded figure of the Republic born a century too late. In its sense of scale and in its desire for order, his imagination had been thoroughly shaped by the idea and the presence of empire. It led him to define his task as one of organizing vast quantities of previously unrelated material concerning the natural world. The work is collective in spirit rather than individual, a fact which Pliny acknowledges by citing his authorities for each book. In this regard, Pliny's great achievement was to impose an order on the disorder of his subject, precisely as generations of Romans had done along the frontier. And it is in the language of such conquests that Pliny prescribes the motives Livy should have had for writing his History of Rome: profecto enim populi gentium uictoris et Romani nominis gloriae, non suae, composuisse illa decuit, maius meritum esset operis amore, non animi causa, perseuerasse et hoc populo Romano praestitisse, non sibi (Pref 16). Pliny was thoroughly a man of the empire in his political life, but in this he showed fortunately a greater skepticism of mind than in his natural history. He knew well from his own experience with Nero that not all emperors were to be served. As Pliny the Younger reports: 'Dubii sermonis octo' scripsit sub Nerone nouissimis annis, cum omne studiorum genus paulo liberius et erectius periculosum seruitus fecisset¹⁵. Like other men out of sympathy with the politics of their day, Pliny saw a moral and civic value in scholarship. He could even turn art history into a vehicle to express political opinions¹⁶. As J. Isager has observed of Pliny's art history: "Vespasian, Titus and their predecessor and ideal, Augustus, are praised, while with the exception of Claudius, the emperors in between are severely criticized. As a result of his political loyalty and friendship with Vespasian and Titus—and without jeopardizing his stoic outlook—Pliny makes propaganda for the Flavian emperors." Of these intervening emperors, Pliny fittingly "casts aspersions on Nero in particular"¹⁷.

We need thus to remind ourselves of the obvious, for it explains much about the Preface. The natural historian was not for Pliny a disinterested observer of the world around him; rather he was committed to a faith that knowledge was the sole trustworthy guide to human conduct. And for a Roman of his time, this was not a question to be considered abstractly, but rather one to be translated into political behavior. This explains Pliny's choice of Titus as the dedicatee of the Natural History. It also explains Pliny's advancement in the History of M. Agrippa and Cicero as figures of the Roman ideal of scholar-statesman¹⁸. In life and in writing, Pliny could not divorce knowledge from pragmatic purposes, nor could he follow an emperor who ruled unguided by knowledge.

It is curious, then, to see Pliny, why rarely reveals a taste for poetry, open his dedication with these lines from the least sober of all Latin poets, Catullus: namque tu solebasl nugas esse aliquid meas putare. If we ignore the authorship of these lines, they might seem entirely proper for Pliny's purpose, for they are drawn from the dedicatory poem to Cornelius which opens the Carmina. The final line and a half of Catullus' poem (quod, o patrona uir go,/ plus uno maneat perenne saeclo) is reason enough for Pliny to allude to it in his Preface, since the desire for immortality is as acceptable a motive for a natural historian as it is for a poet. Yet Pliny's allusion extends beyond this matter and serves to remind the reader that Catullus uses the word nugas because his poems are of little value if compared to Cornelius' projected history of the world in three volumes, doctis, Iuppiter, et laboriosis. On Catullus' part, this is a gracious compliment, although one expects that even its recipient suspected the poet's true preference. But Pliny reads Catullus' line without the playful irony; for him, an historical work, even in potentio, is of greater value than a batch of lyrics. Moreover, by alluding to Catullus' nugas, Pliny is able to maintain a properly deferential attitude towards the Natural History, for it is his own nugae in size and substance if compared to his unpublished History of Our Times (Pref 20). It is also a "trifle" because this other history would be a more fitting offering for a future emperor¹⁹.

This quotation from Catullus might then seem to be Pliny's version of the gracious compliment, had he not deliberately altered Catullus' line (from meas esse aliquid putare nugas)²⁰. As Pliny notes (Pref 1), this alteration makes the line less harsh to the ear, but this seems a rather lame explanation. In fact, Pliny's rewriting of the line affects sense rather more than sound. It throws the crucial word, nugas, into sharper relief by placing it at the beginning of the line. As Catullus uses nugas, it means 'trifles', a modesty on his part which fools no reader. But as Pliny uses it, the word gains some of the connotations it has in Plautus and other writers, namely 'jokes' or 'jests'. By misquoting the line as he does, Pliny destroys the disarming ironic tension of the line and thereby subtly imbues nugas with this further meaning. His version of the line also places meas is a less prominent position. In keeping with the criticism of Livy cited above, this calculated slighting of the personal pronoun signals Pliny's belief in the impersonality of the author. Through his rearrangement of the line, Pliny turns it against Catullus, as if thereby to convict the poet of frivolity in his own words. Lest he appear as something of a boor, however, Pliny is careful not to seem insensitive to the niceties of poetry, as his criticism of Catullus' ear implies: ille enim, ut scis, permutatis prioribus syllabis duriusculum se fecit quam uolebat existimari a Veraniolis suis et Fabullis (Pref 1). This is one of the few outright sarcasms Pliny permits himself in the Preface. Veranius and Fabullus, we remember, were those friends of Catullus who sent him napkins from Spain, the same that were stolen by Asinius Marrucinus. To allude to this poem with its references to a charming, if oversophisticated, dinner party is also to remind the reader of the difference between Catullus' audience and Pliny's. The encyclopedist thus wishes to seem both an informed judge of poetic technique and a critic of its ultimate triviality. Poetry is best written, Pliny implies through his allusion to Veranius and Fabullus, as a means of recovering one's linen, the nugae of the dinner table.

If this reading of Pliny's version of Catullus seems too subtle for a prosaic encyclopedist and conventional civil servant, we should remember that in the Preface he employs his own set of ironic conventions. In the first two sections alone, he refers to his licentiore epistula, to his petulantia, and to alia procaci epistula nostra. These suggestions of intimacy between Pliny and Titus are borne out further when, in the Preface, he refers to his use of army slang (castrense uerbum), to their service together in the military, and lastly to the familiar tone of his Preface: itaque cum ceteris in ueneratione tui pateant omnia alia, nobis ad colendum te familiarius audacia sola superest: hanc igitur tibi imputabis et in nostra culpa tibi ignosces (Pref 4). In these passages, Pliny displays his own skill at the graceful, familiar dedication—saved from sycophancy, as it must be, by the lightness of the irony. His misquotation of Catullus then does not proceed from his failure to understand the rules of the game. As a writer, he is not deaf to the subtle music of irony, but he is also not the sort of writer who enriches a pre-existing irony (Catullus' nugas) with his own ironic reading. Instead, he cancels out Catullus' irony so that only the literal sense remains, and thus establishes his own hierarchy of literary values.

To Varro, a writer of his own school, Pliny pays homage with an irony of the same sort he denies to Catullus. In describing his daily routine, Pliny writes: dies uobis inpendimus, cum somno ualetudinem computamus, uel hoc solo praemio contenti, quod, dum ista, ut ait M. Varro, musinamur, pluribus horis uiuimus profecto enim uita uigilia est (Pref. 18). By doing his scholarly work, he is awake for more hours of the day, sleeping less and living a more productive life. (No Lesbia for him!) As we know from Pliny the Younger, his uncle slept very little so as to have more time for reading and writing²¹, And it is doing this work which he describes as musinamur. His use of this verb is clearly a respectful allusion to Varro and to his committment to the scholarly life, but it also seems a further, uncharitable allusion to the nugas of Catullus. Pliny delights in Varro's expression because it is so obviously an ironic self-deprecation and because it shows a becoming modesty on his part to allude to it in the Preface. Writers of useful works, Pliny implies, have the right to speak of them in a trifling way, for no serious reader would judge Pliny or Varro as writers of nugae, any more than he would treat Catullus with undue seriousness. It is almost as if Pliny resented Catullus' larceny of a trope to which he had no right, because by doing so the poet appropriated some of the honor that should be reserved for the serious prose writer.

Why then does Pliny bother with Catullus at all? He might have stated explicitly that history of any sort is intrinsically a higher and more valuable art than is poetry. To do so, however, would have led Pliny into a polemical tone inappropriate to a dedication. He was bound to some extent by the conventions of the genre, especially if we consider the recipient of the work.

But there was another, far more compelling reason, I suspect, for his indirectness: the prestige enjoyed by poetry as a genre in the Rome of his day. This elevation of poetry represented for Pliny a corruption of traditional Roman standards of literature, and more fundamentally, of life. Poetry was the "Greek" art for him, and was thus never free of the taint of decadence. It would be too extreme to say that Pliny attributed the horror of Nero's reign to poets influenced by Greek culture, though he may well have felt that both were symptoms of the same taste for luxury afflicting Rome.

On several occasions in the Preface, Pliny reveals his distaste for Greek culture. He alludes mockingly to the alluring titles given to their works by Greek authorities: at cum intraueris, di deaeque, quam nihil in medio inuenies! (Pref. 24). A little later, he refuses to apologize for his own prosaic title but wishes rather that it be taken in the spirit of those Greek sculptors who signed their works with provisional titles (pendenti titulo) such as APELLES FACIEBAT. As he explains, he chooses to do so for this reason: ne in totum uidear Graecos insectari (Pref. 26). His only friendly gesture toward Greek culture is limited to imitating this admirably modest practice. This gesture is perhaps more telling for what it implies than for what it expresses, namely, that otherwise Pliny can do quite well without Greek culture, except of course for utilitarian works. Towards these, he openly expresses his indebtedness in the list of authorities in Book I, albeit under the heading of externis.

Pliny's distrust of the personal lyric springs from his more fundamental hostility towards Greek culture. Since the lyric has no larger, public function and is not meant to further the good of the state, it was for Pliny trivial in content but also dangerous in nature because of its unwarranted prestige. If we examine Pliny's relation toward a venerated, non-lyric poet such as Virgil, we discover a curious response: Pliny felt the same distrust towards him as he did towards the lyric poets. There is a difference of degree, however, in this distrust, for if he mocked Catullus, he suspected Virgil. As R. T. Bruère has argued, Pliny felt himself to be a rival of the epic poet: "… despite a professed admiration for Virgil, Pliny is at pains to censure and amend the poet's statements whenever he can find a pretext for so doing. His manner of taking exception is often captious and ill-tempered, and on a number of occasions he misrepresents, seemingly without conscious intent, what the poet has written and then finds fault with the supposed mistakes"²².

This animosity may be traced to the fact that Pliny, like Virgil, wrote a representative national work expressing the Roman ethos. He chose to do so in the form of a "nationalistic encyclopedia" because of his conviction that the writer must benefit the common good in an immediate and practical fashion rather than in a poetic celebration of the origins and history of Rome. To quote Bruère again: "The Natural History is Pliny's attempt to achieve in a hardheaded Roman way, the same end that Virgil had sought to accomplish by his poetry"²³.

This animosity on Pliny's part may be traced to jealousy of some unspecified sort, according to Bruère, which suggests a meanness of motive hardly to his credit. I suspect, however, that this rivalry should be traced to Pliny's belief that the choice of a literary genre implicitly expressed other non-literary and perhaps political views. The national work should not be poetic, for by this very choice of genre, the national character had been violated. The Roman spirit should be celebrated in its proper form—in utilitarian prose.

It is not surprising then that Pliny should mock Catullus as he does, for the lyric poet cannot claim, as could Virgil, the partial defense of having chosen a public theme. Moreover, Pliny did take from Virgil's epic the conception of a national work. It is this note which Pliny first sounds in the Preface: Libros Naturalis Historiae, nouicium Camenis Quiritium tuorum opus, natos apud me proxima fetura licentiore epistula narrare constitui tibi, iucundissime Imperator (Pref. 1). To claim the Natural History or a work of its type as a "novel task for the native muses of your Roman citizens"²⁴ was not strictly true, as Pliny well knew. This sort of task was quite traditional for a Roman writer, as the works of Cato and Varro demonstrate. The notion that a work of this type and this scale was national in spirit and purpose was, however, new. By speaking of a new task for the native muses, he also invokes the older, more accepted task of the native muses, that exemplified for the reader by the Aeneid. On one occasion in the Preface, Pliny mentions Virgil in a seemingly complimentary fashion. In comparing modern authorities with their older sources, Pliny explains, he discovered that many copied without acknowledgement or shame: non illa Vergiliana uirtute, ut certarent (Pref. 22). This is hardly the sort of admiration that most poets would feel their due—to imitate in order to challenge. This is yet another reminder by Pliny that Roman culture had been influenced too greatly by the Greeks, for it was Homer whom Virgil sought to challenge.

Bruère also suggests that Pliny ends the History itself with a "provocative echo" of Georgics, II, 173, as a confident expression that "he had vindicated his challenge to the poet"²⁵. If the Preface contains no direct mention of the Georgics, it does allude quite significantly to the genre and substance of Virgil's poem, de re rustica. Recognizing that a work of this sort might well seem an unusual offering for a future emperor, Pliny excuses this oddity with a charming analogy: uerum dis lacte rustici multaeque gentes et mola litant salsa qui non habent tura, nec ulli fuit uitio deos colere quoquo modo posset (Pref. 11). One may pass over this sentence all too quickly, noting at most that it recalls a writer such as Varro or Columella. Yet Pliny suggests something here more important than his literary relations. The analogy he offers is a defense of the same rural life which it evokes, and thus affirms the ideal of simplicity by which he lived. Pliny here is emphatically unapolegetic for the unsophisticated nature of his work. Rather, he asserts those moral values of an older Rome, which could still honor the fiction of the citizen-farmer. As such, he offers the Natural History as a contribution to the moral regeneration of Rome. Believing as he did that virtue was formed upon knowledge, Pliny did not write a moral treatise but rather a work valuable for the preliminary process of practical education. If knowledge of the world around him would make for wisdom in a man, then Pliny would provide the knowledge necessary for that wisdom²⁶. Those readers who lament Pliny's lack of scientific objectivity are wrong to do so. He was not Linnaeus because he could not afford the luxury of compiling a taxonomy.

This interpretation of Pliny's analogy is further borne out if we recall that it was written for Titus. At this point, we may grasp that a work of natural history was, according to Pliny's scheme of things, a singularly appropriate work to offer to a future emperor²⁷. In his work, Pliny was not simply treating of the natural world, he was also evoking the place and role of the emperor who was to rule over that world²⁸. That he does so implicitly may perhaps be explained by their long friendship, dating back to their days together as comrades during the German campaign. We may fairly suppose that Titus was not unfamiliar with Pliny's beliefs before he read the Preface. He would thus have recognized the Preface and the Natural History as Pliny's appeal that he maintain the ideal of the uir bonus in public life. Nor would Pliny have been his only master in this teaching, since his father, Vespasian, had won praise for the quality of his life. Pliny reminds Titus that he should uphold and honor his father's humble origins and simple faith. In short, that he not become another Nero. That Titus may not have followed the course urged upon him by Pliny in later life suggests tragically the inadequacy of Pliny's counsel for a Roman of the first century A.D. In this praise of simplicity, Pliny is not unlike such other moralists of the Empire as Tacitus and Juvenal. But as an encyclopedist, he did not have the more immediate resources of exemplary history or satire. Only on rare occasions did he become an explicit moralist; for the most part he relied on an implicit belief in the efficacy of knowledge. In a very real sense, he chose the wrong tactic, for it was one likely to appeal only to those of a learned temperament. He seems, in this deliberate refusal to enter into open battle, a man lost in his own time.

Yet with admirable thoroughness, Pliny upholds this philosophical ideal of simplicity, extending it even to his own prose. His rhetorical strategy of simplicity is, however, colored by a certain defensive, edgy tone. After alluding to the offerings of rural worshippers, Pliny describes his History as a work of a lighter sort: nam nec ingenii sunt capaces, quod lioqui in nobis perquam mediocre erat, neque admittunt excessus aut orationes sermonesue aut casus mirabiles uel euentus uarios, incunda dictu aut legentibus blanda sterili materia (Pref. 12). This comment comes as something of a shock, for if anyone writes of the marvelous or the unusual in nature, it is Pliny. Yet, as usual, he is not deluding himself or the careful reader; his encyclopedia is not a work of literature and hence can give little pleasure in its style. It is not the product of talent, of which he has little, but rather of study and diligence. The elegance Pliny describes in Preface 12 is not one of content but rather of style, or more precisely, of poetic style.

One must consider, however, Pliny's reasons for discussing the question of style at all. No contemporary reader would regard his compilation as a work of literary delight; he would have to wait eighteen-hundred years for such a sympathetic reader in Oscar Wilde²⁹. The explanation may well lie in Pliny's pride and his consequent refusal to court popularity through an elaborately literary style. That would mean compromising the dignity of his achievement by a vulgar appeal.

This stylistic austerity has its counterpart in Pliny's description of his subject: sterili materia: rerum natura, hoc est uita, narratur, et haec sordidissima sui parte ac plurimarum rerum aut rusticis uocabulis aut externis, immo barbaris etiam, cum honoris praefatione ponendis (Pref 13). Whatever standard of modesty a preface may require of its author, this statement clearly exceeds it. Moreover to modern readers (and one suspects to his contemporaries as well), Pliny's use of sterili is more than a surprise. No subject could be less unfruitful than the natural world, both because the principle of endless fecundity is everywhere present in it and also because no single author could, as Pliny himself suggests (Pref. 15), do it justice. Yet if we read Pliny carefully, we may see that for him the natural world was sterili in a very special way: it could not be accurately written about in a poetic or rhetorical style. It is sterile because it does not give birth to literary creation or, at least, should not. Instead, the naturalist must resort to language spoken by rustics and barbarians, even though it would appear inelegant to cultivated readers. For Pliny, this was not simply the necessary language, but also the only appropriate one for his History—the language of rustics as they made simple offerings to the gods³⁰.

At this point in the Preface, Pliny returns to the sentiment expressed at its beginning, that he has assumed a new but necessary task: praeterea iter est non trita auctoribus uia nec qua peregrinari animus expetat, nemo apud nos qui idem temptauerit, nemo apud Graecos qui unus omnia ea tractauerit (Pref 14). In this there can be no doubt of his animus towards the Greeks, at whose expense, tellingly, he boasts of his accomplishment. It would appear then that Pliny conceived of his work as unique not only in Roman culture (Pref. 1) but also in those others known to him. Thus, as he explains, the Natural History is an attempt to fulfill in part the ideal described by the Greeks as τη̂ς έγχνχλίον πᾷιδείᾷς in which he encountered numerous difficulties as a writer: res ardua uetustis nouitatem dare, nouis auctoritatem, obsoletis nitorem, obscuris lucem fastiditis gratiam, dubiis fidem, omnibus uero naturam et naturae sua omnia, itaque etiam non assecutis uoluisse abunde pulchrum atque magnificum est (Pref. 15).

To some extent, Pliny brought these difficulties on himself by abjuring the resources of the rhetorical style. If one accepts the restraints of the plain style, as he claims to do here, albeit in a quite rhetorical fashion, then the obscure can be illumed and the marvelous made credible only through the logic and clarity of the writer's presentation. His success in this regard is, of course, a topic for another study.

From this reading of the Preface, Pliny emerges as an embattled conservative searching for the revival of an older, simpler way of life. On certain subjects, especially literature, his opinions extend beyond the conservative; in his belief that the ills of the present may be cured by the restoration of a lost world, he reveals himself as a reactionary aristocrat. This quality may seem deeply unattractive today, but we must also attribute his greatness as an encyclopedist to it. With his faith in the past achievements of man, Pliny could devote himself to recording these in his encyclopedia. To this end he quotes Piso's dictum that thesauros oportet esse, non libros (Pref. 17). And, more crucially, having little faith in the present or future, he committed himself to preserving the past, in which lay salvation of a sort. The case of Pliny illustrates well Fritz Saxl's observation that the appearance of an encyclopedia signals "the fact that a period of learning is approaching its end"³¹. To this keen remark, one might add that Pliny's sense of an ending was less antiquarian than apocalyptic, for nowhere in the Preface does he reveal any suggestion that there will be another such period of learning.

As his nephew noted, Pliny's interest in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius began as scientific curiosity but turned swiftly to rescuing the inhabitants of the devastated cities³². In this sequence of action, the duality of Pliny's life is captured vividly. In those last days, Pliny must have felt himself one with his ideal Romans—M. Agrippa, Varro, Cicero—in heroically serving the Roman state. Yet one remembers that Greek culture in Rome, so beautifully contained in these same ruined cities, long outlived this austerely reactionary man³³.

Notes

¹ The Preface has received little critical attention; the extensive bibliography prepared recently by Klaus Sallmann lists four titles on the Preface. See his Plinius der Altere, in Lustrum, 18, 1975, p. 5-299. Two important studies not listed by Sallmann should be noted: Pierre Grimal, Encyclopedies antiques, in Cahiers d'Histoire Mondiale, 9, 1965-66, p. 459-82; and J. Fontaine, Isidore de Seville et la mutation de l'Encyclopedisme Antique, Ibid., p. 519-38.

² For a study of the conventional nature of the Preface, see Tore Janson, Latin Prose Prefaces: Studies in Literary Conventions, Stockholm, 1964 (Studia Lat. Stockholmiensia XIII), p. 75ff., 95ff., 102ff., 125 and 127.

³ Pliny did not have the good fortune to live in eighteenth-century France when, perhaps for the only time in history, the writing of an encyclopedia was at the center of intellectual life. As a naturalist, he seems to have enjoyed little honor or fame among Latin writers until he was highly praised by St. Jerome. On his posthumous reputation, see Andre Labhart, Quelques temoignages d'auteurs latins sur la personnalite et l'ceuvre de Pline l'Ancien, in Melanges offerts a Max Niedermann Neuchatel, 1944, p. 105-14.

⁴ D. J. Campbell, Naturalis Historiae Liber Secundus: A Commentary, Aberdeen, 1936, p. 2.

⁵ Janson, p. 29.

⁶ The edition of Pliny used throughout is that by C. Mayhoff, Naturalis Historiae, Libri XXXVII, 5 vols, Stuttgart, 1905-1909, rprt. 1967.

⁷Cassiodoris Senatoris Institutiones, ed. R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford, 1937, II, vi. 1. The translation is from Leslie W. Jones, Cassiodorus Senator: An Introduction to Divine and Human Readings, New York, 1969 (Columbia University Records of Civilization).

⁸ See B. I. i., 8-11 in Marcus Terentius Varro on Agriculture, ed. and trans. H. B. Ash, Cambridge, Mass., 1934 (Loeb Classical Library).

⁹ Fritz Saxl, Illustrated Medieval Encyclopedias in his Lectures, London, 1957, p. 228-54; this reference is to p. 229.

¹⁰ Grimal, p. 474, writes: "Dans une certaine mesure, 11 est permis de penser que l'ceuvre de Varron est issue de cette sorte d'angoisse qui saisit alors les Romains et les invita a se repenser eux-memes. Aussi n'est-il pas etonnant que Varron ait symbolise, pendant des siecles, 1'esprit de Rome meme, et que saint Augustin ait a son egard une si lourde dette".

¹¹ The absence of Varro as a source for these books may be explained by their subject matter: aquatic mammals (IX), drugs derived from various vegetative sources (XXIV, XXV, XXVII) and drugs derived from aquatic mammals (XXXII).

¹² Among the many complimentary references to Varro in the text of the Natural History, two are particularly noteworthy. In VII, xxx, 115, Pliny notes two honors granted to Varro: the erection of his statue in the library of Asinius Pollio and the bestowal of a naval crown on him by Pompey the Great. In XVI, ii, 7, Pliny repeats the story of Varro's military honors and adds that M. Agrippa (see n. 18 below) received a similar honor from Augustus. For a brief discussion of the stylistic similarities between Varro and Pliny, see Campbell, p. 5.

¹³ On Pliny's relation to Cato, see Labhart, p. 105. Grimal, p. 464, writes: "II lui (Cato) appartenait de rassembler en une veritable 'encyclopedie' les connaissances considerees comme fondamentales pour atteindre et realiser l' iddal romain de l'honnete homme, uir bonus…".

¹⁴ One does wonder though if this would have been his reaction had he lived to see the publication of his work.

¹⁵ See Pliny the Younger, Letter to Baebius Macer, III, v.

¹⁶ Pliny's debt to Varro for materials on art history is discussed by Raymond V. Schoder, S. J., in his "Preface" to E. Sellers, The Elder Pliny's Chapters on the History of Art, trans. K. Jex-Blake, Chicago, 1976, rprt. On p. K, Schoder considerably modifies Sellers' earlier claim that Varro was Pliny's sole source for this material, but he does not deny that he was used for some of the books of the Natural History.

¹⁷ J. Isager, The Composition of Pliny's Chapters on the History of Art, in Analecta Romana Instituti Danici, 6, 1971, p. 49-62; see esp. p. 58-9.

¹⁸ For Agrippa, see Mary Ann T. Bums, Pliny's Ideal Roman, in Classical Journal, 59, 1964, p. 253-58; for Cicero, see Robert T. Wolverton, The Encomium of Cicero in Pliny the Elder, in Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Honor of Berthold Louis Ullman, ed. Charles Henderson, Jr., Rome, 1964, Vol. I, p. 159-64.

¹⁹ Janson, p. 75, states that Pliny mentions this other history "to cheer [Titus] up by referring to the great laudatio that was to come. As in Vergil and Statius, the theme has the double function of promising and postponing the treatment of the subject most dear to the Emperor". As I argue later, however, Pliny's reason for dedicating the Natural History to Titus was in nature more instructional than complimentary.

²⁰ C. J. Fordyce, ed., Catullus, Oxford, 1973, Poem 1. 1. 7.

²¹ Pliny the Younger, Letter to Baebius Macer, III, v.

²² R. T. Bruere, Pliny the Elder and Virgil, in Classical Philology, 51, 1956, p. 228-46; see esp. p. 245.

²³ Bruere, p. 245.

²⁴ Translation by H. Rackham, Pliny: Natural History, Vol. d, Cambridge, Mass., 1967, p. 3 (Loeb Classical Library).

²⁵ Bruere, p. 245.

²⁶ Grimal, p. 481, writes: "Curieux de toutes choses, penseur optimiste, il est profondement persuade que la connaissance est possible, souhaitable, et salutaire pour l'esprit et l'ame des hommes, que, le monde etant mieux connu, les mccurs humaines deviendront meilleures." See also R. Lenoble, Les obstacles epistemologiques dans l'Histoire Naturelle de Pline, in Thales, 8, 1952, p. 87-106.

²⁷ For an opinion to the contrary, see Janson, p. 103: "… there is no natural contact at all between the author or his work and the distinguished recipient. The dedication theme then loses its original meaning and the preface is filled with fictions, sometimes actual absurdities".

²⁸ We may attribute this combination of political morality and natural history at least in part to Pliny's Stoicism. As Pierre Grimal, p. 479, has stated: "De meme, on peut, sans doute, expliquer par l'influence du stoïcisme, les frequentes et violentes declamations de Pline contre le luxe, la corruption des mceurs, tous les 'peches' que les hommes commettent contre la Nature et qui provoquent leur malheur".

²⁹ In his The Decay of Lying, Oscar Wilde placed Pliny's work in the rarified company of "Tacitus at his best", Suetonius, Froissart, Malory, etc., for in them "facts are either kept in their proper subordinate position, or else excluded on the general ground of dullness." He laments that in the modern age, "the chilling touch [of facts] is over everything". See The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann, New York, 1970, p. 304.

³⁰ Campbell, p. 30, takes a less charitable view of Pliny's style: "In this he is like Varro, continuous reading had destroyed their capability to produce a respectable style …".

³¹ Saxl, p. 228.

³² See Pliny the Younger, Letter to Tacitus, VI, xvi.

³³ I am most grateful to Professors Charles P. Segal and Thalia Phillies Feldman for their encouragement and assistance during the writing of this article.