training of a rhetorician from the cradle onward. The work encompassed three books in six volumes and very likely occupied Pliny during the early years of Nero’s reign. It was consulted by Quintilian and earned some cautious praise from that author. The later, more turbulent, years of Nero’s reign were occupied with an eight-volume study of grammar. Pliny, who later would call Nero an enemy of humankind, was clearly keeping out of the maelstrom of Neronian politics by retreating to his study. It is therefore not surprising that near the end of Nero’s reign Pliny accepted a posting as procurator of Spain, perhaps to remove himself completely from the city during troubled times.

It may have been during this period that Pliny also found time to write a thirty-one-book history that continued the work of Aufidius Bassus. Bassus’s history seems to have ended with the events of Claudius’s reign, and Pliny began there and ended perhaps with the events of 69. It is likely that this work was published posthumously. It was also at this time that Pliny’s brother-in-law died and entrusted the care of his son, Pliny’s nephew, to this now-distinguished Roman figure. Pliny could not care for the lad from Spain but chose a guardian for him until he adopted him on his return to Rome. He held his post in Spain until Vespasian emerged victorious from the turmoil that followed Nero’s death in 69, a year of civil war commonly referred to as the Year of the Four Emperors.

Vespasian brought stability to a war-weary city, and for Pliny he represented political patronage as the father of Pliny’s army friend Titus. After Pliny’s return to Rome, he held several high-ranking posts abroad, and it can be surmised from his first-person reports in the Natural History that one of these trips may have taken him to Africa, where he made copious notes on what he saw. At this time, he was also made an official “friend of the court” and thus became an Imperial adviser, regularly called to Vespasian’s court for meetings at daybreak.

The demands of Pliny’s renewed public life were thus intense, and yet he was also finishing the Natural History at the same time he held these offices. Pliny had been amassing information for this work for years. His nephew writes that his uncle never read without taking notes and that one of his mottoes was that no book was so bad that he could not find something of use in it. He always read or was read to whenever possible—even while bathing, eating, or sunbathing (one of his favorite pastimes). He read or dictated while riding in a sedan chair, and he once chastised his nephew for walking, because it was impossible to read while one did so. He even devised a sort of glove to ensure that his slave could take notes on such trips in cold weather. To find more time for his studies, Pliny retired early and rose even earlier, reading and writing by lamplight in the early morning darkness. So diligent was he that on his death he left his nephew 160 books of notes written in a tiny hand.

The Natural History became the great showcase for these notes. Its thirty-seven books cover virtually every aspect of nature’s works and several of those of humankind. After an entertaining preface, book 1 offers a full table of contents and a list of authorities cited—a rare and welcome practice in antiquity. The remaining books range far and wide across the realms of zoology, entomology, botany, mineralogy, astronomy, geography, pharmacology, anthropology, physiology, folklore, and metallurgy. There are countless long digressions on such subjects as the history of art, the manufacture of papyrus, the growing of crops, religious practices, aphrodisiacs, and magic spells. In his preface, Pliny claims to have studied about two thousand volumes, to have emerged with twenty thousand noteworthy facts, and to have cited one hundred principal authors. In reality, the total number of authors cited by name is almost five hundred. Although it is surmised that the work was published in 77, there are certain signs that it is unfinished; Pliny may well have been revising the work when he met his death.

On August 24, 79, Pliny was on duty at Misenum as prefect of the fleet in the Bay of Naples. On seeing the volcanic cloud from Vesuvius, he sailed across the bay both to investigate further and to help in possible evacuation plans. Once at his destination, he sought to calm his hosts by a casual attitude and even fell asleep amid the danger, a fact attested by those who overheard his characteristic loud snoring. The volcanic eruption intensified, and by the next morning Pliny and his hosts had to flee to the shore with pillows tied over their heads for protection.

The sea was too rough to set sail, and Pliny was exhausted from his labors, being rather obese and prone to heavy and labored breathing. He lay down for a while on a sail and requested cold water, but on rising fell suddenly dead, the victim either of the foul air or of a heart attack. His body was found the next day, looking, according to his nephew, more like one asleep than one who had died.

Significance

It is fashionable to criticize Pliny the Elder as an uncritical encyclopedist, an assiduous notetaker with little or no discrimination. It is charged that his work is devoid of literary style and is almost completely lacking in organization. It is clear that most of his information came from late-night note-taking and not from fieldwork, a point in which he suffers by comparison to Aristotle.

However, in Pliny’s time he was much consulted. One can see traces of his rhetorical and grammatical works in the works of Quintilian and Priscian and of his histories in the works of Tacitus, Plutarch, and Dio Cassius. The popularity of the Natural History is shown in the number of authors who used it as a treasure trove of facts, in its imitators such as Solinus, Martianus Capella, and Isidore of Seville, and by the great number of manuscript versions of the text, in whole or in part, which survived into the Middle Ages.

The work was much used by medieval scholars, who mined it for whatever information they needed. Several produced topical condensations, and in the early 1100’s a nine-volume “reader’s edition” was prepared. Its traces are frequently to be seen, often cited by name, in such authors as Thomas of Cantimpre, Bartholomaeus Anglicus, Vincent of Beauvais, and Saint Albertus Magnus. Not surprisingly, it was printed as early as 1469 and was so popular that by 1499 six more corrected editions had been printed. It was translated into Italian in 1476 and 1489.

Such popularity merits consideration and should cause the work to be judged on its own terms. In the first place, posterity owes Pliny much for preserving so many intriguing facts and the names of authors that would otherwise be lost. Clearly, it is not meant to be read as literature. It is a volume of antiquity, wherein a reader can wander, fascinated, at leisure. It is a book for browsers and, as such, offers the rewards of hours of pleasurable discovery to those people who, like Pliny, believed that knowledge was inherently good.

Further Reading:

Beagon, Mary. Roman Nature: The Thought of Pliny the Elder. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1992. Examines Pliny’s portrayal of the relationship between nature and humankind. Also places both the author and his work in their wider literary and historical contexts.

Chibnall, Marjorie. “Pliny’s Natural History and the Middle Ages.” In Empire and Aftermath: Silver Latin II, edited by T. A. Dorey. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975. Careful and clear study of the influence of the Natural History from late antiquity through the Middle Ages.

French, Roger, and Frank Greenway, eds. Science in the Early Roman Empire: Pliny the Elder, His Sources and Influence. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble Books, 1986. Twelve essays occasioned by a Pliny symposium, with a brief life and studies centering on such subjects as medicine, pharmacy, botany, zoology, metallurgy, and astronomy.

Healy, John F. Pliny the Elder on Science and Technology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Reexamines Pliny’s work in the light of modern experiments, simulating Pliny’s techniques.

Pliny the Younger. Letters and Panegyricus. Translated by Betty Radice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972-1975. Letters 3.5, 6.16, and 6.20 are vivid, firsthand accounts of the elder Pliny, his writings, lifestyle, and death.