Pliny's Encyclopedia: The Reception of the Natural History

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PLINY’S ENCYCLOPEDIA

The Elder Pliny’s Natural History is one of the largest and most extraordinary works to survive from antiquity. It has often been referred to as an encyclopedia, usually without full awareness of what such a characterisation implies. In this book, Dr Doody examines this concept and its applicability to the work, paying far more attention than ever before to the varying ways in which it has been read during the last two thousand years, especially by Francis Bacon and Denis Diderot. This book makes a major contribution not just to the study of the Elder Pliny but to our understanding of both the cultural processes of ordering knowledge widespread in the Roman Empire and the reception of Classical literature and ideas. a u d e d o o d y is Lecturer in Classics at University College Dublin. She has published articles on Pliny the Elder and his Natural History and on Latin literature, and has co-edited (with Liba Taub) Authorial Voices in Greco-Roman Technical Writing ().

PLINY’S ENCYCLOPEDIA The Reception of the Natural History

AU D E D O O DY

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521491037 © Aude Doody 2010 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2010 ISBN-13

978-0-511-67707-6

eBook (NetLibrary)

ISBN-13

978-0-521-49103-7

Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Acknowledgements Note on the text

page vii viii

Introduction: how to read an encyclopedia 

Science and encyclopedism: the originality of the Natural History

 

Science and encyclopedism: the nature of Pliny’s scholarship Itemising nature: lists of names in the Natural History Mistakes and marvels: Francis Bacon and Pliny’s Natural History The originality of the Natural History

 

 Diderot’s Pliny and the politics of the encyclopedia





 

Enkyklios Paideia and the genre of the ancient encyclopedia Common culture and Roman geography Diderot’s Pliny and the problem of posterity The politics of reception

   

Finding facts: the summarium in the early printed editions



Pliny’s preface: instructions for use Editing the summarium: from manuscript to print Organising Pliny: the shape of the summarium Using the summarium and finding the facts Finding answers

 Specialist readings: art and medicine from the Natural History Authority and closure in the Medicina Plinii Eugenie Sellers and Pliny’s Book of Extracts

v

    

  

vi

Contents Artists and attributions in the Natural History Specialist readings of the Natural History

 

Conclusion: changing approaches to Pliny’s Natural History



Bibliography Index

 

Acknowledgements

Many people have contributed to the writing of this book. Thanks to my Ph.D. supervisors, Mary Beard and Philip Hardie, for their insight and encouragement, to Emily Gowers and Duncan Kennedy, my examiners, and to Michael Sharp and the anonymous readers at Cambridge University Press, for their help in reimagining the thesis as a book. Thanks too to Liba Taub who read and commented on the final version, and to Katie Fleming, Annelise Freisenbruch, Michelle Gallen, Miriam Leonard, Emran Mian and Daniel Orrells for their suggestions and support along the way. This book took shape during a research fellowship at Newnham College, Cambridge, and was completed during research leave from University College Dublin; I am grateful to both institutions for these opportunities. Earlier versions of some sections of the book have been published by Ramus and by the Journal of the History of Ideas; thanks to the editors of these journals for allowing this material to be reproduced here. Finally, thanks to my parents, and my sisters, for their help in making this possible.

vii

Note on the text

The titles of Classical works have been abbreviated in accordance with the Oxford Classical Dictionary.

viii

Introduction: how to read an encyclopedia

If Pliny the Elder is famous for anything, it is probably for going too close to a volcano. Not just any volcano, the celebrity of Vesuvius has lent a kind of glamour to the story of Pliny’s death, as it was told by one famous writer to another, in a tantalising moment of literary exchange between Pliny the Younger and Tacitus (Ep. .). For later readers, the mode of his death could make Pliny an icon of scientific endeavour: on his deathbed, Francis Bacon, blaming dangerous experiments rather than too much opium for his final illness, finds a precursor in Pliny; for the radical encyclopedists of eighteenth-century Paris, Pliny’s death made him a martyr for rational science in the face of ignorance and superstition. It is a romantic image, one that oddly coexists with the sometimes dismissive, sometimes indulgent, criticism that nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship lavished on his one surviving work. The Historia Naturalis, or Natural History as I will call it, is less often read than the letters of the more popular Pliny, but it continues to be used as an indispensable source by historians of the ancient world. There is little in the way of romance about the Natural History. Its catalogues of dry facts, studded with fantastic stories, build a monumental account of the nature of things, always threatening to flatten the reader under the weight of its knowledge. For this, and more complex reasons, it is usually called an encyclopedia. But if the Natural History is an encyclopedia, it is not because its first readers could have recognised it as one, or, at least, not on our terms. Yet the idea that the Natural History is an encyclopedia has had, and continues to have, a diffuse influence on how we approach the text, and how we think of its author. Pliny’s Natural History is often called the first western encyclopedia, but it is a strange thing to stand at the beginning of a tradition, especially one as elusive as encyclopedism. The generic recognition of the 

See Chapter  for a discussion of Bacon’s engagement with Pliny, and Chapter  for Denis Diderot and the encyclop´edistes.





Pliny’s Encyclopedia

Natural History as an encyclopedia has profoundly affected the ways we read and use it, but the extent to which its long history of use continues to impact on scholarly approaches to it remains underanalysed. The Natural History is a formidably successful reference work: generations of scholars, right up until the sixteenth century, could turn to Pliny as an authoritative source for information on medicine and on nature. When his facts became less useful for practitioners, they became more interesting to antiquarians: Pliny continues to provide key information for Classicists on aspects of ancient knowledge from agriculture to zoology. In its long history of use, the Natural History had a role in shaping many disciplines, but this role has been discounted by most readers of Pliny, who come to the text with a set of specialist queries in mind. My aim here is to examine the history of reading Pliny’s text as ‘an encyclopedia’. From the subversive and revolutionary encyclopedist that Diderot found in the author of the Natural History, to the pedantic compiler of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the Roman imperialist of recent work, perceptions of who Pliny was and what the Natural History stands for have changed in sympathy with prevailing ideas of what an encyclopedia is for. This book is a study in intellectual history with two distinct aims: the first is to illuminate how a Classical text is read differently in response to the demands of different eras of scholarship; the second is to change the terms on which Pliny is approached by readers today. My more adversarial ambition of defamiliarising the image of Pliny prevalent among modern readers gives the impetus to my approach to the history of his text. Let me begin, then, by sketching out some of the problems facing those of us who want to make sense of Pliny for the new century. The key issue is the continuing usefulness of Pliny’s text. Over the years, a lot has been invested in the ability of Pliny to provide uncontroversial evidence for historians engaged in a wide range of explorations. Pliny has had a long career in the footnotes of major historical studies, lending his weight to the substructure of the argument; it is in footnotes that many battles on the accuracy of Pliny’s information have been lost and won. The underlying question is one that Barbara Levick once posed in a footnote to her study on Roman colonies: ‘but can Pliny be trusted?’ The question of whether Pliny is a book, or a person, to be trusted or mistrusted is an open one. It was Pliny the Younger who put the character of Pliny on the agenda for later readers of his work, and as we will see, ideas of who Pliny is change alongside changing uses of his work. It is an 

Barbara Levick, Roman Colonies in Southern Asia Minor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ),  n..

Introduction: how to read an encyclopedia



unnerving moment, however, when we realise how many arguments over the years have been premised on the accuracy and objectivity of Pliny’s work. Objectivity is a difficult idea to defend these days. Most critics would now attest, with Foucault, that even aside from overt ideological agendas, all reference works occlude choices about what is left out and what is left in, how the information is arranged and presented, all of which affect how the work can be read. There has been a resurgence of interest in ancient technical writing over the past ten years, driven partly by this new awareness of these texts’ complexity. In the case of Pliny, new studies have reacted against the straightforward appropriation of Pliny’s facts and the piecemeal reading of his work, by probing the text for a hidden unity or cohesive message. Mary Beagon and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill looked to Roman concepts of nature for the point of the text; Trevor Murphy, Sorcha Carey and Val´erie Naas found it in an imperialist worldview that has Rome at its centre. If a gap has opened between scholars who use and scholars who read Pliny, it is one historians would like to close as quickly as possible. We still need to use Pliny: he is our best, sometimes our only, written source for aspects of Roman technology and Greek art, for instance. Finding the limits of a fact’s debt to Pliny’s wider concerns is not easy, however, especially if we then want to use the fact to construct our own stories about Roman medicine, or Roman economics or whatever. In one respect, the gap between reading Pliny and using his information is not a large one, in that both practices tend to share a general perception of the Natural History as an unoriginal, and largely self-evident compilation. Even when Pliny’s rhetoric is unpacked, the result is usually an image of the ‘old Roman moralist’, reassuringly conservative in social and intellectual matters. Jacqueline Vons’s work on L’image de la femme dans l’œuvre de Pline l’ancien struggled to reconcile what she saw as Pliny’s idiosyncrasy and a sense that the Natural History was a reflection of a common cultural 





I am thinking of The Order of Things / Le mot et la chose especially here, which was instrumental in sparking reappraisals of encyclopedic works: Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Tavistock, ). Mary Beagon, Roman Nature: The Thought of Pliny the Elder (Oxford University Press, ); Sorcha Carey, Pliny’s Catalogue of Culture. Art and Empire in the ‘Natural History’ (Oxford University Press, ); Trevor Murphy, Pliny the Elder’s ‘Natural History’. The Empire in the Encyclopedia (Oxford University Press, ); Val´erie Naas, Le projet encyclop´edique de Pline l’Ancien (Rome: ´ Ecole franc¸aise de Rome, ); Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Pliny the Elder and Man’s Unnatural History’, Greece and Rome  (): –. For a more nuanced account, see Sandra Citroni Marchetti, Plinio il Vecchio e la tradizione del moralismo romano (Pisa: Giardini, ).



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

system. More dynamically, Mary Beagon and Gian Biagio Conte place Pliny’s ‘typicalness’ at the heart of what they think is important about him: his ability to provide us with an idea of the average interests and competence of a Roman man in the first century. Whether consciously or unconsciously, these ideas about Pliny’s ordinariness are informed by assumptions of what it means to write an encyclopedia. An encyclopedia is rarely imagined to have literary ambitions, often seen instead as a repository of the general knowledge or common culture of the era in which it first emerged. In the case of the Natural History, the idea that its encyclopedism might represent ‘an epitome of first-century culture’ or ‘an encyclopedia of all contemporary knowledge’ is an enticing prospect for modern Classicists, offering a glimpse of shared cultural horizons between writer and reader in the first century. But equating what Pliny gives us in the Natural History with general cultural knowledge is a perversely difficult claim to keep up, without the bulwark of a particular vision of encyclopedism to support it. I intend to open up the more alarming possibility of a radical Pliny, writing a peculiar and innovative natural history that is profoundly and thoughtfully unlike other scholarship that survives from antiquity. As I will suggest, the Natural History represents an odd idea of what one should know about nature – and how one should know it – in the context of Roman writing. Reading it through the lens of a later genre of encyclopedia has too easily naturalised the strangeness of Pliny’s text. My first step is to address the difficulties of assimilating the Natural History into an ancient genre of encyclopedia. On this score, historians of encyclopedism have colluded with ancient historians in making Pliny one of the first encyclopedists, setting him at the start of a tradition of writing that spans centuries and cultures in its attempts to make a text of all human knowledge. This is an overtly teleological narrative, one which in recent works has been tempered by caveats about the dangers of etymology and anachronism, and a greater desire to distinguish between the philosophical impulse towards complete knowledge and the production of an encyclopedic book. An   



J. Vons, L’image de la femme dans l’œuvre de Pline l’ancien (Brussels: Latomus, ). I will discuss Conte and Beagon’s views in more detail later, in Chapter  and Chapter . On the encyclopedia as a repository or summary of popular culture or general knowledge, see for instance Robert L. Collison and Warren E. Preece, ‘Encyclopaedias’, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, th edn, ed. Mortimer J. Adler, Robert McHenry, Warren E. Preece et al. (Chicago, ), , . Beagon, Roman Nature, ; N. Purcell, ‘Pliny the Elder’, in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, nd edn, ed. S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth (Oxford University Press, ), . Cf. ‘the most complete image of ancient common wisdom’: Gian Biagio Conte, ‘The Inventory of the World: Form of Nature and the Encyclopedic Project in the Work of Pliny the Elder’, in Genres and Readers, trans. G.W. Most (Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), .

Introduction: how to read an encyclopedia



older generation of scholars, most notably Pierre Grimal, could trace a progression from the beginnings of encyclopedic thought in the aspirations of Platonic philosophy to the more book-based model offered by Romans such as Varro, or Cato, or Pliny. This triad has retained its importance in accounts of Roman encyclopedism offered by Carmen Codo˜ner and Robert Fowler, although both give extensive thought to the nuances of the anachronism involved in finding encyclopedism in pre-modern contexts. It is a question of whether the concept of encyclopedism can helpfully be applied to antiquity at all. Christian Jacob has argued that it simply cannot: L’affaire semble entendue. Il y a erreur sur les mots, et la fantaisie d’un Rabelais qui . . . fabrique ‘l’encyclop´edie’ a` partir de l’enkyklios paideia des Grecs. L’historien est pris au pi`ege des mots et des choses.

Jacob goes on to suggest that the project of looking for encyclopedism in Greek antiquity challenges the project of writing a history of encyclopedism in the first place – this in a volume that gathers articles on an array of encyclopedic enterprises, grandly titled Tous les savoirs du monde. Encyclop´edies et biblioth`eques, de Sumer au XXIe si`ecle. In the end, his answer to where encyclopedism might happen in Greece rests on an examination of consciously diverse modes of omniscience, from Homeric rhapsode to sophist to Alexandrian librarian. This is an explicit challenge to the idea of a continuity of encyclopedism between ancient and modern contexts, one that threatens to collapse its usefulness altogether in dealing with the Classical past. I believe, paradoxically perhaps, in the relevance of encyclopedism for understanding Pliny’s text, at the same time as I argue that the easy assimilation of the Natural History to a modern encyclopedic genre needs to be reassessed. The problem is not with calling Pliny ‘encyclopedic’, so much as with calling his text ‘an encyclopedia’, though, as I will discuss, the two ideas are difficult to disentangle. But it is not a question of simple  



Pierre Grimal, ‘Encyclop´edies antiques’, Cahiers d’histoire mondiale  (): –. I discuss this and other formulations of ancient encyclopedism in Chapter . Carmen Codo˜ner, ‘De l’antiquit´e au moyen age: Isidore De Seville’, in L’encyclop´edisme: actes ´ du colloque de Caen 12–16 janvier 1987, ed. Annie Becq (Paris: Editions aux amateurs de livres, ), –; Robert Fowler, ‘Encyclopaedias: Definitions and Theoretical Problems’, in Pre-modern Encyclopedic Texts, ed. Peter Binkley (Leiden, New York: Brill, ), –. ‘The matter seems closed. It was a mistake over terms, a fantasy of Rabelais . . . who invented “the encyclopedia” from the Greek enkyklios paideia. The historian is caught between words and things.’ Christian Jacob, ‘Ath`enes-Alexandrie’, in Tous les savoirs du monde. Encyclop´edies et biblioth`eques, de Sumer au XXIe si`ecle, ed. Roland Schaer (Paris: Biblioth`eque nationale de France / Flammarion, ), .



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

anachronism, easily set aside: there is a basic instability in the opposition between ancient and modern concepts of the encyclopedia that Jacob, for one, appeals to. To begin with, there have been many different models of modern encyclopedia: it is a particularly mobile genre, propelled along by changes in what counts as common knowledge and by developments in the technology of the book. Recently, it has undergone a crisis of authority and relevance, with the opening up of the Internet, a crisis that familiar brands like the Encyclopaedia Britannica are attempting to weather profitably. Modern encyclopedism has always been in flux, changing from one concretisation to another. A history of the encyclopedia will tell us that the word first appears in the title of a book in the sixteenth century: one yardstick by which we might judge the emergence of a self-aware genre. But how far should our recognition of what counts as an encyclopedia be determined by a sequential history of a genre? Genre is a powerful matrix for understanding texts, not least because it sets up alternative means of relating one text to another, different from one based exclusively on historical contingency. Genre is important because it provides readers with one means of relating one text to another across time and place; it has a powerful action in mediating and refracting the particular context of composition. On one level, Pliny’s Natural History is an encyclopedia because it displays certain features characteristic of that genre – it is a grand-scale reference work with retrieval devices – and this is the case whether or not Pliny was aware of the genre while writing it. To put it more strongly, the Natural History is an encyclopedia precisely because people read and use it as one. Dismissing this usage as simply anachronistic is a simplification of the terms on which we can read it, and the processes by which we come to have it. Abandoning the idea that the Natural History is an encyclopedia outright would only drive the premises and assumptions that colour our current readings underground. But we have to be aware of the historicity of the particular models we adopt: part of the problem with assumptions about Pliny’s encyclopedism is that they tend to unconsciously align the Natural History with a by now outdated model of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nationalistic, book-based encyclopedias. What we need, what I hope to provide, is an excavation of those assumptions, an archaeology of Pliny’s encyclopedia that will open up different vistas, new and old approaches to the Natural History. 

Robert Collison’s  annotated bibliography of encyclopedias is still one of the best introductions to the field as a whole: my references throughout are to the expanded second edition of : Robert Collison, Encyclopedias: Their History throughout the Ages (London, New York: Hafner, ). See also Foster Stockwell, A History of Information Storage and Retrieval (London: McFarland, ).

Introduction: how to read an encyclopedia



My plan, then, is to isolate and examine some significant moments of Pliny’s reception. Reception studies is in some respects still negotiating its way into mainstream Classics, producing competing models of how and what we might want to know about our texts and the long period of their use. The focus here is both narrow and wide-ranging: it centres on a single text, in various manifestations and in several eras of scholarship. My aim is not to offer a linear narrative of changes in the ways in which Pliny has been read and used since antiquity. Instead, I hope to use my explorations of some key moments in Pliny’s reception history to illuminate the ways in which we continue to use and read his text. The perspective from which I understand Pliny’s later reception is an explicit part of my readings. I am interested in the meanings and significances that different communities of readers have found in the Natural History, but my readings of that history are intended to provoke new understandings of and, as Charles Martindale puts it, dialogues with, Pliny’s text. The first half of this book will deal with the ways in which the Natural History has been viewed through the prism of prevailing attitudes towards science and encyclopedism; the second focuses on the ways encounters with it have been shaped by the availability of retrieval devices and specialist books of extracts. The possibility of innovations on the part of Pliny in the context of first-century scholarship has been made difficult by our awareness of a later genre of encyclopedism. In the first chapter, by turning to Francis Bacon’s reading of the Natural History in the context of his own encyclopedic project, I explore how a modern dichotomy between science and encyclopedism has contrived to obscure the intellectual polemics of the Natural History. Against this background, I offer my own reading of the Natural History, which sees the structures of Pliny’s text as a dynamic part of its 





The best introductions to the field are volumes edited by Lorna Hardwick and Chris Stray, by Craig Kallendorf, and by Charles Martindale and Richard Thomas, where the range of articles indicates the plurality of approaches possible: Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray, eds., A Companion to Classical Receptions (Malden, MA, Oxford: Blackwell, ); Craig Kallendorf, A Companion to the Classical Tradition (Malden, MA, Oxford: Blackwell, ); Charles Martindale and Richard F. Thomas, eds., Classics and the Uses of Reception, Classical Receptions (Malden, MA, Oxford: Blackwell, ). On this issue, see William W. Batstone, ‘Provocation: The Point of Reception Theory’, in Classics and the Uses of Reception, ed. Charles Martindale and Richard F. Thomas (Malden, MA, Oxford: Blackwell, ), –. See Charles Martindale, Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception (Cambridge University Press, ); Charles Martindale, ‘Reception’, in A Companion to the Classical Tradition, ed. Craig Kallendorf (Malden, MA, Oxford: Blackwell, ), –; see also his introduction to Classics and the Uses of Reception (ed. Martindale and Thomas).



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

meaning. Pliny’s conceptualisation of nature as the sum of its parts, accessible in its entirety, finds textual expression in his hierarchical catalogues of discrete facts; his sense that the proper attitude to nature is wonder and contemplation results in a text that is meant to be enjoyed as well as used. A greater awareness of the historicity of our own reading methods and scholarly conventions allows for a more nuanced view of Pliny’s originality in his own intellectual context. This is the springboard for an interrogation of the three most prevalent methods of reading Pliny today: reading for an overriding political or rhetorical point; using for isolated facts; reading in specialist sections. The second chapter turns to the question of what happens when we try to find a coherent message in the text by reading it as a cohesive work. It is also the point where I probe the reflexivity of studying reception, and consider the extent to which my own concerns are embedded in a particular, contemporary politics of reading the encyclopedia. I examine the relationship of enkyklios paideia to the concept of encyclopedism and argue that there was no ancient genre of encyclopedia to which Pliny belonged: if the Natural History is an encyclopedia, this is a function of its reception history. I re-examine Pliny’s geographical chapters and the analysis of the text as a product of Roman imperial power dynamics, an influential approach adopted by Carey, Murphy and Naas, who examine the links between empire and encyclopedism, power and knowledge, in their readings of the Natural History. My elaboration focuses on naming structures within the text to explore the differences between Pliny’s accounts of Europe and of Africa and Asia. This is a productive approach to the text, yet there is something almost inevitable about it, drawing, as it does, on new issues in the study of encyclopedism. Modern encyclopedias are very aware that their organisation of knowledge is supposed to represent a powerful circumscribing of what counts as common cultural knowledge. New encyclopedic projects, and scholarly work on the subject, have had to grapple with the politics of feminism and multiculturalism in trying to define what counts as common knowledge, reacting against the univocal nationalism of the nineteenth-century Encyclopaedia Britannica et al. This strand of thought has had a huge impact on new readings of Pliny’s politics, particularly in his geographical and ethnographical writing, my own included. In an attempt to find a different politics in the text, I turn to the unexpected image of Pliny as a subversive philosophe that emerges in the writings of the Enlightenment encyclopedist Denis Diderot (–) particularly in his ´ letters to the sculptor Etienne-Maurice Falconet (–). The idea of a subversive Pliny that was possible in eighteenth-century France has faded

Introduction: how to read an encyclopedia



completely from current discourse on the Natural History. As we will see, it is difficult to rehabilitate this Pliny without abandoning or renegotiating prior commitments to the politics of modern encyclopedic projects. The third chapter addresses the question of the extent to which the text of the Natural History allows for a methodology of extracting facts rather than reading the narrative. Encyclopedias are predicated on the practice of using rather than reading, and the development of retrieval devices has gone hand in hand with the evolution of the genre and its current reinvention in new digital media. My argument, then, is located in the history of Pliny’s text as a published book, examining the significant differences between incunable and modern editions of the Natural History to determine how changing methods of publication alter the possibility of finding facts in the text. I focus on the idea of the summarium as a retrieval device, and the relative ease with which it can be used to find information in the text of early and modern editions. Pliny provides a summarium, or list of contents, in the first book of the Natural History, but this should not be mistaken for a modern table of contents or index. The tendency of new editions of the Natural History to format the summarium as a table of contents or index naturalises the text, and makes an implicit claim that this is a reference work, to be read in segments. Retracing the history of the summarium’s form points to different potential uses, and different potential meanings. The theme of how far individual passages or sections can be understood in isolation from the rest of the Natural History continues in the final chapter. Here, I look at the history of reading Pliny in subject-defined sections, and the emergence of books of excerpts organised to meet specialist needs. I am interested in how attitudes towards the author of the text and his authority and control over his data are made problematic by the desire of specialist readers to make the work useful. I focus on two contrasting volumes produced at key periods in the development of their particular specialisms: the Medicina Plinii and The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art. In the case of Pliny’s medicine, I deal with Alban Thorer’s editorial decisions in his sixteenth-century edition of this fourth-century text; the book of extracts on art history was edited by Eugenie Sellers in the late nineteenth century, at a point when Classical art history was emerging as an academic discipline. I explore the ways in which books of extracts change the material they excerpt by transplanting it from its encyclopedic context, and how these changes reflect choices about the nature of the specialism constructed. In the case of Pliny’s art history, not only is Sellers’ edition still used by scholars, but the practice of reading the art history as a specialist discourse separate from the concerns of the rest of the work is



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

still very much in use. I explore the limitations of specialist approaches to Pliny’s text by examining how continuities in narrative structures across the Natural History affect our ability to find a simple story on artists and attributions in Books  to . Reading the Natural History is a tricky business, but one that continues to be a necessary task for historians. It is a fascinating book, in the information it highlights and the ways it inveigles its facts into ever more tendentious hierarchies of knowledge. The story of Pliny’s usefulness is a long and complex one, and I have picked out only parts of it, ignoring, in particular, the medieval period, perhaps the highpoint of Pliny’s authority in the West. The usefulness of the Natural History has largely obscured its entertainment value, and the quirkiness of the world that Pliny offers us. Hopefully this interrogation of what it means to read an encyclopedia will open a new space for discovering meanings in the text, new questions we want to ask of it. 

There are several excellent studies of this period, however. In particular, see Arno Borst, Das Buch der Naturgeschichte. Plinius und seine Leser im Zeitalter des Pergaments (Heidelberg: Winter, ); M. Chibnall, ‘Pliny’s Natural History and the Middle Ages’, in Empire and Aftermath, ed. T.A. Dorey (London, Routledge: ), –.

chapter 1

Science and encyclopedism: the originality of the Natural History

Pliny’s Natural History is a peculiar book. The scope of its subject matter and the strangeness of its organising principles are almost unique in surviving Latin literature. But despite its apparent singularity, and despite Pliny’s rhetorical insistence on its originality in his preface, there has been very little speculation as to where the Natural History might fit in the landscape of Roman historia. This is partly the result of the traditional marginality of ancient scholarship to Classical studies, but the lack of speculation about the provenance of the Natural History is in large part due to its self-evident but anachronistic recognition as ‘an encyclopedia’. The form and content of the Natural History have been naturalised as markers of an encyclopedic text; it is commonly called ‘an encyclopedia’ within the field of Classics, and maintains an important position in any attempt to trace the history of encyclopedism into antiquity. Genre has a diffuse influence on the expectations which we bring to the text, and the methods of reading we apply to it. It provides an important framework for understanding the terms on which we should approach the work, suggesting a context for its production or performance and parameters for its content and conclusions. But once we move outside the wellpoliced genres of ‘high literature’, we can run into difficulties. There has been much debate as to how particular branches of historia demarcate their boundaries; these new studies have been concerned to examine the interactions between different types of prose writing, to discover the disjunctions and continuities between fiction and non-fiction, biography, and history,  

See, for instance: Beagon, Roman Nature, ; Conte, ‘The Inventory of the World’; Purcell, ‘Pliny the Elder’, ; Vons, L’image de la femme, . For ancient encyclopedism and Pliny in general studies, see Collison, Encyclopedias, –; T. McArthur, Worlds of Reference – Lexicography, Learning and Language from the Clay Tablet to the Computer (Cambridge University Press, ), ; S.H. Steinberg, ‘Encyclopaedias’, Signature: A Quadrimestrial of Typography and Graphic Arts n.s.  (): –; Stockwell, History of Information Storage, .





Pliny’s Encyclopedia

rhetoric and philosophy. When it comes to scientific writing in antiquity, a wide range of genres were in play, and, as Liba Taub has shown, the choice of genre had a profound impact on the way in which a text could be understood. It is in this context that the effect of understanding the Natural History as part of a genre of encyclopedia needs further examination. Encyclopedism is a fluid concept that becomes a self-aware literary genre only at a much later period in the history of western literature; in fact, the title ‘encyclopaedia’ only begins to appear in the sixteenth century with the publication of Paul Scaliger’s Encyclopaedia, seu orbis terrarum in . The encyclopedia is a difficult genre to define, and its boundaries are hard to ring-fence. As a concept, encyclopedism can encompass the aspiration towards universal knowledge or the sum of general knowledge of a particular culture. It is used as a conceptual tool in debates within the field of semiotics about language use and meaning; within literary criticism, certain texts such as Ulysses or The Divine Comedy can be termed encyclopedic in this sense of an attempt to contain a complete set of cultural reference points. These concepts inform the more concrete idea of the encyclopedia as a book that gathers and organises either the entire set of general knowledge or an exhaustive array of material on a specialised 









For example, see C. Gill and T.P. Wiseman, eds., Lies and Fiction in the Ancient World (University of Exeter Press, ); C. Shuttleworth Kraus, ed., The Limits of Historiography: Genre and Narrative in Ancient Historical Texts, Mnemosyne (Leiden, Boston, Cologne: Brill, ). Liba Taub, Aetna and the Moon: Explaining Nature in Ancient Greece and Rome (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, ). See also Aude Doody, and Liba Taub, eds., Authorial Voices in GrecoRoman Technical Writing (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, ); Burkhard Meißner, Die ¨ technologische Fachliteratur der Antike: Struktur, Uberlieferung und Wirkung technischen Wissens in der Antike (ca. 400 v. Chr. ca. 500 n. Chr.) (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, ); Christiane Reitz, ‘Dichtung und Wissenschaft’, in Antike Fachschriftsteller: Literarischer Diskurs und sozialer Kontext, ed. Marietta Horster and Christiane Reitz (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, ), –. Collison, Encyclopedias, –. See also Joachimus Fortius Ringelbergius’ Lucubrationes vel potius absolutissima kyklopaideia (Basel, ). Rabelais seems to have been the first to use the term in the vernacular in  in his book Pantagruel. D. Alan Cruse, ‘Word Meaning and Encyclopedic Knowledge’, in Understanding the Lexicon: Meaning, Sense and World Knowledge in Lexical Semantics, ed. Rainer Schulze and Werner H¨ullen (T¨ubingen: Niemeyer, ), –; David Crystal, ‘The Encyclop(a)edic Word Game’, English Today: The International Review of the English Language , no.  (): –; Umberto Eco, ‘Metaphor, Dictionary, and Encyclopedia’, New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation , no.  (): –; Umberto Eco, ‘Texts and Encyclopedia’, in Text vs. Sentence: Basic Questions of Text Linguistics, ed. Janos S. Petofi (Hamburg: Buske, ), –; J. Haiman, ‘Dictionaries and Encyclopedias’, Lingua  (): –; J. Haiman, ‘Dictionaries and Encyclopedias Again’, Lingua  (): –. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton University Press, ), –; Hillary A. Clarke, ‘Encyclopedic Discourse’, SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism  (): –; Edward Mendelson, ‘Encyclopedic Narrative from Dante to Pynchon’, Modern Language Notes  (): –.

Science and encyclopedism



subject. In its grand vision, the encyclopedia claims to provide easy access to an objective and complete set of information about everything the individual needs to know about the world in which they live. This overview of what we might mean by calling a text encyclopedic in a contemporary context should point to the particular difficulties we face when we try to find encyclopedic texts in other eras and in other cultures. Some of these difficulties are common to any attempt to trace an intellectual history of a specific subject area: the danger of being anachronistic, of constructing a teleological narrative which views past ideas in terms of an evolution towards modern fulfilment. Classical aetiologies have a particular usefulness in providing legitimating and explanatory narratives for western culture and it is perhaps not surprising that the history of the encyclopedia has been traced to ancient origins; later encyclopedists, as we will see, had no difficulty in seeing Pliny as a kind of precursor. It is not an accident that much of recent scholarship on ancient encyclopedism is published in the context of wider projects, which trace encyclopedism into later time periods, at least as far as the Middle Ages. Pliny’s impact on later encyclopedists is wide-ranging, from the wholesale pillaging of his work in medieval religious compilations, to his role as an inspirational forefather in the eighteenth century. It is in some ways impossible to disentangle the Natural History from its legacy, to imagine an initial moment of reception without a modern genre of encyclopedism to govern it. Encyclopedism is at the centre of current scholarly approaches to Pliny, which divide, by and large, into two camps. One sees a pedantic Pliny, compiling an unoriginal but all-encompassing encyclopedia which modern historians can use, more or less cautiously, for information on the ancient world. The second, newer school of criticism recoups a sort of originality for Pliny by focusing on the underlying politics of Pliny’s text. I will discuss this second mode of approach in the next chapter; for the moment, I want to examine the premises behind the still-prevalent image of Pliny the pedant, compiling his facts in a self-evident, useful manner. The paradox is that although the Natural History is quite unlike anything else that survives from antiquity, its author is a byword for pedantic unoriginality. An alternative to this vision of the Natural History is discernible in the power and longevity 

This is true of Collison, Encyclopedias; Codo˜ner, ‘De l’antiquit´e au moyen age’; Francesco della Corte, ‘Enciclopedisti Latini’, in Opuscula (Genoa: Istituto di Filologia Classica e Medievale, ), –; H.-J. Diesner, ‘Lexikographie und Enzyklop¨adie in der Antike’, in Lexika Gestern und Heute, ed. G. Gurst and H.-J. Diesner (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, ), –; Fowler, ‘Encyclopaedias’; Grimal, ‘Encyclop´edies antiques’; Christian H¨unem¨order, ‘Antike und mittelalteriche Enzyklop¨adien und die Popularisierung naturkundlichen Wissens’, Sudhoffs Archiv  (): –; Jacob, ‘Ath`enesAlexandrie’.



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

of Pliny’s hold over how nature was written about in the centuries after his death. Pliny’s text represented a powerful conceptualisation of what it meant to know about rerum natura in first-century Rome. Pliny imagines nature as exactly the sum of its parts: knowing about the nature of things in the Natural History means knowing the details, but knowing all of them, in their correct place in the elaborate hierarchies of nature that Pliny constructs. I will discuss the ways in which this version of nature is embedded in the basic structures of Pliny’s text, in the lists of names that make up his narrative. Before we can envisage a radical or an inventive Pliny, however, we need to examine the frameworks of our current readings and, in particular, the dichotomy between science and encyclopedism that informs current perceptions of Pliny’s project. Pliny, of course, also stands near the start of a teleological narrative that traces the antecedents of modern science in earlier periods. Natural history is often subsumed into the category of encyclopedism: the natural world is perhaps the most characteristic subject matter of the encyclopedia in any history of the genre. But where the telos of a contemporary history of encyclopedism is Wikipedia or the Internet more generally, the history of natural history is usually seen as a more or less problematic progression towards modern scientific enquiry. At a certain point, then, the generalising comprehensiveness of encyclopedism can be seen to define itself in opposition to the specialised intellectualism of science. If Pliny is a natural historian, a proto-scientist, are we to compare the Natural History with Aristotle’s original research of the Historia Animalium or the philosophical evangelism of Lucretius’ De rerum natura? If Pliny was setting out to provide a theory on the essence of nature then he seems to have failed – a failure that may suggest a different intellectual project. On the other hand, taking Pliny in the context of ‘encyclopedists’ Varro or Cato means accounting for differences in subject matter. Defining the Natural History as encyclopedia or natural history is a matter of privileging form or content in the process of categorisation, but the problem remains that none of the other ancient texts which focus on nature is structured like the Natural History, and none of the other texts with a comparable totalising scope takes nature as its theme. science and encyclopedism: the nature of pliny’s scholarship Opinions on Pliny’s scholarly achievements have varied hugely over the course of his reception history. From the high point of his success in the

Science and encyclopedism



Middle Ages, Pliny’s work went through a radical process of reassessment and vilification, reaching its height with the dismissiveness of nineteenthcentury Quellenforschung, where scholars dismantled the narrative of the Natural History in search of Pliny’s older and more important sources. In modern work, the image of Pliny’s work as a derivative and uncritical compilation is substantially unchanged, although saving graces have been found in the search for a binding principle of nature. At the heart of changing attitudes to Pliny’s scholarship are changes in his relationship to scientific discourse. As Pliny was gradually ousted from his position at the centre of practical scholarship, indignation at his mistakes, misjudgements and complete fantasies grew alongside the development of a modern scientific sense of what belongs to a proper study of nature. This is obviously a complex and elliptical process, and I will look at two particular moments in Chapter , examining how two particular books of extracts create specialist discourses from the Natural History, which reflect disciplinary histories of sixteenth-century medicine and nineteenth-century art history. The dichotomy between science as specialised and experimental, and encyclopedism as general and unoriginal has an enormous impact on how we continue to read the Natural History. But, as scholars are well aware, it is difficult to determine what counts as scientific in pre-modern periods; as I will discuss in the next chapter, it is equally difficult to find a genre of encyclopedia in antiquity. Despite this, the difference between science and encyclopedism continues to provide an implicit framework for our assessments of Pliny’s scholarly achievement. The question of where the Natural History fits in ancient literary categories is crucial to the issue. It is interesting, then, to find one of the most important contributors to this ongoing debate on ancient genre taking Pliny’s Natural History as an example of the encyclopedic genre in antiquity. Gian Biagio Conte’s article, ‘The Inventory of the World: Form of Nature and the Encyclopedic Project in the Work of Pliny the Elder’, is one of four articles collected in Genres and Readers, his influential set of essays on the role of genre in shaping the reader’s responses to the ancient text. This was not the original context for the essay on Pliny: it first appeared as the introduction to the five-volume edition of the Storia Naturale which appeared in , under Conte’s directorship. This movement from its place as an introduction to the text of the Natural History to the context of Conte’s influential work on genre leads to its treatment alongside Ovid’s 

For a brief account of changing attitudes to the text, see R. Schilling, ‘La place de Pline l’Ancien dans la litt´erature technique’, Revue de Philologie  (): –. I will return to the question of Quellenforschung in more detail in Chapter .



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

Remedia Amoris and Lucretius’ De rerum natura. However, the relationship of the Natural History to a genre of encyclopedism is fundamentally different from that of De rerum natura to a genre of didactic poetry. In the collection as a whole, Conte argues for an idea of genre that is not rigidly formulaic, but under constant negotiation; a strategy of the text that requires a reader-addressee to make it function: [Genres] are like strategies, inasmuch as they are procedures that imply a response, an addressee as an integral part of their own functioning, a precise addressee recognizable in the very form of the text.

Conte’s formulation allows for flexibility by imagining genre as a ‘strategy of literary composition’, while keeping a tight rein on the interpretative possibilities through the idea of an implied reader within the text. The idea of the implied reader, in Wolfgang Iser’s groundbreaking model as in later versions, attempts to keep an element of historicity in interpretation, while still figuring interpretation as a negotiation between text and reader. This element of historicity, the idea of a first readership, is placed at a further remove in Conte’s application of reader-response theory to the problems of genre. Genre creates and is created by individual examples, but its existence necessarily implies a normative tradition, a tradition that occludes and mediates the historical specificity of the individual text. Despite the individual novelty of Lucretius and Ovid, there is a timeless quality to the didactic and elegiac genres that the reader is assumed to recognise. This sense of timelessness that the idea of genre produces must help explain why Conte makes no reference to any difference in the type of genre he is dealing with when he moves to the discussion of Pliny as ‘encyclopedia’. In Conte’s general discussions of genre in the introduction and in Chapter Four, he restricts his analysis to poetic forms: elegy, didactic, epic, lyric. While it is possible to argue with Thomas Rosenmeyer that ancient poets were more concerned with the mimesis of particular predecessors than with abstract genres, there seem to be clear grounds for making the assumption that these poetic forms suggested a tight association between form and content to an ancient audience. Conte’s omission of ancient prose from his discussion points to a certain instability of generic    

Conte, ‘The Inventory of the World’, . Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ); Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). Conte, ‘The Inventory of the World’, –, –. Thomas Rosenmeyer, ‘Ancient Literary Genres: A Mirage?’ Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature  (): –.

Science and encyclopedism



boundaries in some categories of ancient prose. The reader implied by the Natural History is a reader who recognises the text as an encyclopedia, but the timelessness of the generic models Conte uses elides the difference between the horizons of expectations of a modern and an ancient readership. This elision has important implications for Conte’s reading of the text in that it focuses the possibilities for novelty on the specific details of the work, while assuming the choice of subject matter and format are themselves self-evident and unsurprising. Conte’s assumption that the form and content of the Natural History are a self-evident selection stems from the model of encyclopedism he adopts, where, in the words of Pierre Grimal, ‘les encyclop´edies marquent des haltes dans le devenir des connaissances humaines’. Here, the impulse towards encyclopedism is a manifestation of the urge to contain and control the ever-expanding fields of specialisation, while collecting the sum of the culture’s knowledge in an accessible and canonical compilation. It is because ‘the Roman universe had already been completely organized’, that Pliny sets to work : With an exceptional, enlightened spirit of service, Pliny feels that now is the time to collect, to synthesize, to summarize and condense, to take care that what has been acquired not be lost – in short, to save what can be used to form an average education of practical utility. The time had come to draw up a closing balance. Here, in this frenzy to draw up the inventory of the world, lies the very secret of Pliny’s great fortune – the fortune of a text destined to a life longer than a millennium. It was the moment for encyclopaedic transcription, and Pliny, an old, conservative classicist, was ready.

Conte’s vision of Pliny as a pedantic but disinterested compiler, who leaves nothing out, grows out of the symbiosis envisaged between Pliny and his Roman readers: [We] should consider the Naturalis historia as a monumental ‘culture text’ figuring within itself an implicit addressee upon whose expectations (upon whose competence) it is modelled . . . In a certain sense, Pliny’s ‘book of science’ is indeed programmed as a practical inventory of naturalistic knowledge, but it seems to conform to the average mentality of the reader, with whom it engages in a kind of 

 

Although John Marincola manages to make use of Conte’s discussion of genre in his reassessment of ancient prose historia, he avoids mentioning Conte’s discussion of Pliny, saying that the theory was applied only to poetry: J. Marincola, ‘Genre, Convention, and Innovation in Greco-Roman Historiography’, in The Limits of Historiography: Genre and Narrative in Ancient Historical Texts, ed. C. Shuttleworth Kraus (Leiden, Boston, Cologne: Brill, ), –. ‘Encyclopedias mark the stops in the making of human knowledge’: Grimal, ‘Encyclop´edies antiques’, .  Conte, ‘The Inventory of the World’, . Conte, ‘The Inventory of the World’, .



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

dialogue and whose ideas it mentions even if it doesn’t share them. Hence Pliny’s tendency to omit nothing from his discourse.

This symbiosis of author and addressee in the formation of the culture text places a stranglehold on the possibility of authorial innovation in the creation of the text. The process of creating this encyclopedia has a particular effect on the relationship between author and addressee, where the act of reading and accumulating the information for the Natural History places Pliny in the same position as his audience: For, in the final analysis, Pliny’s gesture is not that of an ‘author’ who speaks and puts himself at risk, but of an ‘addressee’ who listens and learns. He himself is on the side of the addressee in his monumental compilatory task; he is merely the first addressee of the great book of Greco-Latin natural scientific tradition.

Pliny’s autonomy as author is completely eroded, to the point where he stands in the same position as ourselves, as a reader of the ancient tradition. Pliny’s own contribution to that tradition is effaced along with the historical distance between him and us. On one level, this impossibility of reading originality or selectivity in the Natural History is a function of the text’s rhetoric of completion, a rhetorical achievement that Conte acknowledges. But the rhetoric of objectivity, the rhetoric of completeness should not obscure the actual agency of the author in the selection and originality of his material. The model of encyclopedism that Conte sets out at the beginning of his article is one which assumes that the act of selection is antithetical to the encyclopedic process: ‘The process of making a selection is like a professional disease that endangers the encyclopaedist’s very profession.’ Conte’s reading of the Natural History as part of a genre of encyclopedism forces it to become an automated collection of unmediated information, inseparable from the culture in which it emerges; Pliny’s authorial choices disappear from view. The idea that Pliny compiled a randomly organised but disinterested and comprehensive account of the state of knowledge in first-century Rome is a familiar topos in older work on Pliny: he is ‘a spare time anthologist’ compiling ‘enormous and uncritical anthologies’. Even in recent work which tries to rehabilitate the Natural History as a work to be read and understood in its entirety, we sometimes find the same image of Pliny as a pedantic and not particularly gifted scholar, who put together a  

Conte, ‘The Inventory of the World’, . Conte, ‘The Inventory of the World’, .

 

Conte, ‘The Inventory of the World’, . Collison, Encyclopedias, .

Science and encyclopedism



representative compilation of ancient science, almost, it seems, with later historians in mind. Mary Beagon’s groundbreaking investigation of the Natural History calls it ‘an epitome of the culture of the first century’; Pliny’s lack of intellectual flair is made key to his text’s usefulness for modern scholarship: Insofar as he can be regarded as a type, Pliny provides the student of cultural history with an invaluable balance to the more overtly intellectual writers of this period, such as Seneca. The gifted and original exponents of new ideas are not typical of the mass of those who must have been influenced by such ideas. In order to widen our historical perspective, we must look beyond isolated study of the mind of the philosopher to the effect his theories had on the attitudes of contemporary society at large. Here the views of a more ‘ordinary’ subject, well educated but not esoterically intellectual, are of the greatest value. Pliny, with his encyclopaedic work, is an ideal example. The HN must, of course, also be viewed from a wider perspective than that of literary genre.

The idea of pedantry and objectivism as constitutive of an encyclopedic genre play a large part in Beagon’s evaluation here, an assumption that where the philosopher or scientist is esoterically intellectual, the encyclopedist is a well-educated amateur, who cannot be trusted to discriminate in the realm of specialist knowledge. This image of Pliny the pedant has roots in a particular way of reading the ancient biographical information. Pliny the Elder survives not just in the Natural History, but in the letters that his nephew writes about him, and, from a certain angle, the composite figure that emerges does indeed look like the indiscriminate compiler of modern criticism. When Pliny describes his contribution to knowledge in the preface to the Natural History, it is in curiously quantitative terms: As Domitius Piso says, we need storehouses, not books, so I have packed , things worth knowing from  important authors into  volumes, drawing on my reading of about  volumes, most of them seldom touched by scholars because of their obscure subject matter. I have put in many things which earlier writers did not know about, or which life has recently revealed. (Pliny HN pr. )

Not just self-promotion, despite its symbolic numbering, this has been read as a key statement of Pliny’s conceptualisation of his work. Pliny    

Beagon, Roman Nature, . Cf. Citroni Marchetti, Plinio il Vecchio, –, also comparing Pliny to Seneca. I have used the Bud´e edition of the Natural History where possible, and Wachtmeister/Winkler where the Bud´e volume is not yet available; all translations are my own. Several scholars have questioned the accuracy of Pliny’s , fact figure. W. Kroll counted ¨ , (W. Kroll, ‘Plinius der Altere’, Paulys Realencyclop¨adie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

can quantify the material that the Natural History contains in terms of , separate items of information, and is keen to draw attention to where they come from, proudly pointing to the authors and obscure texts he has researched. The image of a catalogue of fragments that this creates is accentuated when Pliny talks of his contribution to this research as the addition of more factual items to the mix, rather than providing an overarching structural principle or a philosophical rationale. It is this emphasis on raw numbers of facts that brings Trevor Murphy to the conclusion that ‘the Natural History has no rationale other than the will to get larger, and owes its shape more to whimsical gigantism than designing intelligence’. This vision of a scholar who gathers and updates, extracts and itemises, neatly resonates with the picture of Pliny that his nephew, the Younger Pliny, provides in his famous letter to Baebius Macer (Pl. Ep. .). Here, we find Pliny declaring that no book is so bad that it has nothing useful in it, while listening and making notes from morning to night, at mealtimes, on journeys, and when in his villa only stopping, his nephew tells us, while in the bath. The  notebooks of extracts written on both sides of the page in tiny writing, in particular, fit perfectly with the lists of authors provided in the summarium and the emphasis on extensive reading that we find in the preface. The description of Pliny the Elder’s working methods provided in this letter is one of very few descriptions of scholarly methods that has survived from antiquity, and, as such, has been a touchstone for work on ancient scholarship, mined for examples of how ancient writers worked. As John Henderson has shown, this letter also works within Pliny the Younger’s literary framework, interacting with the aims of the collection, building a mythologised and contingent image of his uncle that cannot be taken as a straightforwardly factual image of the writer at work. But this is exactly what writers on Pliny have done, finding in the nephew’s letter an image of Pliny the Elder that seems immediately recognisable from his works:

 



¨ ¨  (): –), a figure repeated by Onnerfors (Alf Onnerfors, In Medicinam Plinii Studia Philologica (Lund: CWK Gleerup, ), ) and Conte (Conte, ‘The Inventory of the World’, ); the discrepancy is also remarked on by Purcell (Purcell, ‘Pliny the Elder’, ). Murphy, Pliny the Elder’s ‘Natural History’, . For discussions of Pliny’s working methods, see T. Dorandi, ‘Den Autoren u¨ ber die Schulter geschaut. Arbeitsweise und Autographie bei den antiken Schriftstellern’, Zeitschrift f¨ur Papyrologie ¨ und Epigraphik  (): –; A. Locher and R.C.A. Rottl¨ander, ‘Uberlegungen zur Entstehungsgeschichte der NH des a¨lteren Plinius und die Schriftt¨afelchen von Vindolanda’, in Feslage H. Vetters (Vienna: Holzhausen, ), –; Val´erie Naas, ‘R´eflexions sur la m´ethode de travail de Pline l’Ancien’, Revue de Philologie , no.  (): –. John Henderson, Pliny’s Statue. The Letters, Self-Portraiture & Classical Art (Exeter University Press, ), –.

Science and encyclopedism



He followed an implacable work rhythm, ‘as though some law compelled him’ [Pl. Ep. .], and he never read anything without making summaries, extracts, note cards. The professional scholar will surely recognise in Pliny his own not quite confessable love for systematically reading bibliographies and assembling quotations and facts into tidily multiplying notes, where even the chance encounters of his reading begin to aggregate toward the production of his ‘own’ discourse; but one need hardly add that he will also find a depressing reflection upon the worst of his profession.

Conte’s account here is an indulgent version of a familiar strain of criticism of Pliny; F.D.R. Goodyear represents the more unsympathetic approach: 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 populizer, a sceptic infected by a traditional sentiment, and an aspirant to style who could hardly frame a coherent sentence. That is the impression given by his only surviving work, and no other evidence gainsays it.

Both these quotations make oblique reference to the influence of Pliny the Younger’s letters on their assessment of Pliny’s working style. But however wryly he recounts them, Pliny the Younger sees his uncle’s wide-ranging reading and energy as scholarly achievements; modern Classicists, on the other hand, have had little patience with Pliny’s scholarship – as Andrew Wallace-Hadrill puts it: ‘In our terms Pliny is rotten rhetoric and worse science.’ What we need to remember, however, is that the terms on which we approach Pliny are relatively new in the long history of reading the Natural History. Our conception of his scholarship as pedantic, unscientific and based on indiscriminately encyclopedic reading, rests on very modern premises about what scholarship properly entails. It is a familiar topos that Roman science is practical and derivative, where Greek science is innovative and theoretical. Pliny’s Natural History fits neatly into this framework. Not only does Pliny fail to mount an explicit and coherent theoretical argument, he relies almost exclusively on extensive reading rather than first-hand experience to produce his work. Worse again, he includes among his data much that is miraculous and mistaken. John Healy’s work on Pliny’s science and technology defends Pliny’s scholarship, but grants that Pliny’s approach is ‘often ingenuous   

Conte, ‘The Inventory of the World’, . F.D.R. Goodyear, ‘Technical Writing’, in The Cambridge History of Classical Literature, ed. W.V. Clausen and E.J. Kenney (Cambridge University Press, ),  Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Pliny the Elder and Man’s Unnatural History’, . Wallace-Hadrill argues that despite this, ‘he casts a flood of light on the cultural world of early imperial Rome’, and goes on to compare his project with that of Lucretius.



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

and uncritical’, blaming his dependence on his sources for some of the mistakes made in including bizarre material. These twin problems, credulous dependence on sources and crazy mistakes, are also addressed by Geoffrey Lloyd in his influential assessment of Pliny in Science, Folklore and Ideology. Here it is Pliny’s ‘encyclopaedic approach’ that is unfavourably contrasted with the specialist, experimental precedent of Theophrastus or Aristotle: Pliny was one of the most learned men of his age, and one who was, as we have seen, broadly committed in principle to the importance of personal observation. The indifference of his performance in practice – the lack of significant original contributions to botany, for instance – can be related in part to the very conflict which it may be suggested arose for him between learning and research. The encyclopaedic enterprise described in the Preface to book  dictated a certain approach. The energy and attention he could devote to independent research in any one field – if only to differentiate the sound from the unsound in what was commonly believed or retailed – were circumscribed by the very comprehensiveness of the task he set himself. The extent to which he actively sought to engage in such research was further inhibited by the great respect he felt for his predecessors, even while he recognised that their results depended on the diligence and carefulness of their first-hand investigations.

Pliny’s encyclopedism, marked by exhaustive reading and respect for a written tradition, is made antithetical to the diligent and careful investigation of the specialist scientist. In this analysis, learning and research map onto encyclopedism and science, and Pliny is gently criticised for not following the scientific path. Looking for investigative science in Pliny’s text means prejudging the point of the text, and being disappointed by his derivativeness, his untheoretical mindset, and his wrongness. These unscientific qualities seem to be somehow constitutive of the ‘encyclopedism’ scholars have found in the Natural History. Pliny’s many errors and his interest in marvels are often criticised; more fundamentally, the weakness or absence of a coherent over-arching argument continues to perturb even the scholars who take Pliny most seriously. Pliny’s work has, as we have seen, been compared unfavourably to that of  

 

John F. Healy, Pliny the Elder on Science and Technology (Oxford University Press, ), , –. See G.E.R. Lloyd, Science, Folklore and Ideology (Cambridge University Press, ), – for an account of his dependence on Theophrastus, and some of the inconsistent and bizarre phenomena Pliny mentions. On Pliny’s use of Theophrastus, see also J. Andr´e, ‘Pline l’Ancien botaniste’, Revue des ´etudes latines  (): –. Lloyd, Science, Folklore and Ideology, . See Trevor Murphy, ‘Pliny’s Natural History: The Prodigal Text’, in Flavian Rome: Culture, Image, Text, ed. A.J. Boyle and W.J. Dominic (Leiden: Brill, ), – on Lloyd’s analysis of Pliny’s debt to his sources here.

Science and encyclopedism



Aristotle and Theophrastus in terms of his lack of investigative research or scientific theory. Similarly, scholars have tried to compare him to Lucretius or Seneca and have been disappointed by his lack of philosophical clarity on what he means by nature. When we look at what Pliny has to say about nature, we find there are very few points at which he discusses it directly. When he does, his comments are often blandly imprecise, but his work implicitly reflects a watered-down Stoicism, or a proto-environmentalist moral crusade against luxury, ideas which hardly needed thirty-seven books to promulgate. But this is to miss the point: Pliny’s lack of interest in argument can be read as one of the Natural History’s great strengths rather than chief weaknesses. As I will suggest, it can be read as both a function of the literary ambitions of the Natural History and a corollary of Pliny’s conception of nature. itemising nature: lists of names in the natural history When Pliny counts his facts and lists his authors in the preface to the Natural History, he outlines what was to be a revolutionary vision of what we ought to know about nature and how we ought to know it. Pliny’s achievement is a conceptualisation of knowledge that privileges information over theory, movable facts over abstract ideas. For Pliny, knowing about rerum natura is not dependent on discussing a particular theoretical or philosophical position, as Lucretius or Seneca would have it. In the Natural History, knowing about nature does not mean engaging in debates about Stoic versus Epicurean philosophy; it means knowing that there are six European trees that produce pitch, that there are three kinds of lettuce, that the best kind of emeralds come from Scythia, and that rocket is an excellent aphrodisiac. This vision of a nature that can be broken into sections and catalogued, fact by fact, name by name, item by item, until all of it is listed, represents a new idea about what it is to know about the nature of things. In the Natural History, nature becomes exactly the sum of its parts, a catalogue of details that anyone can grasp, but that only Pliny has contained and organised. 





Beagon, Roman Nature; R. French, ‘The Natural History of Pliny’, in Ancient Natural History: Histories of Nature (London, New York: Routledge, ), –; Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Pliny the Elder and Man’s Unnatural History’. Wallace-Hadrill compares Pliny’s stance to modern environmentalism: Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Pliny the Elder and Man’s Unnatural History’, For a detailed account of Pliny’s debt to Stoicism in his approach to nature, see Beagon, Roman Nature; French, ‘The Natural History of Pliny’. Pitch trees: HN .; lettuce/lactuca: HN .; emeralds/smaragdi: HN .; rocket/eruca: HN ., ..



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

From this perspective, Pliny’s decision to emphasise the number of facts that he includes is not evidence of his painstaking pedantry: it is an expression of the text’s fundamental belief that nature is available to be known as a series of discrete facts which can be listed and counted. The summarium of contents that Pliny provides is perhaps less significant as a way of navigating the rest of the work than as an assertion that nature can be itemised. Pliny’s totalising account of rerum natura is a collage of details, each significant, all needing to be accounted for. Where Aristotle or Theophrastus amassed specialised data for analysis, Pliny’s facts are meant to inspire. His insistence that nature reveals itself, or herself, in the smallest details probably derives from his Stoicism, a worldview which perceived Nature both as a quasi-divine creative force and as manifest and immanent in each natural thing. When Pliny tells us in the preface that ‘it is a difficult thing to give . . . its nature to everything and all her own to Nature’, he plays on this idea : the Natural History attempts to say something about the specific nature of each thing it includes, but the attempt to elucidate all the things there are is also a tribute to Nature, whom Pliny variously terms mother, stepmother and creator in the course of his work. Nature is present in everything, even and especially the smallest things, as we see in Pliny’s grand opening to his discussion of insects, in which he marvels that Nature the Artist (natura artifex) should design these smallest of creatures with such intricate subtlety. He concludes with a plea to the reader: But we are amazed by elephants carrying towers on their backs, or bulls’ powerful necks tossing things into the air, the attacks of tigers, the manes of lions, when the nature of things is never more complete than in the tiniest things. And so, I hope that readers, who disdain many of these tiny things, will not despise the things I have to say as boring, since nothing can seem extraneous to the contemplation of Nature. (Pliny HN .)

Pliny champions the smallest creatures as a source of microcosmic insights into nature and encourages the reader to persevere with his insistence that nothing is useless or off limits when it comes to the appreciation of nature. For Pliny, nature is present in tiny things, and each fact about them is necessary to the contemplation of nature. In the world of nature, nature is present in each natural object; in the world of Pliny’s text, each discrete fact makes manifest the wonder of nature. 

‘Res ardua uetustis nouitatem dare, nouis auctoritatem, obsoletis nitorem, obscuris lucem, fastiditis gratiam, dubiis fidem, omnibus uero naturam et naturae sua omnia.’ HN pr. .

Science and encyclopedism



The relationship of the individual fact to the overall project is again weighed up in Book , when Pliny justifies his inclusion of miraculous customs and strange peoples in his account of humanity: For instance, who believed in Ethiopians until they had seen one? What isn’t amazing when it is first discovered? How many things are thought impossible before they’re accomplished? As it is, in every instance the power and majesty of the nature of things is unbelievable if your mind grasps only parts of it, and not the whole thing. I needn’t recall the spots on peacocks, tigers, and panthers or the markings of so many other animals, a small thing to mention but a huge thing to think about – or all the different types of speech and language and ways of talking, which make a foreigner seem hardly human to someone of another race! (Pliny HN .–)

Here Pliny argues for an openness to new facts, revitalising the strangeness of familiar phenomena to persuade us to be open to the implausible marvels he is about to relate. His argument leads him straight into a list of exotic animals, foreshadowing the longer list of strange peoples we are about to receive. There is a point to all these facts, though. When Pliny tells us that nature can only be understood in its entirety, first of all it is the power and majesty of nature that we are supposed to understand, not the details for their own sake. Secondly, although we are unable to understand it through its individual parts in isolation, this does not mean the parts are dispensable. In the explanatory list Pliny goes on to produce, the individual markings of the peacock, tiger and panther are individual cases that should make us pause to link and examine them. Details are not indispensable, but we must have all the details, and we must be able to relate them to each other. This seems to be the fundamental principle of Pliny’s project, in which both the individual fact and its juxtaposition with other facts are of primary importance. This principle has far-reaching effects when it comes to the structure of the Natural History. From the perspective of a later history of science or encyclopedism, Pliny’s text ought to give primary importance to clear theoretical frameworks and taxonomic structures. And yet a reader coming to the Natural History expecting a rigid and consistent ordering system is destined for disappointment. For Pliny, nature is knowable through the appreciation of her many parts which Pliny has distilled into a series of concrete facts. The contemplation of individual instances of nature’s power is made possible through Pliny’s presentation of individual facts; enjoying these facts is central to Pliny’s conception of what it is to know about nature, and, as he has no overarching theoretical argument to make beyond this, the arrangement of his facts is designed to amuse readers as much as to instruct them. As



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

Conte tells us, ‘the capacity to be astonished and the will to astonish’ is the unifying principle at the heart of the Natural History. If Pliny’s historia was intended to be pleasurable as well as instructive, a literary text as well as an informative tome, then variation in its patterns of ordering must be expected. In his perceptive analysis of the structure of the Natural History, Trevor Murphy suggests that similarity and antithesis are the key ordering principles in the ‘digressive structure’ of the text: Pliny proceeds to link subjects not solely through the hierarchies he initially signals, but via more or less metaphorical associations and contrasts. This digressive tendency is seen as indicative of Pliny’s wider project: Its taste for the marvellous on the level of content is paralleled by its openness to digressions on the level of structure. Perceived correspondences between things often turn the Natural History away from the direct route and the centre of the topic in hand with the result that the reader gets little sense of progress towards a goal. The ordered structures of knowledge promised by the encyclopedia’s general outline disappear behind a profusion of bewildering details.

Murphy contrasts Pliny’s system of organisation with those of Aristotle’s biological works, where ‘a sufficiently intelligent reader should be able to infer from the logic of the text’s structure the location of a given topic – something quite impossible with the Natural History’ – and sees Book  as an attempt to address this deficiency: ‘The table of contents is a nod in the direction of utility, compensating for Pliny’s playfully drifting aesthetic.’ The central tension in the Natural History is between its aesthetic ambitions as a literary text to be read and enjoyed, and the care it pays to the notion that its information can and should be used, a conflict that arises from Pliny’s sense that nature is both the object of contemplation and the munificent source of goods for human use. This tension between the demands of entertainment and utility plays out in the key organisational structure of the Natural History: the list of named objects. The basic structure of Pliny’s text is the list. The list is an essentially hierarchic form, which implies not only order, but correct order. Although     

 Murphy, Pliny the Elder’s ‘Natural History’, . Conte, ‘The Inventory of the World’, . Murphy, Pliny the Elder’s ‘Natural History’, –. Murphy, Pliny the Elder’s ‘Natural History’, , . On the potential for conflict between the aims of contemplating and investigating nature, see Beagon, Roman Nature, –. On the anthropology of listing, see the seminal work by J. Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge University Press, ); Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologising of the Word (London: Methuen, ).

Science and encyclopedism



Pliny is playfully digressive, the principle of hierarchy structures his text: on a macro level, the Natural History follows a progression from the heavens, to the lands and seas of the Earth, man and the other animals, plants, the uses of these animals and plants in medicine, rocks and minerals. On a smaller scale too, the text often orders its material in gradual progressions from one extreme to another. Different subjects call for different extremes: the most useful, the most exotic, the earliest, the tallest, the biggest, the most numerous and even the most expensive all provide starting points for Pliny’s catalogues. Pliny’s geographical books follow the coastline, but also move from the familiarity of Europe in Books  and  to the exoticism of Africa and Asia in Books  and . Book  asserts that it will deal with humans first of all living things, as they are the most important, and organises the bulk of its information around a progression from youth to old age. Book  begins with the largest animals, which necessarily means beginning with the exotic elephant, and Book  starts with the sea creatures of the Indian Sea, since they are the biggest and most numerous. Similarly, Books  and  begin the treatment of trees with exotic foreign trees, beginning with those that produce the most expensive substances. Book  begins the treatment of Roman trees with the vine, since it is the best, that is the most useful, Italian tree. A chronological progression from earliest to most recent marks Pliny’s treatment of artists in Books  to ; gems are organised by their expensiveness in Book . These hierarchies allow Pliny to construct an image of an ordered world, in which everything has its proper place; within the text, these hierarchical lists provide a sense of impetus and progress, despite being broken up by digressions and asides. Pliny’s lists are made up of individual names of people, places, objects. Names constitute key facts in the Natural History in that they embody information as well as structuring it. They symbolise the object itself within the structure of the text, and allow for a slippage between the place of the object in the text and its place in the hierarchy of the world. Typically, the name is provided, and a short description of its uses or importance is appended. Book , for instance, proceeds by giving the name of each particular garden plant and appending a list of the illnesses which it can cure; Book  lists the bare names of places in western Europe, sometimes adding their major product or peculiarity before moving on. The named object is the building block of the narrative, where the name in the text is assumed to map directly onto an object in nature. This equivalency is a matter of some anxiety for Pliny: if an object has more than one name, or a name covers more than one object this causes difficulties for Pliny’s project that are both literary



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

and scholarly. Not only is Pliny concerned to provide accurate and usable information: without an acceptable name, it is awkward for Pliny to include information on a given subject within the structured catalogues of his text. As we will see in Chapter , this anxiety about attaching information to a single, unambiguous name has consequences for Pliny’s formulation of an art-historical discourse, but for Pliny, and for his early readers, the most difficult problems concerning names are those where a medical substance is at issue. In Pliny’s books on plants, even those on medical plants, he regularly relies on the name alone to indicate the plant and provides no description, or only the most cursory description, of what the plant looks like or where it might be found. He dismisses the practice of the Greeks, Crateuas, Dionysus and Metrodorus, who supplied illustrations of the plants that they discussed to aid the reader in identification. Pliny is aware of this mode of practice, but decides against it, explaining at HN . that it is too dangerous because of scribal error, and the fact that plants look different depending on their maturity and the season of the year. Pliny seems to approve of those who put their faith in the name alone to signify the object: This is why others have given written descriptions of them: some did not indicate their appearance and most have been satisfied with providing the names alone, since it seemed enough to point out the powers and strengths for those willing to look for them. It is not a difficult knowledge to acquire: I at least have been able to examine all except a very few by visiting the garden of Antonius Castor, the greatest expert of our era in this area of knowledge. (Pliny HN .)

This description of practice corresponds to Pliny’s general practice of giving the name of the plant and appending details of its medical powers and properties. The name maps the object into Pliny’s text, and is supposed to be enough to allow the reader to find out more about it, to get hold of it from a seller if they cannot find it in the wild. Pliny holds himself up as an example to the reader: he has used the garden of Antonius Castor to find out what the plants he had read about were. All but a very few were 

 

For example, plants with multiple names can cause problems: type of pear HN .–; type of laurel HN .; types of oak HN .; types of larch HN .; so too plants with no Latin name: Macedonian trees HN .; trees described by Juba HN .–; plants that grow in the sea HN .. For medical mistakes resulting from naming, see for example HN ., .. For a longer discussion of the science and aesthetics of Pliny’s naming practice, see Aude Doody, ‘The Science and Aesthetics of Naming in the Natural History’, in Pliny the Elder: Themes and Contexts, ed. Roy Gibson and Ruth Morello (Leiden: Brill), in press.

Science and encyclopedism



accessible to him simply by asking an expert. A name on its own can be enough to find the plant in the real world, if you have an expert to ask, and an encyclopedic garden to consult. For the active reader envisaged here, the text provides a clue in the name, with or without a description of the plant, which the reader then unravels. Elsewhere, Pliny is less optimistic, more anxious about the ease with which a name and a plant can be associated. The implication here that it is only the unwillingness of readers that bars access to the knowledge of plants is undercut a few paragraphs later, when Pliny bemoans the fact that it is only the uneducated peasants who live in close proximity to the plants themselves who can recognise them. Others, he says, tend to rely on doctors (the ‘turba medicorum’, HN .) without being in a position to recognise the plants themselves – especially, Pliny alleges, since doctors are reluctant to break their monopoly and share their knowledge with others. Some plants, Pliny says, have no names at all because of scholars’ lack of interest. The information in the text is a starting point for acquiring knowledge, but its information needs to be supplemented by experience, either one’s own, or that of an expert who can point out the plants: a scholar like Antonius Castor while he was still living, an uneducated peasant if you can find one, or a doctor, if you can persuade them to teach you. But if names are intended to be used, and there is a process of investigation implicit in deciphering them, there is also an aesthetic to naming in the Natural History. Names have a significance of their own within the text. They can be fetishised as objects of knowledge in their own right, interesting for their peculiarities, and worth knowing, even if the reader cannot or does not apply the knowledge. Knowing the name of something is an important form of knowledge, sometimes the only knowledge Pliny provides. Names of peoples and places can be simply listed, as if for their own sake, as if commemoration was the sole aim of the text, as happens for instance in the list of fifty-three peoples who used to live in Latium at HN .–, or the list of women painters at HN .–. More surprisingly, Pliny sometimes includes names even when he does not know what they refer to, as when he lists the gemstone ‘memnonia’ with the comment ‘what it is, isn’t reported’ (HN .) or when he preserves the name ‘eriophoron’ for a type of bulb, but comments that none of the copies of Theophrastus that he has seen contain information on what it is (HN .). In the Natural History, names are important as markers for objects, but they also take on a life of their own within the text. The name is



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

a significant property of the object, and ordering by similarity of name happens in the Natural History, as for instance at HN . when he groups ‘fish whose names resemble land animals or objects’, or similarly at HN . where he groups ‘gems whose names resemble parts of the body’. On more than one occasion, Pliny worries that his reader may be getting bored listening to litanies of unfamiliar names. The use of ‘barbarian terms’ is something he apologises for in the preface (HN pr. ) and Pliny notably refuses to list barbarian place names in Book  (HN ., ., .) or forty-nine varieties of palm tree with barbarian names at HN ., and abruptly calls a halt to the litany of names of gemstones which ‘Greek ingenuity’ has invented at HN .. If the intent of the Natural History is to be useful, excluding unfamiliar names represents an exclusion of abstruse knowledge that the reader will be unable or unwilling to put to use – perhaps because of the difficulty in understanding what the name refers to. Leaving out obscure, barbarian names suggests that Pliny does expect his reader to recognise or at least enjoy reading the Latinate or Greek names he does include. The erudite reader enjoys knowing the name, whether or not they are willing to put the work in to activate the knowledge of the object that it represents. For those readers who browse, without a specific question to ask, Pliny’s names work on a different level, as invitations to knowledge, sometimes as marvels in their own right. The enjoyment of individual facts is central to Pliny’s conception of what it is to know about nature: the contemplation of nature through its manifestation in even the most ordinary object. In the absence of an overarching argument, lists of named objects are used to provide a sense of forward impetus, which is playfully varied by digressions and asides. Examining the Natural History as a text that was supposed to entertain as well as instruct provides a new perspective on the difficulties scholars have had with some of its odder features. It is designed to be read as well as used, and the principle of variatio makes the narrative more entertaining to follow, while frustrating readers in search of a neat encyclopedic or scientific classificatory schema. The list is the main narrative mode, and its hierarchical format provides the thrust of an implicit narrative that privileges the peculiar and the extreme as a means of understanding the world. Individual facts are bundled under the aegis of a name, where names map objects into Pliny’s text, and into the order of the natural world. The importance of objects’ names, both as a guarantor of existence in the outside world and as an ordering principle in the text, causes some anxiety on Pliny’s part, but they provide a neatly segmented structure, ripe for indexing and excerption.

Science and encyclopedism



mistakes and marvels: francis bacon and pliny’s natural history Pliny’s catalogues of facts divide nature into discrete chunks and make all of them available to the eager reader. It was this vision of knowledge about nature that was to dominate the intellectual landscape of medieval Europe. The great compilations of learning produced by Isidore of Seville (c.– ) or Vincent de Beauvais (c. – c.) did not simply reflect Pliny’s sense that nature could be itemised and contained, they also shared his belief that knowledge about nature could be accumulated through extensive reading. The book-based research methodology that Pliny adopts could seem self-evident to scholars some , years after his death. Such was Pliny’s influence on the intellectual life of the Middle Ages that he has even been accused of stymieing the progress of western science. Making lists, compiling facts, placing them in the correct order to reveal the secrets of nature could be the aim of mainstream compendia right up until the sixteenth century, when the emphasis gradually moves from book-based to investigative research. When it happened, Pliny’s fall from grace came as a result of new philological approaches and a new emphasis on ancient Greek authorities, as well as a growing interest in validating the data in ancient texts by examining the natural world at first hand. The community of scholars who developed the field of natural history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries discovered mistakes and scrutinised marvels in the Natural History, ousting Pliny from his place in the scientific pantheon. One critical figure in the story of Pliny’s fall from grace as an authority on nature was Francis Bacon (–): Bacon was instrumental in removing Pliny from the centre of scientific scholarship, but his attitudes towards Pliny’s work and his methods of criticising the Natural History illuminate the extraordinary power that Pliny’s formulation of natural knowledge possessed. 

 

On scholarly methodology in the Renaissance, see Ann Blair, ‘Humanist Methods in Natural Philosophy: The Commonplace Book’, Journal of the History of Ideas  (): –; D.R. Kelley and R.H. Popkin, eds., The Shapes of Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Springer, ); A. Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). O. Gigon, ‘Plinius und der Zerfall der antike Naturwissenschaft’, Arktos  (): –; see Naas, Le projet encyclop´edique de Pline l’Ancien, – for discussion of this position. See William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature (Princeton University Press, ); also Mary Baine Campbell, Wonders and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY, London: Cornell University Press, ) and William R. Newman and A. Grafton, eds., Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, London: The MIT Press, ). On the development of new approaches to natural history in the early modern period, see Nick Jardine and J.A. Secord, eds., Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge University Press, ); Brian W. Ogilvie, The Science of Describing (Chicago University Press, ).



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

Francis Bacon is a key figure in the history of western science; one who advocated a move away from humanistic debates about the interpretation of ancient, particularly Aristotelian, natural philosophy, in favour of an encyclopedic project of investigation and enquiry into the natural world. This investigation would rest on experimentation rather than experience or observation, nature coerced and controlled rather than in its normal state, and this was to involve an entirely new system of induction, which Bacon sets out in the second book of the Novum Organon. The extent to which Bacon’s experimentation broke completely with Aristotelian models has been the matter of some debate, but its ambitions and approaches were characteristic of the new frameworks of enquiry that characterised what we have traditionally called the Scientific Revolution. Bacon’s contribution to the development of modern science is perhaps better known than his influence on the development of the encyclopedia. His division of understanding into the three faculties of Memory, Reason and Imagination, each with its own intellectual sphere, has a direct influence on the trees of knowledge produced by eighteenth-century encyclopedias and, in particular, on the Encyclop´edie of Denis Diderot and Jean D’Alembert; his plan for a comprehensive natural history was similarly influential. This division is discussed in the Advancement of Learning, which he published in English in , but later translated and expanded in Latin to become the De augmentis scientiarum in . Bacon’s ideas were intended as prefatory to a large-scale encyclopedic project, although it remained unfinished, perhaps unfinishable. This was the Magna Instauratio, which was to comprise six parts. Only the second part, the Novum Organon, was completed, and published in  with an introduction and plan of the work as a whole and a prospectus of the third part, ‘An outline of a natural and experimental history’. Francis Bacon’s attitude to Pliny allows us to see how one key figure at the crossroads between experimental and book-based research viewed his predecessor, as Bacon reworks Pliny’s schema for his own monumental encyclopedic project. When Bacon reflects on Pliny the Younger’s image of his uncle, it is the second letter he invokes, in which Pliny describes for Tacitus the heroic death of the naturalist in the eruption of Vesuvius. It was the last letter  



See Carolyn Merchant, ‘ “The Violence of Impediments”: Francis Bacon and the Origins of Experimentation’, Isis  (): –. On Bacon’s influence on eighteenth-century encyclopedism, see Collison, Encyclopedias, –, Richard Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions. Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge University Press, ), –. Ep. .. Cf. the version of the story Suetonius tells in De viris illustribus.

Science and encyclopedism



Bacon ever wrote, a letter of explanation to a friend in whose house he had taken refuge after catching a cold in the course of an experiment: My very good Lord, I was likely to have had the fortune of Caius Plinius the elder, who lost his life by trying an experiment about the burning of mountain Vesuvius. For I was also desirous to try an experiment or two, touching the conservation and induration of bodies. As for the experiment itself, it succeeded excellently well; but in the journey I was taken with such a fit of casting, as I knew not whether it were the stone, or some surfeit, or cold, or indeed a touch of them all three.

As if in homage to Pliny, Bacon never recovered, although his biographers, Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart, suggest that the cause of death may have been an opium overdose rather than the result of more scientific experiments. He did, however, leave behind a body of work in which Pliny appears again and again as a Classical archetype of the natural historian. In his short appendix to the Novum Organon, the Parasceue to an encyclopedic natural history, the Natural History is used as a model for how to write or how not to write natural history. Pliny appears as an example of how to cite authors who may be unreliable (Parasceue ), and of the value of making editorial observations on observed phenomena (Parasceue ). Bacon’s defence of his concern with seemingly trivial and sordid matters explicitly recalls the passage in the Novum Organon which dealt with this issue in relation to Pliny’s prefatory rhetoric (Parasceue , cf. Novum Organon .). In each of these cases, Pliny is the model from which Bacon advances: no other natural historian is cited as often in the course of the short work, and no contemporary works are mentioned at all. Robert Collison has also pointed out the similarities in Bacon’s lists of projected subjects with the order of Pliny’s Natural History. The tradition of natural history that Bacon was defining his project against is one in which Pliny remains a central figure. Bacon’s natural history was to be a storehouse of raw material for the system of inductive reasoning he outlines in the Novum Organon, and this, he tells us, is entirely new: ‘for neither Aristotle nor Theophrastus nor Dioscorides nor Caius Plinius, much less the moderns, ever suggested this purpose (of which we speak) for natural philosophy’. While it is    

Francis Bacon to the Earl of Arundel and Surrey: James Spedding, The Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon,  vols. (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, –), vol. , . Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart, Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon (London: Phoenix Giant, ), –. The experiment involved stuffing a chicken with snow. Collison, Encyclopedias, . Parasceue : Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne, eds., The New Organon / Francis Bacon (Cambridge University Press, ), .



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

easy to see how Bacon might see Aristotle’s naturalism at the service of a wider philosophy, Pliny’s Natural History is more often criticised by recent scholarship for its lack of thoughtful engagement with a wider philosophical system. It is perhaps Pliny’s championing of the idea of sympathy and antipathy that is, from Bacon’s perspective, inimical to the production of proper natural history: Bacon uses examples from Pliny in his criticism of sympathy in the Novum Organon (.). Sympathy and antipathy are integral to Pliny’s vision of the natural world as designed for humans, but needing to be properly understood and interpreted in order to be correctly used. This underlying Stoic worldview which saw a beneficent nature designing the world for the use of humans was one of the features that had made Pliny’s information so easy for later Christian writers to co-opt for their own encyclopedic projects. Bacon’s idea that observations of nature should not be moulded to support a particular philosophy was a problematic argument in the seventeenth century, since the primary rationale used to explain natural phenomena was Christianity. The relationship of the natural world to a creating divinity was a central problem in the development of writings on natural history, natural philosophy and the gradual emergence of a scientific discourse on nature. The desire to structure an encyclopedia around an implicit ideology of what the natural world means is clearly apparent in the Christian compendia produced from late antiquity to the Middle Ages. In this period, we often find a hierarchy of knowledge that has God at its apex, descending either through disciplinary divisions beginning with theology or down the scale of creation to humans and the natural world. These Christian works recycled information gleaned from Pliny and other Classical sources, but placed it in a radically altered structure designed to reflect the natural order of the world, as it was perceived by the monastic scholars for whom the texts were primarily intended. As a pagan model of how to write a natural history, Pliny also had his uses for later scholars in search of alternatives to Christian theology as a principle of organisation. Theology was still  



See Beagon, Roman Nature; French, ‘The Natural History of Pliny’; Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Pliny the Elder and Man’s Unnatural History’. On Pliny’s approach to sympathy and antipathy, see Patricia Gaillard-Seux, ‘Sympathie et antipathie dans l’ “Histoire Naturelle” de Pline’, in Rationnel et irrationnel dans la m´edecine ancienne et m´edi´evale: ´ aspects historiques, scientifiques et culturels, ed. Nicoletta Palmieri (Saint-Etienne: Publications de ´ l’Universit´e de Saint-Etienne, ), –. See also Franc¸oise Gaide, ‘Aspects divers des principes de sympathie et d’antipathie dans les textes th´erapeutiques latins’, in Rationnel et irrationnel dans la m´edecine ancienne et m´edi´evale: aspects historiques, scientifiques et culturels, ed. Nicoletta Palmieri ´ ´ (Saint-Etienne: Publications de l’Universit´e de Saint-Etienne, ), –. On the influence of Pliny’s text on encyclopedic projects in the Middle Ages, see Borst, Das Buch der Naturgeschichte; Chibnall, ‘Pliny’s Natural History and the Middle Ages’.

Science and encyclopedism



central to the project of writing natural history for Bacon and his contemporaries, and it is the constraints of this approach that Bacon tries to sidestep: he makes God the ultimate cause of all phenomena, but asserts that humans can and should study the natural processes through which God effects His purposes. The influence of pagan philosophies that Bacon criticises openly hints at an uneasy analogy for the influence of Christian doctrine. When Bacon criticises Pliny directly, he criticises him for the fact that the Natural History, alongside the work of Cardanus, Albertus and ‘divers of the Arabians’, is ‘fraught with much fabulous matter, a great part not only untried but notoriously untrue, to the great derogation of the credit of natural philosophy with the grave and sober kind of wits’. This is familiar territory: Pliny’s inclusion of mirabilia was already a problem for Aulus Gellius, one of Pliny’s first recorded readers, but there seems more at issue here than simple error or gullibility. As Mary Beagon and Val´erie Naas have explored, Pliny’s emphasis on mirabilia, on what is peculiar, is part of a wider emphasis on the singular rather than the general in the Natural History as a whole. When we look at the 



 

On Bacon and religion, see, for instance, Paolo Rossi, From Magic to Science (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ); John Channing Briggs, ‘Bacon’s Science and Religion’, in The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, ed. Markhu Pettonen (Cambridge University Press, ), –. The Advancement of Learning: James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, eds., The Works of Francis Bacon (st edn ) (London: Routledge, ), . This text is quoted from the Routledge  reprint of Spedding’s canonical text of the Complete Works. Girolamo Cardano (–) taught medicine at Pavia and Bologna and produced two comprehensive works on natural philosophy: De subtilitate () and De rerum varietate (). Bacon is probably thinking here of his De secretis, an investigation of secrets, published together with a short treatise on dream interpretation in : see Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, –, A. Grafton and N. Siriasi, ‘Between the Election and my Hopes: Girolamo Cardano and Medical Astrology’, in Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, ed. William R. Newman and Antony Grafton (Cambridge, MA, London: The MIT Press, ). Albert the Great (–), the author of various books on alchemy, to whom various books of marvels or secrets were also attributed: the Secreta Alberti, De secretis mulierum and De mirabilibus mundi: see Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, –, for discussion. Noctes Atticae ..–; ... On Pliny’s mirabilia and the centrality of the marvellous in Pliny’s thought, see Mary Beagon, The Elder Pliny on the Human Animal: Natural History, vol. , Clarendon Ancient History (Oxford University Press, ); Philippe Mudry, ‘ “Mirabilia” et “magica” essai de d´efinition dans l’ “Histoire naturelle” de Pline l’Ancien’, in Conceptions et repr´esentations de l’extraordinaire dans le monde antique: actes du colloque international, Lausanne, 20–22 mars 2003, ed. Olivier Bianchi, Olivier Th´evenaz and Philippe Mudry (Berne, Frankfurt am Main: Lang, ); Val´erie Naas, ‘ “Est in his quidem, tametsi mirabilis, aliqua ratio” (NH, IX, ): modes de construction du savoir et imaginaires de Pline l’Ancien’, in Imaginaire et modes de construction du savoir antique dans les textes scientifiques et techniques: actes du colloque de Perpignan, 12–13 mai 2000, ed. Mireille Courr´ent and Jo¨el Thomas (Perpignan: Presses Universitaires de Perpignan, ), –; Naas, Le projet encyclop´edique de Pline l’Ancien, esp. –; Val´erie Naas, ‘ “Ratio . . . multis inuoluta miraculis” (Pline l’Ancien, Naturalis



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

Historia Naturalis, as Pliny calls it, from the perspective of other types of historia, it becomes clear that much of the mirabilia content has clear reasons for inclusion in the context of the text’s literary objectives. As in annalistic history, miraculous stories often occur at the end of an implied section, or as a rhetorical opening to a new subject. Judgement on whether or not they are accurate is usually suspended: they are simply part of the knowledge the reader needs in order to be in command of the subject. It is well known that Pliny’s version of the world places humans at its centre: much of his information on natural objects is directed towards their usefulness and consumption. But Pliny’s text is not just a record of how nature can be used by humans, it is a record of human knowledge about nature: ‘it must be reported because it has been reported’, says Pliny at HN ., discussing figures for the size of the universe which he considers specious; he includes a new method of grafting at HN . ‘so as not to leave out anything I have ever come across’. At times, Pliny includes a fact in which he clearly does not put much faith because of the long-standing authority of the individual who attests to it, as he does with the list of strange peoples of the East in Book , where he explicitly attaches the name of his sources; it is with scepticism too that he includes human urine as a potential remedy on the authority of Varro at HN .. Human tradition is central to Pliny’s project: for Pliny, knowing nature is about knowing what people think and have thought about it, as we see in his listing of sources alongside contents in the summarium, and his frequent recourse to histories of knowledge. If human knowledge and traditions about nature are a primary concern of Pliny’s Natural History, then it should not surprise us that we need to be told what is false as much as what is true. But the project of cataloguing inherited knowledge, untried by experience, interesting even if untrue, was precisely the form of natural history which Bacon was at pains to distance himself from in his own century. Recent scholarship on the emergence of a scientific discourse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has moved away from the vocabulary of the ‘Scientific Revolution’ to place emphasis on continuities and gradual change, varying in scholarship on different subjects and in



historia, II, ): autour de la “ratio” plinienne’, in En dec¸a` et au-del`a de la ‘ratio’: actes de la journ´ee d’´etude, universit´e de Lille 3, 28 et 29 septembre 2001, ed. Val´erie Naas (Villeneuve-d’Asq: Universit´e Charles-de-Gaulle-Lille III, ), –. For instance, Book  ends on the druids’ worship of mistletoe, Book  on an island whose earth kills snakes, Book  on the story of Servius Tullius and the hearth. Similarly, Book  begins with a list of marvels to make the dull subject of garden plants sound more intriguing, Book  with marvels connected with the sea, and the Battle of Actium.

Science and encyclopedism



different countries. The contrast that Foucault drew between a Renaissance mindset, with its emphasis on Nature as a system of secrets and symbols, and a modern, post- idea of scientific disciplines remains useful, but ultimately too sweeping to satisfy the complexity of the picture. Already in the sixteenth century, Pliny’s influence was waning on the practitioners of a new ‘science of describing’, who catalogued and collected plants and animals, placing new emphasis on first-hand observation. Bacon’s scientific thought is an element of a worldview that was also influenced by the alchemist tradition and esoteric religious belief, although the innovations he suggested were part of a change in the way scholars approached the world around them. The great sixteenth-century practitioners of natural history, Conrad Gesner (–) and Bacon’s older contemporary Ulisse Aldrovandi (– ), drew heavily on Pliny in their pursuit of information. More than this, their working practices and underlying assumptions about the point of natural history had more in common with Pliny than the natural philosophy produced in the century after Bacon. For them, composing a natural history involved gathering together and collating all the information on a particular animal from the available authorities, discussing their habitat, reproductive cycles, methods of hunting and so on. But one of the burdens of the work is to establish the emblematic qualities of the animal, the moral lessons it provides for human beings in the stories and folktales that are told about it. Stories about an animal, true or otherwise, are part of the repertoire of things a person needs to know about it to understand its importance in the natural scheme of things. The fabulous stories that 

 

 

See Jardine and Secord, eds., Cultures of Natural History; David Lindberg and Robert Westmann, eds., Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge University Press, ); Margaret J. Osler, ed., Rethinking the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge University Press, ). See Ogilvie, The Science of Describing, esp. – for a discussion of Pliny’s place in the formation of a new discourse on natural history in the sixteenth century. See Stephen A. McKnight, ‘The Wisdom of the Ancients and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis’, in Reading the Book of Nature. The Other Side of the Scientific Revolution, ed. Allen G. Debus and Michael T. Walton (Ann Arbor: Edwards Brothers, ), –; William R. Newman, ‘Alchemical and Baconian Views on the Art/Nature Division’, in Reading the Book of Nature. The Other Side of the Scientific Revolution, ed. Allen G. Debus and Michael T. Walton (Ann Arbor: Edwards Brothers, ), –; Rossi, From Magic to Science, –. On Aldrovandi’s use of Pliny, see Anne Baumer-Schleinkofer, ‘Ulisse Aldrovandi: Vollendung des Aristoteles in plinianischer Manier’, Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte , no.  (): –. On emblematic natural history, see William B. Ashworth, ‘Emblematic Natural History of the Renaissance’, in Cultures of Natural History, ed. Nick Jardine, J.A. Secord and E.C. Spary (Cambridge University Press, ), –; William B. Ashworth, ‘Natural History and the Emblematic World View’, in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David Lindberg and Robert Westmann (Cambridge University Press, ), –; Wolfgang Harms, ‘On Natural History and



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

Bacon criticises in Pliny, Albert the Great and others are not simply the result of a lack of discrimination, they are an integral part of a very different project of natural history, a different conception of what it means to know about nature. The idea that Pliny is a populist writer and that his work is an essentially amateurish compilation is still apparent in current thought on Pliny. But the roots of this position go far back, gathering force gradually, from the medical scruples of Niccol`o Leoniceno in the Renaissance to the changes in approach to natural philosophy that mark the so-called Scientific Revolution. Bacon’s respect for Pliny’s authority is coupled with scepticism about his inclusion of fabulous matter, and scorn for his dependence on symbolic systems of thought. The emphasis on experimentalism and objectivity that Bacon pioneered in the philosophy of science was to be instrumental in our misunderstanding of Pliny’s project as the Natural History gradually came to be seen as unscientific, rhetorical and slightly bizarre. Bacon’s irritation with Pliny’s mistaken stories is recognisable, but the reasons why he might choose to use Pliny as the key example of how to write natural history are less expected. As the Scientific Revolution takes hold, forgetfulness or derision of the systems of thought to which Pliny’s stories belong makes it increasingly difficult to respect his authority as a scholar. The extent to which we have internalised a scientific discourse on nature that has no place for Pliny’s mirabilia, and expects experimentation rather than reading, is reflected in our chronic misunderstanding of the seriousness of Pliny’s scholarship, or the value of his particular claims to originality. the originality of the natural history It is, of course, impossible ever really to know how an ancient text was received at the particular historical moment when it was produced. Our reading of every Classical text is shaped by older readings and the long process of transmission that preserved and altered it. The challenge is to



Emblematics in the Sixteenth Century’, in The Natural Sciences and the Arts: Aspects of Interaction from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century, ed. Allan Ellenius (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, ), –. I discuss Pliny and Leoniceno elsewhere: Doody, ‘The Science and Aesthetics of Naming in the Natural History’. See Charles Nauert, ‘Humanists, Scientists and Pliny: Changing Approaches to a Classical Author’, American Historical Revue  (): –; R. French, ‘Pliny and Renaissance Medicine’, in Science in the Early Roman Empire: Pliny the Elder, His Sources and Influence, ed. R. French and F. Greenaway (London, Sydney: Croom Helm, ), –; Ogilvie, The Science of Describing, –.

Science and encyclopedism



confront these influences, some more subtle than others, and the ways in which they set the terms on which we approach our texts today. The apparent consensus on Pliny’s unoriginal encyclopedism is a particularly pernicious case, where modern generic models have set the terms of the text’s significance. The opposition between insightful science and amateurish encyclopedism has produced an unnecessarily negative image of Pliny’s scholarship as derivative and uncritical. Pliny has become caught in teleological narratives that inevitably shape our understanding of what the Natural History might have meant when it was first produced. Stopping a little earlier in our story of the development of science and encyclopedism, we find an authoritative Pliny, still part of a mainstream discourse on natural history right up until the seventeenth century. Francis Bacon’s respectful rejection of the Natural History is a window onto an older and perhaps more vibrant image of Pliny, as a major intellectual figure in the formation of a European discourse on nature. The preference for Pliny, when scholars such as Varro were lost or epitomised, has been inexplicable to modern criticism. It has even been suggested that Pliny’s pre-eminence in the Middle Ages and Renaissance was due to a simple accident of transmission. But quite apart from any good fortune, if we set aside our preferences for scientific theorising or specialist treatises, there are clear internal reasons for Pliny’s success. The Natural History resists epitomisation, since it has no single argument that can be summarised. While excerpts and individual books from the Natural History found an afterlife of their own, its intricate bulk of data was both invaluable and inexhaustible. The great weakness that modern readers have found was its great strength for earlier scholars. Pliny sees nature as a body of discrete facts, all knowable and related, but divisible and countable. The narrative of his historia is structured to preserve this tension between the object’s correct place in the order of the world, and its availability as a discrete marvel in its own right. It is a human understanding of nature that Pliny presents, placing human needs and human research at the centre of his text. The Natural History is an overwhelmingly useful text, even today, but the history of its changing uses has had a profound effect on the ways we read it and the image of its author that we construct. 

E.g. Grimal, ‘Encyclop´edies antiques’, .

chapter 2

Diderot’s Pliny and the politics of the encyclopedia

The Natural History has perhaps more often been used than read; the idea that it is an encyclopedia is one of the main justifications for taking a piecemeal approach to its many pages. It is hard to know what reading an encyclopedia for its own sake or on its own terms might look like. But in the last ten years, scholars have turned a more stringent eye on technical writing and the politics of these seemingly unproblematic texts. Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things was instrumental in changing our attitudes towards the obvious and the innocent nature of knowledge texts, sensitising us to the powerful political and ideological undercurrents just beneath the surface. In Pliny’s case, the last ten years has seen a move from the philosophical unity Mary Beagon discovered, to the anti-luxuria moralism that Andrew Wallace-Hadrill discusses, to new work that finds a unity of purpose in the centrality of Rome and Roman imperialism to the project of knowledge gathering and presentation in Pliny’s Natural History. This notion of a Roman encyclopedia allowed critics to find an originality of sorts in the Natural History, in the form of the worldview that Pliny encodes into his text. This idea that the Natural History can be used to probe the links between Roman knowledge and Roman power is well established. It has underpinned arguments about Pliny’s preface, his sources, his art history and his treatment of women in the text. A particular vision of encyclopedism is at the heart of this conception of how the Natural History works. As Trevor Murphy puts it: The encyclopedist looks at the world and describes what he sees in the light of empire. If, as Pliny claimed in his preface, it was the enormous variety of Natura  

Beagon, Roman Nature. Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Pliny the Elder and Man’s Unnatural History’. See Carey, Pliny’s Catalogue of Culture; Murphy, Pliny the Elder’s ‘Natural History’; Patrick Sinclair, ‘Rhetoric of Writing and Reading in the Preface to Pliny’s Natural History’, in Flavian Rome: Culture, Image, Text, ed. A.J. Boyle and W.J. Dominic (Leiden: Brill, ), –; Vons, L’image de la femme dans l’œuvre de Pline l’ancien.



Diderot’s Pliny and the politics of the encyclopedia



that demarcated the encyclopedic scope of his work, it was the power of Rome that allowed him to execute that design.

As I will discuss, the analysis of Pliny’s text as a product of Roman imperial politics is very much embedded in the current politics of encyclopedism, of contemporary difficulties in negotiating the legacy of overtly nationalistic nineteenth- and early twentieth-century encyclopedic projects. Studying a text’s reception reminds us of the particularity of our own readings of texts to the circumstances and intellectual politics that inform them. Nor does it offer a straightforward escape route from the premises of our thinking, should we desire one. Still, what I intend to do here is oppose a strong reading of a conservative Pliny’s imperial politics to a strong reading I detect in the writings of Denis Diderot, the editor of the Encyclop´edie. I want to use different models of the encyclopedia as a means of illuminating how one might go about finding an overall political thrust in an encyclopedia: the type of reading this necessitates, and the types of information it occludes. The juxtaposition also allows a space for thinking about the politics of reception, its limits and its potential as a source of alternative readings of Classical texts. Genres have histories, just as texts do, and the encyclopedia is a particularly mobile genre, propelled along by changes in what counts as common knowledge and by developments in the technology of the book. Recently, it has undergone a crisis of authority and relevance, with the opening up of the Internet: how much does Wikipedia have in common either with the Encyclop´edie or with the nationalistic encyclopedias of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? The first part of this chapter will explore the evidence for a genre of encyclopedia in antiquity. Pliny’s Natural History is often grouped together with the works of Cato, Varro and Celsus. They are designated Roman encyclopedists, even in recent work that is at pains to comment on the differences between them, and the difficulties of finding modern encyclopedism in antiquity. Pliny’s Natural History is very different from anything Cato, Varro or Celsus had to offer. As scholars have noted, where they produced works themed around the liberal arts, Pliny takes nature as his subject matter. This glaring difference raises the    

Murphy, ‘Pliny’s Natural History’, . Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia which allows users to write or edit entries. It is available at www.wikipedia.org. As I discussed in the Introduction; see Codo˜ner, ‘De l’antiquit´e au moyen aˆge’; Fowler, ‘Encyclopaedias’. This has been noted by Beagon, Roman Nature. ; Codo˜ner, ‘De l’antiquit´e au moyen aˆge’; Diesner, ‘Lexikographie und Enzyklop¨adie in der Antike’; Fowler, ‘Encyclopaedias’.

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Pliny’s Encyclopedia

question of why these ‘encyclopedists’ were grouped together in the first place, and why they continue to be discussed in relation to each other, even after we have acknowledged this core difference in subject matter. I want to look again at the moments where these authors are grouped together in antiquity, and examine their relationship to the slippery concept of enkyklios paideia, which Pliny invokes in his preface, and from which our word encyclopedia ultimately derives. Etymology has a potent influence on our expectations, long after we have learnt to mistrust its easy equivalencies. Enkyklios paideia will prove to be both different and similar to our encyclopedism, and Pliny’s evocation of it a more complex gesture than critics have allowed. As I will show, if Pliny’s Natural History is an encyclopedia by analogy with later encyclopedias, it matters a great deal which later encyclopedias we mean. It is with this in mind that I will discuss new approaches to Pliny’s Roman politics by examining imperialism in the geographical books of the Natural History, the point at which Pliny’s rhetoric might seem most reminiscent of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in its nineteenth-century heyday. The final section turns to the eighteenth century, examining the attitudes to Pliny held by Diderot and the encyclop´edistes, in the context of the revolutionary politics of the Encyclop´edie. Its production was a landmark in the history of encyclopedism and Enlightenment scholarship, and its philosopher-editor Denis Diderot claims Pliny as a kind of precursor. What kind of political and intellectual politics was it possible to discover in the eighteenth-century Natural History that has become impossible to envision two centuries on? Looking at the politics of Pliny’s reception is an indispensable step in trying to construct the politics of his text.

enkyklios paideia and the genre of the ancient encyclopedia 7 When predecessors in the art of encyclopedia writing are found for Pliny, it is usually Cato, Varro and Celsus who are singled out, with Varro the most important figure. However, the fluidity in the use of ‘encyclopedia’ to mean both the philosophical impulse towards universal knowledge as well as a literary artefact of organised information has made it possible  

This section draws on my article, ‘Pliny’s Natural History: Enkyklios Paideia and the Ancient Encyclopedia’, Journal of the History of Ideas , no.  (): –. See, for instance, Beagon, Roman Nature, –; Carey, Pliny’s Catalogue of Culture, –; Murphy, Pliny the Elder’s ‘Natural History’, , –.

Diderot’s Pliny and the politics of the encyclopedia



to find a surprising array of possible encyclopedists. As far as Pliny is concerned, there can be little objection to the idea that his interests were ‘encyclopedic’ in the sense of wide-ranging, but co-opting his book into a genre of ancient encyclopedia has more problematic implications for our understanding of the text. Recent work on Pliny’s Natural History often divides ancient encyclopedias into two groups: those which deal with the natural world, and those which take their inspiration from the educational system of enkyklios paideia, discussing the various artes – including rhetoric, grammar and medicine. But while Cato, Varro and Celsus can, with varying degrees of certainty, be placed in the second category, the first contains only Pliny, whose Natural History claims to contain , facts but makes no attempt to teach anyone a particular discipline. This difference between Pliny and the other encyclopedists has been emphasised in recent work on the Natural History and it has been suggested that Pliny’s deviation from the model of his predecessors marks a significant innovation on the part of Pliny. For these differences to be innovations, however, we need to be sure that Pliny was writing in the same tradition as Varro, that he and his readers would have understood the Disciplinae and the Natural History in the context of a shared genre of writing. Modern scholarship makes the encyclopedia that shared genre, but was the encyclopedia a recognisable category in antiquity? The simple answer is probably no. There was no ancient genre of encyclopedia that ancient writers and readers understood as such; it was never Pliny’s intention to write ‘an encyclopedia’, and genre is probably not a helpful model for understanding the relationship between Pliny and Varro’s work. The etymology of encyclopedia from enkyklios paideia has been the driving force in calling the works of Cato, Varro and Celsus ‘encyclopedias’, and Pliny’s reference to ‘what the Greeks call enkyklios paideia’ in his preface is one of the proofs brought forward for the encyclopedism of his text and for its links to his three predecessors’ texts. As I will show, it is likely that Pliny’s reference in his preface is neither an allusion to a type of text nor an allusion to the content of his own work. Enkyklios paideia is a disputed term in modern scholarship, and it is not entirely clear what it could encompass for Pliny or his readers. Enkyklios means ‘in a circle’, ‘general’, 



See Collison, Encyclopedias; della Corte, ‘Enciclopedisti Latini’; Diesner, ‘Lexikographie und Enzyklop¨adie in der Antike’; Grimal, ‘Encyclop´edies antiques’; H¨unem¨order, ‘Antike und mittelalteriche Enzyklop¨adien und die Popularisierung naturkundlichen Wissens’. On Pliny’s differences from other encyclopedists as innovations, see Murphy, Pliny the Elder’s ‘Natural History’, –. On Pliny’s differences from Varro as innovative, see Naas, Le projet encyclop´edique de Pline l’Ancien, –.



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

‘ordinary’, and paideia means ‘education’, ‘acculturation’, so that enkyklios paideia has been taken to mean both ‘ordinary education’ and ‘all-round cultural knowledge’. Although most historians of the encyclopedia continue to believe that there is something encyclopedic about the concept of enkyklios paideia, modern historians of education since Henri Marrou have ignored any links between enkyklios paideia and encyclopedism, and used it to mean general education. However, the nineteenth-century philologists on whose reconstructions of the fragmentary texts of Cato, Varro and Celsus we still depend were inspired by a different model of enkyklios paideia. As we will see, not only are these reconstructions of the lost texts’ contents less secure than has sometimes been assumed, but the logic that makes them ‘encyclopedias’ is at times rather tenuous. If Pliny’s Natural History is an encyclopedia it is not because of authorial intention, and its first audience could not have recognised it as part of an encyclopedic genre of texts that included the Ad Filium, the Disciplinae and the Artes. If any of these texts are encyclopedias, it is because of their reception history, rather than because they belong to a shared ancient category of writing. It is easy to see the basis on which Pliny’s Natural History could be assumed into a modern genre of encyclopedia. It is a repository of knowledge on all of nature, all of life, culled from a wide range of secondary works; it advertises the accessibility of its information, advises the reader to consult rather than read it, and provides a list of contents to make this possible. As I will discuss, the basis on which we call the texts of Cato, Varro and Celsus ‘encyclopedias’ is quite different from the reasons we call the Natural History one. In both cases, however, these reasons are heavily dependent on analogy with a later, self-aware genre of encyclopedia familiar to scholars from at least the eighteenth century onwards, but entirely unknown in the first century ad. Enkyklios paideia has been central to the project of tracing encyclopedism in antiquity, a powerful etymological link that continues to influence our 



Marrou explicitly renounces any link between encyclopedism and enkyklios paideia: Henri Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, trans. G. Lamb (London: Sheed and Ward, ; reprint, ), –. For enkyklios paideia as general education, see also Raffaela Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind. Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Princeton University Press, ), , ; Teresa Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (Cambridge University Press, ), –. See HN pr.  for the expansive description of his work as ‘rerum natura, hoc est vita’; pr.  for numbers of facts and authorities contained; pr.  on the list of contents as a means for his reader to find what they want without reading the entire work. On the question of how far it was possible to use Pliny’s summarium to access his information, see Aude Doody, ‘Finding Facts in Pliny’s Encyclopaedia: The Summarium of the Natural History’, Ramus , no.  (): –; Jocelyn Penny Small, Wax Tablets of the Mind: Cognitive Studies of Memory and Literacy in Classical Antiquity (London, New York: Routledge, ), –.

Diderot’s Pliny and the politics of the encyclopedia

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perceptions long after we might recognise its anachronism. Not only is the claim that Cato, Varro and Celsus wrote ‘encyclopedias’ bound up with it, but one of the additional arguments for calling the Natural History an encyclopedia is that Pliny refers to ‘what the Greeks call enkyklios paideia’ in his preface. It is not entirely clear what enkyklios paideia meant in antiquity. There are few uses of the term extant, and even then many of the references either supply little in the way of context or are inconsistent in the specifics they offer. A number of ancient authors make enkyklios paideia the preliminary study that should ideally occur before the student could embark on more intensive and serious specialisation. For Vitruvius, the subjects of enkyklios paideia were interlinked, the individual parts that make up a single body of knowledge, as he puts it (Arch. .). It is this sense of enkyklios paideia as a wide-ranging and interlinked programme of study that inspired the later association with encyclopedism. We need to revisit the question of what enkyklios paideia might have meant in antiquity in order to better understand Pliny’s somewhat obscure reference to the term in his preface: does Pliny use it to reflect the ‘encyclopedic’ nature of his project, and should it be read as a conscious reference to the work of Cato, Varro and Celsus? Although scholars who work on ancient encyclopedias are still committed to the idea that there is something encyclopedic about enkyklios paideia, recent historians of education have insisted on the ordinariness of enkyklios paideia, and discounted its relevance to encyclopedism. Henri Marrou led the way in his groundbreaking study of ancient education: [Enkyklios paideia] has nothing to do with anything ‘encyclopaedic’, which is an entirely modern idea – the word itself only came into existence in the sixteenth century. The word ‘encyclopaedia’ evokes a picture of universal knowledge, and however elastic it may have been, –gkÅkliov paide©a never claimed to embrace the entirety of human knowledge; it simply meant, in accordance with the accepted 



There is an extensive bibliography on enkyklios paideia. Particularly useful starting points are Ilsetraut ´ Hadot, Arts lib´eraux et philosophie dans la pens´ee antique (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, ), – , and L.M. de Rijk, ‘Enkyklios Paideia: A Study of its Original Meaning’, Vivarium  (): –. See also H. Fuchs, ‘Enkyklios Paideia’, Reallexikon f¨ur Antike und Christentum  (): –; Hermann Koller, ‘Enkyklios Paideia’, Glotta  (): –; Hans Joachim Mette, ‘EGKUKLIOS PAIDEIA’, Gymnasium  (): –; Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind, , ; Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds, –. For the assertion that enkyklios paideia has nothing to do with the encyclopedia, see Jacob, ‘Ath`enes-Alexandrie’ and Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, –. HN pr. . See the discussion of this statement in Beagon, Roman Nature, ; Carey, Pliny’s Catalogue of Culture, ; Conte, ‘The Inventory of the World’, ; Murphy, Pliny the Elder’s ‘Natural History’, .



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

meaning of –gkÅkliov in Hellenistic Greek, ‘the usual everyday education received by all’. For this reason I suggest ‘general education’ as a suitable translation.

More recently, in their work on the material evidence for education in Egypt, both Raffaela Cribiore and Teresa Morgan use the term enkyklios paideia to mean ordinary education, encompassing basic literacy. Cribiore emphasises the idea of circularity in enkyklios, understanding it as a metaphor for the student circling back at each stage to study earlier material in greater depth. Teresa Morgan glosses enkyklios paideia as common or ordinary education, but notes that ancient writers on education can trope their works as ‘complete systems which “encircle” the pupil with everything he needs to know’. The exercises painstakingly scrawled on ostraka and papyri that form the evidence discussed by Morgan and Cribiore no doubt represent ordinary educational experiences. It is not clear, however, that this struggle towards literacy is what our ancient sources meant by enkyklios paideia. The problem is that although the word enkyklios may have simply meant ‘ordinary’ in Hellenistic Greek, when the phrase enkyklios paideia occurs in Roman literary texts, it is hard to read it as ‘general education’. The earliest extant use of enkyklios in an educational context appears in Aristotle, where he uses the phrase enkuklia philosophemata and again, ta enkuklia, to refer to subjects which are preparatory to the study of philosophy proper. This sense of enkyklios paideia as preparatory studies persists in later usage of the term: both Seneca and Pseudo-Plutarch make philosophy the end goal in their references to it, but it was also possible to make it a prelude to rhetoric or architecture or geography or knowledge of divine wisdom. The precise list of subjects that it encompasses varies a little from author to author. Vitruvius, in his preface to Book  of the De Architectura, famously makes the case for the erudite architect,      

Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, –. Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind; Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds. Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind, . Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds, . De caelo, I, ,  a ; Eth. Nicom., I, ,  a . For enkyklios paideia as a prelude to philosophy, see Seneca Ep. , Pseudo-Plutarch De liberis educandis c; as a prelude to rhetoric, see Quintilian Inst. Or. ..; as a prerequisite for geographical knowledge, see Strabo Geog. ..; as a prerequisite for architecture, see Vitruvius Arch. ., .; as propaedeutic to the contemplation of divine wisdom, see Philo De congressu  and De fuga –, where Agar, the slave-woman with whom Abraham has his first son, Ismail, is identified with enkyklios paideia, while his wife Sarah, the mother of Isaac, represents philosophy, wisdom and virtue. See Hadot, Arts lib´eraux et philosophie dans la pens´ee antique, – for a discussion of Philo’s use of enkyklios paideia in a religious context and his influence on later Christian writers Clement of Alexandria and Origen.

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who is familiar with all the artes, and offers a list of the subjects which could be included in the comprehensive training that should be studied as prerequisites to architecture: So he should be a man of letters, skilled at drawing, good at geometry, he should know some of the historians, and have listened carefully to the philosophers, he should be familiar with music, know a little medicine, know about judicial practice, have some knowledge of astrology and astrological measurements. (Vitruvius, Arch. .)

Quintilian refers to the concept towards the end of the first book of his Institutio Oratoria, when he is summing up the remaining subjects that might help an aspiring orator. He has covered the ways in which students should be taught to read and write, the training they should receive in grammar and correct use of Latin, in composition and in history, and finishes: I have made my remarks on grammatica as brief as possible, making no attempt to say everything, (for the theme is infinite), but confining myself to the most necessary points. I will now proceed briefly to discuss the remaining arts in which I think boys ought to be instructed before being handed over to the teacher of rhetoric: for it is by such studies that the course of education (orbis ille doctrinae) described by the Greeks as enkyklios paideia or general education will be brought to its full completion. (Quintilian Inst. Or. ..)

The arts that Quintilian goes on to suggest are geometry and music. He then suggests that learning pronunciation from an actor and some dance and gymnastic training might also be helpful. As Ilsetraut Hadot has argued in her work on the seven liberal arts in antiquity, Roman references to enkyklios paideia seem inconsistent with the idea that it could have meant ‘general education’ for later Romans. In antiquity there was never a fixed number of subjects or a definitive list of what enkyklios paideia should include: the idea of enkyklios paideia as a fixed canon of subjects seems to have been heavily influenced by the later fixity of the seven liberal arts. There is something aspirational in Quintilian’s reference to ‘that circle of learning that the Greeks call enkyklios paideia’, and Vitruvius’ allusions to it all come in the course of his attempts to claim a place for architecture as part of elite culture. The painstaking nature of Vitruvius’ explanations of why an architect needs to know such a wide range of subjects is indicative of the idealism of his claims. Vitruvius and Quintilian have to explain to their readers what they 

Hadot, Arts lib´eraux et philosophie dans la pens´ee antique, –. Quintilian mentions enkyklios paideia at Inst. Or. ..; Vitruvius discusses it at Arch. ., .,  pr. .

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Pliny’s Encyclopedia

mean by enkyklios paideia or enkyklios disciplina: it is not an everyday term, and is produced with a flourish at a key rhetorical moment in each of their works. It is this aspirational quality in references to enkyklios paideia that is perhaps the key to the problem of inconsistency in the number and nature of the subjects that ancient authors attribute to it. Enkyklios paideia is always propaedeutic to the more important area of expertise that the writer wishes to promote to his reader: the more impressive the breadth of enkyklios paideia, the more exalted the subject that can only be attempted after such elaborate training. The rhetorical point of enkyklios paideia in these texts is to emphasise the importance of the subject under discussion: different authors choose to frame particular skills or subject areas as constitutive of enkyklios paideia because of the reflected glory that they cast upon their own, more complex specialisation. This consistency in the rhetorical use of enkyklios paideia suggests that the term had impressive connotations; far from signifying ‘ordinary education’, the concept of enkyklios paideia could be used to assert the place of a particular discipline within Roman hierarchies of knowledge. To say that philosophy can only be studied after enkyklios paideia was to assert philosophy’s primacy over all other subjects; to substitute theology for philosophy, as Philo and Origen were to do, or architecture, as Vitruvius did, or rhetoric, like Quintilian, or geography with Strabo, was to stake a claim for one’s particular area of expertise within an already-valorised intellectual framework. When we look at Pliny’s own reference to enkyklios paideia, it is in a similarly aspirational context where Pliny sets out his ideal of what it is that ought to be known. Much has been made of this allusion to enkyklios paideia in recent work on Pliny: it is often mentioned as evidence of Pliny’s encyclopedism and is one of the key reasons for linking Pliny’s Natural History to the work of Cato, Varro and Celsus. As I will discuss, this seems to me an over-reading of what Pliny actually says, a reading that stems partly from an anachronistic expectation that if Pliny mentions enkyklios paideia it must be in reference to his own encyclopedism. The reference comes in the course of his opening mission statement in the preface to the Natural History, which is addressed to Titus. It is worth quoting in its wider context: I have also had the temerity to go so far as to dedicate to you these little books, the fruits of my small efforts. They are not full of insight, with which I am not particularly well endowed, and have no room for digressions or speeches or conversations or amazing accidents or strange happenings, things that are enjoyable to write and fun to read; this is a dry subject: the nature of things, that is life,

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

and the most sordid part of it, using regional or foreign terms, even barbaric ones, which need an apology in advance. Besides which, this is not a well-travelled path for most scholars, or one that minds are eager to wander. None of us has ever attempted it, and no one Greek has covered all of it. Most people look for attractive fields of research; those which are treated by others are said to be of immense subtlety, and are weighed down by the gloomy obscurity of the subject. Now all the subjects that the Greeks call enkyklios paideia ought to be dealt with [iam omnia attingenda quae Graeci “t
v –gkÅkliou paide©av” uocant], but they are unknown or made confusing by over-complications, while others are so often discussed that they become tedious. It is a difficult thing to give novelty to the familiar, authority to the brand new, shine to the out-of-date, clarity to the obscure, charm to the dull, authority to the implausible, its nature to everything and all its own to nature. And this is why even if I have not succeeded, it is a brilliant and beautiful enterprise. (Pliny HN pr. –)

This is perhaps one of the most discussed passages in the whole Natural History, but, to my mind, Pliny’s reference to enkyklios paideia appears decidedly cryptic. One possible explanation of the reference is provided by Mary Beagon in her important book on the concept of nature in the Natural History: It was to this idea, of a non-specialized but wide-ranging knowledge, which, as it were, makes its pupils properly educated and decent citizens, that Pliny alludes in his Preface: ‘Before all else, we should touch upon what the Greeks called enkyklios paideia’ (pref.). The Roman writer Quintilian was later to use the same phrase to denote a general education preliminary to more specialized studies. The literary development of this idea, in the collecting of the various components of enkyklios paideia into a single volume or encyclopaedia, had, in fact, been a Roman achievement.

Beagon believes that Pliny is using enkyklios paideia to refer to his own subject matter, setting it in the context of a particular system of ancient education, which Beagon links with the work of the Roman encyclopedists Varro and Celsus. Beagon goes on to mark a difference between Pliny’s work and that of Celsus and Varro, and argues against the elision of differences between enkyklios paideia and the seven liberal arts of the Middle Ages. But it is the idea of an ancient canon of artes that she has in mind when she argues for Pliny’s originality in integrating ‘the traditional constituents of enkyklios paideia into a unity based on the theme of Natura’. How this   

Beagon, Roman Nature, . Gian Biagio Conte and Trevor Murphy also read this passage to mean that Pliny’s subject will be enkyklios paideia: Conte, ‘The Inventory of the World’; Murphy, ‘Pliny’s Natural History’, . Beagon, Roman Nature, .



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

combination could be effected is not entirely clear. For Cicero, at least, knowledge of the artes and knowledge of rerum natura appear to be two distinct spheres of expertise in his almost comical account of the legendary polymathism of Hippias of Elis. If, as most scholars have taken it, Pliny means that he is going to cover the subjects which the Greeks call enkyklios paideia, then it is difficult for the term to mean either general education or a specific canon of disciplines. Pliny’s Latin is often more opaque than one might like – it has provoked a wide range of responses, from the encyclop´ediste Denis Diderot’s insistence that only Tacitus could rival Pliny as a prose stylist to F.D.R. Goodyear’s caustic comment that Pliny ‘could hardly frame a coherent sentence’. The source of the ambiguity in this case comes in the line ‘iam omnia attingenda quae Graeci t
v –gkÅkliou paide©av uocant’. Exactly whom does ‘attingenda’ implicate: should enkyklios paideia be touched upon by Pliny, by the reader, or by Roman scholarship in general? The question is made more complicated by a small textual problem at the start of the sentence. Most of the manuscripts write ‘an omnia attingenda’, which the early editors corrected to ‘iam omnia attingenda’, and this remains the most common reading in modern editions, although Karl Mayhoff emended it to ‘ante omnia attingenda’ in his Teubner edition, a reading that was reproduced in the Loeb text. ‘Iam’ probably does most to suggest that it is Pliny who is now about to deal with all these subjects: ‘Now I should touch upon all those subjects which the Greeks call enkyklios paideia’. ‘Ante’ could have the same force (‘Before everything else, I should touch upon those subjects which the Greeks call enkyklios paideia’), but it could also be taken in a more temporal sense to mean that Pliny is referring to a range of subjects that ought to have been approached by Romans before they meet the Natural History: ‘Before anything else, the subjects which the Greeks call enkyklios paideia should be touched on’. 



 

Cicero de Orat. .: ‘When Hippias of Elis went to the great five hundredth celebration of the Olympic Games, he boasted in front of the whole of Greece, almost, that there was nothing in any branch of any knowledge that he did not know, not only had he mastered the branches that we call the free and liberal arts – geometry, music, knowledge of writing and poetry – and those which concern nature, human affairs, and politics, but he had also made, with his own hands, the ring on his finger, the clothes he was wearing, and the shoes on his feet. Maybe this was taking things a bit far’. Diderot in a letter to the sculptor Falconet, in a series sometimes referred to as the Letters on Posterity, reproduced in Yves Benot, Le pour et le contre (Paris: Editeurs franc¸ais r´eunis, ), . This correspondence is discussed below. Goodyear, ‘Technical Writing’, . [A]n appears in manuscripts ADFRdEa. For ante in the first sense, see Beagon, Roman Nature, , quoted above; in the second, temporal sense, see Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds, .

Diderot’s Pliny and the politics of the encyclopedia



It may be the case that Pliny is not telling us that his subject is enkyklios paideia at all. As we have seen, Roman and Greek authors usually use enkyklios paideia to refer to the range of subjects that are necessary prerequisites to the more advanced specialism that they are recommending to the reader. In this context, it might seem a little bathetic for Pliny to claim that enkyklios paideia is itself the focus of his study. Of the artes that are usually adduced, it is possible to see medical knowledge, astronomical facts, and information on agriculture touched upon in Pliny’s work, but nothing on, for instance, grammatica, history or music. Unlike our reconstructions of the encyclopedias of Cato, Varro and Celsus, the Natural History does not attempt to teach a reader how to practise a set of skills and rarely presents a narrative account of a particular subject area. If we accept Mayhoff ’s emendation, and take the sentence to read that Romans should be familiar with the subjects covered by enkyklios paideia, then the reference takes on a different meaning. The reference to ‘what the Greeks call enkyklios paideia’ is part of a general discussion of a perceived decline in standards of scholarship, the first of many occasions in the Natural History when Pliny bemoans the lack of intellectual enterprise in contemporary Roman society. Pliny has just explicitly stated that his subject is rerum natura, natural philosophy, which he equates with ‘life’, and he then goes on to explain the difficulty of the task he has set himself. The state of knowledge of enkyklios paideia is analogous to the situation surrounding rerum natura, the subject that Pliny will be dealing with. People ought to be familiar with the subjects of enkyklios paideia, but even these are either obscure, or so hackneyed that they have lost their interest. The point of Pliny’s invocation of enkyklios paideia is to set the Natural History in the context of abstruse Greek knowledge; here enkyklios paideia is again the prelude to another discipline: the study of the natural world. It does not necessarily suggest that Pliny himself will be touching upon the arts that make up enkyklios paideia, and it does not mark a connection between the genre of his work and that of Cato, Varro or Celsus. The idea that Cato, Varro and Celsus contributed to a Roman genre of encyclopedia emerges in the work of late nineteenth-century German philologists keen to make sense of their fragmentary texts. In his article 



See, especially, HN .– on the expansion of the Empire as a missed opportunity for the expansion of knowledge; HN .– for a contrast between ancient industry and generosity in the pursuit of herbal knowledge and present-day decline. On the history of editing fragments and the problems and processes involved, see Glenn Most, ed., Collecting Fragments, Aporemata (G¨ottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, ).



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

¨ of , ‘Uber r¨omische Encyclop¨adien’, Jahn carefully established links between the three lost texts and called them encyclopedias on the basis that all three dealt with a recognised canon of subjects in a single book. In his reconstructions of these texts, Jahn took his lead partly from Friedrich Ritschl’s earlier work on Varro’s Disciplinae, which found traces of nine separate liberal arts in Varro’s nine-book text. Jahn’s work, in its turn, influenced the reconstruction of Cato’s lost Ad filium in Heinrich Jordan’s collection of the fragments of Cato, as well as the reconstruction of Celsus’ Artes in Friedrich Marx’s collection of the fragments of Celsus. As I will show, the idea that these authors contributed to an ancient genre of encyclopedia is problematic; the idea that Pliny’s Natural History should be included in this ancient genre is doubly so. At the root of Jahn and Ritschl’s reconstructions of these texts is the concept of a well-defined curriculum of subjects that students at Rome would follow before more specialised study. Different ancient authors referred to different sets of subjects, but the artes liberales or enkyklios paideia could include grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, mathematics, astronomy, music and geometry, as well as medicine, agriculture and architecture. The differences in the sets of subjects, and the fact that they rarely appear in a simple list, could be glossed as political or ideological disputes over the proper education of a Roman citizen, or a product of changing attitudes over time. Ritschl’s article on Varro’s Disciplinae took this sense of an established curriculum a step further, and set out to prove that Varro’s text was the ancient source for the seven liberal arts that became canonical in the Middle Ages. This set of seven subjects consisted of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric and dialectic) and the quadrivium (geometry, astronomy, arithmetic and music), a sequence that appears as early as the fifth century in Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii. Varro’s Disciplinae, Ritschl argued, was the lost source for Martianus Capella’s canon-making formulation, and he succeeded in finding evidence for each one of the    

¨ O. Jahn, ‘Uber r¨omische Encyclop¨adien’, Berichte u¨ ber die Verhandlungen der K¨on. S¨achsischen Gesellschaft der Wissensch. zu Leipzig, Phil. -hist. Kl.  (): –. Friedrich Ritschl, De M. Terentii Varronis disciplinarum libris commentarius (Bonn, ). H.M. Jordan, Catonis omnia praeter librum de re rustica quae extant (Leipzig, ); Friedrich Marx, A Cornelii Celsi quae supersunt, vol. , Corpus Medicorum Latinorum, (Leipzig, Berlin: Teubner, ). Compare, for example, the liberal arts identified by Seneca Ep.  with the subjects that make up enkyklios paideia for Vitruvius Arch. .. Some scholars have disputed a simple equivalence between enkyklios paideia and the artes liberales: see Hadot, Arts lib´eraux et philosophie dans la pens´ee antique, –; Janet Atwill, Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition, Rhetoric & Society (Ithaca, NY, London: Cornell University Press, ), –. In the contexts in which the terms occur in Roman authors, it seems to me difficult to distinguish any distinct differences between the two.

Diderot’s Pliny and the politics of the encyclopedia



seven liberal arts in Varro’s Disciplinae. Using references to Varro in a wide range of later authors, Ritschl reconstructed the number and identity of the disciplines Varro discussed as grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astrology, music, medicine and architecture – in that order. The problem is that the evidence is extremely thin and Ritschl’s interpretations of it optimistic. Ilsetraut Hadot has unpicked Ritschl’s account of the Disciplinae in her study of the seven liberal arts in antiquity, and argues that the evidence suggests this was a book that dealt with a number of arts or disciplines, but it is not possible to know exactly which disciplines were discussed, or the manner in which they were addressed. The evidence for Cato’s encyclopedia is at least as sketchy as for Varro’s Disciplinae, but Heinrich Jordan’s account of it was more cautiously set out. Recent scholarship has begun to question its existence outright. A.S. Gratwick suggested that Cato’s Libri ad filium ‘were certainly unsystematic and eclectic and quirky’ and that Cato himself probably did not edit them together, while John Briscoe suggested that they were ‘perhaps no more than a brief collection of exhortations’. Codo˜ner follows this line in deciding, on balance, to remove Cato’s work from her list of ancient encyclopedias, and Trevor Murphy acknowledges the insecurity of Cato’s position as the first encyclopedist. When you look at the sixteen quotations that Jordan attributes to the Ad filium, it is easy to see the grounds for doubt. Even the title of the work varies from citation to citation: it appears as the Ad filium, Epistula ad Marcum filium, Praecepta ad Marcum filium. This makes it difficult to pin down the sort of a work it was, whether a treatise, a letter, a list of aphorisms or a combination of the three. Jordan chooses the quotations on the basis that they contain a reference to Marcus, and comes up with several that might relate to oratory, several on agriculture and others on medicine, and, less securely, one or two that might belong to sections on warfare or the law. The problem of how to interpret this evidence is a problem common to studies which try to reconstruct texts based on quotations or ‘fragments’ in other works. Although many of the sixteen quotations attributed to the 





Hadot, Arts lib´eraux et philosophie dans la pens´ee antique. Though see Danuta Shanzer for the argument that Hadot is unnecessarily pessimistic: Danuta R. Shanzer, ‘Augustine’s Disciplines: Silent diutius Musae Varronis?’ in Augustine and the Disciplines, ed. Karla Pollmann and Mark Vessey (Oxford University Press, ), –. John Briscoe, ‘Cato’, in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth (Oxford University Press, ), –; A.S. Gratwick, ‘Technical Writing’, in The Cambridge History of Classical Literature, ed. W.V. Clausen and E.J. Kenney (Cambridge University Press, ), –. Codo˜ner, ‘De l’antiquit´e au moyen aˆge’; Murphy, Pliny the Elder’s ‘Natural History’, .



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

Ad filium are aphoristic, this may not be a sound basis on which to judge the rest of the work. There are many passages in Cato’s De agri cultura that would sound equally aphoristic when taken out of context, and it is precisely aphorisms, injunctions and stern, old-fashioned advice that are most likely to be quoted on the authority of Cato the Elder. Not all of the testimonia are axiomatic, some provide straightforward advice on crops and cures, and could easily have been part of a large, systematic work. The fact remains, however, that Jordan’s tentative organisation of the fragments under headings corresponding to artes reflects a particular decision about what an ancient treatise should look like, one that was very much influenced by the earlier article by Otto Jahn on ancient encyclopedias. In this article, Jahn accepted Ritschl’s reconstruction of Varro’s Disciplinae, but noted the differences between the more theoretical topics supposedly covered by Varro and the practical subjects he suggests were covered by Cato. It was Cato’s Ad filium, Jahn argued, that provided the model for Celsus’ Artes. Celsus’ eight-book work on medicine survives, and references to Celsus and citations of his work in Columella, Pliny and Quintilian indicate that he also wrote on agriculture, on oratory, on warfare and on philosophy. Jahn began his discussion, however, with an intriguing reference in the conclusion of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, which sets Celsus alongside Cato and Varro, albeit in somewhat patronising terms: For example, Marcus Cato was a great general, a counsellor, an orator, a pioneer in the field of historia and law, and a skilled agriculturalist all at the same time. Yet despite all his military and domestic business and the harsh times he was living in, he taught himself Greek in his declining years so that he could prove to people what old men were capable of. Look at all the subjects – almost everything – that Varro covered! What did Cicero miss out that an orator needs to know? There’s no need to go on – even Cornelius Celsus, a man who was not especially gifted, not only wrote about all these subjects but also left work on the basics of warfare, agriculture and medicine, so whether justly or because at least he tried, we must believe he was an expert on all of these things. (Quintilian Inst. Or. ..–)

Quintilian is referring back to the artes suitable for an orator, outlined some pages earlier at .., where he expresses the fear that he might appear to be  

¨ See Jahn, ‘Uber r¨omische Encyclop¨adien’, . On agriculture, see Columella’s initial discussion of his sources at Rust. ... Columella finds fault with Celsus for using colour as a means of testing soil at .. and rebukes him at .. for advising using the weeds grown between the beans as fodder, when he should put human needs before those of animals and criticises him for twisting rather than pruning vine shoots at ... On oratory, see Quintilian Inst. Or. ... On philosophy, see Quintilian Inst. Or. ..: ‘Cornelius Celsus, a follower of the Sextii, wrote a number of philosophical works, which have considerable grace and polish’.

Diderot’s Pliny and the politics of the encyclopedia



asking too much of the student in expecting him to be ‘a good man skilled in speaking’, or too many things, by expecting him to study morality and the law in addition to the usual rhetorical subjects. Quintilian spends the intervening passages amassing examples of polymathic figures to guarantee the achievability of the ideal education he describes: first the Greeks – Homer, Hippias, Gorgias, Plato, Aristotle – and finally Cato, Varro, Cicero and Celsus. This wider context for the reference to these Roman authors is important for the relationships we see between their texts. The link that Quintilian makes here between Cato, Varro, Cicero and Celsus seems less to do with the exact subjects they covered, and more about their place in the Roman intellectual pantheon. At the end of the Institutio Oratoria, Quintilian uses these authors in defending the ideal of learning that his education system has outlined. The common link between Cicero, Cato, Varro and Celsus is something that they hold in common with Homer: they all stand as figures of the polymath, the man in complete possession of the knowledge of his culture, and it is this archetype that Quintilian is using to guarantee the ideal of education that he has been advocating in the course of the Institutio Oratoria. The exact subjects of their work, much less the manner in which it was written is not at issue here. It would be appealing to see this passage as confirmation of the idea that Cato, Varro and Celsus all wrote a similar sort of text, encyclopedias that unified all the artes in a single book, but the emphasis here is on the person who knows everything, not the book that contains everything. For Quintilian, it is the encyclopedic scholar, not the encyclopedia, that is of interest in his attempt to encourage the reader to believe in the Institutio Oratoria’s educational system. That Cato, Varro and Celsus wrote on a wide range of subjects is not in doubt. The question of how far they gathered these subjects into a single work remains more ambiguous. It is Celsus’ text that seems to raise most questions about the structure and cohesiveness of these encyclopedias. Celsus’ books on medicine survive intact, a clear introduction to the different branches of medicine which cohere well as a freestanding medical text in their own right. We know, however, that Celsus’ De Medicina was once part of a larger work largely because of a title given to it in early manuscripts: Cornelii Celsi artium lib. VI item medicinae primus, ‘Book  of Cornelius Celsus’ Artes, being the first book of the Medicine’. We have it on Columella’s authority that Celsus wrote five books about agriculture (Col. Rust. .), and there are 

¨ See Jahn, ‘Uber r¨omische Encyclop¨adien’, –.



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

two references to agriculture in the Medicina. Celsus opens the book with what looks like a link, ‘Just as agriculture gives nourishment to the body, so medicine gives health to the sick’, and later refers to the fact that a medicine he had recommended for sheep could work equally well on humans afflicted by scabies (Med. ..). The conclusion that the first five books of the Artes dealt with agriculture and that the Medicina represents the next section seems compelling. What is interesting, however, is how little difference this knowledge makes to our understanding of the Medicina as we have it. It is simply not necessary to set the Medicina in the context of a wider work on agriculture or warfare in order to be able to read it. And this must have been the case in antiquity too. When Columella refers to Celsus’ five books on agriculture, he makes no reference to the wider context of the Artes. Considering the available book production technologies, this is perhaps not surprising. At a time when individual books were written on individual scrolls, a long work comprised of discrete sections on different subjects might not always be reproduced in its entirety: it would have made good sense only to copy the scrolls that dealt with the particular subject that interested the buyer. This does raise questions, however, about the possibility of seeing any of these texts as cohesive works which attempted to unify the disciplines. Without the physical unity of the different sections in a codex, without the insistence of internal structural links, Celsus’ Artes could dissolve easily into a series of separate works. It was perhaps the encyclopedic author, not the encyclopedic text, that could best unify knowledge of the arts in antiquity. Cato, Varro and Celsus occupy a prominent place in Pliny’s Natural History. Cato and Varro are by far the most often quoted and cited of any of the authorities Pliny lists in Book . This prominence is perhaps not so much a result of similarities in the form of their texts, as an acknowledgement of their role as powerful precursors in Roman scholarship. At the start of the Natural History, Pliny divides his sources into Roman and Foreign, betraying a patriotic desire to identify a distinctively Roman contribution to knowledge of the natural world. Cato, Varro and, to a lesser extent, Celsus are important to Pliny not simply for the information their works contain, but for their status as role models and rivals within the field of Roman scholarship. Pliny admires Cato’s writing style when he quotes him extensively on the subject of soil (HN .–), but there are no references 

According to the lists of references provided in Peter Rosumek and Dietmar Najock’s concordance to the Natural History, Cato is mentioned  times, Varro ; Celsus receives a more modest, but still substantial,  references. Peter Rosumek and Dietmar Najock, Concordantia in C. Plinii Secundi Naturalem Historiam,  vols. (Hildesheim, Zurich, New York: Olms-Weidmann, ).

Diderot’s Pliny and the politics of the encyclopedia



to the type of text that Cato was writing. Anecdotes about Cato and Varro are scattered throughout the Natural History, but specific texts are rarely distinguished. Trevor Murphy’s work on Pliny’s use of sources persuasively argues that, for Pliny, the authorities listed in Book  are conceptualised as individuals rather than texts, with whom Pliny participates in an aristocratic exchange of knowledge. The debt that Pliny owes to Cato and Varro in the Natural History does not necessarily reflect a similarity between the forms of their texts. It is difficult to reconstruct the content and form of the lost works of Cato, Varro and Celsus. The nineteenth-century reconstructions on which we base our knowledge of the texts are less solid than has often been supposed. The designation of these works in particular as ‘encyclopedias’ and their importance as founders of the genre are largely a function of etymology. It is not difficult to see how that etymology is derived, and it is possible to see continuity between the ambitious rhetoric of enkyklios paideia and later encyclopedism. Even if we could be certain that the lost works of Cato, Varro and Celsus did in fact cover all the topics of enkyklios paideia, even if we could be sure that enkyklios paideia was a well-established set of topics that could be covered in toto, these texts have no more claim to be ‘encyclopedias’ on this basis than other ambitiously exhaustive scholarly work from antiquity. They do not constitute evidence that a genre of ‘encyclopedia’ was already recognised in antiquity, a genre so consistent with our own concept of encyclopedia that it could also encompass the Natural History. There is no ancient genre of encyclopedia that could encompass the works of Pliny, Cato, Varro and Celsus; the elusive concept of enkyklios paideia cannot provide a framework for linking these works. It is probably more productive to think of links between the authors than between the texts: Cato, Varro and Celsus are by far the most cited authorities in Pliny’s Natural History. Their brand of Roman polymathism makes them powerful precursors for Pliny, who deliberately sets himself in competition with their knowledge and authority. This does not mean that their texts shared a common genre. The crux is that while we might think that these two sorts of work are encyclopedias, we use different rationales for each type. And there is nothing to suggest that ancient readers, who had not inherited our concept of encyclopedia, ever thought that these four texts should go together. In particular, there is no evidence that Pliny thought that he was writing the same sort of text as Cato or Varro or Celsus, however 

See Murphy, ‘Pliny’s Natural History: The Prodigal Text’.



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

much he admired their scholarship. We gain nothing by discussing Pliny’s Natural History in the context of lost works by Cato, Varro or Celsus, and what we lose is considerable. We lose our sense of the peculiarity of the Natural History in its original context. common culture and roman geography Pliny’s Natural History is not part of any ancient genre of encyclopedia, but encyclopedism has been central to later understandings of the text. In an ancient context, first-century readers probably stored the Natural History alongside Seneca’s Natural Questions in their libraries, but Pliny’s Natural History has had an extraordinary history of use and adaptation since its origins in first-century Rome. Pliny’s encyclopedism is a product of his reception in the context of a later tradition of encyclopedia writing, a tradition in which he was extremely influential. The problem of Pliny’s encyclopedism is not one of simple anachronism. As I have said, genre provides a useful framework for reading texts partly because it allows readers to relate one text to another across time and place: on one level, Pliny’s Natural History is an encyclopedia because it displays certain features we recognise as typical of an encyclopedia whether or not Pliny was aware of the genre while writing it. If we should not simply abandon the idea that the Natural History is an encyclopedia, we do need to interrogate the models of encyclopedism we apply to it, and the different readings that these models produce. The encyclopedia has changed dramatically in form and content over its long history, and the intellectual politics surrounding its production have also varied. There was a revolution in the production of encyclopedias and dictionaries at the end of the twentieth century, with two key factors forcing the pace of change. The first is the development of information technology that allows for completely new systems of information retrieval and distribution: the Internet has provided a new utopian vision of encyclopedism, of complete knowledge universally accessible. Encyclopedias have had to reinvent themselves to be able to compete in what has been heralded as a new era of information. The second great change is a politicisation of reference works, as old definitions of national, common culture seem inadequate in the face of feminism and the emergent identity politics of multicultural societies. 

On the reception of the Natural History, see for instance Borst, Das Buch der Naturgeschichte; Chibnall, ‘Pliny’s Natural History and the Middle Ages’.

Diderot’s Pliny and the politics of the encyclopedia



Several recent books on the Natural History have explored its politics in the light of its encyclopedism. In his work on the imperialist politics of Pliny’s Natural History, Trevor Murphy uses the Encyclopaedia Britannica as his model for an encyclopedic text when he set out to define the nature of Pliny’s encyclopedism: In this book I shall argue for a reading of Pliny’s encyclopedia as a political document, a cultural artefact of the Roman Empire just as much as the Encyclopaedia Britannica was an artefact of the British Empire. I shall demonstrate how the structure and content of the Natural History entwined with Roman political imperium in a relationship of mutual benefit, in that one of the functions of an encyclopedia is to embody how much is known and to demarcate it all from the perspective of central authority.

Sorcha Carey too, makes the Encyclopaedia Britannica her counter-example in explaining the distances and continuities between Pliny’s text and modern encyclopedias. Although both Carey and Murphy do acknowledge the dangers of anachronism, it is not a coincidence that the Encyclopaedia Britannica should be the model of encyclopedia cited in these two books that investigate the centrality of empire to Pliny’s Natural History. And yet the Encyclopaedia Britannica has not stood still: the force of the analogy depends on which edition of this formidable brand is meant. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, one of the most successful and authoritative purveyors of knowledge for over two centuries, is now available online and in a multimedia edition as well as in the traditional print format. This has clear advantages for both publisher and reader: it is significantly cheaper to buy a monthly subscription than to pay for the complete set of print volumes, and the online version can be edited and revised in sections, rather than needing a complete overhaul every ten years and the production of a yearly supplemental volume. The Encyclopaedia Britannica was always a dynamic publishing venture, begun in Edinburgh by William Smellie in , it was bought out by two American salesmen, Horace E. Hooper and Walter M. Jackson, in the late nineteenth century and became a cross-Atlantic production, the first encyclopedia to maintain a permanent staff of editors and sub-editors to facilitate a constant process of revision and renewal. Its magisterial articles reflected a conservative view of the world outside its pages, and the impressive bulk of the multivolume text was a symbol of authority and permanence in the middle-class home. It is this nineteenth- and early twentieth-century version of the  

Murphy, Pliny the Elder’s ‘Natural History’, . www.britannica.com.



Carey, Pliny’s Catalogue of Culture, .



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

Encyclopaedia Britannica that Murphy has in mind, not the contemporary web-based Encyclopaedia Britannica with its hyperlinked pages and international, multimedia content. In an early review of online encyclopedias in the wake of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Adam Hodgkin highlighted fundamental changes in the status of the encyclopedia’s information, running alongside this change in format: The web is dynamic and virtual, where print is permanent and physical . . . But we must admit that the web is also unreliable, slow, frustrating and misleading. Why is this so, when it contains so much information? The short answer is that the web is unreliable precisely because it contains too much information. While Tim Berners-Lee was stirring into his recipe ‘generality’, ‘equality’, ‘simplicity’ and ‘openness’, the wicked fairy was peering over his shoulder muttering ‘selfadvertisement, spam, prolixity and error’. The web encourages contributions from every quarter, experimentation, variety and freedom of expression; and it is short of devices to ensure accuracy, reliability, economy, revision and permanence.

The Internet has the ability to bypass the traditional encyclopedia’s authoritative selection of what counts as common culture, offering a genuinely eclectic selection of information, but there is a trade-off in terms of authority and reliability. Customers will still pay to use Encyclopaedia Britannica rather than simply conduct a free Internet search for the information they want, or, for that matter, use Wikipedia, the revolutionary, if controversial, online encyclopedia consisting of user-generated articles. The authority of names such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica can still carry weight, and there is still a market for authoritative, selective information, safe from the excesses of the boundlessly informative Internet. Neither the Encyclopaedia Britannica nor Wikipedia offer information for the specialist: they are a first port of call for individuals trying to plug a gap in their knowledge, the research equivalent of first aid. The idea that an encyclopedia might be on the cutting-edge of scholarship has fallen by the wayside. Important scholarly work has become more and more specialist in its origins and in its orientation, and even when popular science is published, it is more likely to appear in a brightly coloured book or the supplement of a newspaper than in an encyclopedia. The intellectual importance of the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, at the end of the nineteenth century, or the innovations of the Encyclop´edie in the eighteenth seem very far from current encyclopedic ambitions. 

Adam Hodgkin, ‘Chameleon of the Computer Age: How Web-based Reference Books Are Evolving beyond the Dictionary’, Times Literary Supplement,  September , –.

Diderot’s Pliny and the politics of the encyclopedia

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Similarly, the idea of a national encyclopedia as a source of national prestige is more or less incomprehensible in the Internet era, with its ideal of universal and internationally accessible, instant information. The overtly nationalistic encyclopedias of the twentieth century were explicit in their aims. Perhaps the most famous example is the Enciclopedia Italiana of the early part of the twentieth century: this encyclopedia was intended to be a showcase for Italian knowledge and achievement, and Mussolini himself contributed the article on Italy. A similar nationalist rhetoric drove the great Soviet encyclopedias of the Cold War, produced as a monument to the USSR’s cultural and scientific advances. But the era of national encyclopedias had started earlier, in the nineteenth century: the Brockhaus Enzyklop¨adie as a direct challenge to the Encyclop´edie, the evolving Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Encyclop´edie de France all bear witness to the national orientation of these works, the shared culture they assume and propagate. Unsurprisingly perhaps, a reaction against the encyclopedia as a repository of narrow nationalist culture is now in full swing. The cultural and political agenda of reference works has become hugely important for those who read and for those who write them. The problem of creating useful and ideologically sound reference works is a live issue for encyclopedists and lexicographers. Their work has become more complex as they have become more aware of the normative impact of their work, and the challenge to provide the reading public with a successful product has become more difficult as that public has become more diverse in its needs and expectations. There have been key shifts in the field of lexicography, as we can see from Sidney Landau’s revised edition () of his standard work on dictionaries, Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography (first published ). The revised edition reflected two key changes: new developments in information technology that revolutionised lexicographic methodology and a new awareness of the social and ideological implications of dictionary making. Landau offers two lines of defence against the charge that dictionaries enshrine biases against women and minorities. He argues that ‘every established dictionary reflects, however it may strive to be impartial, the prevailing biases of its times, because the biases often inhere in the very manner of expression used in its definitions’. In answering criticism of a particular children’s dictionary, Landau observes that ‘the real point of the criticism is not that the dictionary was biased, but that it had not kept up with the times. It 

See B. Kachru and H. Kahane, eds., Cultures, Ideologies and the Dictionary: Studies in Honour of Ladislav Zgusta (T¨ubingen: Max Niemeyer, ); Sidney I. Landau, Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography (Cambridge University Press, ), –.

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Pliny’s Encyclopedia

reflected past biases rather than current ones.’ Landau goes so far as to suggest that the same power of a dictionary to enshrine past prejudices could be used in furthering social change, ‘especially when social behaviour has not kept pace with predominant social values’. But predominant social values tend to be hotly contested: dictionaries and encyclopedias that try to reflect social change are also open to criticism on the grounds of bias. Encyclopedias, like dictionaries, insinuate a particular view of the world in their choice of what counts as knowledge. But they are also publishing ventures, rooted in particular times and places, and subject to drastic changes in attitudes and format over their different editions. If we trust in their claim to contain a complete cultural record, then, as the fifteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica puts it, ‘every edition of any good encyclopedia has the additional merit of being a valuable source for the thought and attitudes of the world for which it was published’. If we prefer to see them as a record of particular, elite, vested interests, we can nonetheless read the encyclopedia for the agenda it reveals through its omissions and inclusions. From our perspective, finding Pliny’s authorial prejudices might provide clues to prevailing prejudices and assumptions in the first century, particularly if we accept that as an encyclopedia, the text is less likely to reflect novel or idiosyncratic authorial choices. But we must also take on board Landau’s warning that if reference works enshrine particular biases, the position from which we criticise them is also biased and contingent. As I will demonstrate, there is a tendency among critics to find a reflection of their own political convictions in Pliny’s text, whether they are writing in the twenty-first or the eighteenth century. New work in the early s began to look at Pliny’s work as a text to be understood as a whole, a book that could be read from start to finish. Although, as we have seen, this did little to shake convictions that Pliny’s Natural History was unproblematically ‘an encyclopedia’, the idea that an encyclopedia could have an overall point or a coherent agenda provided new impetus to work on Pliny. The question became one of unity – what was Pliny’s rationale in constructing the Natural History? The search for Pliny’s agenda tends to focus on natura and Romanitas as the key issues. Mary Beagon’s Roman Nature focused on nature as the underlying discourse of the work, examining the impact of ancient philosophical theories of nature on Pliny’s thought. Similarly, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill and Roger French focus on nature and humanity’s place in it as the central themes of the  

 Landau, Dictionaries, . Landau, Dictionaries, . Collison and Preece, ‘Encyclopaedias’, .

Diderot’s Pliny and the politics of the encyclopedia

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Natural History, discussing the role of luxuria as a key element in Pliny’s prescriptions about what is and what is not ‘natural’. These accounts, which aimed to look at Pliny’s nature, came to focus strongly on the Romano-centrism of Pliny’s worldview. For Mary Beagon, Pliny’s view of the Roman Empire had ‘a strong element of philosophic idealism in it’ and Roger French explained the absence of a coherent philosophical system as a Roman dismissal of Greek parochialism in the light of the practicalities of empire. More recently, Sorcha Carey, Trevor Murphy and Val´erie Naas have used postcolonial theory to politicise the Roman worldview at the heart of the Natural History. Pliny’s information is gathered as a result of Roman imperial expansion and as a tool for further expansion, describing the Empire and its usefulness for Rome. It is the political readings of Pliny’s text in the light of postcolonial theory that interest me here. My strategy is to produce a new reading of my own, to demonstrate how persuasive, if not self-evident, such a reading might seem. My reading is rooted in the observation that structure and meaning are closely linked in Pliny’s catalogue of the known world. One of the problems that besets grand theories of Pliny’s text is the problem of being comprehensive, of dealing adequately with the scope of the work. Jacqueline Vons’s study of the image of women in the Natural History made extensive use of quantitative analysis to get an overall grasp of the contents of the work, but most approaches are qualitative, picking and choosing representative examples to support particular contentions. Almost inevitably, it is usually the discursive passages that are picked out for comment, the longer treatments of an object or animal and the rhetorical passages in which Pliny discusses his purpose. Where historians generally pick out factual details, the political reader of Pliny’s encyclopedia picks out the general tendency from the omissions and eccentricities of the work, and from the writer’s statements of intent. It would be difficult to guess from most work on Pliny just how dense and unreadable most of the Natural History appears, with its tightly packed lists of names, tagged with terse explanations. I will focus on the structures of the text in one section of the whole work, in an attempt to uncover an overriding politics. I have already discussed the issue of names and listing as key elements of the factbased understanding of knowledge that Pliny puts forward in the Natural    

Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Pliny the Elder and Man’s Unnatural History’. French, ‘The Natural History of Pliny’. Beagon, Roman Nature, ; French, ‘The Natural History of Pliny’, . Carey, Pliny’s Catalogue of Culture; Murphy, Pliny the Elder’s ‘Natural History’, and Murphy, ‘Pliny’s Natural History: The Prodigal Text’; Naas, Le projet encyclop´edique de Pline l’Ancien. Vons, L’image de la femme dans l’œuvre de Pline l’ancien.

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Pliny’s Encyclopedia

History as a whole. I want to mobilise these ideas again in examining the geographical sections of the Natural History. Geography is a good place to look for politics, particularly the politics of empire. I focus here on Books  to , in keeping with the recent work of Carey and Murphy. Carey uses the geographical books of the Natural History as a way of unmasking the general preoccupation with Roman power diffused over the rest of the work: the encyclopedia’s ambition to organise and contain all the knowledge of the world is co-extensive with Rome’s ambition to control the world. This lesson from the geography forms the impetus to Carey’s reading of Pliny’s art history and its relationship to contemporary Roman culture which is the focus of her book: the geographical prologue allows us direct access to politics that are more opaque in the art history. Murphy, on the other hand, makes the geographical and ethnographical material the focus of his book, illuminating the subtle interplay between self and other, Roman and foreign in Pliny’s work. This larger study provides a sophisticated reassessment of the place of mirabilia in Pliny’s text, and exhibits a seriousness and generosity in its approach to Pliny’s scholarship, avoiding the traditional expectation of pedantic amateurism in Pliny’s text. The conclusion that the Natural History is fundamentally about Rome and Romanness emerges from a careful analysis of selected episodes and the overall treatment of foreign places and cultures in Pliny’s text. This new work on ancient geography has been informed by postcolonial approaches to geography, and the current interest in the politics of cartography, both in ancient and modern contexts. The key insight of this approach is that geographical texts are never an innocent representation of the world around us, but are necessarily embedded in the wider politics of the community for which they are designed. Behind the wilful strategy of objectivity lies a subjective and selective process of assimilation and control, which is implicated in large-scale economic and political power relations, particularly so in the context of empire. An account of the world, then, can never be an objective representation of the world as it really is, but encodes important information about how a society sees itself in relation to those outside itself. Hence, deciphering the meaning of Pliny’s geography 

See especially Claude Nicolet’s groundbreaking study: Claude Nicolet, Space, Geography and Power in the Early Roman Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ). See Katherine Clarke’s work on Strabo for a complex account of geographical historiography and Roman power: Katherine Clarke, Between Geography and History: Hellenistic Constructions of the Roman World (Oxford University Press, ). See also C.E.P. Adams and Ray Laurence, eds., Travel and Geography in the Roman Empire (London: Routledge, ).

Diderot’s Pliny and the politics of the encyclopedia

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should provide us with insights into the relationships between Romans and Greeks and Barbarians in the first century ad. Working from this premise, I will show how the dullness, even obviousness, of the methodology of naming camouflages an underlying politics of appropriation at work in Pliny’s geographical discourse. As I discussed in Chapter , Pliny’s concept of nature is generally taken to be Stoic in essence, although Pliny’s philosophical stance is not completely consistent. His geography too seems influenced by a Stoic conception of the world as a place designed for people, and dependent on humans for its significance and coherence. Despite this, work on his conception of nature has tended to avoid his treatment of cities and to focus instead on the more general concepts of ‘land and sea’ as Mary Beagon puts it. A tradition of geography which deals primarily with the location of cities and peoples – the human landscape – was one key mode of describing place in the ancient world. As Katherine Clarke points out, Strabo chose to write in this Stoic tradition, prescriptively warning that ‘the geographer does not need to be interested in what’s outside our inhabited world’. There were alternatives in the mathematical geography of Eratosthenes’ school and in the model of physical geography which focused on ‘empty spaces’, closely allied with meteorology, as in the anonymous Airs, Waters, Places or the fragmentary works of Agathermus, writing in the third century ad. Pliny does in fact mention the project of mathematical geography based on plotting the longitude of particular places, but he is unimpressed. His antecedents, unsurprisingly, are more easily found in the practical and largely unassuming guise of periplus literature. These texts describe the ‘sailing around’ or travelogue of a particular area, describing its coastline and the major bays and points of interest along the way, signalling the distances between them. Although they were mainly limited in scope and focused on trade routes – as in the case of the surviving Periplus of the Erythraean Sea – there was also the example of the Periplus of Hanno, a more expansive work, which Christian Jacob has suggested is less the description of an actual voyage than an exploration of alterit´e. It is the periplus genre that provides Pliny with the structural framework for his description of the world. He begins in Book  at the Straits of     

For an articulation of this position, see Beagon, Roman Nature, ; French, ‘The Natural History of Pliny’, . Beagon, Roman Nature, –. Strabo Geog. ..; Clarke, Between Geography and History, –. Christian Jacob, G´eographie et ethnographie en Gr`ece ancienne (Paris: Armand Colin, ), . On methods for presenting practical information for travellers in the Roman world, see Kai Brodersen, ‘The Presentation of Geographical Knowledge for Travel and Transport in the Roman World:

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Pliny’s Encyclopedia

Gibraltar, follows the coast around to the river Don, turns inland at the Rhipaean Mountains and comes back via the northern coastline. At the beginning of Book , he begins again at the Straits of Gibraltar, this time travelling along the coast of North Africa until he reaches the Don again, returning by the southern oceans. The list format was used to a greater or lesser extent in most geographical texts; it can be traced back to the foundational moment in ancient histories of geography, to the Catalogue of the Ships in Homer’s Iliad. The status of Homeric geography was a matter of serious scholarly debate in antiquity, a question to which Strabo devotes a great deal of space in his programmatic opening books, where he gives an account of the disputes between the Hellenistic geographers on this issue, coming down forcefully against the scepticism of Eratosthenes. If we accept that the Catalogue of the Ships and the wanderings of Odysseus could be conceptualised as key prototypes for the writing of place in antiquity, we find an unexpected dichotomy between discursive encounters with foreign and distant peoples, and honorific catalogues of the more familiar and near at hand. While Pliny’s main sources of lists may have been Roman administrative papers, the model of the Catalogue of the Ships suggests that listing names is not only about providing information in a neat and orderly fashion, it is also about display, about hierarchy and about memory. Pliny’s geographical books fall into two sections: Books  and  deal with Europe while  and  are concerned with Africa, Asia and the edges of the known world beyond the limits of the Empire. While the books on Europe are almost entirely taken up with dry lists of place-names and ethnonyms, the further Pliny moves from the centre of power at Rome, the fewer names are recorded and the more discursive his account becomes. One simple reason as to why this should be is the greater availability of information on the regions nearer Rome, and the subsequent importance of literally name-checking the places that a well-informed reader would expect to find mentioned. The discursive style in describing more distant regions must partly be dependent on the greater novelty of the material,

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

Itineraria non tantum adnotata sed etiam picta’, in Travel and Geography in the Roman Empire, ed. C.E.P. Adams and Ray Laurence (London: Routledge, ), –. See James Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought (Princeton University Press, ), –  on the debates on Homeric geography in antiquity. See Clarke, Between Geography and History, – and passim, on Strabo’s intellectual debt to Homer, and his use of Homeric geography to explain differences between then and now, and to give his readers their bearings so that they can map new knowledge into pre-existing frameworks of thought. On lists as an interface between oral and written culture, see the seminal work by Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind; Ong, Orality and Literacy.

Diderot’s Pliny and the politics of the encyclopedia

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the enjoyment value to be gained from mirabilia and the need for more thorough explanations of the nature of the area under discussion. But there is more to this change in style and format. The significance of naming in the books on Europe and the significance of its absence in the rest of the world can be read as indicative of a particular cultural and intellectual agenda. At the beginning of Book , Pliny gives this reason for his endless listing of names: The bare names [nuda nomina] of places are set down with as much brevity as possible, their reputation and its causes are related in the proper places; at the moment, however, our concern is with the overall picture. This is the reason why I would like it understood that if the names are invoked bereft of their reputations [uidua fama sua nomina], as they were in the beginning before they had any achievements, and it only amounts to a catalogue of names, still it is a catalogue of the world and the nature of things. (Pliny HN .)

In this programmatic statement, Pliny consciously sets out to divorce history from places, to rupture the link aetiology makes between the name and the history it contains. These naked names that Pliny wants to invoke situate the place in the natural order of things, without the burden of their specific histories or reputations. On one level, this is a matter of convenience, a simple convention: ‘unfortunately there is no time here to discuss . . .’ But in an account of the world, or a mapping of the Empire, the desire to chart names without histories takes on a particular significance. Emptying place-names of their histories fixes them eternally in the present and ignores the existence of a past where things were different; it maps the current status quo onto the landscape, and asserts that this status quo is what constitutes the nature of things, the way the world is. The inter-relatedness of history and geography, of space and time, is a key issue in work on geographical theory. In the field of ancient history, it has been explored by Katherine Clarke in her work on Hellenistic geography. Pliny’s preference for de-historicised fact, not specific to a particular time or circumstance is characteristic of what Paul Carter terms ‘imperial history’ in his ‘spatial history’ of Australia, The Road to Botany Bay. These facts are free to find new meanings and associations within imperial discourse. But despite Pliny’s assertion that his names are to reflect a time before anything had been accomplished, the existence of a name is, in itself, a powerful  

See the influential work by Y.-F. Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (London: Edward Arnold, ). Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History (London: Faber, ).

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reminder of the circumstances and character of the original naming, the founding story of the place and the people who live there. In the Classical world, aetiologies and founding myths were expected to reflect something essential about the place or institution that they accompanied. Almost in spite of himself, Pliny regularly refers to the founding moment of a city and the act of naming, sometimes by way of explanation as to the name’s origins: Olchinum used to be called Colchinum because it was founded by the Colchians (HN .); or, in a more recent military context, Corsica contains thirty-two states along with the colonies of Mariana, founded by Marius, and Aleria, founded by Sulla (HN .). Despite these examples of aetiological explanations, the great majority of Pliny’s names are listed without comment. The region of Boeotia provides an example of the typical pattern: In Boeotia are Anthedon, Onchestos, the free town of Thespiae, Lebadea and the city that is no less famous than Athens, Thebes, which is cognomined Boeotian, and, they would have it, the home of two divinities, Liber and Hercules. The Muses too are given a birthplace in the groves of Helicon. The woods of Cithaeron and the river Ismenus also belong to Thebes. Apart from this, the other springs in Boeotia are those of Oedipus, Psamathe, Dirce, Epicrane, Arethusa, Hippocrene, Aganippe, Gargaphie. The mountains other than those already mentioned are: Mycalesus, Hadylius, Acontius. The rest of the towns between Megara and Thebes are: Eleutherae, Haliartus, Plataeae, Pherae, Aspledon, Hyle, Thisbe, Erythrae, Glissa, Copae, Larymna and Anchoa on the river Cephisus, and Medeon, Phlegya, Acraephia, Coronea, Chaeronea. On the coast below Thebes are: Ocalee, Eteonos, Scolos, Schoenos, Peteon, Hyrie, Mycalesos, Iresion and Heleon, Ollarum, Tanagra, a free people, and right in the inlet of the Euripus, which is made by the island of Euboea opposite, is Aulis, famous for its extensive harbour. The Boeotians were called Hyantes in antiquity. (Pliny HN .–)

The easiest elements to latch onto in this description of Boeotia are the suggestion of the traditional enmity between Athens and Thebes, and Pliny’s mildly sceptical references to Thebes’ links with Liber, Hercules and the Muses. However the text soon dissolves into a blur of names, some common, others unfamiliar, all of them put forward with the minimum of exegesis and in what appears to be the most straightforwardly functional format possible: the list. This leads to the creation of a catalogue where names of different sorts and from different contexts can be linked together without the appearance of incongruity. When we pause to consider a passage such as this description of Baetica, we find an odd mixture of places, whose differences are levelled out in the process of listing:

Diderot’s Pliny and the politics of the encyclopedia



The first land on this [gulf] is called Further Spain, or Baetica, and then from the border of Murgitanum onwards becomes Nearer Spain, or Tarraconensis, as far as the Pyrenees. Further Spain is divided lengthwise into two provinces: Lusitania stretches along the north side of Baetica, divided from it by the river Ana. This rises in the fields of Laminium in Nearer Spain and sometimes flowing into lakes, sometimes narrowing to a channel or hiding in burrows and joyfully re-emerging, pours itself into the Atlantic Ocean. (Pliny HN .)

In this passage, which is almost lyrical by Pliny’s usual standards, we find the names of Roman administrative districts mapped into the landscape on the same terms as the names of a river, a mountain or an ocean. Taking the history of the name away from it, removing the story of these provinces’ foundation, can map the place into the world as a whole and the natural order of things. But it does so by creating an undifferentiated mass of knowledge that denies the fact of its own contingency on the past, on empire, on a particular, Roman, perspective. These issues of temporal, imperial and Roman contingency are not lost on Pliny, and surface uneasily from time to time in his lists of names. Nor is the force of naming in preserving alternative histories and signs of other cultures unrecognised in Pliny’s text. But there is a strict hierarchy in place when it comes to what must be listed and what can be excluded from Pliny’s geography – not every name deserves a place in the natural order, or the attention of Pliny’s readers. As we have seen, the usefulness of Pliny’s text for many scholars lies in his ability to reflect the concerns of a first-century readership, but Conte’s vision of an encyclopedia modelled on the competency of its readership is open to politicisation. If it is specifically the competency of a Roman reader that the Natural History is concerned with, then this trajectory has concrete repercussions for what is included or omitted from the text. In his geography of Europe, the most obvious omissions in Pliny’s lists of names are those of indigenous or foreign origin. This could be put down to a problem of ignorance: Pliny just does not know any Celtic or Germanic languages and neither did his sources. The prejudice against foreign names is common to ancient geographers more generally: Strabo is scathing in his refusal to give the names of the unfortunate subjects of Roman Spain: I hesitate from giving too many of the names, avoiding the unpleasant task of writing them down – unless anyone gets some enjoyment from reading ‘Pleutaurans’, ‘Bardyetans’, ‘Allotrigans’, and other names even less pleasant and less significant than these. (Strabo Geog. ..)

When we look at the places in Pliny’s text where these omissions are signalled, we see that this practice is not just a necessity, it also reflects an

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Pliny’s Encyclopedia

editorial attitude. The omission of foreign names appears as a conscious strategy in Pliny’s construction of a world where names without histories fix places in the scheme of things. The spread of Roman power and the spread of the Latin language are closely associated in Book , in the course of Pliny’s florid introduction to the subject of Italy. At HN ., Pliny speaks of bringing antagonistic voices of diverse peoples into communication through the bond of language as part of Rome’s project of civilising the world through its empire. Again, towards the conclusion of his praeteritio, he associates language with force of arms as dual means of conquest: Neither do I commemorate its spirit, deeds and men, or the peoples conquered by its might and its language [lingua manuque]. (Pliny HN .)

The Latin language is mobilised as a key element in the spread of Roman dominance. Perhaps we are to see the association of ‘might and language’ as an indication of two different paths to hegemony, direct control by conquest but also cultural imperialism characterised by the spread of Latin. It is in the light of this politics of language that we must consider Pliny’s treatment of foreign naming in his account of the world. Over the course of Book , foreign naming and foreign languages surface as an issue at several points. Mary Beagon has commented on some of these passages as evidence of Pliny’s efforts to ‘give the general reader as much information about the places of the world as is possible without becoming unreadable or boring. This is clear from such phrases as HN ., on the listing of tribes which can be mentioned ‘without inducing boredom’; HN ., an assertion of brevity and lack of detail other than names; HN ., ‘few of the places are worth mentioning or have pronounceable names’; and again at HN ., which implies a similar reservation, ‘a collection of peoples . . . who are unimportant and have outlandish names . . .’ If Pliny was trying not to be boring, the avoidance of historical detail and picturesque foreign names seems a doubtful strategy. Looking at the passages in question it is possible to trace an alternative agenda in Pliny’s choices and omissions: Baetica has four jurisdictions: those of Gades, Corduba, Astigis and Hispalis. There are  towns in all, of these  are colonies,  are municipalities of Roman citizens,  were given ancient Latin rights,  have freedom,  have treaties,  pay tribute. The things that are worth mentioning or easy to discuss in Latin are [ex his digna memoratu aut latio sermone dictu facilia]: beginning from the river 

Beagon, Roman Nature, –.

Diderot’s Pliny and the politics of the encyclopedia



Ana on the coast, the town of Ossonoba, which has the cognomen Aestuaria, at the confluence of the Luxia and the Urium. (Pliny HN .) The jurisdiction of Lucus contains  peoples, apart from the Celtici and the Lemavi they are unremarkable and have barbarian names [ignobilium ac barbarae appellationis], but , free people all together. (Pliny HN .) The race of the Liburni lives between the Arsia and the river Titius. Among them were the Mentores, the Himani, the Encheleae, the Bulini, and the people whom Callimachus called the Peucetii. Now they are all called by one name – the Illyrici. Few of these peoples’ names are worth mentioning or easy to say [Populorum pauca effatu digna aut facilia nomina]. (Pliny HN .)

The first passage reflects Pliny’s policy of listing cities in order of the closeness of their links to Rome. In these lists, he rarely gets as far as listing the names of tributaries, focusing instead on those cities with Latin rights, or which started as Roman colonies. In all three passages, a city’s importance and ease of naming in Latin are explicitly associated. Whether importance necessitates naming or naming constitutes importance is left unclear. It is not just a question of previous Roman acknowledgement boosting a city’s status; Pliny is concerned with being understood by his readers, with finding a Roman world for a Roman readership. And yet, there is a degree of anxiety in Pliny’s refusal or, perhaps, inability to list these incomprehensible names. There is a sense of loss in Pliny’s litany of old names for the people now bunched together under the homogeneous title of Illyrians. Elsewhere, Pliny is well aware of the force of recording a name in preserving the memory of another culture, a different story. There are many passages where Pliny produces lists of cities which no longer exist at the time he is writing his geography, but which are recorded in his sources. Some of these lists are almost elegiac, for example this list of towns that have disappeared from Latium: In the first region, there also used to be these famous towns in Latium: Satricum, Pometia, Scaptia, Politorium, Tellena, Tifata, Caenina, Ficana, Crustumerium, Ameriola, Medullum, Corniculum, Saturnia where Rome is now, Antipolis which is now a part of Rome called Ianiculum, Antemnae, Camerium, Collatia, Amitinum, Norbe, Sulmo. Besides these, there were the Alban peoples who used to take part in the sacrifices on the Alban hill: the Albani, Aesolani, Accienses, Abolani, Bubetani, Bolani, Cusuetani, Coriolani, Fidenates, Foreti, Hortenses, Latinienses, Longulani, Manates, Macrales, Munienses, Numinienses, Olliculani, Octulani, Pedani, Poletaurini, Querquetulani, Sicani, Sisolenses, Tolerienses, Tutienses, Vimitellari, Velienses, Venetulani, Vitellenses. And so,  peoples have vanished without a trace from ancient Latium. (Pliny HN .–)

Even though these places and ethnic groups no longer exist, the fact that they existed in the past is important to Pliny’s understanding of the present



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

state of Latium; their names suggest their significance in any spatial history of Italy. Similarly, when a place has more than one name, Pliny often makes scrupulous show of giving both, even when the alternative name is a simple translation from Latin to Greek – the island Capraria is also known as Aegilion (HN .) etc. We find Greek names are often given as alternatives to the first, Latinate name that Pliny provides, and are meant to be taken as equivalent in meaning and authority. In contrast, in Pliny’s books on Europe, there is only one example of a foreign name being given as an alternative to the Roman one, and one example of a name deriving from a language other than Latin or Greek appearing with an etymological explanation. In Books  and , then, Pliny sets out to map Europe through lists of names without histories, and these names are free to form new associations within the eternal present of imperial geography. But, as Pliny is aware, names themselves have an intrinsic aetiological force in suggesting an original namer and the circumstances of first naming. Lists of vanished cities, alternative names are preserved scrupulously as markers of past cultures and forgotten peoples, but only when the languages and peoples involved are readily accessible to the interests and competency of the Roman reader to whom the Natural History is addressed. In practice, this means the construction of a world where non-Roman and non-Greek names are sidelined to the point of being consciously omitted, and where importance can be equated with comprehensibility. The simple device of listing serves to obscure the politics of Pliny’s Europe, where the omission of foreign names masks the possibility of dissenting otherness within the western Empire by presenting the Roman reader with hierarchical lists of recognisable names. When we come to Books  and , however, we find a different naming practice and a different type of story told about Africa and Asia. At the beginning of his account of Africa, at the start of Book , Pliny explains that ‘the names of its people and towns are completely unpronounceable except in their own languages’ (HN .). This unpronounceability, which we met already in regard to the barbarian names of Europe, makes African and Asian names unsuitable for listing. This marks a change in both the narrative form and in the mode of political discourse in Books  and .   

For an alternative perspective, on Strabo’s treatment of lost cities and people in his geography, see Clarke, Between Geography and History, –. For example, Corsica/Cyrnon HN .; Populonium/Aethalia HN .; HN . on the Aegean Sea. HN . – and even here the names, Austeravia and Actania, look suspiciously Latinate. The Italian river Padus is given a Gallic root, padi, at HN .. Explanations of foreign names occur more frequently outside of Europe, e.g. HN ., ., ..

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

The first effect of Pliny’s disinterest in foreign names is that fewer lists of names appear in Books  and , which makes the treatment of Africa and Asia more discursive and more descriptive than the careful catalogue of Europe, particularly in the case of fantastically distant places, as the extended treatment of Taprobane exemplifies (HN .–). When lists do appear, they tend to be shorter lists of Roman towns or colonies, rather than a representation of the settlements of the indigenous people – in a continuation of the naming policy Pliny adopted in Europe. But whereas, in Europe, the listing of Roman cities in Spain and the exclusion of those with foreign names seemed a confident choice from a wide range of accessible information, in Africa, the sparse lists of colonies and trading posts seem more indicative of a general uncertainty beyond them. The towns of Europe were ordered into controlled lists of important places, but the place-names of Africa and Asia resist being marshalled into neat columns, except at the points at which they have been forced into direct contact with Roman imperial expansion. The general lack of suitable names for listing and the particular contexts in which they can be found lead Pliny to be more explicit about sourcing his information than in his account of Europe. In Book  of the Natural History, Pliny includes his list of sources along with a table of contents for each of the remaining thirty-six books, but in the course of the text, he rarely specifies which information comes from which source. Here in Books  and , however, the expeditions that procured Pliny’s knowledge are regularly signposted, even dramatised. For instance, our knowledge of Southern Cyrene comes from the military expedition of Cornelius Balbus, or, more exactly, from the triumphal procession following his victories there: There is this remarkable story: our sources have recorded the towns captured by Balbus that I’ve just mentioned; in his triumph he himself led the names and effigies of all the other peoples and cities, apart from Cydamum and Garama. They went in this order: the town of Tabudium, the tribe of Niteris, the town of Milgis Gemella, the tribe or town of Bubeium, the tribe of the Enipi, the town of Thuben, the place called the Black Mountain, Nitibrum, the town of Rapsa, the Viscera tribe, the town of Decri, the river Nathabur, the town of Thapsagum, the tribe of Tamagi, the town of Boin, the town of Pege, the river Dasibari; then a series of towns, Baracum, Buluba, Alasit, Galsa, Balla, Maxalla, Cizania; Mount Gyri in front of which was a placard saying it produced gems. (Pliny HN .–)

This is a particularly graphic example of the purpose and provenance of the geographical knowledge Pliny presents us with in the Natural History, and of the emblematic importance of the written name of a place or people.



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

The explicitly military sourcing of Books  and  does more than expose the triumphal nature of listing names in the context of imperial geography. In Book , we had already been given the dry inscription of a triumphal arch as a way of enumerating the peoples of the Alps (HN .–). The difference in Pliny’s account of Africa and Asia, is that the narratives of exploration, conquest and discovery focus our attention on the historical moment at which the names of places and people became known to Rome. Paradoxically, these explicitly imperial narratives create a geography that is more open to question than the ahistorical lists of Books  and . Telling a story of naming, even a story of Roman expansion, is to admit that things were once different and to make explicit the perspective of the narrator. Pliny’s historical awareness in Africa and Asia throw a backward light on the stories and the silences of his European catalogues. Despite their initial impenetrability, then, Pliny’s lists of names express an ideal of total knowledge and total order that is both scholarly and imperial in intent. The neat ideal of names without histories provides a docile silence in which the particular can be mapped into the grand scheme of things. This neat system of control breaks down outside the confines of Europe, when catalogue gives way to narrative as we approach the limits of both knowledge and imperial power. Where names can be credited with an aetiological force in expressing the nature of the place itself and listing names can be a gesture of triumph, there is an uneasiness at the heart of Pliny’s refusal or inability to list non-Roman and non-Greek names. Choosing to chronicle rather than catalogue in Africa and Asia means leaving countless indigenous names outside of the Roman order and although Pliny assures us that what is untranslatable is not important, the iconic importance of controlling knowledge and people in the same gesture of naming leaves room for insecurity – have people been left off the map, or have they slipped the Roman net? This seems to me a persuasive, if polemical, reading of how we might construct a politics of Pliny’s geography in the early twenty-first century, using the structures of the text as a way of illuminating the imperialist agenda that informs its contents. But there is something vaguely unsatisfying about the politics I have traced in Pliny’s geography, something almost inevitable about my reading. If these are the politics of Pliny’s text, they must be recognised as reflections of key concerns in the modern academy: the product of a very particular modern anxiety about encyclopedism, reacting against the univocal and imperial monumentalism of nineteenthand early twentieth-century texts. It is not that these readings are not available in the Natural History, or that I would wish to close down these

Diderot’s Pliny and the politics of the encyclopedia



approaches, but I do want to suggest that they are the product of a particular community of readers, with the Natural History as the text in this class. Choosing to read the Natural History as the inevitable product of Roman imperialism means losing sight of other readings, other politics in the text. Any attempt to find alternative ways of understanding the Natural History necessitates finding alternative communities of readers, other intellectual frameworks in which to find a politics of the encyclopedia. It is to confront the inevitability of contemporary associations of power/knowledge that I turn to another persuasive reading of the politics of Pliny’s text from the eighteenth century. The reader I have chosen is Denis Diderot, a revolutionary figure in the history of encyclopedism and in the philosophy of Enlightenment science. diderot’s pliny and the problem of posterity Few encyclopedic projects have received as much scholarly attention as the Encyclop´edie ou Dictionnaire raisonn´ee des sciences, des arts et des m´etiers. A central text for the study of the French Enlightenment, it has been seen as instrumental in producing the changes in educated public opinion which precipitated the French Revolution. It was planned as a straightforward translation from the English of Chambers’ successful Cyclopaedia. Under the editorship of Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond D’Alembert, its scope was expanded to produce an entirely new vision of what an encyclopedia should encompass. In his  prospectus to the Encyclop´edie, Diderot offered subscribers a philosophical encyclopedia that would cover not only the traditional arts and sciences, but new developments in technologies of production, to explain techniques of manufacture that usually remained trade secrets. The Encyclop´edie was to expand the horizons of what counted as common cultural knowledge to include philosophical essays by leading philosophes such as Voltaire and Rousseau, at the same time as it made the work of manufacturers the subject of legitimate interest and scrutiny on the part of the emergent bourgeoisie. The democratisation of knowledge went hand in hand with subversion of church and state in this precarious but ultimately successful publishing venture, steered through the minefields of suppression and confusion by the editorial powers of Diderot, after D’Alembert quit in frustration. The Encyclop´edie was designed not just to store information but to propagate a particular way of thinking; at its best, it was a vehicle for avant-garde opinion and scientific innovation. It chose an alphabetical mode of displaying its information, but insisted on the essential unity of knowledge,



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

going to great lengths to assure readers that a holistic understanding of the sciences would be possible, despite the practical segmentation into discrete, widely diffused articles. The philosophical system upon which the text was organised was set out by D’Alembert in the Discours pr´eliminaire, which made clear its debt to Bacon, going so far as to add a short appendix detailing the differences between the two systems. Both used the tripartite division of the understanding into Reason, Memory and Imagination; the differences lay in the specific choices of what subjects properly belonged to each faculty. One of the most significant differences, flagged by D’Alembert in the appendix, is the movement of theological studies from the sphere of rationality to the sphere of memory. Bacon’s decision to make theology a branch of knowledge rather than the lens through which knowledge must be viewed was already a departure from traditional systems of thought. This relegation of religious knowledge from the domain of Reason was a deliberate point on the part of the encyclop´edistes, part of the emphasis on rationalism that distinguished their worldview. This tendency towards secular liberalism made the publication of the Encyclop´edie a difficult venture in the cultural climate of the time. Any work published in eighteenth-century France needed an official permit from the King and was subject to official censorship. Although some books could receive tacit approval from the magistrate in charge of regulating the book trade, publishing unauthorised books in Paris was a difficult business. Censorship was rigorous, and any allusions to ideas critical of the monarchy or orthodox Catholicism were vigorously suppressed. Diderot himself spent several months in prison in  following the surreptitious publication of his Lettre sur les aveugles a` l’usage de ceux qui voient. This treatise on the psychology of the blind was influenced by John Locke’s ideas on our dependency on the senses for any knowledge of the world around us; in his probing of the psychology of the blind, Diderot had asked what concept of God a person can have if they lack one of the usual five senses. The suggestion of materialism and the questioning of religious doctrine were not safe in Louis XVI’s Paris. Apart from the official censors, the formidable 



Attempts to justify alphabetical organisation were a standard part of prefatory rhetoric in eighteenthcentury encyclopedias. Editors were keen to provide for a coherent understanding of subject areas, in spite of the necessity of presenting information in discrete articles across several volumes. This was a particularly difficult question, considering the fact that most encyclopedias were published volume by volume to subscribers, and could take many years to complete, so that information on a subject in the first volumes might be out of date or contradictory to information on the same subject in later volumes. See Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions; Collison, Encyclopedias. Despite this honesty, or because of it, the editors were criticised for wholesale plagiarism of Bacon’s thought by contemporary critics.

Diderot’s Pliny and the politics of the encyclopedia



intellectual resources of the Jesuit community brought pressure to bear on officials through its influential journals and close links with the palace. In the case of the Encyclop´edie, the minute attention of the Jesuits was doubly assured since the work was in competition with the monumental Dictionnaire de Tr´evoux which ran to seven editions between  and , and with the ill-fated D´escription et perfection des arts et m´etiers which was set in motion by the Acad´emie des Sciences in the late seventeenth century, though the first volume did not appear until . The Jesuit periodical, Le Journal de Tr´evoux, was one of the most formidable opponents of the Encyclop´edie in its chequered publication history. Despite the carefulness of the contributors, the Encyclop´edie was suppressed twice, reinstated on both occasions and finally published some  years after its initial advertisement, but to a much increased list of some , subscribers, an enormous figure at the time. With any frontal attacks on the establishment out of the question, contributors to the Encyclop´edie evolved a variety of methods for oblique criticism of the regime. Cross-references could be used to create disquieting juxtapositions of ideas and ironically fulsome rhetoric pointed up the author’s scepticism about the ideas being detailed. For example, in his article on ‘Damnation’, Diderot wrote: DAMNATION, (Theol.) eternal punishment in hell. The doctrine of damnation or eternal punishment is explicitly revealed in Scripture. There is therefore no further need for rational enquiry as to whether or not it is possible for a finite being to render an infinite injury to God; whether or not an eternity of punishment is more in conflict with his mercy than consistent with his justice; whether, because it pleased him to ordain infinite rewards for the good, it did or did not please him to ordain infinite pain for the bad. Instead of tangling oneself up in specious arguments, likely to shake a faith not well established, one should submit to the authority of the holy scriptures and the decisions of the Church, and secure one’s salvation trembling, bearing in mind constantly that the size of the sin is in direct proportion to the importance of the sinned-against and the inverse of that of the sinner; and that the sin of the first man could not be effaced but by the blood of the Son of God.

This tongue-in-cheek account is more likely to leave the reader wondering about the objections it quashes than secure in the beliefs it professes. Contributors were sometimes even more provocative, as in Voltaire’s playfully learned opening to his short article on ‘Fornication’, where he begins 



For an account of the Encyclop´edie’s publishing history, see Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment. A Publishing History of the Encyclop´edie 1775–1800 (Cambridge, MA; London: Belknap Press, ). Encyclop´edie, vol. , –.



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

by quoting some Jesuit scholarship: ‘The Dictionnaire de Tr´evoux states that this is a theological term.’ Voltaire was not entirely satisfied with this approach, as he wrote in a letter to D’Alembert: ‘What you’ve told me about the articles on theology and metaphysics breaks my heart. It is truly terrible to print the opposite of what one thinks.’ But while Voltaire was living on the border with Switzerland, ready to cross if he raised official hackles, the editors of the Encyclop´edie had to balance caution with intellectual honesty at the heart of Paris, paying lip-service to official positions in order to publish substantial articles on new economic and social theory. There are passages where Diderot makes veiled reference to his own dissatisfaction with the dissemblance. In volume , it is Pliny’s example he turns to as a model for his own predicament, in an unassuming-looking article on Achor: ACHOR (Myth.) Fly-killing god or god of the flies. Pliny says that the inhabitants of Cyrene sacrificed to him so that he would deliver them from these insects which sometimes brought about contagious diseases in their country. The author adds that the flies died as soon as the people had made the sacrifice. A modern scholar comments that Pliny should have contented himself with saying, for the sake of the truth, that this was just public opinion. For my part, it seems to me that one should not demand a truth that could be dangerous to express from an author who is accused of having lied on many occasions when he would have been truthful were it not for the consequences, and that Pliny, who probably did not really believe in the divinity of the Fly-killer but who set himself to instruct us on the prejudices of the inhabitants of Cyrene, could not have written differently without jeopardising his peaceful existence [sans exposer sa tranquillit´e]. This is, I think, one of those occasions when one cannot extract any conclusion from the author’s testimony either against him or for the fact that he attests.

Diderot attributes to Pliny circumstances which seem to suit his own position rather more than they do Pliny’s, gathering the ancient encyclopedist into the embattled present as an ally in the struggle to inform in the face of prejudice. Pliny is one of us, as far as Diderot is concerned, and the image of Pliny the philosophe is familiar to Voltaire too, in his indignant letter to Diderot of  January : Is it really true, sir, that while you render service to the human race and enlighten it, those who think that they were born to blind it are allowed to libel you and   

Encyclop´edie, vol. , . Voltaire to D’Alembert,  October : Voltaire, Correspondence, ed. Theodore Besterman, vol. ,  (Geneva: Institut et Mus´ee Voltaire, ). Encyclop´edie, vol. , .

Diderot’s Pliny and the politics of the encyclopedia



those who think like you? What? Should Garasses be allowed to insult Varros and Plinies?

Franc¸ois Garasse (–) was a Jesuit agitator against blasphemy, and Voltaire is writing to Diderot in the context of the first suppression of the Encyclop´edie. It was a position he was later to expand to include Lucretius and Poseidonius in his article Philosophe, written around  and finally published when the reinstated Encyclop´edie was completed in –. The idea of Pliny as a philosophe is surprising, in the context of what the term had come to mean for eighteenth-century intellectuals. In his article ‘Philosophe’, Voltaire includes Ren´e Descartes and Pierre Bayle as examples of instructors in virtue and reason set upon by the unreasonable forces of religion and authority: There were philosophes of the first order in France, and all, with the exception of Montaigne, were persecuted. It seems to me the final mark of the perversity of our nature to want to oppress the same philosophes who want to correct it.

Being a philosophe was not dependent on putting forward a coherent philosophy or set of positive beliefs, it was a particular stance, rational and inquiring, speculative and virtuous, in the face of orthodoxy. In contemporary terms, Diderot and the writers and thinkers associated with him were collectively known as philosophes, both among themselves and among their critics. Pliny, alongside other notable figures from antiquity, was mobilised as a fellow philosophe, engaged in his own battles against the opposing weight of bourgeois culture. Diderot’s article on L’Histoire naturelle, makes Pliny the only named exponent of the genre, calling him ‘one of the greatest philosophes of antiquity’, drawing attention to the expansion of Pliny’s basic scheme alongside the development of science. But while Diderot’s respectful assessment of Pliny as a philosophe is attested here, the fullest treatment of Pliny in the Encyclop´edie provides a more nuanced judgement. The Encyclop´edie did not include biographical entries on specific people, but followed the practice of discussing famous people under the aegis of the place where they were born. The entry on Pliny, then, comes under the heading of Verona:    

Voltaire to Diderot,  January : Diderot, Œuvres compl`etes, ed. Roger Lewinter (Paris: Club franc¸ais du Livre, –), vol. , . See Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, ed. Christiane Mervaud, The Complete Works of Voltaire (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, ), vol. , . Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, The Complete Works of Voltaire, ed. Mervaud, vol. , . Encyclop´edie, vol. , –.



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

This great man is, of all the writers in the world, the one whom the Encyclop´edie has cited the most. His tragic end particularly fascinates humanity and his writings fascinate the world’s scholars, writings which are the most valuable monuments from all antiquity in both the arts and the sciences.

The writer, the Chevalier de Jaucourt, goes on to copy out in full Pliny the Younger’s letters about his uncle (Ep. . and .), and continues: Of all the writings of Pliny the Elder, only his natural history survives to us, a remarkable work both for its aims and for its execution of them; but the author is even more distinguished for the beauty of his spirit, for his great and noble way of thinking, and for the strokes of brilliance that sparkle in his work. The subtlety of his brushwork will never come through in translation. Yet the fate of this great writer is that everyone admires him and nobody puts any faith in his stories; but to vindicate him in two words, he did not set out to be mistaken himself or to mislead either his own era or the centuries afterwards. I will only add that one discovers every day facts that one had considered to be pleasant fantasies in his work that he had reported entirely on the authority of people he trusted too much.

This passage on Pliny is interesting for the emphasis it places on Pliny as an inspirational figure, whose life and death as described by his nephew form the bulk of the entry. The image of the consummate scholar and martyred scientist becomes the main value of Pliny, now that his work has outgrown its usefulness. The Natural History may be the most important work on arts and sciences to survive, its style praised far beyond modern assessments, but there is a central doubt about the value of the work, an implicit acknowledgement of the criticism it attempts to defend him from. The idea of a gullible Pliny, too trusting of his sources, is the alternative to an untrustworthy Pliny, inventing stories for the amusement of his readers. Diderot’s use of Pliny’s passage on Achor takes for granted that the information was false in itself, but finds an ingenious and ingenuous reason as to why it was included. But making Pliny a kind of precursor is  



Encyclop´edie, vol. , . The Chevalier de Jaucourt contributed heavily to the last ten volumes of the Encyclop´edie, and was an invaluable ally to the enterprise after the second, more serious, suppression when many contributors, and the second editor, D’Alembert, retreated from the now underground enterprise. Despite his usefulness, contemporaries were critical of his intellectual capabilities, with Voltaire, Marmontel, Grimm and perhaps Diderot himself considering him a hack compiler. See J. Lough, The ‘Encyclop´edie’ in Eighteenth-Century England, and Other Studies (Newcastle upon Tyne: Oriel Press, ), –. Encyclop´edie, vol. , . On natural history in the Encyclop´edie more generally, see James Llana, ‘Natural History and the Encyclop´edie’, Journal of the History of Biology , no.  (): –.

Diderot’s Pliny and the politics of the encyclopedia



not without its difficulties, if Pliny’s version of encyclopedism is open to the charge of bad scholarship. The most extended discussion of Pliny in Diderot’s work comes in a ´ series of letters he exchanged with the sculptor, Etienne-Maurice Falconet, which were posthumously published and referred to as Letters on Posterity. This series of twenty-five letters, written between  and , conduct a heated debate about the influence of posterity on the work of the artist, and whether the approbation of contemporaries or future critics was more worth having. The debate became focused on the value of tradition more generally, with Falconet championing modern judgements and modern art while Diderot maintained the superiority of ancient art and the accuracy of ancient authors. It had begun as an argument between the friends at a salon, and was continued intermittently over the course of the following year, with Falconet providing much of the impetus to Diderot’s slow responses. Falconet was already an acclaimed artist, on the point of being asked to sculpt the statue of Peter the Great in St Petersburg, for which he is perhaps most famous. Diderot was only now in the course of – bringing the last ten volumes of the Encyclop´edie into print, after seventeen years as editor, including six years when the encyclopedia was officially suppressed. He published none of his own works after the suppression in , setting aside the completed manuscripts of all of his most substantial works, La Religieuse, Le Neveu de Rameau, Le Rˆeve de D’Alembert and Jacques le fataliste, which were only published after his death. Posterity, to whom the Encyclop´edie was famously dedicated, was not as innocent a subject as it might seem for the self-taught, successful artist or the classically educated encyclopedist. It was to become a debate about the ancients versus the 



There is some dispute about the text of these letters. Falconet was eager to publish them as a series and re-edited his own for publication, urging Diderot to do the same. Diderot, however, never got around to doing this, although his daughter revised and censored the text to some extent. The two most recent editions are those of Yves Benot, and of H. Dieckmann and J. Seznec: Benot, Le pour et le contre; H. Dieckmann and J. Seznec, Diderot et Falconet: Correspondence. Les six premi`eres lettres (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, ). Benot provides a text of all the letters, making use of the revised versions and providing information on variations in the endnotes. Dieckmann and Seznec reproduce only the first six letters, placing the emphasis on finding the unedited versions. The problem is a complicated one: the best introduction to the subject is Maurice Posada, ‘An Introduction to the Textual Problem of the Diderot–Falconet Correspondence on Posterity’, Diderot Studies  (): –. In what follows, I have translated Benot’s text. For discussion of the debate on art between Falconet and Diderot, see H. Dieckmann and J. Seznec, ‘The Horse of Marcus Aurelius: A Controversy between Diderot and Falconet’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes , no. / (): –; Philippe Heuz´e, ‘Pline “critique d’art”? Les avis contradictoires de Diderot et Falconet’, Helmantica  (): –. On Diderot’s use of Pliny in his art criticism elsewhere, see Kate E. Tunstall, ‘Text, Image, Intertext: Diderot, Chardin and Pliny’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century  (): –.



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

moderns, questioning the ability of an encyclopedist to fully comprehend the knowledge of the specialist. The discussion begins with the relative value of contemporary praise and the judgements of posterity, with Diderot claiming that contemporary praise is always tainted with self-interest, while posterity rightly judges and redeems work which might be overlooked in its own time, adding, ‘We are the posterity for those who went before us.’ It is not long before Falconet becomes irritated, both with Diderot’s assumption that posterity will vindicate him, and with his suggestion that Falconet’s work will survive more securely ‘in one of our lines’ than in the fragments of marble that will be left by the ravages of time. In his second letter Falconet responds that posterity’s opinion is not necessarily so very different from that of one’s contemporaries, especially when it rests upon the judgement of contemporaries who were not so very well informed at the time. The examples of bad judgement that Falconet picks out are Pausanias’ and Pliny’s art histories, reserving special contempt for the opinions of Pliny: So you have faith in the lines that are passed on to posterity! O my friend, if you knew, like a painter and a sculptor knows, what childish nonsense people use when they eloquently admire us, if I showed you how much Pliny is a drivelling idiot [un petit radoteur], you would say I was right not to want my share of praise that is so ridiculously confused. If I ever fall victim to dreams of posterity, the thought of all the Plinies we have brings me to my senses.

In the context, this is clearly a pointed choice of exemplar. As H. Dieckmann and J. Seznec comment on this passage: Nous ne savons pas si Falconet, en e´crivant ceci, se rendait compte de l’admiration que Diderot e´prouvait pour Pline, s’il soupc¸onnait que Diderot s’identifiant dans une certaine mesure avec l’auteur latin. Dans l’affirmative, il a consciemment bless´e son ami et il devait s’attendre a` une r´eaction violente.

When Diderot does reply, it is with a torrent of questions that Falconet cannot but take personally: I do not know if Pliny is a drivelling idiot, but it’s wise of you to confide this amazing discovery only to your friend. Do you know this Pliny that you talk   

Diderot I: Benot, Le pour et le contre, . Roman numerals refer to the numbered sequence of the letters in Benot’s text.  Falconet IV: Benot, Le pour et le contre, . Diderot III: Benot, Le pour et le contre, . ‘We do not know if Falconet, when he wrote this, was aware of the admiration that Diderot felt for Pliny, if he realised that Diderot identified to some extent with the Roman author. If he did, he deliberately hurt his friend and he had to expect a violent reaction.’ Dieckmann and Seznec, Diderot et Falconet: Correspondence, .

Diderot’s Pliny and the politics of the encyclopedia



about so lightly? Have you spent any time with him? Do you know that this is a man of the most profound learning and the greatest taste? Do you know that the ability to truly appreciate him is a rare ability? Do you know that there is no one but Tacitus and Pliny on the same level? . . . My friend, I hope you get a Pliny.

Diderot goes on to accuse Falconet of only reading Pliny in translation and in the criticism of the Comte de Caylus, a critic whom Diderot particularly disliked. These were barbed comments to a man who had taught himself Latin, and Falconet responds indignantly, protesting against Diderot’s rude and involved questions, and supplying a list of examples of alleged stupidities in Pliny’s encyclopedia, repeating Diderot’s question: ‘have you spent time with him?’ The debate had turned personal, with Pliny a cipher for the encyclopedists more generally, but it had also turned philological, as Falconet retreated to the Classical texts to prove that ancient painting was inferior to modern work, and that he was as good a Latinist as any. At the heart of the dispute is the question of how we can know what ancient painting was like and how it might compare with modern works. In the mid-eighteenth century, evidence for the material remains of ancient painting was difficult to come by, and few books provided visual representations of actual works, but recent discoveries at Herculaneum had opened up a heated debate on the merits of ancient painting. The most valuable book available to Diderot and Falconet was the Pitture di Ercolano, the first volume of which appeared in  to an avid public, but the pictures it represented were small, occasional works, with little in common with the complex tableaux described in the ancient texts. This was the core of the problem: the great masterpieces of ancient painting were only available as written descriptions. The reputation of famous names such as Apelles and Polygnotos ultimately rested on the opinions of writers such as Pliny and Pausanias. Understanding what ancient painting looked like meant taking an imaginative leap from the written description,    



Diderot VIII: Benot, Le pour et le contre, . Diderot, Œuvres compl`etes, ed. Lewinter, vol. , –. Falconet X: Benot, Le pour et le contre, . See Letters XII and XIII for a battle of citations between the two, begun by Diderot, who refers to Homer, Horace, Ovid, Cicero, Epicurus, Virgil, Cato the Elder, Pliny the Younger, Sallust, Tacitus, Anacharsis, as well as Montaigne and Voltaire, in support of his argument. On the impact of Herculaneum and Pompeii on artistic debates in eighteenth-century France, see F. Kimball, ‘The Reception of the Art of Herculaneum in France’, in Studies Presented to David Moore Robinson on His Seventieth Birthday, ed. George E. Mylonas and Doris Raymond (St Louis, MO: Washington University Press, –), –; J. Seznec, ‘Herculaneum and Pompeii in the French Literature of the Eighteenth Century’, Archaeology  (): –.



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

trusting that Classical painting was as sophisticated as Classical sculpture, trusting that Pliny and Pausanias were insightful enough to provide an accurate assessment. The debate between Diderot and Falconet here picks up on a controversy that began some twenty years earlier, between defenders of ancient art and those who, with Nicolas Cochin as their champion, argued that modern painting represented a huge advance on ancient works, with their lack of scientific perspective and the rest of the technical advances of the Renaissance. Diderot sided with the ancients, believing both in Pliny and in the accuracy of his own visual imagination. Falconet, with the dispassionate practicality of a visual artist, refused to make these leaps of faith: ‘I do not believe in masterpieces unless I see them.’ The remaining letters, then, are concerned with the interpretation of the written texts, and the question of how far we can trust their evidence. Posterity’s evaluation of ancient art was dependent on the testimony of Pliny and Pausanias, just as the future’s sense of modern art might be dependent on the testimony of contemporary critics such as Voltaire. The authority of these writers to speak on art becomes a key point of contention, as Falconet denies the value of a non-specialist’s opinion on art. Early on in the debate, Diderot brings in Voltaire to support his contention that although Pliny was not exclusively an art historian, he could, like Voltaire, transmit the educated opinion of his times. This, it turns out, is exactly what Falconet objects to: the undiscriminating banalities of the educated amateur, the man who knows a little about everything. He is dismissive of both Voltaire and Pliny: ‘Here are two men of the greatest ability who, with eighteen hundred years between them, set themselves to immortalise the fine arts: look how they went about it. Which of them would you trust that you would arrive at posterity without being disfigured?’ Voltaire is criticised for setting good painters alongside bad, praising works for the wrong things and misattributing innovations. Falconet is particularly damning in the case of Pliny, giving a list of examples from Pliny’s art history, gently misquoted to produce a more negative reading. Falconet criticises Pliny’s lack of technical knowledge of how art is made and accuses him of a ‘bourgeois’ ignorance of what is and what is not difficult to    

On Pliny’s place in this debate, see Chantal Grell, Le Dix-huiti`eme si`ecle et l’antiquit´e en France 1680–1789 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, ), vol. , –. ´ ´ Etienne, Falconet, Œuvres compl`etes d’Etienne Falconet (Paris: Dubrow, ), vol. , . See Diderot VIII: Benot, Le pour et le contre, –.  Falconet X: Benot, Le pour et le contre, –. Falconet X: Benot, Le pour et le contre, –.

Diderot’s Pliny and the politics of the encyclopedia



achieve. His criticism comes down to the allegation that ‘Pliny spoke about art as a man of spirit, as an amateur, but never as an expert’. Amateurism and encyclopedism appear conflated as Falconet defends his specialist province against the intrusion of the bourgeoisie. Of course, it was not just Voltaire who was both a modern encyclopedist and an art critic: Diderot also published on art, and in particular, on the question of how painting relates to poetry, an important issue for contemporary critics. Diderot’s own ideas on the subject were similar to the conclusions Gotthold Ephraim Lessing would draw in his famous essay on the Laocoon. The argument was with contemporary conflations of the aesthetics of painting and poetry, which made the Horatian line ‘ut poesis pictura erit . . . [as is painting, so is poetry]’ the catchphrase for an approach that saw no distinction between the ways in which poetry and painting achieve their effects. The assimilation of one to the other was evident in contemporary French art, which was very dependent for its images on Classical mythology, sometimes taking its cue directly from passages in ancient texts. The Comte de Caylus had recently gone so far as to publish a book suggesting treatments of passages from Homer that artists could execute. Diderot continued his long-standing feud with Caylus in criticising this book for its literalism, and for failing to recognise that there is an essential difference between what works in a painting and what works in a poem. Diderot, like Lessing, based this difference on the significance of time for each genre: where a painting could give a complete account of a particular moment, a poem could only describe sequential actions. The key to a good painting, then, was choosing the right moment to depict, one that would allow for the most possibilities in interpretation. While a poem could still be an inspiration for a picture, an exact correspondence between the two was not possible. Despite these contentions, in his letters to Falconet, Diderot allows written descriptions of paintings the ability to evoke and to prove the sublime quality of the painting itself. Although a description 

 



The rights and wrongs of this debate about the value of Pliny as an art critic are discussed by Philippe Heuz´e: Heuz´e, ‘Pline “critique d’art”?’ Heuz´e sets out to adjudicate between the two on the question of whether or not Pliny’s taste was indeed bourgeois; not quite, he concludes, but almost. Falconet X: Benot, Le pour et le contre, . See Jean Seznec, Essais sur Diderot et l’antiquit´e (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), –; Hubertus Kohle, Ut pictura poesis non erit. Denis Diderots Kunstbegriff (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, ). For a discussion of the debate, see Seznec, Essais sur Diderot et l’antiquit´e.



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

is not aiming for the same effects as a poem, it is still a narrative account of the scene portrayed in the painting, an essentially different mode of representation. For the effect of its overall composition, we have to trust the positive judgement of Pausanias or Pliny, and the elaboration of our own imaginations depends on our assessment of their competence. The theoretical issue underlying the letters’ disagreement, then, is the problem of what we can learn about a visual image from a written description. In the course of his criticism of Pausanias, Falconet takes the example of his famous description of the two paintings by Polygnotus at Delphi, one depicting Odysseus’ visit to the shades of the dead, the other showing the aftermath of the fall of Troy (Perigesis .. – ..). Pausanias restricts himself to listing the events represented in the picture, and tells us nothing about the mode of its execution. From his reading of Pliny and Plutarch, Falconet concludes that the figures must have been painted without perspective, shading, expression or proper use of colour, creating a Gothic effect. Diderot answers Falconet’s objections in two extensive recreations of the scenes, in which draughtsmanship and drama and pathos rescue the works from the ignominy of Gothicism. Both reconstructions rely on the analogy of more recent art history to supply the missing evidence of the style and technical abilities of ancient painters, and both fit their analysis into a wider framework for how they understand historical progress. Diderot makes ancient art the pinnacle of achievement, forgotten and obscured by the Middle Ages, and now rivalled by modern developments; Falconet, on the other hand, sees ancient art as the infancy of the discipline, and refuses to allow Diderot to make the analogy from the sophistication of ancient sculpture or ancient literature to ancient painting – just because Homer was a genius does not mean that Polygnotus was a great painter. What Falconet and Diderot want to find in ancient art seems fundamentally different. There was no reconciliation possible between the positions of the two writers, coming as they did from diametrically opposed positions on the value of tradition. Where Falconet saw ancient art, like ancient medicine, outgrown by progress, Diderot looked back to an inspirational source of unsurpassed achievement. Where Falconet criticises Pliny’s untrue stories as wilfully ignorant, calling him a bad naturalist and a worse art 

 

For some modern reconstructions of what these paintings were like, see the sketches of Mark Stansbury O’Donnell, in J.J. Pollitt, The Art of Ancient Greece: Sources and Documents, nd edn. (Cambridge University Press, ), –, –. Falconet XV, XVII, XIX: Benot, Le pour et le contre.  Falconet XIX: Benot, Le pour et le contre. Diderot XVI, XVIII: Benot, Le pour et le contre.

Diderot’s Pliny and the politics of the encyclopedia



historian, Diderot defends his encyclopedic precursor: ‘Pliny a drivelling idiot! And for what? Because among an amazing number of opinions that show the finest discrimination, the most exquisite taste, there are one or two terrible ones; let’s pass over these, pass over them quickly.’ As Falconet comments in the margin of this letter, for him, Pliny was a book, not a person. But for Diderot, who admits elsewhere in the letters that he has not actually read the Natural History for twenty years, Pliny is both a person and a symbol of the antiquity, and hence the value, of encyclopedic scholarship. In one of his notebooks, making a plan for a university curriculum, Diderot sums up Pliny in his list of Latin authors: Pliny the naturalist, subtle, ingenious, sometimes sublime, always incisive, often obscure, in short, too many things not to be teeming with errors.

The factual errors that Falconet was mean-spirited enough to catalogue have limited consequences for Diderot’s assessment of the great man behind the work. Sublime Pliny, battling against the bourgeoisie, succeeds in setting out his encyclopedic vision for the edification of Roman readers and the inspiration of those to come. If Diderot’s praise of Pliny seems a little self-reflexive, it is a very different Pliny to the familiar pedant of modern studies. the politics of reception As one commentator notes, as far as posterity is concerned, Falconet seems to have had the best of the argument on Pliny. The information the Natural History contains, and the symbolic system that justified it, were made redundant by the gradual emergence of modern science. Bacon’s formulation of a new natural history based on experimentation marked a change in the direction of natural philosophy that definitively relegated Pliny’s vision to the past; this fundamentally altered the premises upon which it was read. If the Natural History became an out-of-date encyclopedia, there were still people interested in reading it for the information it contained about the Classical past. But the usefulness of the text, even for this purpose, depends to some extent on our opinion of the author, whether or not we trust his judgement, and the value we place more generally on the authority of antiquity. As we saw in Chapter , Bacon rejected Pliny’s idea of natural history, but he still turned to Pliny’s example to explain his ideas for how a   

 Diderot XX: Benot, Le pour et le contre, . Falconet XIV: Benot, Le pour et le contre. Diderot, Œuvres compl`etes, ed. Lewinter. vol. , . Diderot, Œuvres compl`etes, ed. Lewinter. vol. ,  n..



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

proper natural history should be written. Despite the fact that Diderot had not read the Natural History for many years, he identifies with its author, respecting the image of the encyclopedic philosophe he finds reflected in the text. Bacon and Diderot are critical of the errors of knowledge in the Natural History, but ultimately these errors do not make Pliny less of a great man. The eighteenth century was the great age of encyclopedism, reflecting a continued belief in the encyclopedia as a concretisation of the ideal of complete knowledge, even if it was no longer thought attainable by a single individual. But Falconet already suggests the seeds of doubt, in his dismissal of Pliny as an irrelevancy at best, a fool and an amateur at worst. Here Pliny and the world he describes stand at the beginning of a progression towards modernity. Pliny’s knowledge is valued against modern discoveries, and the errors Pliny is seen to have made have a direct impact on our opinion of him as scholar. Falconet’s insistence that only the artist can know about art opposed specialist expertise to encyclopedic amateurism and error. Even if we reject the rigidity of Michel Foucault’s schematic approach, the rise of disciplinarity in the nineteenth century was an important element in the eventual relegation of encyclopedism to the margins of the scholarly community: the manual of the amateur rather than the locus of scholarly debate. Although it was possible to rehabilitate the idea of the encyclopedia as a vehicle for popularising new discoveries, the huge number of popular encyclopedias in the nineteenth century were not great intellectual achievements. It is not surprising, perhaps, that Pliny suffered from a crisis of faith, as scholars unpicked the work, looking for the roots of other texts in Pliny’s unimaginative compilation. Modern scholarship finds Pliny useful in other ways, but in our search for an overall discourse of his encyclopedia, we look for a different sort of philosophy, and a different kind of politics than Diderot could. Modern encyclopedias are very aware that their organisation of knowledge represents a powerful circumscribing of what counts as common cultural knowledge. New encyclopedic projects, and scholarly work on the subject, have had to grapple with modern identity politics in trying to define what counts as common knowledge, reacting against the univocal nationalism of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century encyclopedias. This strand of thought has had a huge influence on new readings of Pliny’s politics, particularly in his geographical and ethnographical writing. The Natural History is a text that has Rome and Roman imperialism at its centre. Pliny’s geopolitics are resolutely imperialist, and his insistent complaints about

Diderot’s Pliny and the politics of the encyclopedia



the erosion of old Roman values mark him out as a social conservative. It does not follow, however, that Pliny was similarly conservative in his intellectual politics. The idea of a dynamic and subversive Pliny that was possible in eighteenth-century France has faded completely from current discourse on the Natural History, but elements of this picture may be worth remobilising. It is hard to recapture Diderot’s sense of Pliny’s radicalism, particularly since it depends partly on a notion of Pliny the man of science, as opposed to Falconet’s idea of Pliny as text. As I discussed in Chapter One, the image of Pliny that we get from his nephew’s letters polarises around the images of the martyred scientist and the pedantic compiler, with the latter more often invoked in modern work on Pliny. Although my reading of Pliny’s imperial geography was rooted in the text of Books  to , the assumptions it brought with it were rooted in a particular set of ideas about Pliny’s encyclopedism. But if it is possible to trace an imperialist Pliny by focusing on a particular section of the text, it is harder to pinpoint Pliny the philosophe. The idea that the Natural History is an attempt to democratise the availability of knowledge, to include both emperor and craftsman, as Pliny claims in the preface, might have appealed to the instincts of the editor of the Encyclop´edie. Similarly, Pliny’s comprehensive vision, his inclusion of manual crafts as well as aristocratic theory, his impassioned attempts to enlist Romans in the project of intellectual enquiry, could all contribute to Diderot’s sense of Pliny’s concerns. If Pliny’s politics are those of the imperial elite, his attitudes towards knowledge are eclectic and expansive in their interest in non-elite forms of knowledge, Roman as well as foreign. More fundamentally, his emphasis on discrete facts could be read as a radical opening of information to users: Pliny’s emphasis on seeing nature as a series of facts rather than a system of knowledge makes the natural world newly accessible. When it comes to finding the politics of the Natural History, its status as the first encyclopedia makes the outcome of the search a little overdetermined, as it responds to particular visions of what an encyclopedia does. For Diderot, Pliny could stand as a kind of archetype of the good encyclopedist, even against the conviction of Falconet that the encyclopedist was inevitably bourgeois, amateurish and mistaken. In the end, though, it seems that it is more the fact of Pliny’s work, rather than anything in particular he says in it, that drives this Enlightenment perspective on the writer. If the Natural History is an encyclopedia, it is not because this genre was recognised in antiquity. In the absence of a well-defined ancient genre, the Natural History is only identifiable as an encyclopedia on the



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

analogy of later generic models. Its politics too have been read in the light of contemporary conceptions of this volatile genre. Diderot had a complex engagement with the politics of empire in his own day, perhaps most clearly visible in L’Histoire des deux Indes, which displays his distaste for the dehumanising effects of colonial rule; his conception of encyclopedism saw it as a positive advancement of knowledge, a democratising redistribution of cultural wealth among its readers. It is perhaps not surprising that Diderot was more interested in finding subversive ingenuity at the heart of Pliny’s encyclopedism; it is perhaps equally unsurprising that we can find only an oppressive Romanness. Opposing Diderot’s Pliny to a new orthodoxy on the politics of Pliny’s encyclopedia provides a space in which to consider the substructure of our arguments, and the availability of other frameworks of interpretation. In the end, however, I am reluctant to abandon contemporary critiques of encyclopedism completely in my approach to his geography, even when faced with the opposing strong reading of Pliny’s politics produced by the writers of the Encyclop´edie. Abandoning the critique of Pliny’s imperial geography might mean colluding with the assumptions it encodes about the cultures it catalogues. Diderot’s vision of a liberalising Pliny is possible partly because of a greater acceptance of the limitations of the male elite culture that the Natural History inhabits. Calling Diderot up as an alternative voice provides a new angle on Pliny and his text, but it does not provide us with an escape from the debates that inform our own approach to the text, the debates that made it worthwhile inviting his different perspective in the first place. Politics is perhaps the point where we must choose to embrace the situatedness of our readings most warmly, and decide how to interpret in the face of loaded alternatives. Knowing that such alternatives exist, however, complicates our understanding of the text and of our own investments in reading it. If it is difficult to recoup a sense of this Enlightenment Pliny in the twenty-first century, the disjunction at least points to the significance of our model of encyclopedia to our understanding of the text. Not all 



See Fabienne-Sophie Chauderlot, ‘Prol´egom`enes a` un anti-colonialisme futur: Histoire des deux Indes et Suppl´ement au Voyage de Bougainville de Diderot’, in Interpreting Colonialism, ed. Byron R. Wells and Philip Stewart (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, ), –; Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton University Press, ), –. For perceptive engagements with the politics of Classical reception, see Katie Fleming, ‘The Use and Abuse of Antiquity: The Politics and Morality of Appropriation’, in Classics and the Uses of Reception, ed. Charles Martindale and Richard F. Thomas (Malden, MA, Oxford: Blackwell, ), –; Miriam Leonard, Athens in Paris: Ancient Greece and the Political in Post-War France (Oxford University Press, ).

Diderot’s Pliny and the politics of the encyclopedia



encyclopedias have been nationalistic, and not all encyclopedias have contained general knowledge. If there is no ancient genre of encyclopedia to which the Natural History belongs, then it is only on the analogy of later encyclopedias that we can recognise it as such. The encyclopedic features that we recognise in the Natural History are not inherently more characteristic of the encyclopedic model provided by the nineteenth-century Encyclopaedia Britannica than the Encyclop´edie. Nor is the imperialist, nationalist geopolitics the Encyclopaedia Britannica embodied more characteristic of encyclopedism than the democratising and subversive intellectual politics of the eighteenth-century models. Pliny’s moral stance is conservative, and his geopolitics are contentedly imperial, but the analogy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the spectre of an ancient genre of encyclopedia should not obscure the possibility of finding an intellectual radicalism at the heart of Pliny’s work.

chapter 3

Finding facts: the summarium in the early printed editions∗

Pliny’s Natural History demands a very particular approach from its readers. The key paradox of the encyclopedic text is that, having gone to the immense effort of gathering together information covering all the branches of human knowledge, it expects its readers not to read it all. The tension between the unifying discourse of complete knowledge and its practical segmentation into digestible chunks requires a certain amount of conceptual shimmying on the part of the reader. How relevant is the surrounding information to the single fact retrieved? In the case of Pliny, the possibility of understanding disembodied sections and facts in isolation is a promise held out to the reader by the book itself: Pliny explicitly gives his blessing in the preface and provides a summarium to aid in the process. This summarium takes up all of Book  of the Natural History, listing the contents of the other thirty-six books, together with the sources Pliny consulted. But although the paratext promotes one model of how to read the Natural History, the text itself is ambivalent; the insistency of linear narrative never quite surrenders to the allure of complete segmentation. There is a logic to the Natural History that only reveals itself to the reader who follows the stream of information from fact to fact, section to section, book to book, subject to subject. The competing models of reading and using the Natural History have shaped current divisions in scholarship on the Natural History, but they also have wider implications in terms of Pliny’s continuing usefulness to critics in many disciplines. Reading all of Pliny’s text is a time-consuming and sometimes bewildering enterprise, one which most scholars avoid, despite the references to the Natural History in their footnotes. In the face of current sensitivity to the importance of context in using text as evidence and the pressure from new work on Pliny to understand the Natural History as a holistic enterprise, is it still possible to ∗

Part of this chapter is based on my article ‘Finding Facts in Pliny’s Encyclopaedia: The Summarium of the Natural History’, Remus  (): –, and is reproduced here by permission of Aureal Publications.



The summarium in the early printed editions



justify excerpting information from the Natural History by using an index or taking it in subject-defined sections? The tension between reading narrative and finding facts is a familiar aspect of the encyclopedic genre. As we have seen, however, genres are historically contingent, and the encyclopedias have changed radically to adapt to new publication methods and techniques of information retrieval. The balance between narrative and compartmentalisation, reading and using, changes with the movement from book roll to codex, from manuscript to printed text, to the recent emergence of digital and Web-based media, and each of these formats allows for different degrees of speed and accuracy in retrieving information. The history of the encyclopedia is intimately bound up with the technology of book production and scholarly publication. In the long transmission and publication history of the Natural History the experience of reading or using the text has altered with the changes in methods of publishing, and with the introduction of chapter and page numbers, glosses, editorial cross-references, multiple indices, footnotes, an apparatus criticus, bibliographies and, now, hyperlinks and search engines – all the paraphernalia of scholarship that we take for granted. It is within a context of the material culture of the book, then, that we need to explore the possibility of using the summarium as a retrieval device. The summarium is our clearest textual hint for a methodology of reading that pinpoints the necessary fact at the expense of reading the narrative. It is usually glossed as an ‘index’ or ‘table of contents’ in references to the Natural History, with the assumption that its function and importance in the text are similar to those of modern manifestations of these retrieval devices. This naturalisation of the summarium as a table of contents needs to be explored in the context of the development of reference tools in the history of the book. The usefulness of the summarium as a reference tool has varied over the course of its long transmission history but, as we will see, the text of the summarium and the ways in which it is presented have been deeply affected by the editor’s desire to make it useful, in modern no less than in early editions. My aim here is to look at the impact of editorial choices on the function of the summarium by comparing modern print editions of the summarium with the early printed version, as represented by the fifteen incunable editions of the Natural History, editions dating from the first fifty years of printing. At present, we are in the process of a major paradigm shift in 

I focus here on the fifteen Latin editions that were produced in the incunable period, working on the collections housed in the British Library and the University Library at Cambridge. The British Library



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

publication methods: as the full potential of the Internet and digital media is being explored and realised, we are witnessing a change as profound in its implications as the move from roll to codex, or manuscript to print. New retrieval devices that make every word in a text fully searchable are already changing research methodologies and research questions. With this in mind, now seems a good moment to explore the strengths and limitations of the printed summarium, contrasting its potential as a retrieval device in the first generation of printed books with what became possible at the late-twentieth-century high point of print technology. The differences and distances between early and modern editions of the Natural History may help in determining how far the summarium goes in recommending using rather than reading the text and how helpful its directions can be to users of Pliny’s Natural History. pliny’s preface: instructions for use The summarium of the Natural History is an integral part of the text. Unlike other ancient summaria, that of Cato’s De agri cultura for instance, there is no debate as to whether or not the author intended it to be there. The evidence that it is not a later addition comes from the text itself, in the words of Pliny’s preface in Book . This first book of the Natural History consists of a prefatory letter addressed to the future emperor Titus, followed by the summarium that lists the contents of each book, together with a list of sources, usually subdivided into Roman and Other. It is perhaps not surprising that Pliny’s all-encompassing project should come complete with instructions on how to read it. The explanation for the summarium is the last thing in the preface, framed as a joke which picks up on an earlier passage that deals with Titus’ role as first reader: But who could be confident about the standard of his work when he is going to submit it to the judgement of your great intellect, especially when he’s asked for your opinion? Because it is a different thing having you as the named dedicatee, rather than a member of the reading public. In that case I could have said, ‘Why

 

contains all fifteen editions, several in multiple copies: on this collection, see A.C. Klebs, ‘Incunable Editions of Pliny’s Historia Naturalis’, Isis  (): –. The University Library at Cambridge houses six editions: Venice: N. Jenson ; Treviso: M. Manzolus ; Parma: A. Portilia ; Venice: R. Novimagio ; Venice: M. Sarazin ; Venice: Thomas Blavis , discussed below. In citing the copies of these editions that I have consulted, BL indicates that the copy is housed in the British Library, CUL refers to the Cambridge University Library. See Bianca-Jeanette Schr¨oder, Titel und Text (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, ). On Pliny’s preface, see especially N.P. Howe, ‘In Defence of the Encyclopedic Mode: On Pliny’s Preface to the Natural History’, Latomus  (): –; T. K¨oves-Zulauf, ‘Die Vorrede der plinianischen “Naturgeschichte”’, Wiener Studien  (): –; Sinclair, ‘Rhetoric of Writing and Reading in the Preface to Pliny’s Natural History’.

The summarium in the early printed editions



are you reading that, emperor? That was written for the common people, a gang of farmers and craftsmen, and scholars with nothing else to do: why are you setting yourself up to judge it? You weren’t on the jury when I took on the job; I thought you were too big for me to expect you to descend to this!’ (Pliny HN pr. )

Pliny’s play on the rhetoric of authorial modesty is already signalled as a literary topos in the first paragraph of the preface, where he pretends to improve Catullus’ dedicatory poem by smoothing out the metre, ‘just to gently improve my old mate Catullus – you know the army slang – because as you know, by changing the first syllables he made himself look a little coarser than he wanted to appear to all his little Veraniuses and Fabulli’ (HN pr. ). This joke at the expense of poetic egos guarantees the credentials of both Pliny and Titus as literary critics, but although he includes an encomiastic tribute to Titus’ military and artistic triumphs, the intimate tone of his rhetoric provides a playful edge to the serious business of setting out the rationale behind his work, its claims to importance. It is in this spirit that Pliny explains the reasoning behind the summarium and its usefulness to his readers: To spare you for your work in the public interest, I added what the individual books contain at the bottom of this letter, taking great pains so you don’t have to go to the trouble of reading them. And so you will have provided everyone else with the means not to read it through either, instead everyone will look for the particular thing they want and know where to find it. This has been done in our literary tradition before me in Valerius Soranus’ books called The Initiates. (Pliny HN pr. )

And so the preface ends, aptly enough, on a careful citation of precedent. Pliny’s joke that he has provided a summarium with the best interests of the state at heart only to realise that now no one will read his text is a facetious way of pointing to the novelty of the system he is advocating – a system he goes to the trouble of explaining: look for the particular thing you want and find out where to find it. The final claim of Soranus as precursor in providing a summarium suggests that Pliny is anticipating a degree of unfamiliarity with the system, although the resonant specificity of ‘in litteris nostris’ (‘in our literary tradition’) sounds like a Romanising claim to a pre-existing Greek tradition. Suggesting that the reader may not read the whole work is a prefatory joke that Martial can also make in the opening poem of the tenth book of his epigrams, but providing a summarium changes the implications of the topos. Pliny’s joke that his summarium means no one will read his text exposes the logic of reading that later encyclopedias insist upon, but making the joke at all suggests that reading the book right through is



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

still the normative methodology that Pliny generally expects his readers to follow. Making a joke about using rather than reading the Natural History reflects a central ambivalence in the text, an uncertainty about how information should be stored that results from the uncertainty about how it should best be read. The certainty that finding facts rather than following narrative will be the dominant model for reading the Natural History rests on a removal of the irony of Pliny’s prefatory rhetoric, but the possibility is authoritatively introduced by Pliny himself. One way to understand the dynamics of how the summarium works is to follow the example of the imaginary reader that Pliny envisages, imperiously searching for the one fact wanted from the mass of information catalogued in the summarium. editing the summarium: from manuscript to print Readers of Pliny have encountered different forms of the summarium over the long history of reading the Natural History and following Pliny’s instructions is a different project during different phases of the text’s transmission. Not only do different methods of publication allow for different methods of consulting the text, but the text of the summarium has also been through different recensions: the summarium that we use today has changed considerably from the versions that readers of the Natural History used right up until the mid-nineteenth century, when J. Sillig, L. von Jan and D. Detlefsen’s detailed manuscript work established the text that has remained substantially unchanged in subsequent modern editions. The demands of utility, as well as philology, have driven changes in the form and layout of the summarium. Although the authenticity of the text was the dominant concern of Renaissance scholars, the approach of the early editors to the summarium was also influenced by its usefulness as a key research tool, in the absence or inadequacy of indices, or even page numbers. The comparison with 

See J. Sillig’s edition of the Natural History: J. Sillig and L. von Jan, eds., C. Plinii Secundi Naturalis Historiae Libri XXXVII (Leipzig: Teubner, –); also Detlefsen’s  edition and especially his article on Pliny’s indices: D. Detlefsen, ‘Die Indices der Naturalis Historia des Plinius’, Philologus  (): –; D. Detlefsen, ed., Caii Plynii Secundi Naturalis Historiae Libri XXXVII (Berlin: Weidmann, –). In focusing on the earliest and on the most recent editions, I am avoiding an intermediate stage in the development of the printed text, which was marked by the publication of J. Hardouin’s edition in : J. Hardouin, Caii Plinii Secundi Naturalis Historiae Libri XXXVII (Paris: Franciscus Muguet, ). This edition recognised a discrepancy between available manuscript evidence and the version of the summarium that was still in use, but Hardouin’s text was discarded by Sillig, who started from scratch in establishing the modern version of the summarium. On Hardouin, see A. Grafton, ‘Jean Hardouin: The Antiquary as Pariah’, The Warburg Institute  (): –.

The summarium in the early printed editions



our modern, but older, version of the text provides a means of examining the role of the summarium in helping the reader to find a fact, the task Pliny lays out for it in the preface. The usual equation of Pliny’s idea of a summarium with an index or a table of contents elides a long history of scholarly methods, the traces of which can still be seen in the text of the Natural History, in modern no less than in early editions. The possibility of using the text as a mine of information has changed alongside the development of technologies of retrieval, indices, page numbers, and chapter numbers. Similarly, the degree to which reading the whole work consecutively is possible has been affected by methods of publication which afford the reader more or less ease in handling a text of this length. These changes in the framing of the text are integral to our understanding of how to read the Natural History: how we can read it depends on the edition we use. Pliny’s Natural History was published early and reprinted often in the first fifty years of print. There were fifteen separate incunable editions, representing publication and reissues of six different recensions, as R. Sabbadini established: . Editio princeps, editor unknown. Venice: Johannes de Spira, . . Giovanni Andrea Bussi. Rome: C. Sweynheym and A. Pannartz, , reproduced Venice: N. Jenson, . . Niccol`o Perotti. Rome: C. Sweynheym and A. Pannartz, . . Filippo Beroaldo. Parma: Stephanus Corallus, , reproduced Treviso: M. Manzolus, ; Parma: A. Portilia, ; Parma: A. Portilia, ; Venice: R. Novimagio, ; Venice: M. Sarazin, ; Venice: Thomas Blavis, . . Angelo and Giacomo Britannici. Brescia: Angelo and Giacomo Britannici, , reproduced Venice: Bartolomeo Zani, . . Giovanni Battista Palmari (incorporating Ermolao Barbaro’s commentary). Venice: B. Benalius, , reproduced Venice: J. Alvisius, . The number of editions alone should suggest Pliny’s vogue among humanist editors and publishers. As commentators have noted, the very abstruseness of the text and the corrupt state of the available manuscripts made 



R. Sabbadini, ‘La edizione quattrocentesche della S.N. di Plinio’, Studi italiani di filologia classica  (): –; see also Charles Nauert, ‘Caius Plinius Secundus’, in Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum: Medieval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries, ed. F.E. Crantz and P.O. Kristeller (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, ), –. There were also three separate editions of the Italian translation by Cristoforo Landino, Venice: N. Jenson, ; Venice: Philippo di Pietro, ; Venice: B. Zani, . For this identification, see Sabbadini, ‘La edizione quattrocentesche della S.N. di Plinio’; Martin Davies, ‘Making Sense of Pliny in the Quattrocento’, Renaissance Studies  (): –.



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

the Natural History a kind of battleground on which scholars could display their prowess. Pliny provided a key access point to not only the scientific thinking, but also the scientific vocabulary of the Roman world, essential reading for the humanist scholar. The transmission of Pliny’s text is a complex one, and the popularity of the Natural History as a living text, one that continued to be used and consulted right up to the Renaissance, had an important impact on its integrity as a representation of what Pliny actually wrote. Misunderstanding of technical detail and unfamiliar words, abridgement, modernisation, and contamination between the different branches of the tradition are visible in a proliferation of manuscripts, many of which are badly corrupt. In the case of Book , the situation is especially complicated. Its position at the start of the codex must have contributed to its unusual degree of damage: like the final book, it survives in very few manuscripts, and in none of the older ones. But some of its mutations have been explained by deliberate alterations designed to make it more useful. The manuscript evidence for the summarium is complicated. There are three types: manuscripts which give the summarium in Book , those which divide up the summarium and place the relevant section at the start of each book, and those which do both, so that the summarium appears at the beginning of the work and again in segments throughout. All the editions published in the fifteenth century seem to be based on manuscripts from one common ancestor, containing all thirty-seven books, 

 

See Davies, ‘Making Sense of Pliny in the Quattrocento’, ; Vincenzo Fera, ‘Un laboratorio filologico di fine quattrocento: la Naturalis historia’, in Formative Stages of Classical Traditions: Latin Texts from Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. O. Pecere and M. Reeve (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’Alto medioevo, ), –; John Monfasani, ‘The First Call for Press Censorship: Niccol`o Perotti, Giovanni Andrea Bussi, Antonio Moreto, and the Editing of Pliny’s Natural History’, Renaissance Quarterly  (): –. See, especially, Detlefsen’s pioneering article on Pliny’s indices: Detlefsen, ‘Die Indices der Naturalis Historiae des Plinius’. F (codex Leidensis Lipsii 7; early tenth century), R (codex Florentinus Riccardianus 488; tenth/eleventh century) and E (codex Parisinus Latinus 6795; ninth/tenth century) give two versions of the summarium, often producing variant readings between the version at the start of each book and the version in Book , and so the book-by-book version is generally designated Fa , Ra , Ea in the apparatus. Two manuscripts which seem closely related to F only supply the summarium in Book , d (codex Parisinus Latinus 6797) and T (codex Toletanus), both from the thirteenth century. Similarly, the most important manuscript to provide the summarium only at the start of individual books is an influential descendant of E, written in the twelfth or thirteenth century and designated a (Vienna ¨ ONB codex CCXXXIV). The modern text of Pliny’s summarium largely rests on the evidence of these manuscripts, but other incomplete manuscripts of the text come into play at significant points: M, the codex Moneus, a fifth-century codex containing an incomplete version of Books  to , including part of the index of Book , B, the codex Bambergensis, a tenth-century copy of Books  to  each with its index, and D + G + V, which is a ninth-century manuscript now split between Rome (D: Vaticanus Latinus 3861), Paris (G: Parisinus Latinus 6796) and Leiden (V: Leidensis Voss. fol. 61).

The summarium in the early printed editions



but ending at .: ‘quacumque ambitur mari’. This common ancestor ¨ must have resembled Vienna ONB cod. 234, which editors refer to as a. Manuscript a, written in the twelfth or thirteenth century, preserves the summarium only at the start of individual books, and reflects a movement away from its close relative E (codex Parisinus Latinus 6795), dating from the ninth or tenth century, which provides two versions, in Book  and at the start of each book. Despite their descent from the ancestor of a, early printed books only include the summarium in Book . These changes in the position of the summarium are not simply the product of manuscript corruption, they represent real changes in the idea of how the text should best be read and used. The summarium occupies a particularly vulnerable, or perhaps flexible, position in the text, useful and necessary, but selfeffacing and, crucially, lacking the authority of literary narrative to demand that it be copied exactly as its author intended. Editors have felt free to alter Pliny’s summarium to make it more accessible and useful to readers. Although modern editors are quick to criticise this practice when it leads to corruption in the manuscript tradition, modern editions also alter the text to suit their readers by adding chapter numbers for ease of reference that were not part of Pliny’s original schema. These obvious additions generally go unnoticed by readers, who overlook what is an integral and self-evident device in any modern table of contents. Placing an individual summarium at the start of each book responds to the needs of readers who wanted the convenience of being able to consult the relevant section without having to return to the start of the work. It is impossible to know whether or not this was part of Pliny’s original plan for the work, but it is likely that the practice originated very early on in the tradition, while the papyrus roll was still dominant and before the codex form made referring back to Book  a matter of flicking backwards. If each book was originally contained in an individual papyrus roll, it would be more useful to have the summarium for the individual book placed at the start of the individual roll that contained it. As the codex becomes the dominant form for literature over the third 



See Davies, ‘Making Sense of Pliny in the Quattrocento’, ; Detlefsen, ‘Die Indices der Naturalis Historiae des Plinius’, ; Sabbadini, ‘La edizione quattrocentesche della S.N. di Plinio’. On the particular manuscript sources of Giovanni Andrea Bussi’s recension, see Paola Casciano, ‘Il ms. Angelicano , fase prepatoria per l’edizione del Plinio di Sweynheym e Pannartz (H )’, in Scrittura biblioteche e stampa a Roma nel Quattrocento: Aspetti e problemi, Atti del Seminario 1–2 giugnio 1979, ed. C. Bianca (Vatican City: Scuola Vaticana di paleografia, diplomatica e archivistica, ), –; A. Marucchi, ‘Note sul manoscitto di cui si e` servito Giovanni Andrea Bussi per l’edizione del Plinio del ’, Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes, Bulletin  (–): –. On the nature of paratext, including the table of contents, see G. Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, ).



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

and the fourth centuries, this practice must have continued, despite the new possibilities for reference that the form represented. At the very least, the fragmentary evidence of the Codex Moneus, M, makes clear that the practice was current by the fifth century, and may perhaps have been already present in the second-century manuscript from which M appears to have derived. This would fit with the patterns noted in Jean Irigoin’s work on the summaria found in Greek historical writing more generally. Perhaps the return to a model where the summarium is included only once, at the start of the Natural History, is more practical in the early printed tradition, where the whole work can be contained in a single volume. In any case, the change from multiple smaller summaria over the course of the encyclopedia to a single summarium at the beginning fundamentally alters its rhetorical effect as the opening statement of the Natural History; in the absence of shorter ad hoc summaria, it stands alone as first advertisement and final monument to the magnitude of the work ahead. The summarium in the early editions may be similar to that in most modern editions in its placement, but its text is substantially different. The changes must partly be due to the deterioration of copies over the course of time, but the ways in which the text diverges from the version we use suggest that the changes were due to ordering devices designed to assist readers to pinpoint material in the text. At an early stage in the tradition, editors introduced running chapter headings (capitula) into the text of the Natural History, which could be used by readers to locate particular passages 

 



The codex is believed to have been adopted as the dominant form for literary texts sometime between the third and fourth centuries, developing from its earlier adoption by Christians for sacred texts. See H. Blanck, Das Buch in der Antike (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, ); R. Marichal, ‘Du volumen au codex’, in Mise en page et mise en texte du livre manuscrit, ed. J. Vezin and H.-J. Martin (Paris: Promodis, ), –; C.H. Roberts and T.C. Skeat, The Birth of the Codex (Oxford University Press, ); E.G. Turner, The Typology of the Early Codex (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ); W.V. Harris, ‘Why Did the Codex Supplant the Book-Roll?’ in Renaissance Society and Culture: Essays in Honor of Eugene F. Rice Jr., ed. John Monfasani and R.G. Musto (New York: Italica Press, ), –. For a brief introduction to the transmission of Pliny’s text, see L.D. Reynolds, ‘The Elder Pliny’, in Texts and Transmission, ed. L.D. Reynolds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), –. Jean Irigoin, ‘Titres, sous-titres et sommaires dans les œuvres des historiens grecs du er si`ecle apr`es J.-C.’, in Titres et articulations du texte dans les œuvres antiques. Actes du colloque international de Chantilly, 13–14 d´ecembre 1994, ed. J.-C. Fredouille, M.-O. Goulet-Caz´e, P. Hoffmann and P. Petitmangin (Paris: Institut d’´etudes augustiniennes, ), –. On the evolution of the index, see Mary Rouse and Richard Rouse, ‘Concordances et index’, in Mise en page et mise en texte du livre manuscrit, ed. J. Vezin and H.-J. Martin (Paris: Promodis, ), –; Mary Rouse and Richard Rouse, ‘La naissance des index’, in Histoire de l’´edition franc¸aise, ed. H.-J. Martin, R. Chartier and F.-P. Viret (Paris: Promodis, ), –.

The summarium in the early printed editions



in the text. Some of these headings were drawn from the summarium, but this inevitably led to others being adopted into the text of the summarium to fill a gap or elucidate the existing entry. This poses significant problems for the establishment of the text, as editors have noted, but it also has important consequences for our understanding of the origins of the early printed summarium. In the Renaissance, one common methodology used in generating an index was to collect together the subject headings that had previously been written in the margins of the text. In this context, using the headings as a tool to supplement existing versions of the summarium would have been a particularly easy step for the editors of the early printed editions of Pliny. In most of these early editions, the two devices appear to be interdependent, equal partners in the task of guiding the reader through the bulky pages of Pliny’s text. Only the first two editions do not provide running chapter headings or capitula in the text of the Natural History. Johannes de Spira’s editio princeps (first edition) seems to leave these devices to the rubricator: the summarium is printed in columns, with spaces for the book number and perhaps the chapter number also to be added. Similarly, space was left in the text itself for chapter headings to be added; these could be added in red ink, making them both attractive and easy to locate. In this edition, the chapter headings seem part of the editor’s conception of how the text functions, but not necessarily an integral part of the text itself: space is left for them, but the decision to add them is left to the individual owner, who can order the work done by a rubricator and pay the extra cost, or leave them blank. The situation seems different in the second edition, which offers an intriguing look at scholarly practices and polemics in fifteenth-century Italy. The  edition published by Sweynheym and Pannartz, edited by Giovanni Andrea Bussi, contained no running chapter headings and unlike 

 

There is some debate as to when chapter divisions and other paratextual devices come into use in antiquity: see Diana Albino, ‘La divisione in capitoli nelle opere degli antichi’, Annali della facolt`a di lettere e filosofia, Napoli  (–): –; Irigoin, ‘Titres, sous-titres et sommaires’; F.G. Kenyon, ‘Book Divisions in Greek and Latin Literature’, in William Warner Bishop: A Tribute (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), –; Pierre Petitmangin, ‘Capitula pa¨ıens et chr´etiens’, in Titres et articulations du texte dans les œuvres antiques. Actes du Colloque international de Chantilly, 13–14 d´ecembre 1994, ed. J.-C. Fredouille, M.-O. Goulet-Caz´e, P. Hoffmann and P. Petitmangin (Paris: Institut d’´etudes augustiniennes, ), –. See Ann Blair, ‘Annotating and Indexing Natural Philosophy’, in Books and the Sciences in History, ed. M. Frasca-Spada and N. Jardine (Cambridge University Press, ), –. In the four copies of this edition that I have consulted, three supplied both these additions, while one supplied book numbers only. (BL) IC., (BL) G., (BL) C..d. supplied both; (BL) IC. provided book numbers only.



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Spira’s edition, there is no space provided for these to be added, either in the summarium or in the text itself. However they were reinstated by Nicolas Jenson in his  re-edition of Bussi’s text, and Sweynheym and Pannartz’s  edition of the Natural History, edited by Niccol`o Perotti, also printed chapter headings. Where Johannes de Spira’s first edition seems to have made little impact on subsequent editions, and is not referred to by later humanists, Bussi’s edition was controversial. Bussi’s text provoked an outraged response from Niccol`o Perotti, who circulated a pamphlet calling for the pope to appoint an official censor of Classical editions to suppress the publication of bad quality texts. Whether or not Perotti saw himself as the best man for the job, he did include a sample of his work in the form of twenty-two corrections to the text of Bussi’s edition, taken from the preface alone. Giorgio Merula and Giorgio Vitelli became involved in the dispute, while the pamphlet itself had an interesting afterlife: reprinted under the title ‘Commentariolus’ and re-edited to suit Venetian circumstances, it appeared as an endnote to Giorgio Merula’s  and subsequent editions of Perotti’s Cornucopia. Perotti’s concerns focused on the intellectual rigour with which Bussi had dealt with the difficulties of Pliny’s Latin, and the presence or absence of chapter headings were beneath his interest, at least in print. But his own edition of the Natural History in  does include them, as does Jenson’s edition of Bussi’s text in . Why were they missing from Bussi’s  text in the first place? The relevant entry in the British Museum catalogue of early printed books suggests one possible answer: [The  Pliny was] the latest Sweynheym and Pannartz book in which the headings are left to the rubricator instead of being printed.

This may have been the intention; however, none of the incunables in the British Library’s collection had chapter headings added in ink in the text. Indeed, it would be difficult to see where to fit them: the text of the summarium, and the rest of the work is printed in solid paragraphs, with no space for additions. One copy, (BL) IC., does try to supplement the text with headings, but it places them in the margin, sometimes adding numbers, which seem to be taken from a different edition of the text, and 

 

On this controversy and its implications see esp. Monfasani, ‘The First Call for Press Censorship’; S. Prete, ‘La lettura di Niccol`o Perotti a Francesco Guarnieri’, Studia Picena  (): –; see also Davies, ‘Making Sense of Pliny in the Quattrocento’; Fera, ‘Un laboratorio filologico di fine quattrocento’; Nauert, ‘Caius Plinius Secundus’. Robert Proctor, An Index to the Early Printed Books in the British Museum: From the Invention of Printing to the Year MD (London: Kegan Paul, ) vol. , . (BL) IC., (BL) G.–, (BL) C..d..

The summarium in the early printed editions



are not marked in the summarium of this copy. The additions become increasingly fewer as the text goes on, petering out almost entirely by the last seven books. Similarly, the marginalia in (BL) C..d. sometimes correspond to chapter headings, although a third copy in the British Library (G.–), which originally belonged to the Medicis, makes no attempt to provide chapter headings in the margins. Some readers, at least, felt the loss of running chapter headings, and later editions did their best to meet this need: The absence of an editorial preface and other front matter might be thought to have been occasioned by a desire to save on expensive paper, especially now that the loquacious Bussi was out of the picture. In fact the  edition takes up  more leaves than the  edition, though both have the same type-page; this is due to the more generous layout of the later edition, with printed chapter headings and so on.

The implication is that the absence of chapter headings in Bussi’s  edition is simply due to pressures of space, a decision taken on practical grounds originating in the business interests of the publishers rather than the philological concerns of the editor – and in these early days of printing the defining lines between these roles were often blurred. It is possible to explore Bussi’s decision further, because we are fortunate in that the successive stages of Bussi’s preparation of the text for the  edition of Sweynheym and Pannartz are preserved in two manuscripts, which document the movement from initial manuscript collation and correction (Angelicano 1097) to the production and re-editing of a fair copy (Vat. lat. 5991) that formed the basis of the printed text. If pressures of space and practical economy were the reasons behind the decision to omit chapter headings, it is interesting to note that they seem to have been communicated to Bussi right at the start of his preparation of the text. In the examples from the Angelicano manuscript, as described by A. Marucchi, Bussi has flagged chapter headings in the text for removal and has simplified the titles of the individual books themselves. These chapter headings have been omitted by the copyist who produced the Vatican manuscript, which incorporates all the changes that Bussi had indicated in the Angelicano. The  

Davies, ‘Making Sense of Pliny in the Quattrocento’, . I have not had the opportunity to consult either of these manuscripts, but tentative inferences can be drawn from the information and examples provided by Paula Casciano and A. Marucchi in their articles on these texts: Paola Casciano, ‘Il ms. Angelicano , fase prepatoria per l’edizione del Plinio di Sweynheym e Pannartz (H )’, in Scrittura bibliotecne e stampa a Roma nel Qualtrocento: Aspetti e problemi, Atti del Seminario 1–2 giugnio 1979, ed. C. Bianca (Vatican City: Scuola Vaticana di paleografia, diplomatica e archivistica, ), –; A. Marucchi, ‘Note sul manoscritto di cui si e` servito Giovanni Andrea Bussi per l’edizione del Plinio del ’.



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Vatican manuscript, complete with further emendations, was the version presented to the printers, containing no indication that chapter headings had ever been present. Removing the chapter headings completely from the version presented to the printers suggests that Bussi at least thought they were extraneous to Pliny’s text. Modern editors remove them because they are not part of Pliny’s original conception of his work, and were introduced later for reasons of clarity. While this is a possible construction of Bussi’s actions, it seems more likely that there is a conceptual difference in the fifteenthcentury approach to these chapter headings, brought about by their practical use as a reference tool. To a reader used to following printed headings through the text, chapter headings must have been a particularly marginal issue in textual scholarship: not properly part of the text, but a self-explanatory aid to research, they may have seemed no more problematic than the addition of an apparatus criticus to a modern printed edition. Separated by the page layout from the author’s text, these additions could have seemed more a matter of scholarly convenience than a problematic question of authenticity. But, as we will see, these alterations in formatting and academic apparatus do impact on the shape of a text and the ways it can be read. The unfamiliar example of these first editions of Pliny helps us to assess the degree to which our own experience of reading the text of Pliny is shaped by the books in which we encounter it. If the preface to the Natural History seems to encourage readers to use the summarium as a means of finding the information they need without the burden of reading the entire text, then the question remains as to whether the summarium is an effective means of pinpointing information. It is difficult to gauge how useful the summarium Pliny provided would have been to his first readership, although Jocelyn Penny Small has suggested that available book production techniques would have made using the summarium a slow business at best. Even if we are secure in the assumption that the text was substantially the same as the version recovered by modern scholarship, the act of reading a papyrus roll is peculiarly distant from the experience of using a modern text, and no ancient Plinian texts survive as material witnesses to this first formulation. Comparing the first printed editions with the summarium of modern editions is partly an attempt to bridge this gap in experience, to underline the changes and continuities in our understanding of how to use Pliny’s encyclopedia over 

Jocelyn Penny Small, Wax Tablets of the Mind: Cognitive Studies of Memory and Literacy in Classical Antiquity (London, New York: Routledge, ), –.

The summarium in the early printed editions



the course of its reception history. The shape of the text has changed, but the tension between fact-finding and thorough reading remains a central dynamic in the text. The differences between the context and concerns of a Renaissance reader and those of a modern academic are both obvious and complex. My concern is less with the elaboration of the theme of how Politian or Petrarch read their Pliny – some interesting work has already been done on this subject – than with the question of how the differences in the way our books are organised direct our relationship with the text, providing different ways to deal with the facts of the Natural History. organising pliny: the shape of the summarium So far, we have been looking at the standard practices and editorial assumptions which affected the appearance and usefulness of the summarium in its early history. The effects of these changes on the text are obvious in so far as they are unfamiliar, but they should work to sensitise us to the conventions and editorial practices which produce the version of the summarium that we are more used to reading. The twentieth century produced seven editions of the Natural History, beginning with Carl Mayhoff ’s revision of Jan’s Teubner text, through H. Rackham and W.H.S. Jones’s Loeb edition in the earlier part of the century, to the Bud´e begun in  by A. Ernout and R. P´epin, eliciting substantial contributions from Jacques Andr´e, among others. Two Italian editions have also emerged, overseen by G.B. Conte and by E. Gabba and A. Grilli, as well as a German edition by R. Winkler and G. K¨onig. Different editions provide more or less in the 





See Fera, ‘Un laboratorio filologico di fine quattrocento’; Fera, ‘Poliziano, Ermolao Barbaro e Plinio’, in Una famiglia veneziana nella storia: I Barbaro. Atti del Convegno di studi in occasione del quinto centenario della morte dell’ umanista Ermolao, Venezia 4–6 Novembre 1993, ed. Michela Marangoni and Manlio Pastore Stocchi (Venice: Istituto veneto di scienze, lettere ed arti, ), –; Nauert, ‘Humanists, Scientists and Pliny’. C. Mayhoff and L. von Jan, C. Plini Secundi Naturalis Historiae libri XXXVII. Post Ludovici Iani obitum recognovit et scripturae discrepentia adjecta edidit Carolus Mayhoff,  vols. (Stuttgart: Teubner, –; reprint, –); H. Rackham, W.H.S. Jones and D.E. Eicholz, eds., Pliny: Natural History. With an English Translation,  vols, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, –). The Bud´e edition is an ongoing project, with multiple contributors; in what follows, I will be focusing on Jean Beaujeu’s edition of Book : J. Beaujeu and A. Ernout, Pline l’Ancien Histoire Naturelle Livre I, ed. and trans. J. Beaujeu, introduction by A. Ernout (Paris: Soci´et´e d’´editions ‘Les Belles Lettres’, ). Gian Biagio Conte, A. Barchiesi and G. Ranucci, eds., Gaio Plinio Secondo, Storia Naturale,  vols. (Turin: Einaudi, –); E. Gabba and A. Grilli, Plinii Naturalis Historia / Plinio, Storia Naturale, ¨  vols. (Pisa: Giardini, –); R. K¨onig and G. Winkler, eds., C. Plinius der Altere, Naturkunde (Munich: Tusculum, –).



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

way of research tools – indices, apparatuses, translations, commentaries – and these different emphases provide an interesting key to the intended audience at which the particular book is aimed. But before we consider the impact of these devices, there is an even more fundamental pattern of organisation that we need to examine: the page layout of the printed summarium. It is not often, perhaps, that page layout makes a substantive point about the editor’s conception of a text’s function. But in the case of Book  of the Natural History, making a decision about how the text should be formatted is an admission of a particular attitude to the usefulness of the summarium. The long lists of information that Pliny provides force editors to decide whether to print these lists in a column or as paragraphs of text, whether to place multiple paragraphs on the same page or a single list, and to choose whether or not to provide chapter numbers alongside the different items, and the degree of prominence to award them. Compare the different impact of the format of the summarium of Book , copied from the Loeb and the Bud´e editions of the text: Libro XXVIII. continentur medicinae ex animalibus. (iii) An sit in medendo verborum aliqua vis. (iv–v) Ostenta et sanciri et depelli. (vi–xix) Ex homine remedia; contra magos; ex viro medicinae et observationes CCXXVI, puero VIII; (xx–xxiii) muliere LXI, (xxiv–xxxii) ex peregrinis animalibus elephanto VIII, leone X, camelo X, hyaena LXXIX, crocodilo XIX, crocodilea XI, chamaeleone XV, scinco IV, hippopotamio VII, lynce V. L. XXVIII CONTINENTUR Medicinae ex animalibus II. III. IV–V. VI–XIX. XX–III. XXIV–XXXII. XXIV. XXV. XXVI. XXVII. XXVIII. XXIX. XXX. XXXI. XXXII.

Ex homine remedia. Contra Magos. An sit in medendo uerborum aliqua uis. Ostenta et sanciri et depelli. Ex uiro medicinae et obseruationes CCXXVI, puero VIII. Muliere LXI. Ex peregrinis animalibus. Elephanto VIII. Leone X. Camelo X. Hyaena LXXVIIII. Crocodilo XVIIII. Crocodilea XI. Chamaeleone XV. Scinco IV Hippopotamio VII. Lynce V.

The summarium in the early printed editions



The text is substantially the same in these two versions, but the method of presentation makes it impossible to read them in the same way. Where Rackham’s Loeb edition chooses to present the text in the form of a continuous paragraph, placing sequences of chapter numbers in parentheses before groups of entries, J. Beaujeu’s Bud´e prints a neat column of items, as far as possible assigning an individual number and a separate line to each new subject, as do the editions of Mayhoff, Conte and Winkler. Further typographical aids embellish the systematic ordering of Beaujeu’s summarium: the book number appears in the position of a title, though this necessitates splitting the first sentence into two parts. The second part, containing the short statement of the book’s contents, is printed beneath in bold, to catch the reader’s eye for easy reference. Similarly, Beaujeu picks out the more important subject headings in bold, and prints the rest in plain type, marking them as subsections of these bold-face entries. Mayhoff and Conte indent the less important entries to make the same point, but the Loeb marks the distinction between more and less general headings less dramatically by placing chapter numbers only before the more important ones. Divisions between one type of subject and another are difficult to spot in the Loeb summarium, and its erratic system of punctuation does little to clarify the problem, but this produces an overall fluidity between one entry and another; in the absence of the rigid divisions of the vertical list, the reader is induced to follow the words as though they formed a narrative, finding it difficult to catch sight of an individual entry and isolate it at a glance. If the shape of the text is the first signal to the reader of what they are about to read, then it would be easy to take the Bud´e summarium for a modern table of contents, although, naturally, in a French book, this is generally placed at the end of the text proper. The long single column of entries, complete with titles and subtitles, does much to produce the effect – and Conte’s summarium is similar in this regard. The crucial difference between the two is the position and importance of the chapter numbers. In Conte’s text the numbers come after each entry, marked off as marginal additions by parentheses, and this is also the case in Mayhoff’s Teubner edition. The prominence of Beaujeu’s chapter numbers, which appear in bold type before the text, makes it appear that they are a structuring principle in their own right, and this in turn camouflages the fact that the order in which the summarium entries proceed cannot always be tied down to an exact sequential order in the text. Mayhoff’s edition comes somewhere between the Loeb and the Bud´e in its presentation of the summarium. It lists the items vertically, but packs two columns onto a page, half of which



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

is taken up with a complex and detailed apparatus criticus. The cramped spacing of the text and the obvious presence of learned commentary make it difficult to see the text as anything other than an object of study, distanced both from the immediacy of Beaujeu’s table of contents and from the readability of Rackham’s continuous paragraphs. Winkler’s edition is the only one to allude to the historicity of the modes of retrieval on display, and then only obliquely. Chapter numbers are provided in this summarium, which are listed as the first of four columns in Winkler’s summarium: the second contains the chapter number, the third the modern Latin text and the fourth a German translation of it. A footnote on the first page notifies us that these chapter numbers were standard issue in earlier editions of the text, before the authoritative recensions of the nineteenth century divided the text into shorter chapters. It does not, however, allude to the differences between the old and the new text established for the summarium at this point, and in the absence of an apparatus criticus it is impossible for the reader to gauge the complexities of the tradition from the text on the page. Winkler’s columns produce the effect of a table, but the footnote and the number of columns make it more difficult to elide the distance between this and a modern table of contents than is the case in Beaujeu’s Bud´e or in Conte’s edition. These distinctions in formatting reflect modern uncertainties about what the summarium is for, but each formatting style in turn exercises a subtle influence over the expectations the reader brings to the text. In what follows, I intend to highlight the impact of formatting by alternating between different styles of presentation of the summarium, drawn from the different modern editions. With the exception of Bussi’s  edition discussed above, all the incunables of the Natural History print numbered chapter headings throughout the text and the summarium consists of a list of these chapter headings and their numbers. Apart from Bussi’s  edition, which uses a paragraph layout, early editors and typesetters arrange the text of the summarium in columns, two or three to a page, with a number either before or after the entry. In the  editio princeps, these numbers are left to the rubricator to add by hand, but in the rest they are provided in print by the publisher. Stephanus Corallus’  edition of Beroaldo’s recension provides an example of the usual combination: An finitus sit mundus & an unus ca.i. Is the world finite and singular capitulum  Pliny HN . (Beroaldo. Parma: Stephanus Corallus, )

The summarium in the early printed editions



Compare this with the text printed in Beaujeu’s Bud´e: I. An finitus sit mundus et an unus. . Is the world finite and singular? Pliny HN . (Beaujeu. Paris: Soci´et´e d’´editions ‘Les Belles Lettres’, )

At first it appears that there is not much difference between the two: in this case the text printed is the same in both, although Beaujeu puts ‘mundus’ in bold type as a marker of the book’s contents. The only thing changed is that the number refers to a chapter heading in the incunable, whereas in the modern text it refers to a number alone. It is a small change in the text of the summarium, but it signifies a crucial difference in the experience of reading the Natural History and the possibility of finding a fact in its many pages. It is difficult to spot the subtle range of devices which break down the text of a modern edition; they seem so much part of the structure of the book that they are almost invisible. In a modern text, information can be pinpointed either via the summarium, where the chapter numbers come into play, or via the index, which tends to use page numbers to direct the reader. There are usually two sets of numbers in modern editions, one corresponding to the older divisions made by the running chapter headings, dividing the books into long, uneven sections; the other numbers were introduced by nineteenth-century editors to divide the books into shorter paragraphs. It is still to the older capitula divisions that these numbers in the modern summarium refer to, despite the fact that recent work usually refers to the text of Pliny by chapter number alone, as I do here. But these numbers are tucked safely into the margins of the page so that when it comes to reading the text the reader is presented with a largely unbroken narrative. In the early printed editions, the existence of chapter headings produces a summarium that works as a structuring principle in the text as well as the main means of retrieving information. Reading the text, the movement from one subject to another is marked by a physical division, so that the long sweep of Pliny’s narrative is tied into tighter sections, each headed by a pre-emptive statement of what is to come. The prominence of these chapter headings varies from edition to edition – some are printed in capitals with plenty of space around them, others are squashed between the paragraphs and more difficult to spot simply by scanning the page, others again are picked out in ink by the illuminator, heightening their visibility and importance in the text. None of the fifteenth-century 

For example, for chapter headings in capital letters, see Venice: Thomas Blavis, ; Venice: Bartolomeo Zani,  for more indistinguishable ones; (BL) Cd, a copy of Cristoforo



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editions is supplied with printed page numbers, but the book number is often added in ink to the top of each page, although the first editions to print these numbers appear in , which were also the first to contain title-pages. The chapter headings and their key, the summarium, are the main navigational device provided by the printer to aid the reader, but the responsibility of readers to provide their own additions to the text is clearly seen in the illuminated capitals, highlighted chapter headings, marginal notes and book numbers which embellish the printed text of these early editions. It is important to emphasise the physical difference between these books and the mass-produced, multi-volume editions we use today; these large, cumbersome folios are difficult to handle except with the respect they demand. As we will see, for a modern Classicist, let alone a Renaissance reader, using the summarium is a different enterprise when using these early editions. using the summarium and finding the facts The reader that Pliny talks about in his preface does not have the time to read all thirty-seven books of the Natural History, but has particular questions and requirements of Pliny’s storehouse of knowledge. The summarium designed for Titus is put forward as the solution to the busy reader’s problems: And so you will have provided everyone else with the means not to read it through either, instead everyone will look for the particular thing they want and know where to find it. (Pliny HN pr. )

The summarium is supposed to help the reader find something they want in the text, but the type of question put to the text will determine the degree of success in finding help in the summarium. General questions such as ‘Where can I find information on the geography of Asia?’, or ‘Which books deal with medicine?’, are relatively easy to answer with the help of the summarium, though again, the ease with which this information can be found depends to some degree on editorial and publication methods. In

 

Landino’s translation (Venice: N. Jenson, ) for an example of hand-embellished chapter headings. For example, see (BL) IC.: Rome: C. Sweynheym and A. Pannartz, ; (BL): Cd: Venice: N. Jenson, ; (BL) IB.: Venice: B. Zani, ; (BL) IB.: Venice: Thomas Blavis, . Brescia: Angelo and Giacomo Britannici,  and Venice: Bartolomeo Zani, . These represent the twelfth and thirteenth editions of the complete Latin text. See also Venice: B. Benalius, , Venice: J. Alvisius, .

The summarium in the early printed editions



the original papyrus-roll format, each book would have occupied a separate roll, with its first few words written on a label to give an indication of its contents. If the summarium was copied out in separate segments at the start of each book roll, this sentence usually begins with the book number and a short indication of general contents eg. ‘Book  contains things that live in water’ (‘Libro IX continentur aquatilium naturae’), while the examples that avoid this formula still provide substantial clues to what is to follow. In any case, the initial few words of the book itself regularly contain a short indication of its contents: ‘the world’ (‘mundum’) is the first word of the cosmological Book , and the first word of the text proper. In the Teubner, Bud´e and Loeb editions, the summarium begins with the contents of Book , continues with Book  and moves slowly towards Book . If this was the only means of finding what each book contains, it could be a slow process indeed. In the early printed editions, however, the standard form of the summarium began with a prefatory list of contents titled Summatim Haec Insunt Libris Singulis, which was designed to help readers pinpoint the book they needed. For the first six books, it reads: In the first is the preface addressed to T. Vespasian, the emperor. In the same book are the names of the authors from whom he took what follows, along with the capitula for individual items in the other thirty-six books. In the second, the world: the elements and the stars In the third, the first and second gulfs of Europe In the fourth, the third gulf of Europe In the fifth, a description of Africa In the sixth, a description of Asia

Books The world So far The third Africa Asia

In the first column is a brief summary of the book’s contents, while the second indicates the first word of the individual book. Contemporary editions make up for the lack of such a list in the text itself by supplying the information in the preface, or on the title-page of the individual book. Recognising these book-based organisational divisions is the first step in any attempt to use the Natural History, and in different phases of the 



The summaria of Books , , , ,  and  do not follow this formula. Interestingly, the initial formula of the summarium of Books  and  follows the same pattern as the rest but assumes that the summarium has been read right through from the beginning, in that they claim to contain the remaining medicines by classes (‘reliquae per genera medicinae’, ) and the remaining types of plants and the medicines derived from them (‘reliqua genera herbarum, medicinae ex his, ). This summary is first published by Bussi, and the text appears in all later editions, apart from Perotti’s  edition for Sweynheym and Pannartz. In this case, I have copied the text from Bussi’s  edition for Sweynheym and Pannartz.



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

text’s transmission the summarium’s helpfulness has been supplemented by different means to help the reader to understand this. But what if Pliny’s reader comes to the text with an array of more specific questions in search of specific answers, would the summarium be of any use in pinpointing the particular place in the text that the information could be found? To explore this problem, let us suppose we have three questions: r How is iron produced? r Who was Praxiteles? r What is a good cure for headache? As we will see, different types of question produce different degrees of success in finding answers in the summarium. And the differences of the early printed and modern editions find their resonance in the process of trying to use them. Relying on the summarium, rather than on an index or table of contents, poses particular problems, but, as we will see, many of the key difficulties in trying to find facts in the Natural History come from the organisation of the text itself, its organic shape and natural sequence. Using the Natural History’s information means making terms with the text’s narrative. After narrowing down the search for answers to a book or range of books, the summarium proper comes into play. Reading through the summarium, it is difficult at times not to think of Borges’ fantasy of a Chinese encyclopedia, famously discussed by Foucault, that divides animals into: ‘a) belonging to the emperor, b) embalmed, c) tame, d) sucking pigs, e) sirens, f ) fabulous, g) stray dogs, h) included in the present classification, i) frenzied, j) innumerable, k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, l) et cetera, m) having just broken the water pitcher, n) that from a long way off look like flies’. The logic of Pliny’s taxonomy is at times similarly elusive: (xxxiv–xli) de aetate picturae; operum et artificum in pictura nobilitates CCCCV, picturae primum certamen; qui penicillo pinxerunt; de avium cantu conpescendo; qui encausto aut ceris vel cestro vel penicillo pinxerint . . . (–) The antiquity of painting;  important paintings and painters; the first painting competition; who painted with a brush; how to stop birdsong; who was first to paint using encaustic or wax or engraving or brush . . . cimolia: medicinae ex ea IX; Sarda, Umbria, saxum; argentaria; qui et quorum liberti praepotentes; terra ex Galata, terra Clupea, terra Baliarica, terra Ebusitana: medicinae ex eis IV . . . 

See Foucault, The Order of Things, xv.

The summarium in the early printed editions



Cimolian earth; medicines from it: . Earth from Sarda, Umbria, rock; argentaria; which and whose freedmen are the most powerful; earth from Galatia, Clupean Earth, Baliarican Earth, Ebusitanian Earth;  medicines from them. Pliny HN . (Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, )

While the displacement of ideas caused by Borges’ list is the result of what appear to be bizarre category mistakes, the peculiarity of Pliny’s sequence arises from the appearance of disjunction: what have birds got to do with painters, why connect freedmen with types of earth? These incongruous juxtapositions are an illusion of the listing format, which short-circuits the organisational logic of the narrative. If we look at the specific stories that the summarium entries refer to, we see the link that Pliny intended. ‘How to stop birdsong’ refers to a story about Lepidus, who complained to his hosts that his sleep was disturbed by birds singing. The problem was solved by placing a lifelike painting of a huge snake outside the house which frightened the birds away. The passage is flagged as a digression, but it fits neatly in the anecdote-laden discussion of the lives and works of famous painters and their patrons that surrounds it, picking up on a theme of animals being fooled by lifelike paintings and sculptures. Similarly, the link between argentaria and freedmen comes in Pliny’s explanation of the uses of the earth, as a polish for silver, and, in previous times, as a chalk to mark the finishing line in chariot races and also in slave markets to mark the feet of slaves who had been imported from overseas. This leads Pliny into an excursus on slaves who rose from this position to become important freedmen at Rome, a passage redolent of the conservative politics that mark Pliny’s moralising discourse throughout the Natural History. These two examples are extreme cases of the fragmenting effect of the summarium, but they demonstrate its tendency to obscure the narrative links of the text. Pliny uses a constantly shifting variety of organising principles to connect up his , facts, dealing with them chronologically, alphabetically, by value, by colour, by common source, by geographical closeness. The terse mnemonics of the summarium create the illusion of a much more disjointed text than the actual books provide. This is not always the case in the earlier versions of the summarium printed in pre-modern editions. Here, we find lists of contents that appear to highlight the organising principles of the text, and re-order information so as to achieve a clear sequential progression from the beginning of the narrative in chapter one to its conclusion. The modern edition’s 

See HN ..



For animal stories, see HN ., .–, ..



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

summarium describes what happens in the text, sometimes summarising the contents of several chapters together or mentioning subjects out of the order in which they appear. In the case of named objects, it is a common practice to list all of them, without much indication of the principle that binds them together. The difference between the two versions becomes clear in a comparison of their treatment of Book , with its swiftly changing patterns of organisation. Modern editions print a long list of names of types of gem, but apart from the section that is clearly alphabetical, this version of the summarium leaves the reader to guess at the principle behind the organisation. Incunable editions print an entirely different list, which gives the names of the important stones, but avoids naming the copious numbers of lesser gems, providing instead an explicit indication of the organising principle under which they are included. So the text of modern editions runs: De smaragdis (–) Smaragdi (–) Genera eorum XII ()  kinds () Vitia eorum () Their flaws () Tanos gemma. The Tanos gem. Chalcosmaragdos () Chalcosmaragdos () De beryllis. Genera eorum VIII. Vitia Beryls.  kinds. Their flaws () eorum () Pliny HN . (Conte et al. Turin: Einaudi, )

In the early printed tradition, we find a shorter entry: De smaragdi generibus: & gemmis viridibus & translucidis. ca. v Types of smaragdus and green and translucent gems. ca.  Pliny HN . (Beroaldo. Venice: M. Sarazin, )

Similarly, when Pliny moves from organisation by colour to an alphabetical list, the manuscript tradition that modern editions follow provides all the names of gems, but the early printed editions just put: De quibusdam gemmis per alphabeti ordinem ca. x Other gems in alphabetical order ch.  Pliny HN . (Beroaldo. Venice: Thomas Blavis, )

Perotti’s recension breaks it down further, adding: De gemmis per b & c ordinem . . . ca. xi Gems beginning with b and c . . . ch.  Pliny HN . (Perotti. Rome: C. Sweynheym and A. Pannartz, )

The summarium in the early printed editions



The switch to grouping gems together that are named after animals, objects and parts of the body is similarly ignored in modern editions and reported in earlier versions. This difference has some interesting consequences when it comes to the lists of sources of medicines in Books  to , as we will discuss later. Early printed editions provide a summarium that reflects the structure of the text more exactly and in general produces a neater version of the contents, following the sequence of Pliny’s argument. This must partly be the result of the interdependence of summarium and headings in the text. Entries in the incunable summarium are usually short and formulaic, ironing out many of the strange-sounding sequences, by shortening and simplifying Pliny’s descriptions into neat organisational headings. Some books have been more influenced by this process than others – the dissonant juxtapositions of Book  that we looked at above are preserved in the early editions and the geographical books manage to retain most of the list of place-names as in the modern editions, which suggests that early editors no less than modern ones had better texts to work from for some parts of the summarium than for others. But there are also changes which seem to have practical rather than accidental origins. The great majority of entries in each summarium begins with de, as in ‘De peregrinis arboribus & malo assyrio’: ‘On foreign trees and the Assyrian apple’ (Book  ca. iii), so much so that in the summarium for Book  and Book , every entry begins with de and all but one entry in Books , , ,  and . These simplifying and standardising tendencies are clearly useful when it comes to reading short, self-contained headings in the text, but it is not entirely clear that they work to make the summarium itself more useful as a reference tool. Returning to our questions, then, and using a modern edition of the text, iron appears listed in Book : De ferrariis metallis (–) The metal iron (–) Simulacra ex ferro Statues of iron Caelaturae ex ferro () Iron engraving () Differentiae ferri () Types of iron () Ferri temperatura () Tempering iron () De ferro quod vivum appellant () ‘Live’ iron () Robiginis remedia () Remedies for rust () Medicinae ex ferro VII ()  medicines from iron () Medicinae ex robigine XIV ()  medicines from rust () Medicinae ex squama ferri XVII.  medicines from iron scale. Hygremplastrum () Wet Plaster () Pliny HN . (Conte et al. Turin: Einaudi, )



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

Medicine to cure a headache is difficult to find using the summarium, since even in the books that deal exclusively with medical treatments, the herbs or animal part that forms the medicine are listed, but only very occasionally does it add what the medicine is for. Only Books  and  append a list of the illnesses and parts of the body that are mentioned in the text as a kind of triumphal afterthought. The model adopted in Books  and  lists the uses of its medicines at the end, providing a formidable list of potential illnesses: Summa: medicinae CCLVII; ex iis ad canis morsus, ad caput, alopecias, oculos, aures, nares, oris vitia, lepras, gingivas, dentes . . . Total:  medicines, including ones for dog bites, for the head, baldness, eyes, ears, noses, mouth ulcers, leprosy, gums, teeth . . . Pliny HN . (Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ) Summa: medicinae ex his LXXXIX, ad serpentes III, bestiarum morsus, ad venena, caput, oculos, epinyctidas . . . Total:  medicines from these things,  for snakes, animal bites, for poisons, the head, eyes, eyelid sores . . . Pliny HN . (Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, )

Whether or not headache cures might be among the medicines listed in other books is not so easy to tell. Praxiteles is not mentioned by name in the summarium for Books  to , and so demands a little more knowledge to find. Finding out who Praxiteles was means having the general idea that he was a sculptor, and working from this premise to find the sections that deal with sculpture: bronze in Book , where we are promised  famous sculptors and sculptures, and marble in Book , which promises ; statues in iron, as we have seen, are also mentioned in Book , and clay statues are dealt with in Book . Finding the relevant information will mean consulting all these sections. In the incunables, the entries are a little different, but the consequences are similar. There are no lists of medical ailments at the end of Books  and , so the task of finding a headache cure is even more diffused over the course of the work. The entries for iron are shorter, but hardly less informative: De ferro et ferreis metallis et differentiae ferri De temperatura ferri: et medicinae ex ferro et ex erugine

c.a. xiiii

The summarium in the early printed editions et rubigine: et squama ferri et hygremplastro About iron and iron metals and types of iron About tempering iron, and medicines from iron and from verdigris and rust and iron scale and wet plaster



c.a. xv ca. 

ca.  Pliny HN . (Beroaldo. Parma: A. Portilia, )

There is still no mention of the iron mining that we want to find. Again, the usual form of the entries on sculptors and sculpture is similar in content to those printed in modern texts: Nobilitates ex aere operum & artificum ccc.lxvi c.a. viii The  most important works and artists in bronze ca.  Pliny HN . (Beroaldo/Manzolus, ) Qui primum laudati in marmore scalpendo: et quibus temporibus c.a. iii Nobilitates operum: et artificum in marmore cxxvi. de marmore pario: & mausoleo c.a. iiii The first to be praised for sculpture in marble and their dates ca.  The  most important works and artists in marble; Parian marble and the mausoleum ca.  Pliny HN . (Bussi. Venice: N. Jenson, )

This is the standard form of these entries in the summarium that continues to be printed right up until the innovations of J. Hardouin in . However the first two published editions vary in some significant ways from this general consensus. As we saw, the second edition, that of Giovanni Andreas Bussi for Sweynheym and Pannartz, published in Rome in , has no chapter headings, although the  edition by the same printers supplies them along with the more usual form of the summarium. Johannes de Spira’s editio princeps in  provides chapter headings throughout, but offers a version similar to Sweynheym and Pannartz at some crucial points in the text. The important difference for the purpose of our experiment comes in the entries for Book  describing the sections of the text that deal with



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

sculptures and sculptors in marble. Here we find a much fuller list than is available either in other editions of the time, or in the text printed by modern editors. Johannes de Spira’s version runs as follows, the numbers on the left to be supplied by the rubricator:            

Qui primum laudati in marmore sculpendo & quibus temporibus Nobilitates operum & artificum in marmore ccxxvi De antiquitate marmorariae artis De Praxitelis marmoribus operibus De Scopa De Emulis Scopae The first to be praised for sculpture in marble and their dates The  most important works and artists in marble The antiquity of art in marble The works of Praxiteles in marble Scopas The rivals of Scopas Pliny HN . (Venice: Johannes de Spira, )

The listing of the names of the key sculptors in this section of the text – Bussi also includes Pheidias – is in keeping with the listing of all the names of gems, or indeed of countries in Books  to , in the version of the summarium printed in modern editions, although the present instance lacks an authoritative manuscript basis. Its usefulness to a reader is clear – the task of finding the specific artist is made simpler by this direct reference, in Johannes de Spira’s case with the addition of chapter headings to aid in pinpointing the relevant part of the text. Using this information to find answers in the text proves more complicated than might be expected – partly due to the assertion of the narrative sequence once we move beyond the neat categorisation of the summarium, but also to the basic limitations of the summarium as a retrieval device, limitations which are overcome differently in the two eras of book production that concern us. Finding out who Praxiteles was with the aid of Johannes de Spira’s summarium meant finding the correct capitulum in Book , by flicking through pages without any numbers of folio or book indicated, unless supplied by the individual reader. Chapter headings in this edition are sufficiently easy to distinguish to make this a comparatively easy task. The absence of any running headings, as in the case of the  edition of Bussi, would have made finding the relevant passage a matter of scanning the pages in the general area indicated by the summarium, comparing the contents with the adjacent entries in the summarium, until hitting upon 

Venice: Johannes de Spira, ; numbers added by the rubricator in (BL) Cd.

The summarium in the early printed editions



the right passage. In the more common form of the summarium where Praxiteles is not listed by name, finding references to him would involve the same process of scanning the page for his name in Books  and , but in these texts, the general chapter headings – ‘the most important artists in bronze’ for example – might narrow the parameters. But for someone re-reading the edition, the process is simplified by the practice of adding notes in the margin of the text, which highlight points of interest for easy reference. Sometimes these points reflect the specific concerns of the reader, but often the device seems merely to underline important names or morals so that the contents of the page can be easily remembered or retrieved a second time. Praxiteles is marked in the margin of one copy of Johannes de Spira’s  edition and in the  edition of Bussi in the British Library, but only in Book , to correspond with the reference in the summarium, and although Praxiteles is also discussed in Book , this reference is not marked in the margin. The danger of the summaria in these two editions is that it might cause the reader interested in Praxiteles to consult only Book , missing the information on his work in bronze that appears in Book . Finding out who Praxiteles was and where references occur in the text of the Natural History is a different process in a modern edition. This is not because the text of the summarium is any more informative: it is similar to the usual text in the incunable editions: XIX –

IV

–

Nobilitates ex aere  of the most operum et artificium important works CCCLXVI and artists in bronze Pliny HN . (K¨onig/Winkler. Munich: Tusculum, ) Qui primi laudati in The first to be marmore scalpendo praised for et quibus sculpting in marble temporibus. De and their dates. The Mausoleo Cariae. Carian Mausoleum. Nobilitates operum The  most et artificium in important works marmore CCXXV and artists in marble Pliny HN . (K¨onig/Winkler. Munich: Tusculum, )

While the Loeb edition continues a tradition of printed marginalia that stretches back to Alvisius’  text of Pliny, and includes Praxiteles in both Books  and , the most efficient method of locating Pliny in a 

(BL) C..d.: Venice: Johannes de Spira, ; (BL) C..d.b: Rome: C. Sweynheym and A. Pannartz, .



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

modern print edition is to look at the index. The Teubner edition sets aside a complete volume for its index, the Loeb provides some indices book by book, subdivided by subject – hence there is a complete index devoted to artists in volumes  and  of the edition, which house Books  to . Finding Praxiteles in an index is a simple matter of following the alphabetical organisation, second nature to any literate person in the western world, and using the reference to page or chapter numbers to find any reference across the range of books in the Natural History. Although the modern index might seem to be an extension of the summarium, more efficient, but essentially the same device, the effect of the two is in fact quite dissimilar. The summarium’s catalogue of contents works to obscure the links that the narrative makes between subject and subject, but the aim of the index is to override the logic of the narrative entirely, to set up an alternative and independent means of knowing the facts that the narrative contains. Reading with a summarium still involves an essentially sequential understanding of how the text works, presupposing the primacy of the narrative order imposed by the author. But an index promises the complete separation of the individual item and the context in which it appears. The history of the different editions of the Natural History is marked by continuing changes and advances in the scope of the index. It seems a long way from Nicolaus Maillard’s five-page index in  to the volume set aside in the editions of Mayhoff and Conte, the multi-volume concordance and the new searchable web-based texts. This movement towards the ideal of a total catalogue allowing access to every fact in the Natural History’s storehouse is partly the product of the text’s own promises, set in motion by Pliny’s provision of a summarium. But the proliferation of indices in editions of the Natural History is not just of interest as a sidelight on the history of the book. The development of effective indices has shaped the ways in which the Natural History has been read, and dictated, as well as facilitated, the interests of critical work on Pliny the Elder, as we shall see when we turn to look at the importance of Books  to  in the study of ancient art in the next chapter. A major development in the history of using the Natural History came with the printed index of Joannes Camers in . Camers (Giovanni Ricuzzi Vellini) was a Franciscan theologian, who edited the geographical and topographical works of Pomponius Mela, Dionysius Afrus and Florus 

Published in two volumes: J. Camers, Prima pars Plyniani indicis (Vienna: H. Victor, J. Singrensius, ); J. Camers, Secunda pars Plyniani indicis (Vienna: H. Victor, J. Singrensius, ).

The summarium in the early printed editions



among others. His index was a free-standing work in two parts, the first everything but the geography and the second geographical names only. It is an extraordinarily detailed and careful piece of work, which seems to have supplied a need that was already felt. There had been other indices to Pliny before. Three years earlier, in , Maillard had supplied a fivepage index to his Paris edition, and scholars had no doubt made their own, making lists of references beneath headings that were of particular interest to them. What is different here is that the choice is pre-made, in a one-size-fits-all version, and that implies that there are a fixed number of things the reader might like to know about. And it is the printed page that encourages this standardisation. The finding devices in manuscripts are based on divisions in the text: book numbers and chapter headings, and these are the divisions to which the summarium refers. A printed edition, on the other hand, provides a standard page, and allows for more exact reference to folio or page or even line numbers. When Camers explains how to use his index, he explains that the line numbers he provides refer to the text of the codex Ermolao Barbaro used, as in the edition published by Bernadinus Benalius in Venice in . This was a landmark edition, in which Giovanni Battista Palmari incorporated the emendations of Barbaro into the text of the Natural History. Palmari’s text became the standard version in many editions to come. As Camers explains, though, if readers use a different text, they may need to look in the line before or after to find what they are looking for. In many later editions of the Natural History, this index becomes a key element of the book. Each entry is made to refer to numbers in the text of the specific edition, and numbers are added in the text of the work to facilitate the utility of the index. The index is the driving force behind these changes in the page layout, but the numbers cited in each edition are different and they refer to different things. In Joannes Caesarius’  edition, published at Cologne, two numbers and a letter are provided. The first entry is ‘Abaculi quid. ..c.’ As the introduction to the index explains, the first number refers to the book number, the second to the chapter number and the letter, either a, b or c, tells the reader whether the item occurs towards the beginning, in the middle or towards the end of the section. This impressionistic use of letters rather than exact line numbers is valorised in the introduction:  

N. Maillard, ed., Caii Plynii Secundi. Naturalis Hystoriae libri XXXVII (Paris: F. Regnault, J. Frellon, ). J. Caesarius, ed., C. Plinii Secundi Naturalis Historia Opus (Cologne: Eucharius Cervicornus, ).



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

Indicating parts of the section by the letters a, b and c is something we invented on our own initiative to stimulate the reader’s efforts, which Camers seems to have dampened somewhat with a bit too much pedantry and zeal by using a third number to indicate even the individual line.

What might have been a failing is made into a virtue, in this refusal to follow Camers in patronising the reader. In the text, book numbers are indicated in a running heading and folio numbers are also given – so it was open to the editor to choose folios rather than chapter headings as the main means of finding material. The retrieval devices in this edition depend on the book number, which has always been an integral part of the text, and the capitulum number, which had been a standard element for centuries. These two tools had been the main means of finding material with the aid of the summarium in the manuscript tradition. In Petrus Vidoueus’  Paris edition, on the other hand, the first entry is: ‘Abdomen quid. folio.. linea .’ Throughout the book, folio numbers are added in the top right hand corner and each line is numbered in the inner margin from  to . The chapter headings are also numbered, as usual, and the book number is given in the running header at the top of the right-hand page. This formulation manages to get rid of the primacy of the chapter headings in directing and breaking up the text into manageable chunks. In the summarium, numbers usually refer to the chapter number, but in this edition, folio numbers appear alongside the chapter number so that the reader can turn directly to the item, with less regard for its place in the sequence of the narrative. The precision of the index’s references has increased again in the  Froben edition, edited by Erasmus, where each entry in the index is followed by four numbers. The first entry is ‘Abaculi quid lib.. cap.. linea.. facie .’ As the accompanying text explains, this means turn to Book , capitulum , line  on page . This edition supplies page numbers at the top right corner of every page, and marks every tenth line clearly by putting , , , etc in the inner margin. There is a running title at the top of each page. It also provides some printed marginalia, marking points of interest, for instance Graecae uanitatis at Book , Cap. , p. , a quotation from the Iliad at Book , cap., p. . It is substantially easier for a modern reader to find items in the text of the Natural History using the system of line numbers and page   

Caesarius, C. Plinii Secundi Naturalis Historia Opus. Petrus Vidoueus, ed., C. Plinii Secundi Naturae historiarum libri XXXVII (Paris: Petrus Gaudoul, ). Desiderius Erasmus, ed., C. Plinii Secundi Naturae Historiarum libri XXXVII (Basel: J. Froben, ).

The summarium in the early printed editions



numbers provided by Erasmus than using the capitulum-plus-letter method provided by Caesarius, with Vidoueus’ folio-plus-line-number somewhere in between. There is more at stake here than simple ease of use. The summarium of the Natural History provides a list of the contents in sequential order, which keeps the individual fact in its proper place within the hierarchical ordering system that Pliny sets up. Finding a fact with the aid of the summarium means acknowledging that the fact occurs in a wider context, and in relationship to other facts of a similar sort on either side of it. An index, on the other hand, breaks down the authority of the author’s original ordering of the material of the text, by listing individual facts in the random order imposed by the alphabet. An index makes information available in a way that the author could not have envisaged, and opens to the reader the possibility of endless re-ordering and re-use. The new page layout that accompanies the index in the editions by Vidoueus and Erasmus, with numbers beside each line, suggests a breakdown in the cohesion of the narrative of the Natural History. If every line is numbered, each line is available for consideration in its own right, without reference to the information surrounding it, or its purpose in the context of the work as a whole. There are questions, however, which an index would be of little help in answering. Regardless of whether we use a modern or incunable edition, finding out how iron is mined means finding a direct conflict between the principle of reading the narrative and the technique of using individual segments. As we have seen, the main discussion of iron occurs in Book , and covers types of iron, means of tempering iron, and medicines produced from iron and iron derivatives. What the summarium fails to note is the lengthy polemic on the role of iron as a weapon of destruction, contrasting with its use in farm implements and peacetime activities. This rhetorical passage picks up on the theme of destructive use of nature’s gifts which animates the crusade against luxuria in the Natural History. The treatment of iron provides powerful illustration of this theme of the dangers of human use of natural materials, but provides solace in the form of the mysterious processes of sympathy and antipathy, where blood becomes the means of keeping iron from rusting, but rust itself can be introduced to wounds to promote healing – this may not be medically sound, but it makes symbolic sense. The question of how iron is mined in the ancient world, which we began with, is not answered in these passages on iron in Book  that we located with the help of the summarium, but it is alluded to: The method of extracting it from the mines is the same. (Pliny HN .)

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Pliny’s Encyclopedia

Eadem here does not refer to any adjacent description of mining: it picks up on the similar lack of a particular description of how aes is mined at the beginning of Book : The vein is excavated and purified by fire in the way I have described. (Pliny HN .)

The actual description that we are directed towards happens in Book , when Pliny provides us with a striking ekphrasis on mining for gold, which provides both detailed technical information and a peculiarly lyrical account of the dangerous work of the miners (HN .–). The Lucretian pastiche of the rushing waters carrying all before them points to the ironic ambivalence at the heart of Pliny’s castigation of luxuria. It may be wicked, but it provides him with his best and most miraculous material. The moral for our attempts to use Pliny’s text to answer a specific question is clear, however. Despite the apparent openness of the information to our view – either in a summarium, or an index – the premise of the text is still that the reader has read the previous books. An even clearer example comes in the absence of a description of pearls in Book , despite the fact that Pliny places them second only to diamonds in his list of the most valuable gemstones: The next in value in my opinion are the pearls of India and Arabia, which I discussed in the ninth book among the products of the sea. (Pliny HN .)

The discussion of pearls in Book  is part of a passionate rant about the extremes to which luxuria will go in search of new pleasures. It would be easy to fall into the trap of criticising these cross-references to other sections of the work as the product of an organisational failure on the part of the author. The harsh caricature of Pliny as the bumbling scholar piling up information in no particular order must be partly the product of frustrations like these. If Pliny expected readers who started with Book  and read all the way to the end, he could not have foreseen the difficulties this system might present to scholars in search of particular information, easy to locate and transport from the text of the Natural History. The method of reading suggested by the summarium, that of complete segmentation and easy reference, does not play out perfectly in the text of the Natural History, but the impetus to create more efficient tools and methods of accessing the Natural History’s information comes from the text itself, from the alluring but overwhelming bulk of the data

The summarium in the early printed editions

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that it contains and from the way in which those data are organised and imparted. The importance of accessing the Natural History’s information comes home to us when we consider the fact that our third and final question, a request for a cure for headaches, was once a question on which Pliny could speak with authority to a sick and eager public. Pliny’s medical legacy in the Middle Ages is well known, although the Natural History has yet to be the subject of a large-scale study by scholars in the growing field of ancient medicine. In modern editions, as we have seen, only Books  and  provide any hints to the nature of the illnesses that are dealt with in their pages, and this list gives no clues to the points where they appear in the narrative, except when they are added by editors. Headaches are discussed throughout the body of the medical books of the Natural History, but they are difficult to locate with the aid of a summarium, though the existence of modern indices does something to alleviate the problem. In the fifteenth-century summarium, which was to continue in use for another two centuries, the list of illnesses is absent from Books  and , but the text for several of the books that deal specifically with medicines has been changed to address this problem. The central books of the Natural History are entirely given over to medical writing, but the medicines Pliny provides are usually organised not by illness, but by type of medicine. So Books  to  deal with medicines derived from plants, and  to  contain medicines from animal products, where Pliny usually proceeds by naming a particular plant or animal and listing the medicines that can be extracted from it, although some books make use of a loose grouping by illness to vary the pattern. This structure is reflected in the modern summarium, which largely consists of long lists of these names complete with numbers of different medicines from each. In the incunable editions, the pattern is similar in most of the books dealing with medicine, although the numbers have disappeared and the lists are shorter; but in the much-truncated summaria on animal derivatives, we find suggestions of a different pattern of organisation: alongside the references to animals there are entries which offer cures for specific illnesses. Of the books on herbal medicine, only the summarium of Book  contains entries that list the illness rather than the medical derivative; of the books on animal substances, only the summarium of Book  does not contain any references to specific illnesses, a pattern which reflects the fact that Pliny groups materia medica by illness more frequently in the books on animal derivatives. The summarium for Book  makes the most extensive



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

use of this type of ordering, printing a very different text to that found in the modern version. This can be illustrated by comparing the Bud´e edition and Portilia’s  edition of Beroaldo’s recension: L. XXVI CONTINENTUR

BOOK 26 CONTAINS

Reliquae per genera medicinae

The remaining Medicines by type

I. De nouis morbis. I. The new diseases II. Quid sint lichenes. II. What is ringworm? III. Quando primum in Italia III. When did it first come to Italy? coeperint. IV. Item carbunculus. IV. The same for carbuncles. V. Item elephantiasis. V. The same for leprosy. VI. Item colum. VI. The same for colic. VII. De nova medicina. De Asclepiade VII. The new medicine. The doctor medico. Asclepiades. VIII. Qua ratione medicinam veterem VIII. The ways in which the old mutauerit. medicine was changed. IX. Contra Magos. IX. Against the Magi. X. Lichen, gen. II. Med. V. X. Lichen,  types,  medicines. XI. Proserpinaca I. XI. Proserpinaca, . XIII. Bellis II. XIII. White Daisy, . XIV. Condurdum I. XIV. Condurdum, . XV. Bechion siue arcion siue XV. Bechion or Archion or chamaeleuce quae tussilago III. Chamaeleuce, ‘tussilago’ . XVI. Bechion quae saluia IIII. XVI. Bechion, ‘salvia’ . Pliny HN . (Beaujeu. Paris: Soci´et´e d’´editions ‘Les Belles Lettres’, ) LIBRO Vicesimosexto continentur reliquae per morborum genera medicinae: et de novis morbis: et de lichene quid sit: et quando primum in Italia coeperint: et de carbunculo elephantiasi et colo. Ca.i. Laus Hippocratis Ca.ii. De nova medicina: et Asclepiade medico: et qua ratione veterem medicinam mutaverit. Ca.iii. Irrisio magicae artis: et de lichene et 

Book twenty-six contains remaining medicines for kinds of diseases; about new diseases; how ringworm happens and when it first came to Italy; carbuncles and leprosy and colic Ca.i. Praise of Hippocrates. Ca.ii. The new medicine; Asclepiades the doctor; how he changed the old medicine Ca.iii. Criticism of the magic arts; lichen

I have looked at two copies of this edition, one in the British Library (Cd) and one in the University Library at Cambridge (SSS..). The Cambridge copy has illuminated capitals at the beginning of each book, and the initial capital of each paragraph is written in blue or red ink, so that the initial L of Libro above has been added in red by the rubricator. The British Library copy has no additions of this kind.

The summarium in the early printed editions

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tapsia Ca.iv. and tapsia Ca.iv. Ad strumas: et ad digytos: et ad Medicines for tumours; for pectus et tussim medicinae Ca.v. fingers; for the chest and coughing Ca.v. De verbasco et chameleuce vel Verbascum and chameleuce or tussilagine et bechio et aqualea ‘tussilago’ and bechion and aqualea et salvia. Ad lateris dolores et and salvia. For pains in the side and pectoris: et ad hortopnoeas: ad chest; and for constricted breathing; iacinoris dolorem cordis dolori for pain in the liver, heart pain, for pulmoni urinae tussi pectori lungs, urinary system, for coughing, ulceribus pulmoni reuibus epaticis: the chest, ulcers, the lungs, kidneys ad vomitionem: ad liver; for vomiting, for hiccups, for singultus pleureticis lateri Ca.vi. pleurisy Ca.vi Pliny HN . (Beroaldo. Parma: A. Portilia )

The pattern that emerges towards the end of these extracts continues: where the modern text lists plants and the number of medicines that can be derived from them, the incunable includes a selection of the illnesses that these drugs can treat. When we turn to the text of Book , we find that both interpretations of the contents are available: Pliny groups the lists of plants around types of illness, sometimes focusing on the plant as the unit of organisation, sometimes on the illness. Where the modern text prefers a neat continuation of the listing of plants, the incunable summarium privileges an illness-by-illness organisation at the expense of the materia medica. Both summaria reflect the contents of the book they describe, but their differences point to the fact that the representation of those contents is not self-evident: the summarium reflects choices about what it is that readers might want to find. Although there is still no mention of headaches in any of the entries, the medical summaria do point the way towards the logic of the specialist, and the hegemony of the reader with specific questions requiring definite answers. Scholars who wanted to use Pliny as a source of specifically medical knowledge needed another way of accessing the text. This need was answered as early as the fourth century with the emergence of the Medicina Plinii, an edited collection of all the relevant information from the whole of the Natural History, and partly from other sources. It was gathered together in the fourth century and substantially revised and expanded in the sixth to form a separate text, the Physica Plinii, with a 

The Latin is awkward here. Medieval orthography regularly causes confusion with h’s, which were silent, so ‘orthopnoeas’ becomes ‘hortopnoeas’ and ‘hepaticis’ becomes ‘epaticis’ in the early printed text. ‘iacinoris’ is written where we might expect ‘iocinoris’ or ‘iecinoris’, and ‘reuibus’ is a misprint for ‘renibus’. These emendations are reflected in the translation.

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Pliny’s Encyclopedia

parallel transmission history. Each book has an individual summarium placed before it, which provides access to Pliny’s information by illness, not by type of medicine. The first printed edition of the Medicina Plinii appeared in , complete with a nine-page index. The summarium of the first book begins as follows: Capitula of Book One For Catarrh or too much fluid in the head: and what Catarrh is. For pains in the head. For headaches.

I. II. III.

Problem solved. Finding cures for illnesses is a straightforward matter once the extraneous material from the Natural History has been scraped away. The logic of the book of excerpts, neatly organised and deftly relevant to a particular subject area, questions the status of Pliny as author, at the same time as it glorifies the Natural History as a storehouse of key products, valuable but needing processing. We will return to the Medicina Plinii and the history of reading in sections in the next chapter, comparing it to the phenomenon of the Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art, a late-nineteenth-century production still used and cited by modern art historians. finding answers As we have seen, the process of excerpting information from the Natural History and of dividing its thirty-seven books into more manageable thematic segments begins early in the history of the text and its readers. Pliny’s preface and summarium act as imprimatur for the process, and the ‘farmers, craftsmen and scholars with some free time’ that Pliny envisages, only slightly tongue-in-cheek, have evolved ever more ingenious methods of not reading his text over the history of its reception. The summarium alone, whether in the fifteenth-century folios or the modern multi-volume editions, is not an adequate means of finding useful facts. Indices are more effective, in that they work to separate the individual entry from the sequential order of the narrative. But, as our example of 



On the Medicina Plinii and Pighinuccius’  edition, based on manuscripts of the Physica, see Arturo Castiglioni, ‘Pseudo-Plinian Medicine’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine  (): –; ¨ A. Onnerfors, ‘Die mittelalterichen Fassungen der Medicina Plinii’, Berliner Medizin  (): ¨ –; Onnerfors, In Medicinam Plinii studia philologica. Thomas Pighinuccius, C. Plinii Secundi Medicina (Rome, ).

The summarium in the early printed editions

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the question of iron mining showed, finding specific answers in the text of the Natural History often involves trailing the logic of Pliny’s narrative backwards to the books that the text assumes we have read, re-asserting the authority of the narrative’s organisation and the entertainment value of the book. It is the effort of Pliny to be entertaining that perplexes scholars who come to the text expecting to find answers to questions rather than the elaboration of a lifetime’s intriguing reading. The mirabilia that have been so recklessly criticised in Pliny’s text most frequently appear corralled at the end of a subject section, the ornamentation at the edges of the discussion, but also the final word, the key to the fascination of what went before. The search for answers in the text of Pliny is supported by the devices of listing, segregating and categorising, the ingenuity of these frequent changes keeping the reader skipping along after, while the discontinuity they produce justifies the researcher in finding only the section needed. The way in which we can use the summarium depends to a large extent on the role the editor assigns to it, and this has varied hugely over the course of the text’s transmission history. The choice of where to place the summarium – in Book  or in segments at the start of each book – pre-empts particular approaches to its usefulness. The division of the summarium into separate sections begins early in the manuscript tradition of Pliny’s work, perhaps due to the format of the papyrus roll, where individual books occupied a separate and distinct material form. Early printed editions print a single summarium in Book , as do all modern editions of the text, although the Bud´e edition, which allocates a separate volume to each book, reprints the summarium at the beginning of each. Where a single stream of information at the start of the work as a whole has the appearance of a summation, a comprehensive map of all that follows, its division into relevant guides to each book suggests a more utilitarian project, a list of what is to come, or a reminder of what has been read. The modern gloss of the summarium as ‘an index’ or ‘table of contents’ ignores fundamental differences in the ways in which the summarium affords access to the work that follows. The illusion that the summarium is a ‘table of contents’ is aided by particular methods of presenting and typesetting the text in some modern editions, which list columns and paragraph numbers that work to naturalise the summarium’s peculiarity for a modern readership. In the fifteenth-century editions of the Natural History, the summarium consists of lists of chapter headings which break Pliny’s narrative into titled sections from Book  onwards. This link between the text of the summarium and the visible organising structures of the text provides the summarium with a more instrumental role in the use of the text than in

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Pliny’s Encyclopedia

modern versions, where entries in the summarium refer only to a particular chapter number in the text of the rest of the work. Reading the summarium has become a separate enterprise from reading the rest of the work: where the summarium was once a very obvious summary or collection of all the subject headings of the entire Natural History, it is now an independent guide, isolated in Book . Finding facts with the aid of these chapter headings is not necessarily more difficult than with a modern text. As we saw, it depends greatly on what sort of information you look for. In the case of general questions of subject matter of particular books, the Summatim Haec Insunt Libris Singulis provides a key to the contents that most modern editions provide in the prefatory material, on the flyleaf, or the title-page, although here the tendency is towards grouping ranges of books under the disciplines of ‘botany’, ‘zoology’ and so on. In response to particular questions, the difference in the text of the summarium comes to the fore, where complete lists of particular items make it more or less easy to pinpoint individual subjects. Praxiteles was simple to discover when listed by name in the first two editions of the Natural History, though in a modern edition, the index makes up for the generalisation of the summarium. Neither type of summarium could help much in discovering the methods of iron mining current in antiquity, since the information is embedded in an earlier story, cross-referenced but obscured by the narrative logic of his text. Medical questions expose the summarium’s tendency to privilege the patterns of Pliny’s structure, rather than providing an alternative means of uncovering his information. Modern editions are more rigid in their catalogues of Pliny’s materia medica than the incunables, where, as we saw, the usefulness of the text for curing illness affects the ordering of the summarium, providing some books with an image of their contents that is both description of Pliny’s ordering schema and prescriptive advice on where to look for specific cures. For Pliny’s Natural History, the problem of accessing facts needs to be understood in the context of the continuing alteration of the format of the text to suit successive generations of readers. Not only have the questions we ask of the text changed, but the means by which we look for answers. The continuities of reading practices, the impetus to find answers rather than read narrative, manifests itself in the continual process of ‘modernising’ the summarium to make it compatible with current forms of paratext. As we saw in the case of the Medicina Plinii, the use of the summarium, indices and tables of contents to pinpoint facts in the whole work has been complemented by the existence of books of excerpts which reorganise the Natural History into neat specialist works. In the next chapter, I go on to

The summarium in the early printed editions

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explore the dynamics of reading versus using the text, by looking at two important books of excerpts created in the fourth and in the nineteenth centuries: the Medicina Plinii and The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art. This latter text was reprinted twice in the twentieth century and continues to be read and cited by art historians: perhaps it is all the Pliny they need. But the implications of using facts or short excerpts from Pliny’s vast storehouse need to be examined: what would the art historian gain by also being a naturalist?

chapter 4

Specialist readings: art and medicine from the Natural History

Pliny’s data have remained alluring, although the questions asked of them and the analysis applied to them have changed dramatically. To a large extent, the history of scholarship on Pliny is a history of specialist readings of particular segments of his text: Pliny’s zoology, Pliny’s astrology, Pliny’s geography have all received their fair share of criticism, often in isolation from any substantial consideration of the work as a whole. Recent specialist accounts of Pliny’s art history and science do discuss the overall encyclopedic aims of the work, but still focus on its place in a wider discourse outside the text, rather than on its context within the text itself. Perhaps the fact that for many subjects, Pliny is our best, sometimes our only, source for the period allows for its easy passage into the general set of information on a topic, with minimal concern for Pliny’s literary ambitions. Perhaps it is its encyclopedic organisation and authorial opacity that suggest that sections can stand alone, designed to be read in isolation. The Natural History is an unwieldy book, and reading it subject by subject remains a practical and persuasive approach to its array of information. But in the wake of scholarship that insists on overarching agendas in Pliny’s work, we need to consider: what do we lose by reading the Natural History as the sum of its specialisms? I focus here on Pliny’s contribution to the study of ancient art and his early importance as a medical text: the Natural History remains a living text 

 

For books on Pliny that are collections of essays on specialist areas, see R. French and F. Greenaway, eds., Sciences in the Early Roman Empire: Pliny the Elder, his Sources and Influence (London, Sydney: Croom Helm, ); [L. Alfonsi, ed.] Plinio il Vecchio sotto il profilo storico e letterario: atti del convegno di Como 5/6/7 ottobre 1979 (Como: Banca Briantea, ), and the special editions of Helmantica  () and  (). Carey addresses this problem in relation to Pliny’s art history: Carey, Pliny’s Catalogue of Culture. See also Healy, Pliny the Elder on Science and Technology. See how ‘Science in the Early Roman Empire’ is made equivalent to ‘Pliny the Elder, his Sources and Influence’ in French and Greenaway’s title. See Greenaway’s introduction for a defence of this approach: French and Greenaway, eds., Sciences in the Early Roman Empire: Pliny the Elder, his Sources and Influence.



Specialist readings of the Natural History

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for mainstream art criticism, a centrality he has lost in other disciplines, despite his long history of relevance, particularly in the sphere of medicine. My strategy is to examine books of extracts, looking in detail at The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art, and contrasting it in some respects with the Medicina Plinii. Books of extracts are severe examples of the tendency to read Pliny’s subject areas as distinct and separate; they provide a concretisation of the process of reading and excising that acts as a metaphor for less dramatic specialist encounters with the text. The compiler of a book of extracts creates a new text from the old, giving new meaning to the excerpts by transplanting them into a specialist context. Selections from Pliny can be seen to stand in judgement on the original encyclopedia as well as producing a new, perhaps polemical, assertion of what does and what does not belong to the specialist discourse. Choosing which chapters are ‘The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art’ is not as straightforward as it might seem. Eugenie Sellers’ choices reveal a good deal about her conception of what counts as art, and what an art historian could ask of Pliny at a particular moment in late-nineteenthcentury Classics. The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art is still read and cited by scholars of ancient art. It was edited and introduced by Eugenie Sellers, and translated by Katherine Jex-Blake, two Classicists from Girton, at the start of long careers in the academy. First published in , it went through two reprints in the twentieth century and still remains a useful first access point to Pliny’s key sections on art. I want to compare some of its concerns and assumptions with those of another highly successful book of extracts from Pliny, one written in a very different era of scholarship and on a very different subject. The Medicina Plinii, as we saw, is a collection of medical excerpts from Pliny, first compiled in the fourth century and then overhauled in the sixth: the differences between these two collections are so significant that scholars now refer to the sixth-century collection as the Physica Plinii. This compilation had a long history of use, and new editions seem to testify to its continuing appeal as late as the sixteenth century. Unlike The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art, which speaks to Classicists in search of mediated historical information, the Medicina Plinii offered a practical means of accessing Pliny’s heaps of medical remedies, providing essentially practical advice. Despite these key differences, there are similarities in the difficulties faced by the compilers in both cases, though the means by which they extricate and exonerate themselves are different.

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Pliny’s Encyclopedia

Books of extracts place themselves in an awkward position in relation to the Natural History. Issues of authenticity and authorship are never far from the surface, as we will see in relation to Alban Thorer’s sixteenth-century edition of the Medicina, no less than in Sellers’ nineteenth-century compilation. In particular, both editors struggle to balance acceptable philological practice and respect for the text with the competing impetus to make the compilation as useful as possible for their contemporary audiences. As we will see, these competing pressures contribute to a re-evaluation of authorial authority in these texts, and a related problem of closure and control. The next section will explore these issues in relation to the Medicina Plinii, and the roaming life of this text in the manuscript and early printed tradition. As the text becomes part of large manuscripts of similar medical texts, it attracts other works under its aegis, and becomes part of a larger discourse on medicine – a process of corruption that Thorer solved rather differently from twentieth-century commentators. For Eugenie Sellers, the problem of closure remained but authorial control had become the burning issue. Although her main concern is to provide a useful text of Pliny that could answer the needs of contemporary art historians, complete with up-to-date archaeological information in the footnotes, her introduction is entirely concerned with the question of Pliny’s authority. Her analysis summarises and comments on the work of contemporary German scholars, who attempted to reconstruct Pliny’s sources from the evidence of the text. Pliny himself becomes ‘an indiscriminate compiler’ who adds virtually nothing to the ancient Greek sources, whose works we can read through a careful rearranging of Pliny’s words. This book of extracts from Pliny raises the spectre that the Natural History may itself be understood as a book of extracts, to be assembled and disassembled as required. As we saw in Chapter One, the idea of Pliny as an uninventive compiler has never gone away, and this image, as Sorcha Carey has suggested, has roots in the Quellenforschung Sellers discusses here. In my second section, I will explore the sort of reading of the Natural History this approach necessitates, and examine the scholarly impetus that could have informed Sellers’ adoption of it in the world of fin de si`ecle archaeology. The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art offers one persuasive version of what sort of information we might want on art from Pliny. It focuses on Greek art, and in particular, Greek artists, and is interested in grand sculptural or pictorial images, rather than in crafts such as jewellery or furniture decoration. Similarly, Sellers excludes Pliny’s rhetorical 

Carey, Pliny’s Catalogue of Culture, .

Specialist readings of the Natural History

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diatribes on the moral questions art raises and most of the miraculous stories he provides, in favour of a neater and more pristine art-historical narrative. Modern art historians have a broader horizon of interests than Sellers choices allow for, but we still have to negotiate our inheritance of a discipline heavily focused on named artists and great, Greek art. Pliny’s conception of art history was hugely influential on the founding figures of western art criticism: Vasari and Winckelmann. There is, I would argue, a certain circularity in some of the questions that have been asked of Pliny’s art history, in that they are questions that he helped to first formulate. The final section explores some of the issues surrounding our history of using Pliny’s art history, focusing on the issue of artists and attributions. Pliny’s continuing usefulness to modern art historians means that there is a vital need to examine how art history fits into Pliny’s wider narrative structures. Re-integrating the Elder Pliny’s chapters on the history of art into the Natural History as a whole makes subtle but substantial differences to how we can go about using it. authority and closure in the medicina plinii Pliny’s medicine has had a long history of use, and its early success was in part due to the importance of the medicine it offered in convenient Latin form, unburdened by complex theorising. For modern scholarship, Pliny’s medicine exhibits the same key failings that we saw in relation to his science in Chapter . As Ralph Jackson writes, contrasting Pliny with Celsus: The strength of the work, its comprehensiveness, is also its weakness, for Pliny refused to select from his sources. The result is that absurd theories rub shoulders with sensible measures, and many of his medical remedies . . . we would regard as little more than superstitious nonsense.

Pliny is wrong, often bizarrely so, and provides a general rather than a specialist account. Assessments of the effectiveness of ancient animal and plant remedies have varied, though some recent studies have suggested that 



On Pliny’s influence on Vasari, see Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, ), –; Peter Sohm, ‘Ordering History with Style: Giorgio Vasari on the Art of History’, in Antiquity and its Interpreters, ed. A. Payne, A. Kuttner and R. Smick (Cambridge University Press, ), – . On Pliny’s influence on Winckelmann, see A. A. Donohue, ‘Winckelmann’s History of Art and Polyclitus’, in Polykleitos, the Doryphoros and Tradition, ed. W.G. Moon (Madison, London: Wisconsin Press, ), –; Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal – Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, ), –, –. Ralph Jackson, Doctors and Diseases in the Roman Empire (London: British Museum Publications, ), –.

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Pliny’s Encyclopedia

they were more useful than older critics allowed, or, at least, that the process of understanding efficacy is fraught with serious problems, practical and epistemological. The placebo effect may account for a certain amount of success, but only if the patient trusts the remedy and, crucially, the authority who prescribed it. Authority is central to the practice of medicine: even leaving aside the question of placebos, patients must have compelling reasons to be persuaded to take one course of action rather than another. In the first century ad, there was no consensus about human physiology, and adherents of the rival schools competed for authority, and for patients, to support their positions. The dubious personal morality of doctors was a topos in Roman satire that suggested real concerns in an era with no regulation of services, and Pliny can trace his polemics against Greek doctors back to Cato. Scholars have suggested that the concern with doctors’ probity is a peculiarly Roman development, one that grew out of the increased distance between practitioner and patient in urban Rome, although Heinrich von Staden has argued that these concerns are already apparent in the Hellenistic period. Creating the right impression of knowledge, skill and moral character was a serious concern for the individual doctor. But if persuading the patient was important to the medical practitioner, claims to authority were also central to the project of producing a medical text. The methods that writers use to assert that their medicine is useful and trustworthy vary from text to text, not least because different types 





For a discussion of the issues, see John M. Riddle, Dioscorides on Pharmacy and Medicine (Austin: University of Texas Press, ), xx–xxv; his work on contraceptive and abortifacient drugs in the ancient world argues that they were more effective than usually assumed: John M. Riddle, Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West (Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press, ); John M. Riddle, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press, ). Riddle’s optimism has been criticised by Helen King among others: Helen King, Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (London: Routledge, ), –; –. As he explicitly does, at HN .. On Pliny’s attitudes towards Greek medicine, see Johannes Hahn, ¨ ‘Plinius und die griechischen Arzte in Rom: Naturkonzeption und Medizinkritik in der Naturalis Historia’, Sudhoffs Archiv  (): –; Vivian Nutton, ‘The Perils of Patriotism. Pliny and Roman Medicine’, in Science in the Early Roman Empire. Pliny the Elder, his Sources and Influence, ed. Roger French and F. Greenaway (London: Croom Helm, ), –. Heinrich von Staden, ‘Character and Competence. Personal and Professional Conduct in Greek Medicine’, in M´edecine et morale dans l’antiquit´e, ed. H. Flashar and J. Jouanna (Geneva: Fondation Hardt, ), –. On Roman attitudes to Greek doctors, see D. Gourevitch, Le tri´ ange hippocratique dans le monde gr´eco-romain (Rome: Ecole franc¸aise de Rome, ). Innocenzo Mazzini, ‘Le accuse contro i medici nella letteratura latina ed il loro fondamento’, Quaderni linguistici e filologici (–): –; Vivian Nutton, Ancient Medicine. Sciences of Antiquity (London, New York: Routledge, ), –; Heinrich von Staden, ‘Liminal Perils. Early Roman Receptions of Greek Medicine’, in Tradition, Transmission, Transformation, ed. F.J. Ragep and Steven John Livesey (Leiden: Brill, ), –.

Specialist readings of the Natural History

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of medical text call for different types of strategy. Galen’s specialist and theoretical works can claim authority through their detailed engagement with philosophical theory, the emphasis on the physician’s practical experience and the polemical doxographical approach to earlier authorities. Celsus too, on a smaller scale, writes himself into a history of medicine by exploring the debates between rival schools at the start of the Medicina, while Dioscorides claims comprehensiveness and greater systematisation in his lists of materia medica. Pliny’s medicine differs from these in that it is less clearly demarcated within the larger project of the Natural History. Where Celsus’s Medicina is self-sufficient within the larger schema of the Artes, Pliny’s medicine in Books  to  is full of cross-references to the plants and animals first described elsewhere, and medical recipes spill over into the accounts of minerals in  to , as an organic part of what Pliny feels we need to know about metals and rocks and their uses. This lack of a clear separation between medicine and the rest of the work is indicative of Pliny’s polemical stance against specialist, professional medicine. As Johannes Hahn has argued, Pliny’s polemic against Greek doctors is partly rooted in his concept of a beneficent nature, which drives his disapproval for doctors’ lack of respect for nature and their exploitation of natural cures for profit. Pliny’s lack of theoretical engagement, his avoidance of describing illnesses and symptoms or divining causes, his lack of interest in most aspects of patient care, including dosage, become a virtue through the moral authority they afford, Pliny as a champion of old Roman medicine. He does, however, provide us with a doxography of sorts, exploring the history of various aspects of medicine over the openings of Books  to . It is not through lack of knowledge, the reader is supposed to infer, that Pliny has chosen this particular stance. The authority of Pliny’s medicine in the Natural History rests on the authority Pliny creates through the comprehensiveness of the work as a whole, a holistic vision of the world in which medicine is fully integrated. What happens then, when the work is dismantled to produce a specialist medical handbook, in which recipes are chosen and arranged in a selfcontained system? The Medicina Plinii is dated to the fourth century, a 





For explorations of Galen’s doxographical approach, see Amneris Roselli, ‘Notes on the Doxai of Doctors in Galen’s Commentaries on Hippocrates’, in Ancient Histories of Medicine, ed. Philip van der Eijk (Leiden, Boston, Cologne: Brill, ), –. On Celsus, see Heinrich von Staden, ‘Celsus as Historian?’ in Ancient Histories of Medicine, ed. Philip van der Eijk (Leiden, Boston, Cologne: Brill, ), –; on Dioscorides, Riddle, Dioscorides on Pharmacy and Medicine. ¨ Hahn, ‘Plinius und die griechischen Arzte in Rom’.

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Pliny’s Encyclopedia

period when practical compilations of medicine were coming into vogue. Gargilius Martialis’ compilation of simple cures from garden plants had appeared as early as the late third century and Marcellus is already aware of the Medicina Plinii in the late fourth century, when he composes his own compilation of cures including some from Pliny alongside Gallic recipes, charms and chants. These short, practical epitomes have been seen as symptoms of political instability in the western empire; as Vivian Nutton puts it, they ‘emphasised the need for self-help in a society from which the institutions that had sustained learned medicine were rapidly disappearing’. Although theoretical and practical medicine were perhaps never completely distinct in earlier practice, in the early Middle Ages of the Latin West these pragmatic compilations took the place of the more theoretical, Galenic, medical texts available to Greek speakers or in scant translations from the Galenic Canon, a selection standardised in Alexandria by about  ad. In this new intellectual climate, the Medicina Plinii changes the form and the sense of Pliny’s medicine and finds new ways to claim authority. 







¨ Alf Onnerfors has done the most important recent work on the subject, particularly in establishing the relationship between the various branches of the tradition. What I say here draws on his conclusions in his detailed discussion in In Medicinam Plinii studia philologica, which established ¨ a new phase in the understanding and editing of the text. Onnerfors, In Medicinam Plinii Studia Philologica. Marcellus refers to ‘both Plinies’ (‘uterque Plinius’) in his account of his sources in his preface: Marcellus De medicamentis liber pr. ; Max Niedermann and Eduard Liechtenhan, eds., Marcellus u¨ ber Heilmittel. Corpus Medicorum Latinorum, vol.  (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, ). On Marcellus’ preface, see Maria Paola Segoloni, ‘L’epistola dedicatoria e l’appendice in versi del De medicamentis liber di Marcello’, in Prefazioni, prologhi, proemi di opere tecnico-scientifiche latine, ed. Carlo Santini and Nino Scivoletto (Rome: Herder, ), –. On Gargilius Martialis, see V. Rose, Plinii Secundi quae fertur una cum Gargilii Martialis medicina (Leipzig: Teubner, ); John M. Riddle, ‘Gargilius Martialis as a Medical Writer’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences  (): –; Brigitte Maire, ‘Les “Medicinae” de Gargilius: un manuel pratique aux ambitions litt´eraires?’ in Les textes m´edicaux latins comme litt´erature: actes du VIe colloque international sur les textes m´edicaux latins du 1er au 3 septembre 1998 a` Nantes, ed. Alfrieda Pigeaud and Jackie Pigeaud (Nantes: Institut universitaire de France, ), –. On the similarities and differences between Pliny’s Natural History and medieval herbal handbooks, see I. Mazzini, ‘Pr´esence de Pline dans le herbiers de l’antiquit´e et du haut moyen aˆge’, Helmantica  (): –. Vivian Nutton, ‘Medicine in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages’, in The Western Medical Tradition, ed. L.I. Conrad, M. Neve, V. Nutton, R. Porter and A. Wear (Cambridge University Press, ), . See also Klaus-Dietrich Fischer, ‘Anweisungen zur Selbstmedikation von Laien in der Sp¨atantike’, in XXX Congr`es international d’histoire de la m´edicine (Dusseldorf: Vicom KG, ), –; Owsei Temkin, ‘History of Hippocratism in Late Antiquity: The Third Century and the Latin West’, in The Double Face of Janus and Other Essays in the History of Medicine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), –. I have written further on this issue elsewhere: Aude Doody, ‘Authority and Authorship in the Medicina Plinii’, in Authorial Voices in Greco-Roman Technical Writing, ed. Aude Doody and Liba Taub (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, ).

Specialist readings of the Natural History

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Although it draws most of its information from the Natural History, the Medicina Plinii represents a very different idea of medical writing. It is an organic, three-book work, complete with preface, that organises its material by illness, starting with symptoms that affect the head and proceeding downward, ending in the third book with illnesses that affect the body as a whole – leprosy, epilepsy and so on. This top-to-toe organisation system was to become dominant in medieval books of remedies, but it represents a significant break with the text of the Natural History, which, as we saw, usually organises its medical information by materia medica, so that each plant or animal substance is given and the cures they can provide are listed beneath. The Medicina has no interest in the information in the Natural History that relates to the materia medica rather than to the illness, so it dispenses with any discussion of types of plant or botanical detail, sources for the recipes, and almost all the anecdotes and points of historical or mythological interest that Pliny had included. Its preface, however, retains two important elements from the Natural History: the polemical stance against complex, professional medicine and the authority of Pliny’s name. Most of the manuscripts identify the author as Plinius Secundus Iunior, and the preface makes no reference to the fact that the work might not be by the Pliny of the Natural History, though the word ‘breviarium’ is used, which often indicates an epitome or book of extracts. A book of extracts faces particular problems of authority: it remains dependent for some of its status on the authority of the source from which it draws – and in the case of the Medicina Plinii continues to name – while at the same time creating a text that overrides and reinvents the original source. The rationale for creating a book of extracts is the effort to make the information easily accessible in a specialised context. As we will see, the question of closure, of how to end and how to recognise the end of these essentially open texts, creates difficulties for those who use them. The Physica Plinii, with its complex recipes and additional books demonstrates the difficulty of setting a seal on the work, claiming Pliny’s authority while moving further and further from the text of the Natural 



On the preface to the Medicina Plinii, see Maria Franca Buffa Giolito, ‘Topoi della tradizione letteraria in tre prefazioni di testi medici latini’, in Les textes m´edicaux latins comme litt´erature: actes du vie colloque international sur les textes m´edicaux latins du 1er au 3 septembre 1998 a` Nantes (Nantes: Institut universitaire de France, ), –; Maria Paola Segoloni, ‘Il prologus della Medicina Plinii’, in Prefazioni, prologhi, proemi di opere tecnico-scientifiche latine, ed. Carlo Santini and Nino Scivoletto (Rome: Herder, ), –. ¨ On the author’s name in the manuscript tradition, see Onnerfors, In Medicinam Plinii Studia philologica, –. On ancient epitomes, see Rosalind MacLachlan, ‘Epitomes in Ancient Literary Culture’, Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, .

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Pliny’s Encyclopedia

History. The end of the Medicina Plinii seems to be an appropriate place to begin looking at problems of control and usefulness, the relationship of the book of extracts both to its encyclopedic source and to the specialist discourse that it chooses. The final illness that the Medicina deals with is the poisonous bite of an asp. There is a build-up to this dangerous affliction: the final five chapters have pursued the theme of general antidotes to poison, the sting of a stingray, the mus araneum, phalangium, the bites of snakes and of humans, before turning finally to the asp: . AGAINST THE ASP Against the bite of an asp, our ancestors had only one antidote: the person who was bitten had to drink their own urine. Inside a few years, an alternative remedy was discovered by chance. A man who was carrying a bottle full of vinegar was bitten by an asp but didn’t feel any pain until he got tired and put the bottle down for a rest. When he did this, he started to feel the pain, and when he applied the bottle to himself again, it went away. So he realised that if he drank the vinegar, he could get well. His experience has clearly shown that this medicine is extremely effective. But if blood follows the bite of an asp, there is no hope for the person who’s been bitten. (Medicina Plinii .)

This is a more dynamic passage than most of the entries in the Medicina, which restrict themselves for the most part to lists of medicines. It is the final word in the Medicina’s lists of illnesses, and in some ways an odd ending to the piece. This anecdote about the progress of medicine from the old-fashioned and unpleasant to the new and effective – and this by a process of experimentation – would be a fittingly hopeful moral on which to end a practical guide to medicine. But the final sentence leads us into doubt again: there are circumstances in which a cure is not possible, times when the writer of the Medicina runs out of knowledge and useful advice. The point on which the text ends is the point at which the text can no longer help us. The story of curing the asp’s bite is one case where there is still room for medical progress. All the material in this passage has been drawn from the Natural History. But there are clear differences in the effect of the information, changes that take place in the process of excerption. Looking at where the Medicina’s information happens in the Natural History helps us to understand how the process of compilation works, and how the facts change in significance in the course of the process. In this case, the writer of the Medicina has pieced together the narrative from three or four references scattered over

Specialist readings of the Natural History

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Pliny’s encyclopedia. The anecdote about the discovery of vinegar as a cure for asp bites comes in Book , in a long section on the uses of vinegar in medicine: Doctors did not know how much vinegar helps against asps. Recently someone was bitten when he walked on an asp while carrying a bottle of vinegar. Whenever he put it down, he felt the bite, at other times it was like he was unharmed. He realised then that it was a remedy and felt better when he drank it. People also wash their mouths out with vinegar when they suck poison from a wound. (Pliny HN .–)

This passage in the Natural History contains the main substance of the story of the discovery of vinegar as a cure for bites of an asp: and the fact that doctors had only recently become aware of it. The striking rhetorical contrast that the Medicina makes between old and new cures is suggested in two other passages which deal with urine as a potential remedy: You often find not only rational measures but also superstitions associated with urine in the sources. Different kinds are distinguished, that of the eunuch is a good fertility charm. From the ones which bear repeating [quae referre fas sit], that of an adolescent boy works against the spit of the asp they call the ptyas, since it spits venom in the person’s eyes . . . (Pliny HN .) Asps kill those they bite by paralysis and coma, of all snakes their bite is the hardest to heal. Their venom kills immediately if it comes into contact with blood or a recent wound, but if it touches an old wound, it kills more slowly. On the other hand, however much you drink, it doesn’t kill you, as it has no corrosive power [tabifica uis], so it is safe to eat animals that died from its bite. I would hesitate to suggest remedies derived from it, if Marcus Varro, in the rd year of his life, hadn’t claimed that the bite of an asp could be cured most effectively by the bitten person drinking their own urine. (Pliny HN .)

The remaining elements of the story are contained in these two passages. Pliny already betrays the amused disdain for the use of urine as a cure that the Medicina adopts with wry humour. Pliny’s amusement is at the expense of his sources, sneering at the superstition of the unnamed auctores of the first passage, and taking a rare swipe at Varro’s seemingly senile suggestion in the second. This is a characteristic display of scholarly acumen, a joke that reinforces Pliny’s ability to choose between the material available and present us with the best. In the Medicina, however, the temporal distance between the discovery and the views of the priores is stressed. It is not just the joke that launches the anecdote, it becomes an integral part of a narrative of medical improvement. Similarly, the choice to end on a note of aporia with the observation that once the venom enters the bloodstream

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Pliny’s Encyclopedia

medicine is no use, is not forced by the sequence of the text in the Natural History. These passages were chosen and arranged to make a particular rhetorical point and many passages relating to other possible cures for asp bites have been ignored in their favour. Asps occur in many contexts in the Natural History: we are introduced to their biology in Book , come across a miraculous story about their relationship with humans in Book , and in the medical books they are both an affliction that demands remedies, and a source of potential cures. Remedies against their bites, then, are just one element in a wider discourse on asps and snakes in the Natural History, that moves through a full range of their possible types of interaction with humans, from venomous to friendly, from cure to illness. The segments that the Medicina picks out are only a fragment of this story. Not only does the book of medical extracts leave out the wider context which sees snakes as part of the wider world of nature, it chooses which elements of the medical knowledge it wants to use, and builds a narrative that reforms their significance. While asps are a danger to humans in the Natural History, they are one among many, and they occur in many places, scattered among other comparable diseases and disasters, as a remedy as well as threat. But the Medicina places the asp at the end of a list, separate from other snakes, whose venom is less deadly, and after a build-up of poisonous animals, some of which are so obscure that the author has to explain what they look like and where they are to be found. The build-up and the carefully contrived story seem to work well as a closing moment, a suitably exotic illness combined with some food for thought about the nature of medical progress. If the Medicina ignores the wider context of the Natural History, it is because it has substituted a new context, the discipline of medicine. All the manuscripts which contain the Medicina or the Physica include them in the context of a collection of medical works, some by familiar figures such as Galen and Hippocrates, but also many anonymous works, stray recipes and charms that together present a comprehensive picture of the range of medical knowledge available to the Medieval and Renaissance reader. When we turn to the Physica, we see that this manuscript context had a direct bearing on the evolution of the text. The question of where the Physica  

 

See HN . on asps and other types of snake. HN . tells the story of a mother asp in Egypt who used to eat at a certain man’s table in Egypt. One day she had a litter and one of her young bit her host’s son: the mother asp was so embarrassed she killed the young snake and never returned to the house again. For antidotes, see HN ., . on beetles; HN ., ., . on various herbs. Mainly eye-ointments, HN .; but also scrofula, HN ., and malaria/quartan ague, HN ..

Specialist readings of the Natural History

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ends depends on which text you read. The two Codices Bambergenses, M (Bambergensis med. 1) and Q (Bambergensis med. 2), both stop in the middle of what is Book  in the other four manuscripts. S (Sangallensis 751) reaches the end of Book  and the entry against asp bites, but continues into a fourth book, headed, incipit liber IIII antidotorum ad variis passionibus (‘Book  on antidotes for various afflictions’). The most complete texts, however, are E (Florentinus Strozzianus 70) and F (Florentinus Aedil. 165), which provide five books – the fourth is substantially the same as Gargilius Martialis’ De oleribus et pomis, a list of plants and the cures derived from them, and the fifth is a book on diet, an old Latin epitome of a work by Alexander Trallianus (fl. ). P (Pragensis Lat. 2425) provides four books, including Gargilius Martialis, and follows with the book on diet ‘by the same author’. The early editions followed this tradition of a five book Physica which ends on a summary of how to conduct a healthy life in the different seasons of the year, the climax of a series of capitula dealing with different diets to suit particular illnesses. This reflects a different idea of what medicine should encompass – not just lists of remedies, but a regimen of healthy living that the patient should adopt. It also reflects the difficulty of recognising the end of a book of extracts, especially in the absence of a strong authorial imprimatur. The attachment of Gargilius Martialis and Alexander Trallianus to the end of the Physica seems to have happened due to the proximity of the books in the big manuscript collections of medical works. In four of the manuscripts of the Medicina, the work is followed directly by the works of Gargilius Martialis and the book on diet, though in these cases they are distinguished as separate works. Knowing where to stop copying and deciding what counts as relevant or irrelevant information is difficult in these huge compendia of knowledge, where usefulness is the main criterion of inclusion. The Physica’s extension of the terms of the Medicina seems almost inevitable since the premium placed on completeness and usefulness sometimes necessitates a choice between keeping faith with the authority of the text, and updating it, to make its information more useful. The individual medical text draws authority from the volume of other texts set alongside it, so that the bigger compilation created by the process of binding allows shorter texts to borrow authority from the compilation as a whole, and anonymous recipes can confidently rub shoulders with 

This is the case in L (Londoniensis Lat. Reg. 12 E), G (Sangallensis 752), V (Vossianus Lat. o. 92) and H (Hertensis med. 192). In B (Cantabrigensis S:ti Petri 222: III), they are only separated by a few stray recipes.

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respected names. Slippage between one text and another has produced a process of corruption that later philologists have been at pains to unravel. Most of the manuscripts that have survived belong to the Medicina branch of the tradition. The Physica, as we have seen, is not a uniform text, and there is considerable variation between the different branches of its manuscript tradition. The first edition, edited by T. Pighinuccius in ¨ , drew on manuscripts of the Physica which Onnerfors has identified as similar to F (Florentinus Aedil. 165). But the edition of Alban Thorer (Torinus) in  draws on both branches of the tradition, having access to manuscripts of both the Medicina and the Physica. The corruption in ¨ the textual tradition that ensues seemed wayward to Onnerfors’s rigorous philology, but the compromise Thorer negotiates is more interesting than modern criticism has allowed. His response to the difficulties this posed to the construction of a single cohesive edition is instructive, telling a story about the concerns of sixteenth-century medicine, and about the tension between proliferation and control that dominates the process of making a book of extracts. When the Medicina Plinii was published in , Alban Thorer (– ) had been at the university of Basel for twelve years, first as a student and then as a member of the Faculty of Arts. Although Thorer would go on to become Professor of Medicine from  to  and Rector of the University in , at this point he had just joined the Faculty of Medicine where he was still working towards his doctorate. In this period, Basel was a key centre for humanist scholarship, with an important university and a more important printing industry; it was soon to be 

 

Different branches of the Physica’s manuscript tradition have produced separate modern editions. Alf ¨ Onnerfors edited manuscripts M (Bambergensis med. 1) and Q (Bambergensis med. 2) to produce the Physica Plinii Bambergensis (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, ). A Physica Plinii Florentino-Pragensis was produced by different editors in the s, based on the manuscripts E (Florentinus Strozzianus 70), F (Florentinus Aedil. 165) and P (Pragensis Lat. 2425): G¨unter Schmitz, Physica Plinii FlorentinoPragensis, Liber 3, Lateinische Sprache und Literatur des Mittelalters (Frankfurt, Bern, New York, Paris: Peter Lang, ); Walter Wachtmeister, Physica Plinii Florentino-Pragensis, Liber 2, Lateinische Sprache und Literatur des Mittelalters (Frankfurt, Bern, New York, Paris: Verlag Peter Lang, ); J. Winkler, Physica Plinii Florentino-Pragensis, Liber 1, Lateinische Sprache und Literatur des Mittelalters (Frankfurt, Bern, New York, Paris: Lang, ). ¨ See Onnerfors, In Medicinam Plinii studia philologica, –. Little is written about Thorer: for skeletal accounts of his life, see Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas Brian Deutscher, Contemporaries of Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation (University of Toronto Press, ), ; Albrecht Burckhardt, Geschichte der medizinischen Fakult¨at zu Basel (Basel: Friedrich Reinhardt, ), –; Hans George Wackernagel, ed., Die Matrikel Der Universit¨at Basel (Basel: Verlag der Universit¨atsbibliothek (Basel), ); H. T¨urler, M. Godet and V. Attinger, eds., Historisch-Biographisches Lexikon der Schweiz,  vols. (Neuenburg: Administration des Historisch-Biographischen Lexikons der Schweiz, –).

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convulsed by the religious and social upheavals of the Reformation. In , both Erasmus (–) and Paracelsus (–) were in Basel, though neither stayed long – Erasmus left in the following year, when the city officially adopted Protestantism, and the university was shut or disrupted until , at which point Thorer was made Professor of Latin and Rhetoric. Paracelsus had a lasting influence on Thorer, though the great flowering of paracelsianism at Basel had to wait for a younger generation of professors. Thorer’s main contribution to medical scholarship was a series of erudite editions and translations, mainly of Greek texts. The relationship between philology and medicine was a close one, despite the tensions between textual and experimental approaches that were beginning to surface. Thorer’s ability to be both Professor of Medicine and Professor of Latin and Rhetoric over the course of his career indicates the basic interrelationship between the two, where a course in the liberal arts was still usually the preparation for the study of medicine in European universities. The libraries of Basel had a remarkable collection of medical manuscripts, and besides his edition of the Medicina Plinii, Thorer produced translations of medical works by Paul of Aegina, Alexander of Tralles, Ioannes of Damascus (Ibn Sarafyun/Serapion) and Rhazes (Al-Razi), among others. In , however, all this was ahead of him: the Medicina Plinii seems to have been one of the first texts he edited, at an early stage in his medical career, when he was still being taught by Paracelsus. The sixteenth century was a period of debate and change in the study of medicine, as western scholars redefined their relationship to the Classical 





On Basel in this period, see Hans Berner, ‘Die gute Correspondenz’: die Politik der Stadt Basel gegen¨uber dem F¨urstenbistum Basel in den Jahren 1525–1585 (Basel: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, ); Paul Burckhardt, Geschichte der Stadt Basel (Basel: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, ); Amy Nelson Burnett, Teaching the Reformation: Ministers and their Message in Basel, 1529–1629 (New York: Oxford University Press, ); Hans Guggisberg, Basel in the Sixteenth Century (St Louis: Center for Reformation Research, ). On the university, see Beitr¨age zur Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und der Technik in Basel / herausgegeben von der CIBA aus Anlass ihres 75 j¨ahrigen Bestehens als Aktiengesellschaft (Olten: Urs Graf, ); Marc Sieber, Die Universit¨at Basel und die Eidgenossenschaft 1460 bis 1529 (Basel: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, ). See Heinrich Buess, ‘Basler Mediziner der Barockzeit’, in Beitr¨age zur Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und der Technik in Basel / herausgegeben von der CIBA aus Anlass ihres 75 j¨ahrigen Bestehens als Aktiengesellschaft (Olten: Urs Graf, ), –. On manuscripts and early printed books on medicine at Basel, see G. Goldschmidt, ‘Medizin im alten Basel und die medizinische Handschriften der Universtit¨atsbibliothek Basel’, in Beitr¨age zur Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und der Technik in Basel / herausgegeben von der CIBA aus Anlass ihres 75 j¨ahrigen Bestehens als Aktiengesellschaft (Olten: Urs Graf, ), –; K. Bruckner, ‘Buchdruck und Wissenschaft im humanistischen Basel vor ’, in Beitr¨age zur Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und der Technik in Basel / herausgegeben von der CIBA aus Anlass ihres 75 j¨ahrigen Bestehens als Aktiengesellschaft (Olten: Urs Graf, ), –.

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texts. Where developments in the fifteenth century had been fuelled by the editing of rediscovered Greek works, now new work began to fundamentally question the accuracy and dependability of Galenic medicine. Thorer had links with two of the key figures in this slow and diffuse process of re-evaluation: Paracelsus and Vesalius (–). Paracelsus launched an assault on orthodox Galenic medicine and scholarly natural philosophy. He advocated a move away from scholarly emphasis on written texts, insisting that the Book of Nature was the proper basis for natural philosophy. Paracelsus taught Thorer during his short stint as official city physician between  and , and was a major influence on Thorer’s medical views. When Vesalius’ De Humani Corporis Fabrica was first published in  in Basel by Joannes Oporinus, Thorer produced an epitome of the work in the German language: one of the first important books of medicine to be published in German, a populist gesture that was perhaps influenced by Paracelsus’ emphasis on the vernacular. He also edited and translated a text of Rhazes (Al-Razi) in association with Vesalius in . Thorer was up to date on the key issues and the key figures of the contemporary medical scene, favouring new, sometimes iconoclastic, approaches to the scholastic tradition of Galenic medicine. Scepticism about the authority of Pliny’s medicine was not a completely new phenomenon, however: the medicine in the Natural History had come under intense scrutiny some thirty years earlier when Niccol`o Leoniceno published a treatise criticising errors in the medical parts of Pliny’s text and those of medieval Arab physicians. The De Plinii et plurium aliorum medicorum in medicina erroribus of  broke new ground in that it criticised Pliny for making mistakes in his use of terminology, due to a lack of understanding of Greek terms used by Dioscorides among others. Where other commentators had tried to restore the text based on manuscript evidence and similar authors, they had always assumed that errors in the 

 



See Burckhardt, Geschichte der Stadt Basel, ; Sieber, Die Universit¨at Basel und die Eidgenossenschaft 1460 bis 1529, . On Paracelsus, see R.H. Blaser, Paracelsus in Basel (Muettenz: St Arbogast Verlag, ); Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance, nd edn. (Basel: Karger, ). On Thorer’s translation, see H.E. Sigerist, ‘Albanus Torinus and the “Epitome” of Vesalius’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine  (): –. This edition of the works of Al Razi was edited by Alban Thorer; for the most part the translation used was that of Gerard of Cremona (/–) apart from Books  and  of the Ad regem Almansorem, where Thorer contributed a translation of Book  and Vesalius contributed a translation of Book ; the translation of the Liber de pestilentia was that of Giorgio Valla (–). The edition was published in Basel by Heinrich Petri. This controversy and its implications for the study of Pliny in the Renaissance has been well discussed in two important articles by Charles Nauert and Roger French: French, ‘Pliny and Renaissance Medicine’; Nauert, ‘Humanists, Scientists and Pliny: Changing Approaches to a Classical Author’.

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text were introduced by bad copyists or the vicissitudes of transmission. Leoniceno suggested that the problem might be with the authority of Pliny himself. This suggestion was rebutted by Pandolfo Collenuccio in , and the controversy continued in pamphlet form for several years. Although the point of the argument was the usefulness of Pliny’s text as a medical resource, neither scholar resorted to empirical evidence in their attempts to prove their point. The argument rested on philological grounds, where Leoniceno turned to Greek sources, in particular the recently discovered Dioscorides, to prove Pliny’s Latin mistaken. The correct editing of Pliny’s text was essential to any debate about the usefulness of his medicine, and philological and medical knowledge went hand in hand in producing a text. Thorer’s edition of the Medicina had to negotiate between the sometimes conflicting demands of textual criticism and medical expediency. In the De re medica, Thorer presented a collection of ancient medical texts: the Medicina Plinii is set among the first editions of Soranus of Ephesus’ In artem medendi isogoge and Oribasius’ fragmentary De victu ratione, alongside Pseudo-Apuleius’ De herbarum virtutibus and the De betonica usually attributed to Antonius Musa. In his preface, Thorer sets out his rationale in approaching Pliny’s Medicina: I turn now to Pliny. Several people have claimed that the whole spirit of this work is different from the quality and style of Pliny. I myself believe that the text itself cries out that a good part of this little work is not by Pliny, but even a blind man can see that it has the scent of its father. However, I think that some compiler has collected the material from the Natural History and arranged it in this order. And then – since Pliny is not the only author this has happened with – who would argue that many interpolations completely unworthy of Pliny have been scattered into the text by hackwork [lucubrationibus]? I have excised nothing; in fact, some things have been added with the help of an old codex. Since the things that Pliny did not write do not seem to need excision, when even a gardener can sometimes tell you useful things. All the same, in case anyone sneers ‘you’re waving incense over dung’, so as to separate out the genuine and, more importantly, for the benefit of future readers, I have distinguished the spurious and the interpolated passages, which I have marked with daggers (which surround the sections like chains), and in extreme cases, so that nothing should be lacking, I have left them to the end. Good Gods, what Augean stables have I cleansed here! A Roman copy that Christian Herbort, that famous investigator of the secrets of nature, sent to help was stained with errors.  

Alban Thorer, De re medica (Basel: Andreas Cratander, ). Thorer, De re medica. Folio numbers are printed in the body of the text, but not in the prefatory material. Where applicable, the numbers given below are folio rather than page numbers. These

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Thorer was perfectly aware that the Medicina was not written by Pliny, but was compiled by a later writer; he knew that there were problems with the text and that many passages have been interpolated from different sources, but instead of trying to sort out the false from the genuine, he cuts the Gordian knot and decides that there would be no point: even a gardener can sometimes tell you something useful when it comes to medicine. The choice that Thorer makes here privileges the usefulness of the text’s knowledge above its authenticity as a representation of what its first author wrote. This step is made easier by the fact that Pliny, it seems, did not write the work himself: the authority of the author is inevitably weakened by the fact that the work is spuriously attached to an old Roman master. But if Thorer is keen to place the utility of the text’s medicine above the necessity of excising spurious passages, it is not a careless gesture, or a dismissal of the importance of philology. The preface advertises the fact that the editor is doing his job properly, using old codices, obelising difficult or spurious parts, and even excising passages when the task is hopeless. The point of the text might be the information it contains, but the accuracy of that information is dependent upon careful editing of the text. Medicine is the moment where choosing the correct variant may seriously impact on the health of your readers. The impulse towards completeness, and the desire to present all the information available to him, led Thorer to produce a composite text. As his marginal notes make clear, Thorer is concerned about the difficulties of balancing faithfulness to the manuscript tradition at his disposal with presenting as much medical information as possible. There are several kinds of marginal note provided in the text: alternatives to obelised words in the text, wry comments on particular cures, marking of historical figures, but the majority of notes indicate where a particular remedy is discussed in the text. So, for example, on chapter  on earache, the glosses read: ‘what to do if a creature gets in your ear’, ‘how to treat terrible earache’, ‘how to get water out of your ears’. These reflect the primary importance of guiding the reader towards the particular cure they require, the practical use of the medical text. But the marginal notes that mention the codices that Thorer uses also give indications as to his editing practice. These allow us to assess how Thorer assembles his text of the Medicina, and the tension he negotiates between a desire for completeness and the philological principles he espouses. 

folios are divided into four sections, where a and b indicate the upper and lower halves of the recto, c and d indicate the upper and lower halves of the verso.  Thorer, De re medica, c–d. Alternatives: c, d; Historical anecdotes: c, a.

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The first example comes from the first chapter in Book , on cures for headaches. Thorer begins by following the text of the Medicina branch of the tradition, setting out the text from the first chapter much as it is ¨ printed in Onnerfors’s edition. Where that entry ends, he inserts a passage taken from the Physica, a passage that appears under the second chapter heading in Pighinuccius’  edition, and as the third entry in the Physica Bambergensis. The passage from the Physica deals with the treatment of a patient with sunstroke, and suggests a regimen of care alongside particular medicinal remedies: Here the style and method of healing clearly changes, hence I suspect this has been added by a recent author, because in the past simples were more often used, whereas we use compounds more often.

Now if a very hot sun beats down on the head, suddenly the mind is diverted, and the person becomes like a madman, talking strangely and recognising no-one. When you see this happen, make him withdraw immediately to a secluded area and restrain him. He should not smell wine or even vinegar and water, and the person caring for him should not drink them. After this, boil some dill in water, and bathe his head with the warm mixture seven times a day and three times at night. He should not see any light, neither daylight nor firelight. But when he starts to recover, offer him lamplight. Then, put warm rose-oil on his head with a woollen bandage, and bind it day and night, changing the bandage often. When he has already begun to get well, bring him into the light and let him drink diluted wine, but before that he should take honey-wine in warm water, then rose-wine. In this way you will revive a living man as if from death. A very healthy and well-tried remedy.

The passage taken from the Physica breaks with the style of the passage from the Medicina, which listed various cures for headaches, but showed little interest in the wider problems of caring for a patient. Thorer recognises that there is a problem and sets it in a wider framework of medical practice, seeing a difference between older and newer styles of medical writing. He marks the difference, but keeps both passages of text, refusing to choose between the greater modernity of the second part and the greater authenticity of the first. 

Thorer, De re medica, c.

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These comments on the very first chapter work as a kind of illustration of the practice that Thorer will pursue throughout the work, and the daggers appear many times in the text marking interpolations, sometimes with comment, but more often without. The opening of the second book marks another important moment of choice for the editor, a textual problem so garish that Thorer’s note is placed, not in the margin, but directly underneath the title: The first fourteen chapters of this book were not in the old codex, but I thought it was better to print them with spurious inscriptions (as there are quite a few of them) rather than leave them out; I think they contribute something to the work.

The first fourteen chapters are part of the Physica, and had already appeared in this form in Pighinuccius’ text. They are completely absent or presented in a very different format in the Medicina, hence their absence from Thorer’s manuscript. The choice to include them here, but also to make clear to the reader that there was a question mark about their authenticity, is indicative of Thorer’s bias towards utility over a thorough purging of the text on the basis of the manuscript evidence. For Thorer, finding a pristine first version of a medical text does not seem worthwhile: the point of the text is its usefulness, and the more complete it is, the more useful it can be. There is something inevitable, however, about the expansion of Pighinuccius’ editio princeps of what is essentially the Physica by Thorer’s addition of passages from the Medicina. It is a cannibalistic process that seems to mirror the earlier evolution of the sixth-century Physica from the fourthcentury Medicina. Thorer’s conflation of the two traditions of the Medicina and the Physica does not just represent a misguided case of contaminatio, ¨ as Onnerfors treats it in his comments on the early editions. It is a decision about what the function of a medical text should be, guided by an understanding of the Medicina in a living discourse of medical writing and not simply as an ancient text, whose textual integrity must be restored and preserved. That said, Thorer does not follow the example of the disputed second edition of the Medicina Plinii, which Arturo Castiglioni suggests should be put back into the discussion of the textual tradition. Printed in  by Hyeronimus de Benedicti in Bologna, alongside Leoniceno’s De morbo gallico, this edition substantially changes the text of the Medicina   

Explicit references to his editorial practices come at, for instance, d, a, a, a, c, d, c, a.  Onnerfors, ¨ In Medicinam Plinii studia philologica, –. Thorer, De re medica, c. Castiglioni, ‘Pseudo-Plinian Medicine’.

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as found in the manuscripts and the editions of Pighinuccius and Thorer. It does so by adding new recipes and technical remedies, even clinical observations, which seem out of place in relation to the other medicine. This updated version of the text, may, as Castiglioni argues, have been approved by Leoniceno, but its departure from the manuscript tradition is very different from Thorer’s approach, despite their shared ambition of producing a text that is useful to their contemporaries. Thorer’s edition sets the Medicina Plinii in the midst of other ancient work on medicine, and the extent to which they were to be consulted as a single authority is shown by the index that Thorer provides. This index contains references for illnesses and materia medica that point the reader towards passages in all five works, so that looking up headaches, for instance, might send the reader to entries in the Pseudo-Apuleius’ herbal as well as in the text of the Medicina Plinii. The boundaries between the different texts are porous, and the status of each writer lends something to the authority of the edition as a whole. This is the problem with seeing the text of the Medicina Plinii in isolation. It speaks both to the text of the encyclopedia from which it originated, and to the medical texts that it evolves alongside. Both in the manuscript tradition and in the early printed tradition, the text of the Medicina is bound with other medical and scientific works. It is a potential problem with the new editions of the Physica that they elevate the text to a new level of tidy isolation, perhaps obscuring its messy and dependent history. So, what does the Medicina have to tell us about the Natural History, and the relationship of the book of extracts to the encyclopedia? First of all that the book of extracts creates a new context and a new narrative from the facts it gathers, and while this narrative is in part suggested by the Natural History, it is also a judgement on it. Systematically rearranging facts by illness rather than by their place in a hierarchy of animal, plant and human substances creates a new medical system in which to view the information, removing the accretion of both mirabilia and natural history from the plain facts of the potential cures. The book of extracts is more ruthlessly orientated towards a particular discipline, removing the facts of the encyclopedia into a specialist discourse, where they interact with similar texts, and are judged accordingly. This movement into a specialist field is what gives the Medicina a life of its own, where it becomes not just a set of extracts from Pliny, but evolves through the selection of passages from other medical sources into the Physica, an embodiment of the difficulty in putting a final seal on a book of extracts. As we saw in the case of Thorer’s edition, the tendency of a book of medical extracts towards

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expansion grows both from the lack of a strong authorial figure and from the importance of the information it contains. The drive towards providing as much medical knowledge as possible encourages Thorer to include information from as many manuscript sources as possible, overriding his sense that some readings point to older and some to newer strains in the tradition. Medicine is the point at which philology gives way to utility, but also the point at which textual criticism is at its most crucial, where providing the right reading means providing the right remedy. And this dynamic lends urgency to the decisions that Thorer makes known to us in his marginalia but also engaged the cream of humanist scholarship in the establishment of an authentic text of the Natural History. Books of extracts pose a challenge to the integrity of the Natural History, by dismantling its organisational schema and making its facts more useful for the specialist. Despite the many books of extracts that have emerged from it, the text of the Natural History, with its holistic view of medicine’s place in nature, still survives in its entirety. The Natural History’s usefulness and its unsurpassed completeness, its purposeful authorial voice and, in a way, its idiosyncrasy, guarantee the text’s integrity, and protect it from the twin dangers of expansion and dismantlement. As we saw in Chapter One, the absence of a clear philosophical point, or an explicit argument makes it difficult to summarise. In the Natural History, no less than in the medical extracts, the point is the information, the heaps of facts Pliny puts at our disposal, challenging us to see nature as exactly the sum of its parts. eugenie sellers and pliny’s book of extracts The idea that Pliny’s Natural History might be exactly the sum of its parts would have appealed to Eugenie Sellers. The excerpter who produced The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art obviously stands in a different relation to her text than the anonymous compilers of the medical excerpts or their sixteenth-century editor. When Eugenie Sellers set out to produce a compilation of Plinian art history, her project was to produce an edition of a Classical text, whose historical information would be of use in understanding the past rather than in solving the scientific problems of the present. The book was designed to meet the expectations of the burgeoning interest in the material culture of the ancient world, and Sellers’ commentary is filled with references to new discoveries and developments in this field. From the start, The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art was designed to be used by a specialist audience, and to be understood

Specialist readings of the Natural History



less in terms of the Natural History than the discourse of contemporary art history, but like Thorer, Sellers also has a duty to the best models of textual criticism available to her in producing a useful, scholarly edition of the text. As her preface indicated, the best model of textual criticism available to Sellers was a distinctively German one; Sellers begins by situating herself firmly on the side of Quellenforschung, then a cutting-edge approach to the Natural History. It was not just on the philological side of things that Sellers had a close relationship to German scholarship. Although she was educated at Girton College, Cambridge, and subsequently worked at the British Museum under Charles Newton, it was her German teachers whose influence she foregrounded in her accounts of her scholarly upbringing. In archaeological matters, she had made a name for herself as an English commentator on contemporary German work: her two previous books had been a translation of Karl Schuchhardt’s introduction to Schliemann’s excavations, complete with an appendix by Schliemann and D¨orpfeld themselves (, reprinted Chicago ), and a translation of Adolf Furtw¨angler’s Meisterwerke in . As early as , she came out on the German side of a controversy over the shape of the Greek theatre, in which D¨orpfeld was finally and embarrassingly proved right, at the expense of English archaeologists at the British School at Athens. The early s found her in Munich, working on Pliny under the guidance of two men whom, her first biographer tells us, she was to call ‘the pole-stars’ of her intellectual life: the philologist Ludwig Traube and the archaeologist Adolf Furtw¨angler. It would be a mistake, however, to see philology and archaeology as polar opposites when it came to dealing with Pliny’s Natural



 



See Stephen Dyson’s biography of Eugenie Sellers Strong: Stephen L. Dyson, Eugenie Sellers Strong: Portrait of an Archaeologist (London: Duckworth, ). Her life and work is also discussed at length in Mary Beard’s biography of Jane Harrison: M. Beard, The Invention of Jane Harrison (Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press, ). See also the early memoir by Gladys Scott Thomson: Gladys Scott Thomson, Mrs Arthur Strong: A Memoir (London: Cohen and West, ). I have also had the opportunity of examining the archive material at Girton College, Cambridge – my thanks to the archivist, Ms Kate Perry, for her kind assistance. It should be noted that Eugenie Sellers married Arthur Strong in , and is generally known as Mrs Arthur Strong in her professional life from this point on. On Sellers’ intellectual genealogy, see Beard, The Invention of Jane Harrison, –. See also Dyson, Eugenie Sellers Strong, especially Chapter  ‘The German Years’, –. On which see Beard, The Invention of Jane Harrison, –. On German archaeology of the period, see Suzanne Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton University Press, ). See Thomson, Mrs. Arthur Strong: A Memoir, –; Beard, The Invention of Jane Harrison, –; Dyson, Eugenie Sellers Strong, –.



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History. Furtw¨angler, who had worked at Olympia and was then an established figure in the German archaeological scene, had himself produced an article investigating the Greek sources for Pliny’s art criticism. As we will see, source criticism and archaeology were closely linked in the concerns and assumptions they brought to Pliny’s text. As we saw in the last section, creating a book of extracts produces a crisis of authority, and a cognate difficulty about where and how to stop. The project of extracting The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art from the Natural History was something Sellers felt she should defend, however fleetingly, at the beginning of her preface: Pliny’s larger and compacted purpose might . . . seem to condemn this present detachment of the History of Art for special treatment. But the general commentary on Pliny in the light of modern research, to which the texts of Sillig and L. von Jan were but to serve as preliminaries, seems likely to remain in the region of unachieved possibilities, if not further away still – in Utopia . . . Meanwhile, from the nature of the subject, the Plinian account of Ancient Art and Artists forms an episode sufficiently complete in itself to be made, without further apology, the subject of a special inquiry.

The claim of utility and the demands of specialist attention rather than encyclopedic scope carry the day. And although Sellers obviously felt that this apology needed to be made, it is something of a matter of form. Her reviewers had no difficulties with the concept, and, as Sellers tells us in the preface, another project to produce a similar set of art-historical extracts from Pliny had already been undertaken by Heinrich Ulrichs, a suggestion that the idea at least was not beyond the mainstream of Classical studies. The sculptor, Falconet, had already produced a commentary on Pliny’s art history in the late eighteenth century, and a new selection of   



A. Furtw¨angler, ‘Plinius und seine Quellen u¨ ber die bildenden K¨unste’, Jahrbuch f¨ur klassische Phlilologie  (): –. E. Sellers, ‘Introduction’, in The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art, ed. K. Jex-Blake and E. Sellers (London: Macmillan, ), xiii. For reviews of The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art, see A.G. Bather, ‘Pliny’s Chapters on Art’, Classical Review  (): –; Th´eodore Reinach, ‘Review: Pline l’Ancien. The Early [sic] Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art’, Revue des ´etudes grecques  (): –; C. Sittl, ‘Review: The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art’, Neue philologische Rundscan  (): –. It is mentioned in the bibliographical listings in Wochenschrift f¨ur Klassiche Philologie . (): , which remarks that it will be ‘an indispensable aid’. It is also listed in the Journal of Hellenic Studies  (): , as one of the new acquisitions for the society library. Although the association between Sellers and Ulrichs was to end badly, with claim and counterclaim in pamphlets about the extent to which Ulrichs had contributed to the work. See Dyson, Eugenie Sellers Strong, –; Thomson, Mrs Arthur Strong: A Memoir, –. See also the letters in the Girton Archive between Sellers and Ulrichs, and between Salomon Reinach and Sellers regarding the incident: GCPP Strong / File , GCPP Strong / File .

Specialist readings of the Natural History



Plinian extracts on art was collected by S. Ferri in . The idea seems to have been accepted without qualms by J. Isager in his  volume, Pliny on Art and Society: The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art, which follows Sellers’ lead in summarising and commenting on Pliny’s art-historical passages, largely in isolation to the rest of the work. Sorcha Carey’s work on Pliny’s art history grapples thoughtfully with this issue, setting Pliny’s art history in the wider context of an imperialist agenda within the work, and the material culture of the first century. Perhaps the most interesting response to Sellers’ decision to remove The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art from Books  to  was K.C. Bailey’s The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on Chemical Subjects, published in . Created in direct response to Sellers’ challenge, Bailey justifies his project along similar lines in his introduction: The chapters on Botany, Zoology, Medicine and other subjects must receive treatment from those who are expert in those sciences. When therefore it was necessary to take sections from the earlier books of the Natural History, books which consist mainly of non-chemical matter, only those sections which are directly concerned with chemical subjects were selected. On the other hand, the whole of Book XXXIII (except a few paragraphs already edited by Jex-Blake and Sellers) has been included, even parts which have little connection with chemistry, for only thus can the whole of the Natural History be covered by such a scheme as I have outlined above.

The uneasiness of Bailey’s principles in segregating the science from the rest of the text lies less in any scruple about removing the discipline of art, as in an uncertainty as to what to do with the areas that are not entirely either. His Book , as he says, contains all of the opening section on the decline in morals associated with gold as a symbol of wealth, the history of the equestrian order and its right to wear gold rings and the history of coinage at Rome, all of which forms part of the anti-luxuria moralism that informs much of the Natural History. Bailey’s compromise still leaves him with pages of discontinuous fragments on mineralogy garnered from the rest of the work. Sellers too, despite her confident beginning, also trails off with a selection of short fragments about art and artists from the rest of the work: testimony to the difficulty of deciding what is and what is not a chapter on the history of art as well as a claim of completeness.   

On Falconet’s criticism of Pliny’s art history, see Chapter . S. Ferri, Plinio il Vecchio: Storia delle Arti Antiche (Rome: Fratelli Palombi, ). Carey, Pliny’s Catalogue of Culture, – for an explicit discussion of this issue. K.C. Bailey, The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on Chemical Subjects,  vols. (London: Edward Arnold, ), –.

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Pliny’s Encyclopedia

But the practical problem of editing and specialist knowledge is not the only, or indeed the most persuasive, justification Sellers has to offer: the question of Pliny’s own authority to order and control his information had become a major issue at the end of the nineteenth century. In the course of Sellers’ preface it becomes clear that Pliny himself is to be read as a book of extracts from other authors, who may be difficult to disentangle perhaps, but not impossible to distinguish. The evidence from the text that Sellers calls on for support is the passage in the preface where Pliny counts his , facts from  books. She concludes her preface: Thus the tendency of modern research is to lessen more and more the importance of Pliny’s personal contribution in his account of the artists, as indeed in the whole of his great work. Yet, by a singular irony, the fundamental faults of his work have bestowed upon it a permanent value. He has given us what is better than any original criticism which his century could have produced – a short compilation which is, to borrow the word he applies to the whole Historia, the ‘storehouse’ or thesaurus wherein are consigned fragments from the lost text-books of Xenokrates, from the Biographies of Duris and Antigonos, nay, priceless sayings that have filtered through the ages from the very writings of Apelles and Pamphilos.

This passage puts the key premises of Quellenforschung succinctly: that the later writer adds nothing to the text, leaving undigested chunks of older authors visible to the skilled philologist; more fundamentally, it assumes that the earlier works preserved in the text are the real valuables, worth the huge effort of recovering. The convenience of this ‘tendency of modern research’ goes unremarked, but the singular irony is well observed: the image of Pliny as ‘an indiscriminate compiler’ gains credence right at the moment at which it is essential to the project of dividing up his text among more authentic, Greek authors. This vision of Pliny as an indiscriminate compiler seems to appear first in the nineteenth century, in response to the particular demands of Quellenforschung. As we saw in Chapter , it remains an underlying assumption in work on Pliny, even on the part of critics most engaged in trying to read the work as a coherent venture. Although it is clear from comparisons of his work with that of extant authors, such as Theophrastus, that Pliny did adapt, paraphrase and translate his sources in making his text, the idea that this practice detracts from the integrity of Pliny’s text is debatable. The question of authenticity that it raises seems a somewhat artificial one: does information derived from Theophrastus in Pliny’s text  

 Sellers, ‘Introduction’, xciii–xciv. Sellers, ‘Introduction’, xiii. On Pliny’s use of Theophrastus, see Lloyd, Science, Folklore and Ideology, –; Andr´e, ‘Pline l’Ancien botaniste’.

Specialist readings of the Natural History



belong to Pliny or to Theophrastus? Would it depend on how close Pliny’s translation kept to the text of Theophrastus? Or does Pliny’s avoidance of independent research fundamentally disqualify him from any claim to originality? In the light of postmodernism, and in a contemporary context where traditional ideas of copyright are coming under pressure, where remixing is an accepted artistic strategy, it is perhaps easier for us to see a compilation as an original and creative work. Nineteenth-century Quellenforschung’s understanding of Pliny’s encyclopedia as a book of extracts that can be separated into its constituent parts necessitates a type of reading that can seem to us contorted, if strangely compelling. Sellers’ introduction aims to provide English-speaking readers with a summary, with new observations, of recent German work that tried to attribute all Pliny’s information on art to different, Greek-named authors. It was a difficult task, as she explains: although the Plinian Indices might mislead us into believing that his work was a mosaic, a piecing together of the several statements of all the authors, Greek or Roman, whose names he quotes, we shall find, on the contrary, that it resembles a stratification of which the superimposed layers can still be distinguished at many points, even though at a number of others they have run so together as to baffle analysis.

This theory of stratification was rooted in a neat conceptualisation of how writing works: Pliny was assumed not to have read any work but Varro, who in turn had only read Pasiteles, who had drawn on Antigonos who had used Duris and Xenocrates. But despite the distance this stratification assumes between Pliny and his Greek sources, we can still trace not just their information, but even individual sentences from their works in Pliny’s Natural History. Every sort of information in Pliny’s text is traced back to a particular, preferably Greek, source, and so we find Pasiteles being credited with ‘otherwise unallotted information in the early parts of [Book] xxxiv’. More often, however, the process of determining sources involves complex, if circular, arguments, based on a formidable knowledge of obscure and fragmentary literature. Xenocrates and Antigonos, for example, are mentioned twice, one after another, in the Natural History, when Pliny notes that each was a sculptor 

  

For an introduction to current debates about ‘fair use’ and copyright in the digital age, see Lawrence Lessig, Remix. Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybid Economy (London: Bloomsbury, ). Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture (New York: Penguin, ). Sellers, ‘Introduction’, xv. See, for instance, Sellers’ praise of a turn of phrase as Xenocratean: Sellers, ‘Introduction’, xxxiv. Sellers, ‘Introduction’, lxxx.



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

who wrote about art (HN .–, .). From this unpromising beginning, scholars had constructed a sense of who they were and what sort of text they wrote. To Xenocrates was attributed the sequence of artists who discover and develop artistic techniques, by various ingenious arguments. Xenocrates’ treatise must have been revised by someone else because Xenocrates is a writer who aims at critical, unbiased assessments, and hence would do his best to avoid rhetorical flourishes, ‘yet little epigrammatic or anecdotic tags are plentiful even in those parts of the Plinian account which have been shown to be essentially Xenocratic’. This writer must be Antigonos, since the two are mentioned in close succession at HN .. Antigonos was identified as Antigonos of Carystus by Otto Jahn, although little is known about this Antigonos of Carystus either, apart from a few citations of a paradoxographic work and a reference to the effect that Diogenes Laertes drew on him for his Lives of the Philosophers. Sellers accepts Jahn’s identification, situating herself alongside F. M¨unzer and F. Susemihl, against the disagreement of H.L. Urlichs and H. Diels. Once the equivalency has been agreed, the arguments can take flight, moving swiftly from premise to premise. On the evidence of the remaining fragments of Antigonos’ (now Antigonos of Carystus) work, we can conclude ‘Antigonos, unlike Xenokrates, belonged to the class of people who are curious of facts rather than critical of their significance’. With this as guidance, Sellers goes on to note: The treatise of Antigonos on the other hand [unlike Xenokrates’], with its looser method of synthesis, is more difficult to retrace. We cannot point to this or that fragment of the Plinian history as bearing his particular stamp. But we can distinguish certain elements in Pliny which go back to those general sources – art-historical, epigrammatic, anecdotic, &c. – whence we know Antigonos to have drawn, and, on examining these, we shall find that the majority of cases to afford such strong proof of his handling that, failing contrary evidence, it will not be unfair to assume the remainder also to have come into Pliny through his medium.

From this, all anecdotic or epigrammatic statements in the art sections of the Natural History can be attributed to Antigonos. And that’s not all: 



For a case study of the fortunes of Xenocrates, see Gabriele Sprigath, ‘Der Fall Xenokrates von Athen. Zu den Methoden der Antike-Rezeption in der Quellenforschung’, in Tradita et Inventa. Beitr¨age zur Rezeption der Antike, ed. Manuel Baumbach (Heidelberg: Universit¨atsverlag C. Winter, ), –.  Sellers, ‘Introduction’, xl.  Sellers, ‘Introduction’, xl. Sellers, ‘Introduction’, xxxvi.

Specialist readings of the Natural History



From the fact that Antigonos incorporated the Treatise of Xenokrates into his own work, and from his allusion in his life of Polemon (above, p. xxxviii) to a Treatise upon Portraiture by the painter Melanthios, we may infer that it was he who introduced references to a number of artists as having also written upon their art.

All references to artists who wrote about their art – including himself at HN ., presumably – were derived from Antigonos’ work. And Sellers goes on to conclude that Antigonos’ probably derived this anecdotal material on artists from Duris, making Duris, alongside Xenocrates, the ultimate source for the Natural History’s information. And it is ultimate sources that Sellers and her colleagues were aiming at, as Sellers reminds us, ‘as a fact the value of the Plinian sources increases in the order, not of their nearness to Pliny, but of their approach to the distant fountain-head’. This strange and tendentious way of reading Pliny’s text not only makes the Natural History a glorified book of extracts, but is rooted in a very particular understanding of how the process of compiling works. As we saw in the case of the Medicina Plinii, even when all the material was drawn from a single work, the section on asp bite produced a cohesive story with a new point in its new context. In the logic of Quellenforschung, however, art history becomes a slow, attenuated process of compilation from earlier sources, with little or no room for polemic or appropriation. Authority and originality rest with the oldest source, and the further a writer is from this source, the more derivative and uninteresting they are assumed to be. Hence the conclusion that ‘It is little or nothing, then, of intrinsic importance from our point of view, that Pliny added to the Greek Treatises as he found them excerpted in Varro.’ The ‘indiscriminate compiler’ provides an automated account of ancient art, which allows us access to the more important, though lost, Greek originals. There is something familiar in this approach to Pliny’s art history. The attempt of Quellenforschung to find older Greek works clearly visible in Roman derivations is paralleled in contemporary art history, where the indisputable preference was for Classical Greek art, even if this had to be reconstructed from the evidence of Roman copies. The analogy had not escaped Sellers, and she makes the connection in a passage dealing with Pasiteles, who apparently wrote in Greek in the first century BC: Even as we doubtless owe to him and his school not a few of those copies which have rescued Greek statues from complete oblivion, so we may owe it to his 

Sellers, ‘Introduction’, xl.



Sellers, ‘Introduction’, lxxxiii.



Sellers, ‘Introduction’, xcii.



Pliny’s Encyclopedia

reverence for the art-literature of the Greeks that some part of it has filtered down to us through the subsequent medium of the Roman authors.

Roman art history and Roman artworks act as filters for the genius of Greek originals. Pliny’s primary usefulness to a generation of scholars excited by new archaeological discoveries lay in his ability to help make sense of the findings, to bind them into the textual mainstream of Classical research. But for an academy more interested in lost Greek origins than extant Roman successors, Pliny’s belatedness and Latinity made him somewhat problematic. When German scholars came to apply source criticism to Pliny’s work, it is perhaps not surprising that it was the art history that drew their attention. Finding Greek sources in the Natural History gave it a new authority, even if it did so at Pliny’s expense: the ‘vindication’ of Duris, whose writings are ‘restored’ to him, plays its part in reinstating the Natural History’s information on art as authentic, ancient and, naturally, Greek. After the publication of The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art, Eugenie Sellers changed the focus of her scholarly work. In her later life, as Mrs Arthur Strong, it was Roman art and Roman culture that drew her attention; in her Roman Sculpture from Augustus to Constantine () she would combat against the preference for Greek art and Greek writers that had marked her own The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art. Looking back on this early period in her research, she was to cast her move to Roman art as a brave strike for independence in the face of current orthodoxies: whether ransacking texts for traces of works of art recorded by Pliny or studying material directly from actual monuments, it was always the Greek world I was  





Sellers, ‘Introduction’, lxxviii. On Philhellenism in Germany and England in the nineteenth century, see Marchand, Down from Olympus; Frank M. Turner, ‘Why the Greeks and Not the Romans in Victorian Britain?’ in Rediscovering Hellenism: The Hellenic Inheritance and the English Imagination, ed. G.W. Clarke (Cambridge University Press, ), –. Pliny’s art history drew a great deal of attention from eminent German philologists in this period. See D. Detlefsen, ‘Die eigenen Leistung en des Plinius f¨ur die Geschichte der K¨unstler’, Jahrbuch des Deutschen Arch¨aologischen Instituts  (): –; Furtw¨angler, ‘Plinius und seine Quellen ¨ u¨ ber die bildenden K¨unste’; O. Jahn, ‘Uber die Kunsturtheile des Plinius’, Berichte der s¨achsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften  (): –; A. Kalkmann, Die Quellen der Kunstgeschichte des Plinius (Berlin: Weidmann, ); F. M¨unzer, ‘Zur Kunstgeschichte des Plinius’, Hermes  (): –; G. Oehmichen, Plinianische Studien zur geographischen und kunsthistorischen Literatur (Erlangen: A. Deichert, ); L. Traube, ‘Zu Plinius kunstgeschichtlichen B¨uchern’, Hermes  (): –; L. Urlichs, Die Quellenregister zu Plinius letzen B¨uchern (W¨urzburg: Stahel, ). See the introduction to Roman Sculpture, where the study of Roman art is made a twentiethcentury, cutting-edge subject in opposition to dismissive nineteenth-century attitudes: E. Strong Roman Sculpture from Augustus to Constantine (London: Duckworth, ), –.

Specialist readings of the Natural History



striving to reconstruct. Rome and her Empire, that occupy so many minds today, seemed then to archaeologists a mere cloud or shadow overhanging the clear world of Greek art. Had I spoken of the merits of Roman sculpture to Furtw¨angler, he would have replied, as he was wont to do when his wife indulged in flights of fancy, ‘dummes zeug, mein kindchen, dummes zeug’ [‘nonsense, my child, nonsense’].

With the benefit of hindsight, and a position as Assistant Director of the British School at Rome (from  to ), Sellers seems to distance herself from the youthful enthusiasm of ransacking Pliny for traces of Greek art. The art of Rome is held up as a self-evidently important study, and Sellers herself is the pioneer who realised as much. However, as the searchers for Pliny’s sources recognised, there is something strangely Greek about Pliny’s art history. Ransacking the text for traces of Roman art would produce scanty results. If we are dissatisfied with the determinism that makes this anomaly a simple result of Pliny’s dependence on Greek sources, then we need to find another reason for the emphasis on Greek art and Greek artists in the Natural History. A deep-seated respect for Greek artistic production in Roman culture, where connoisseurship privileges Greek over Roman enterprise, is the not-verysatisfactory alternative that comes to mind. Whatever the reason, there is a certain circularity about the project of dismantling Pliny in search of Greek artists. Recent work on Vasari and Winckelmann has examined the extent to which Pliny’s work served as a model for these founding figures for western history of art. Pliny’s narrative of development and inevitable decline, his focus on named artists, his stories of competition between them were hugely influential on Vasari’s Lives, as Vasari makes clear in his prefaces. Winckelmann in turn adapts Pliny’s cyclical model, generalising from individual artists to characteristic styles, where Pheidias, for example, typifies the ‘severe style’ of Classicism. Winckelmann’s system of periodisation, from Archaic to Classical to Hellenistic to Roman, followed the implicit arc of development to decline that Vasari had traced in the Natural History. It is difficult to overestimate the influence of Winckelmann’s conception of ancient art on nineteenth-century German priorities. Even today, the periodisation that he instituted is still in use, though the stigma attached to Roman art as derivative and belated has almost gone away.    

Quoted in Thomson, Mrs Arthur Strong: A Memoir, –. On Pliny’s influence on Vasari, see Barkan, Unearthing the Past, –; Sohm, ‘Ordering History with Style’. On Pliny’s influence on Winckelmann, see Donohue, ‘Winckelmann’s History of Art and Polyclitus’; Potts, Flesh and the Ideal. See Marchand, Down from Olympus.

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Pliny’s Encyclopedia

Pliny’s account of art history as a sequence of discoveries, centred on the individual character of the creative artist, seems a natural, almost self-evident, way of writing about art. History of art has traditionally followed Pliny in charting the rise and fall of artistic movements, carried along by particular artists. Although Pausanias offered an alternative model, placing art objects in the context of their ritual and topographical significance, it was Pliny’s History of Artists that was to prove inspirational. Pliny’s artists still provide a useful framework on which to hang knowledge of ancient art, a more appealing and humanised picture of the past. As I will show in the next section, however, Pliny’s artists and attributions are more problematic than they first appear. The project of reading The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art in isolation, of finding a specialist discourse on art in the Natural History, obscures continuities between Pliny’s discussion of art and the rest of the text. Reading Pliny’s art history as an organic part of the text rather than a discrete digression fundamentally changes the terms on which we can interpret the facts it provides. It is the basic structures of Pliny’s text, names and lists, and not just political rhetoric that binds the Natural History. artists and attributions in the natural history Pliny, like Pausanias, has had a long career as a mine of information for archaeologists and art historians. In the early days of art history, the main usefulness of the Natural History lay in its ability to provide a provenance for the visible remains of Classical art. Individual anonymous works could gain prestige and significance by being attached to a named artist. Finding matches between objects and artists was at the expense of reading the text, where small snippets of information in Pliny’s lists of artists and artworks could be extracted to build stories for surviving works of art. Many of these identifications still stand – marble statues of Apollo Sauroktonos in the Louvre and the Vatican are supposed to be versions of an original bronze by Praxiteles on the evidence of HN ., for instance. There are several sculptures on this theme but Winckelmann did his best to make the best of them an original by Praxiteles, despite Pliny’s insistence that Praxiteles’ statue had been made of bronze. This is one example where a pioneering art historian read selectively to produce a neater match between text and 

On the history of this statue’s reception, see Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique. The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900 (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, ), –.

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object than the text really allows. It seems oddly dated, just as the premises behind Sellers’ book of extracts appear to have fallen victim to changes in our priorities and methodologies. Recent work has emphasised the importance of engaging with wider issues in Pliny’s and Pausanias’ texts: Ja´s Elsner changed the terms on which Pausanias’ guide was read, by suggesting that his tour of Greece was fundamentally concerned with religious experience; Sorcha Carey argues that the art in the Natural History needs to be understood in terms of the wider imperial politics of the text and the material culture of the period in which it was written. But although broader questions are raised, in the case of Pliny at least, the art history still tends to be understood as a digression, growing out of his treatment of minerals, but an independent discourse nonetheless. Eugenie Sellers’ premise, that the Elder Pliny’s chapters on the history of art are easy to recognise and extract, remains a useful model for art historians in search of information from Pliny. My aim here is to look again at Pliny’s information on artists and on attributions, examining it in the light of Pliny’s narrative principles elsewhere in the Natural History. As we saw in Chapter One, Pliny’s narrative generally proceeds in the form of hierarchical lists of names. In the case of the art history, the figure of the individual artist is the organising principle that supports the progress of Pliny’s narrative; it is the material object to be listed and catalogued alongside and among the pigments, metals and rocks that make up the rest of the information content of Books  to . Each artist is named, and a list of his most famous works appended. This method of writing and conceptualising information is at the heart of the stories Pliny chooses and the emphases he places on named artists. Before we debate Pliny’s attributions in a wider art-historical discourse, we need to look more closely at the role they play in his own work. As we will see, reading Pliny’s facts in the context of his narrative provides a different spin on the information we take away. Perhaps the most important of Pliny’s contributions to the identification of any surviving work came with the discovery of the Laocoon sculpture group in . This semi-mythological moment of acclamation and recognition, complete with Michelangelo in attendance, has been revisited recently in several new studies engaging with the Laocoon and its legacy for the history of scholarship on Classical art. At the same time, the debate about Pliny’s attribution of a Laocoon sculpture group to the artists 

Ja´s Elsner, ‘Pausanias: A Greek Pilgrim in the Roman World’, Past and Present  (): –; Carey, Pliny’s Catalogue of Culture.

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Pliny’s Encyclopedia

Hagesander, Polydorus and Athenodorus of Rhodes has been the cause of much controversy over dating, particularly in the light of the finds at Sperlonga, where the same three sculptors’ names have been identified on an inscription. Both these strands of scholarship take Pliny as their starting point, but neither those interested in the history of scholarship nor those interested in the problems of dating have examined the role that the identification plays in Pliny’s own work. The discussion of the Laocoon comes at the end of Pliny’s run-through of famous names in marble sculpture, just before the round-up of related mirabilia, which he often uses as a means of closing a subject. The Laocoon appears as an example of a particular problem facing Pliny the art critic: There are not many more famous artists: although some have produced important works, the number of artists involved stood in the way of their success, since no one person can claim the glory and several people cannot be named [nuncupari] on an equal basis. An example of this is the Laocoon in the house of Titus, a statue that surpasses all other works of painting and sculpture. Carved from a single block, Laocoon and his children and the wonderful coils of the serpents were made by the supreme artists Hagesander, Polydorus and Athenodorus from Rhodes, according to their agreed plan. Similarly, the houses of the Caesars on the Palatine were filled with much-admired statues by Craterus and Pythodorus, Polydeuces and Hermolaus, a different Pythodorus and Artemone, and Aphrodisius of Tralles who worked alone. (Pliny HN .–)

The Laocoon, then, is an example of a work that highlights the difficulty posed by multi-authored works: although this is a masterpiece, Pliny finds it hard to place it within the framework of his discussion. The difficulty lies in according the praise to the correct authority and this is partly a problem with the nature of fame: the tendency of a single individual to attract more notice than a group. But there is a second part to the problem: nec plures pariter nuncupari possunt, when there are several artists, they cannot all be ‘called by name’ on an equal basis. This poses a significant problem for Pliny, given the structure of the Natural History. In Pliny’s art history, individual works of art are subordinated to the figure of individual artists. The artist is named in his proper place in the list, and the works of art associated with him are listed beneath. Multi-authored works make difficulties in this neat formula, and open up the possibility that such associations are not always possible. A clear hierarchy in the relationship of the artists makes things more straightforward: 

See, for example, the mirabilia rounding off the discussion of bronze at HN ., of types of soil at HN ., of stones at HN ..

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Pliny can list the work under the name of the most prominent artist, and include the subordinate workers alongside it. But the problem of placing a multi-authored work, or attributing the right amount of fame to the individual workers is indicative of a wider issue in Pliny’s work: it raises the spectre of anonymous art objects lurking on the edges of Pliny’s tidy catalogues. The Laocoon passage picks up on a section earlier in Book , at the end of Pliny’s treatment of Scopas’ work in marble. It is one of several places in the text where Pliny showcases the difficulties involved in making secure attributions. Pliny comments that a particular statue of Venus by Scopas would be enough to make the reputation of any other city that held it, but continues: Of course at Rome it is almost forgotten amid the huge number of works, and, more importantly, pressures of business and public duties put people off studying them carefully, since the appreciation of art requires time and peaceful surroundings. This is why no one even knows the artist of the Venus that the emperor Vespasian dedicated in the temple of Peace, though it is worthy of one of the ancient artists. There is just as much doubt about whether it was Scopas or Praxiteles who made the dying children of Niobe in the temple of Apollo Sosianus; similarly the Janus Pater, who was dedicated in his own temple after Augustus brought him back from Egypt, is by one or other of them, but the gilding has now made it harder to tell. The same thing is asked about the Cupid holding a thunderbolt in the Curia of Octavia, the only thing that is known for sure is that it is Alcibiades, the most distinguished beauty of his time. In the same building there are many fine works with no author: four Satyrs, one of which is carrying Liber Pater dressed in a palla on his shoulders, another is carrying Libera in the same way, the third is stopping a child from crying, and the fourth is giving a drink to another out of the mixing bowl, and the two Winds with their cloaks flowing out like sails. There is just as much debate about who made the statues in the Saepta of Olympus and Pan, and Chiron with Achilles, especially as their guards are subject to capital punishment. (Pliny HN .–)

After this digression, the narrative takes up where it left off, with the successors of Scopas and the building of the mausoleum, before moving into the list of artists who worked in groups that begins with the description of the Laocoon. In this passage we find that Pliny apparently cannot tell the difference between the styles of work produced by Scopas and Praxiteles, or at least not well enough to attribute any of these works to one or the other of them. This is potentially disturbing for modern critics, given the weight that has been given over the years to Pliny’s ability to tell us differences in style between the great masters of ancient sculpture, and the foundations

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Pliny’s Encyclopedia

this laid for a developmental theory of the progress of ancient art. But can Pliny’s concerns about attribution be mapped exactly onto our own: how much does it matter to Pliny whether it was particularly Scopas or particularly Praxiteles who made the Venus in the temple of Peace or the children of Niobe at Rome? Despite its unpromising appearance, this passage did feature in attempts to decide the provenance of the Children of Niobe sculptures housed in the Uffizi Gallery. As early as , Franc¸ois Perrier attributed them to either Scopas or Praxiteles, on the basis of this passage from Pliny. Winkelmann thought he could do better, and identified them as the work of Scopas – if not actually sculpted by him, then copied from his work exactly – although he was familiar with another head of Niobe, which seemed more Praxitelean. Later debates were more concerned with the question of whether or not they were Greek originals; the particular artist who produced them was less important than that they should avoid being Roman copies. The question of whether or not it actually was Scopas or Praxiteles who made any of the statues listed, is unanswerable – partly because it seems rhetorical in Pliny’s text. Although a desire to prevent loss of information and lack of Roman knowledge is a theme that runs through the Natural History, this passage is hardly a convincing indictment of Roman ignorance. If the greatness of Rome dwarfs the importance of the individual artist or sculpture, and Roman lack of interest leads to the loss of names to attach to the great works of implicitly Greek art on display about the city, this is simultaneously criticism and glorification. Scopas and Praxiteles seem to have been chosen more for their image as archetypal Greek ‘old masters’ than for any clear stylistic or circumstantial reasons. Perhaps it is not quite enough for a Roman connoisseur that a statue is ‘worthy of one of the ancient authors’ or perhaps it is Pliny’s own impetus to group works by artists that suggests the either/or choice. These important artworks enter the text under the aegis of Scopas’ oeuvre, and finish off the treatment of his work – it is only by making a link with one of the great names of antiquity, that Pliny could fit objects into the rigid framework of his collection. As we have seen, hierarchical listing is a key structural principle in the Natural History. In the Laocoon passage, part of Pliny’s problem was the difficulty in naming a number of artists on an equal basis; Pliny has less difficulty conceptualising and including works by several artists when there  

On the history of this group, see Haskell and Penny. Taste and the Antique. –. HN pr. .

Specialist readings of the Natural History

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is a clear inbuilt hierarchy in their relationship: that of father and son, or master and pupil. Yet when he tries to describe a composite work by Praxiteles and Calamis, where Praxiteles made the human and Calamis sculpted the chariot, he can only explain the relationship in terms of Praxiteles’ ‘kindness’ in helping Calamis, who was better at horses than humans. Even in works produced by a group of artists, the model that Pliny employs is that of the individual famous artist, assisted by a dependent underling, or in competition with his peers. Hierarchy is central to Pliny’s conception of nature, and competition is a key method of dramatising hierarchies, in the case of art history no less than in the natural world. One of the most famous stories of competition from the Natural History is that between Zeuxis and Parrhasius, which appears in Book , as part of Pliny’s explication of the life of Zeuxis and his place in the history of painting: Zeuxis’ equals and rivals were Timanthes, Androcydes, Eupompus and Parrhasius. The story goes that this last one went into competition with Zeuxis, and that Zeuxis produced a picture of grapes that was so good that birds flew up to them on the stage. But Parrhasius produced a painting of a curtain that was so realistic that Zeuxis, puffed up by the birds’ verdict, started asking for the curtain to be drawn to show the painting. When he realised his mistake, he was decently embarrassed, and conceded the contest, since he had fooled the birds, but Parrhasius had fooled an artist. (Pliny HN .)

This story has been used for contrasting purposes in introductory works on Greek art by Nigel Spivey and Robin Osborne. In the introduction to Greek Art, Spivey paraphrases this story alongside a similarly themed anecdote concerning Apelles and Protagoras as evidence for competitive rivalry among artists, by way of illustrating to the reader the different contexts in which art was conceived and produced in the ancient world. The story is seen to refer to existing patterns of interaction between painters, an important arena in which art functioned. Osborne also turns to Pliny for evidence, but of more elusive sort, reading this passage as illustrative of a particular theoretical attitude towards art: 



Colotes, Pheidias’ pupil, assists him in his work on the Zeus at Olympus HN ., .. The acknowledgement of collaboration is much more widespread in Pausanias’ work, although, here again, the expectation is of a clear hierarchical relationship: e.g. that of son or pupil HN .., ..; or a local artist and a famous artist HN .., ... Interestingly, groups of the lesser partners – sons or local artists – also appear unproblematically as collaborators: HN .., the sons of Polycles; HN .., Timocles and Timarchides, who are both from Attica.  Nigel Spivey, Greek Art (London: Phaidon, ), –. HN ..

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Pliny’s Encyclopedia

This is the founding text for the conception of art as mimesis, as the imitation of nature in such a way as to deceive the viewer into thinking that it is nature. But the attraction, and for critics like Plato the dangers, of mimesis lie as much with what the artist can do with such an image so rich in its reference.

Both of these points drawn from the story of Zeuxis take art-historical discourse as their wider frame of reference, rather than seeing it in the context of the narrative of the Natural History. Placing it firmly in the context of the rest of Pliny’s encyclopedia yields different readings, which impinge on the possibility of finding a self-contained discourse on art within the Natural History. In Book  of the Natural History, Zeuxis and Parrhasius are just two painters in a list that is organised chronologically, including all the best painters and the technical developments they brought about. It is the first of several lists which go together to make up an extremely hierarchical and rigidly categorised conceptualisation of art: the best painters of smaller works at HN .– are followed by painters of encaustic, organised according to a pupil–teacher lineage, which continues in a catalogue of the second best artists, their names and works, followed by a third division of names, sometimes with a tutor or place name added, the final list deals with women painters together with various mirabilia connected with painting. This emphasis on pinpointing the best thing and ordering by the most important item is common to the whole of the Natural History. On the large scale, the arrangement of the books reveals a hierarchy of cosmos, earth, humans, animals, plants, minerals; within the books, the same organisational principles apply – the elephant, to give one familiar example, starts the account of animals that begins Book : ‘The biggest is the elephant’, Pliny begins, ‘and most like humans in intellect.’ In this schema, the importance of competition, of rivalry for the best position, has a special significance, and the rigidness of anything’s place in the order of things is a tension between the thing immediately better and the thing immediately worse than it. Rivalry also has a special place in the conception of the world as a system of sympathia and antipathia, which Pliny tropes as a system of rivals and allies, particularly, perhaps, in the animal kingdom, as the famous battle of the snake and the elephant testifies. Here the tussle between antagonists leads to the death of both, but on the level of narrative, it is the snake who survives to resurface a  

Robin Osborne, Archaic and Classical Greek Art (Oxford, New York: Oxford Classical Press, ), . HN .–.

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few paragraphs later, continuing the pageant of information that makes up Pliny’s zoology. Similarly, the contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius is a transitional moment, a neat device which eases Parrhasius’ entry into the narrative when he becomes the central figure at HN .. Parrhasius in turn gives way to Timanthes, defeated in a competition to see who could paint the best Ajax. Competition is a linking mechanism; like the frequent recourse to teacher–student lineages, it guarantees the continuity of the story, while still insisting on a story of succession: the best wins, and the history of art progresses. The importance of hierarchy powers the lists that make up Pliny’s arthistorical narrative. Pliny likes to be seen to be getting things right, fixing the appropriate name in its proper place. But the question of accurate attribution, linking the right name with the right object, feeds into the broader concerns of the Natural History. The individual artist, whether arranged chronologically, by status, by type of work, by location, is the building block of the narrative. In fact, as we see in the Laocoon passage, Pliny often provides lists of artists with no further information, as though the act of naming them had a commemorative rather than a didactic function. We find these lists elsewhere in the Natural History, lists of stones, lists of plants, lists of places, named with little or no explanatory material, as though testifying to their existence was the sole aim of the text. The function of these lists is partly rhetorical: the promise of completeness that the text offers appears to be fulfilled by the seemingly pedantic heaps of dry lists with which Pliny intimidates his reader. But this cannot be all of the story. Knowing and supplying the right name is a preoccupation of Pliny in other contexts in the Natural History: we find complaints about the difficulty of understanding foreign names of places in Books  to , and frightening stories about the dangers of misnaming medicines appear throughout. It is not solely the practical applications of misnaming that concern Pliny, however. Correctly adducing the relationship between signifier and signified has important consequences for a narrative that is so dominated by lists of names and objects. Attribution, then, is a serious problem for Pliny in his chapters on art history. And this is something we need to be aware of in our discussions of the problems of using Pliny’s text to identify particular artworks. There are more reasons than straightforward accuracy for attributing a particular work to a particular person. The principle of listing artworks by named artist almost inevitably leads to a process of tidying up, where anonymous works are attracted towards famous names – and we can see traces of this process in Pliny’s difficulties with Scopas and Praxiteles and the array of

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Pliny’s Encyclopedia

unattributed statuary in Rome. Similarly, works which are the product of more than one artist have difficulty finding a place in Pliny’s schema, which privileges a neat correspondence between single object and single name. Despite these dangers, Pliny manages to present an exhaustive array of material, stretching the limits of his system in order to incorporate the range of what he knows. His struggle to attribute each object to a named artist and to avoid anonymous works produces an image of an active and thoughtful author not usually associated with the Natural History, a critic already grappling with the problems of attribution that later scholars were to demand his help in solving. specialist readings of the natural history The impulse towards understanding the Natural History as a work that can be broken down into movable sections comes early on in the history of its reception, and excerpts from the Natural History could find themselves co-opted into several types of text. Pliny’s material formed the basis of Solinus’ third-century compilation, Collectanea rerum memorabilium, which takes roughly three-quarters of its amazing facts from the pages of the Natural History. As recent scholarship has shown, Pliny continued to provide information for excerption in the massive collections of Isidore of Seville through to Vincent de Beauvais and encyclopedic scholars of the Middle Ages. His descriptions of animals, particularly mythological animals, are visible in the texts of medieval bestiaries. In these cases, the Plinian fact is divorced from its context in the Natural History as a whole, and proceeds to form new associations in the ranks of information that make up these later encyclopedias. Pliny stands in relation to Isidore of Seville in much the same position as Varro stands to Pliny: an authoritative precursor and a source of valuable information. The end result of the process of excerption in these cases is a new text, with a new authorial imprint. The highly successful books of extracts I have discussed here still bear witness to Pliny’s Natural History at the same time as they create a specialist work, geared to the needs of a specific audience. These books of extracts offer a very extreme example of specialist readings of the text, cutting and slicing through the unnecessary portions of text 

On the uses of Pliny for scholars of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, see Borst, Das Buch der Naturgeschichte; Chibnall, ‘Pliny’s Natural History and the Middle Ages’; French, ‘Pliny and Renaissance Medicine’; Mazzini, ‘Pr´esence de Pline dans le herbiers de l’antiquit´e et du haut moyen ´ aˆge’; J. Oroz Reta, ‘Pr´esence de Pline dans les “Etymologies” de Saint Isidore de S´eville’, Helmantica  (): –; G. Sabbah, ‘Pr´esence de la N.H. chez les auteurs de l’Antiquit´e tardive: l’exemple d’Ammien Marcellin, de Symmaque et d’Ausone’, Helmantica  (): –.

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with dexterous narrow-mindedness. The selective readings they concretise speak to the particular concerns of the discipline in which the new text will be used, producing a new and contingent version of what Pliny said. The Medicina Plinii’s short and useful summary of Pliny’s remedies was one of a large number of similar compilations prepared in the straitened circumstances of the late western Empire. It developed a life of its own, in which the practical needs of medical knowledge tempered any desire to be faithful to manuscript authority. In the changed circumstances of sixteenthcentury university medicine, we find some of the same tensions in Alban Thorer’s edition, which tries to find a balance between a commitment to careful editing practices and the desire to produce as useful a text as possible. Thorer is helped by his recognition that the Medicina was not written by Pliny himself: a pseudonymous compilation, even an old and useful one, did not demand the same degree of philological conservatism as the work of a Roman master. And this is presumably part of the reason why the Medicina had preserved Pliny’s name in its title in the first place. Some of the same issues of authority and usefulness surface again in Eugenie Sellers’ editing of The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art. Her excerpts are geared to the needs of late-nineteenth-century archaeology, focusing on named Greek artists at the expense of small-scale decorative art and, perhaps more significantly, the rhetorical or historical passages on the place of art in Roman society. Sellers seemed justified in finding a specialist discourse on art history in the Natural History, a discourse that could exist independently of the rest of the text and which mapped onto the concerns of modern criticism. The right of the excerptor to take individual passages in isolation was further justified by the idea that the Natural History was itself just a book of extracts, compiled indiscriminately from older and better sources. As we have seen, the logic that Quellenforschung rested on seems tendentious and dated – even at the time, the hard line that Sellers adopts in seeing Varro as Pliny’s main source was overtaken by M¨unzer’s Beitr¨age zur Quellenkritik der Naturgeschichte des Plinius just a year later. But although Quellenforschung is no longer a mainstream concern among readers of Pliny, its legacy is the image of the Natural History as a mindless book of extracts and Pliny as an unoriginal compiler. Before the late nineteenth century, Pliny is often criticised for being wrong, but his intellectual authority over his work is not questioned. As we saw in Chapter , even now, the image of the author as an inept compiler still 

M¨unzer, ‘Zur Kunstgeschichte des Plinius’, A letter in the Girton Archives shows M¨unzer was sent a copy of The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art, and duly thanks Sellers, telling her of his imminent new book in February : GCPP Strong / File .

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has consequences for how the Natural History is read, impinging on our ability to envisage novelty or scholarly polemic in the text, long after the system which produced the image has been discredited. I am not suggesting that all specialist readings of the Natural History are as drastically short-sighted as a book of extracts can be. Much important work has been done that examines Pliny’s text in segments with a sensitive eye for detail, and recent work has tried to set specialist concerns in the broader framework of the text’s aims. Despite this, there is a tendency to see the book as the sum of specialisms, loosely connected by an overall conception of nature or politics. As I have shown in the last section, however, the methods by which Pliny organises his information remain constant throughout and have a complex influence on how he conceptualises his material. In the case of art history, Pliny contributed to the founding discourse of the discipline, and continues to be used today as a source of information. The idea of Pliny as an active author, moulding information to the demands of his text has implications for how we understand the story of artists and their work that he provides. The interconnections between one subject and another happen at a more basic level than specialist readings tend to allow.

Conclusion: changing approaches to Pliny’s Natural History

The Natural History is a powerful text, not least for the fantastic claims it makes in its preface, the assurance that life itself is the subject of investigation. It has also had a pivotal role in brokering information to subsequent generations of scholars, right up to the present day. Requirements have changed, his centrality has been lost, but the usefulness of Pliny remains. I have engaged here with a particular model of using the Natural History, one that assimilates the text to a later tradition of encyclopedic writing. This book has been more concerned with the encyclopedia as book than with encyclopedism as the will to knowledge. There is more that might be said about Pliny’s encyclopedism, in the latter sense, the particular vision of complete knowledge he presents, and the philosophy that might support it. But before that is possible, we need to examine the assumptions about encyclopedias that we bring to the text, assumptions that have tended to make the Natural History an amateurish compilation, self-evident in its premises and its choices. I have traced the antecedents of this image of Pliny to a particular set of nineteenth-century concerns, when the rise of specialisation within the academy and the new demands of Quellenforschung produced the conditions for the emergence of Pliny as a dull and pedantic compiler of other scholars’ more interesting work. The Natural History is an interesting text in its own right, I have argued, not just for its information, not just for its political vision, but also for its intellectual stance in first-century Rome. Classicists will need to continue to use Pliny’s information, however, preferably finding ways to do justice to the text as a whole, while still picking out the relevant fact. Finding facts in Pliny’s text has become increasingly simple, with the development of reference tools that allow readers to pinpoint a passage or a word with ease and accuracy. However, we need to be careful about reading too much into Pliny’s summarium, naturalising it as a kind of index or table of contents, as though our concerns and those of its first readers could be directly mapped on to each other. If 

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Pliny’s Encyclopedia

the Natural History seems to lend itself to the removal of decontextualised fact, this may be more to do with Pliny’s structuring of his material and his conceptualisation of what it means to know about nature. For historians wanting to do justice to the context of Pliny’s facts, the basic structures of the text – the devices of naming and hierarchical listing – should be understood as an integral part of its meaning. Art historians in particular, need to integrate Pliny’s art history into the wider work, not just through its politics, an approach Sorcha Carey has pioneered, but by acknowledging that the art history is intimately bound to the rest of the work, guided by the same narrative principles. This approach affects the meanings we can find in Pliny’s information on artists and attributions in the Natural History; it also has implications for historians working in other fields who need to use the Natural History as source material. In my discussion of the text, I have focused on some of the key areas, medicine, art, geography, but swathes of Pliny’s information remain undiscussed, beyond the scope of this encounter. Pliny is a key figure in any history of how Classical knowledge impacted on later western thought, particularly on art, on medicine and on zoology. Unusually for a Classical author, there has been a great deal of work done on how Pliny was read and used in later periods, particularly in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The stories I have chosen to tell here about Pliny’s reception are necessarily only part of the history one might construct of reading the text. Unlike previous versions of this history, my story of Pliny’s reception has a polemical point: that not only have the ways in which the Natural History has been used had an impact on the meanings found in it, but the shape and content of the text have also changed to meet changing requirements. The Natural History we work with today is the product of these earlier readings; it is also subject to new pressures and new changes, in response to the demands of the ongoing project of reading it. We need to accept a place in the intellectual tradition of reading Pliny, however broken and multivocal that tradition might be, if we are to engage with the uniqueness of the Natural History in the spectrum of ancient historia, and the uniqueness of the processes by which we come to read it.  

Carey, Pliny’s Catalogue of Culture. See, for instance, Borst, Das Buch der Naturgeschichte; Chibnall, ‘Pliny’s Natural History and the Middle Ages’; Davies, ‘Making Sense of Pliny in the Quattrocento’; French, ‘Pliny and Renaissance Medicine’.

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Index

Achor  aetiology – Africa – Agathermus  Airs, Waters, Places  Aldrovandi, Ulisse  Alexander Trallianus  Alvisius, J. ,  Andr´e, J.  Antigonos – Antonius Castor ,  Apelles  Aristotle , , , , ,  and Francis Bacon ,  Historia Animalium  art history The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art –, , – in Natural History –, – Pliny and discipline of –, – artists in collaboration –, – in competition – problems in identifying – Asia – Aulus Gellius  Bacon, Francis , –, , – Advancement of Learning  De augmentis scientiarum  Novum Organon , – Baetica – Bailey, K.C.  Barbaro, Ermolao ,  Basel – Bayle, Pierre  Beagon, M. , , , –, –, ,  Beaujeu, J. ,  Beauvais, Vincent de ,  Benalius, B. ,  Benedicti, Hyeronimus de 

Beroaldo, F. ,  Blavis, T.  Boeotia  book production technologies and cohesiveness of ancient encyclopedias  and usefulness of retrieval devices , –, – Borges, Jorge Luis ,  Briscoe, J.  Britannici, A.  Britannici, G.  Brockhaus  Bussi, Giovanni Andrea –, , – Caesarius, Joannes –,  Camers, Joannes – capitula (chapter headings) – in early printed editions – Carey, S. , , , ,  Carter, P.  Castiglioni, Arturo , – Cato De agri cultura ,  Libri ad filium –, – admired by Pliny – as encyclopedist , –, – and enkuklios paideia – polemic against Greek doctors in  as polymath ,  Catullus  Caylus, Comte de ,  Celsus Artes –, – admired by Pliny – as encyclopedist –, – and enkuklios paideia –,  as medical writer ,  as polymath ,  Chambers’ Cyclopaedia  Cicero ,  Clarke, K. , 



Index Cochin, Nicolas  Codo˜ner, C. ,  Collenuccio, Pandolfo  Collison, R.  Columella , ,  Conrad Gesner  Conte, G.B. –, , , , –,  Corallus, S. ,  Cornelius Balbus  Crateuas  Cribiore, R. 



Encyclop´edie ou Dictionnaire raisonn´e des sciences, des arts et des m´etiers, Internet, Natural History, Wikipedia Encyclop´edie de France  Encyclop´edie ou Dictionnaire raisonn´e des sciences, des arts et des m´etiers , – enkuklios paideia – and encyclopedism – as general education – as ideal – in the Natural History – Erasmus –,  Eratosthenes ,  Ernout, A.  Europe – Extracts, Book of authority as problem in  closure as problem in –, –,  as commentary on source text  editorial choices in –, –, – Natural History as –,  and relationship to specialist field –, –, – see also Medicina Plinii; Sellers, Eugenie; Thorer, Alban

D’Alembert, Jean Le Rond , ,  Descartes, Ren´e  Detlefsen, D.  Dictionnaire de Tr´evoux ,  Diderot, Denis , – L’Histoire des deux Indes  Jacques le fataliste  Letters on Posterity – Lettre sur les aveugles a` l’usage de ceux qui voient  Le Neveu de Rameau  La Religieuse  Le Rˆeve de D’Alembert  as critic of art – editorial strategies of – and the Encyclop´edie – on Pliny , –, –, , – see also Encyclop´edie ou Dictionnaire raisonn´e des sciences, des arts et des m´etiers Dieckmann, H.  Diels, H.  Dionysus  Dioscorides , , , – D¨orpfeld, W.  Duris –

´ Falconet, Etienne-Maurice –, ,  Letters on Posterity – on Pausanias –, ,  on Pliny –, –,  Ferri, S.  Foucault, Michel , ,  Fowler, R.  fragments – French, R. –,  Furtw¨angler, Adolf –, 

education in antiquity and enkuklios paideia – and liberal arts – elephant – Enciclopedia Italiana  Encyclopaedia Britannica , , –, , ,  encyclopedias in antiquity –, – as genre –, –, –, –, – history of – and Internet  politics of –, – see also Brockhaus, Chambers’ Cyclopaedia, Enciclopedia Italiana, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclop´edie de France,

Gabba, E.  Galen  Garasse, Franc¸ois  Gargilius Martialis ,  geography – and empire –, –, – and history – Homeric  and periplus literature  place names and – and Stoicism  Goodyear, F.D.R. ,  Gorgias  Gratwick, A.S.  Grilli, A.  Grimal, P. , 

 Hadot, I.  Hahn, J.  Hanno  Hardouin, J.  headache , , –,  Healy, J.  Henderson, J.  Hippias ,  Hodgkin, A.  Homer ,  index –, –,  see also Camers, Johannes insects  Internet and encyclopedism ,  online encyclopedias  Irigoin, J.  iron , –, – Isager, J.  Iser, Wolfgang  Isidore of Seville ,  Jackson, R.  Jacob, C. ,  Jahn, O. –, ,  Jan, L. von ,  Jardine, L.  Jaucourt, Chevalier de  Jenson, N. ,  Jex-Blake, K.  Jones, W.H.S.  Jordan, H. , – K¨onig, G.  Landau, S. – language , –,  Laocoon sculpture group – Latium – Leoniceno, Niccol`o , –,  Lepidus  Lessing, G.E.  Levick, B.  lexicography – lists –, , – commemorative function of –,  and empire –, – in geographical writing  implying hierarchy –, –, – and narrative –, – and rhetoric of completeness ,  Lloyd, G.E.R. 

Index Lucretius , , ,  De rerum natura ,  luxuria , ,  Maillard, N. ,  Manzolus, M.  Marcellus  Marrou, H. , – Martial  Martianus Capella  Martindale, C.  Marucchi, A.  Marx, F.  Mayhoff, C. , –,  Medicina Plinii –, –, – differs from Natural History – edition of Alban Thorer – editorial choices in – manuscript tradition – and relationship to specialist field – see also Extracts, Book of; Physica Plinii; Thorer, Alban medicine , –, – and problem of authority – Merula, G.  Metrodorus  mirabilia credibility of –, –,  as entertainment  and natural world – place in Natural History ,  Pliny’s attitude towards – Morgan, T.  M¨unzer, F. ,  Murphy, T. , , –, , , –, ,  Mussolini  Naas, V. ,  names –, –, – aesthetics of –, – and aetiology – commemorative function of , – difficulty of identifying objects by –, –, – and empire – structural function in text –, – natural history , –, ,  Natural History (Historia Naturalis) Bud´e edition –, , ,  as entertaining , ,  errors in –, –, –, – incunable editions of – Loeb edition –, , ,  originality of –, –, –, , – politics of –, –, –

Index preface of –, – and science , –, – structure of –, , – Teubner edition , –, ,  unity of – usefulness of –, , , , , – see also art history, artists, geography, index, lists, medicine, mirabilia, names, Nature, Pliny the Elder, sources, summarium Nature as creator  humans’ place in ,  as source of wonder – as sum of its parts , –, ,  Newton, Charles  Novimagio, R.  Nutton, V.  ¨ Onnerfors, A. , ,  Origen  Osborne, R.  Ovid ,  Palmari, Giovanni Battista ,  Pannartz, A. , ,  Paracelsus ,  Parrhasius – Pasiteles  Pausanias as art historian ,  discussed by Diderot and Falconet , , , ,  pearls  P´epin, R.  Periplus Maris Erythraei  Perotti, Niccol`o ,  Perrier, Franc¸ois  Philo  Physica Plinii , , , – see also Medicina Plinii Pighinuccius, T. , , ,  plants – Plato  Plinius Secundus Iunior see Medicina Plinii Pliny the Elder biographical tradition –, – as pedant –, – as philosophe ,  as proto-scientist –, – see also Natural History Pliny the Younger , , , –, , ,  Polygnotos  Portilia, A. 



Poseidonius  Praxiteles as artist , –,  as search term , ,  Pseudo-Plutarch  Quellenforschung , –, – Quintilian –, – Rackham, H. ,  readers as active – humanist – Pliny as reader – Roman – reading methods –, – reception studies , –, – retrieval devices see capitula, index, summarium Ritschl, F. – Rosenmeyer, T.  Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  Sabbadini, R.  Sarazin, M.  Scaliger, Paul  Schliemann, H.  Schuchhardt, K.  Scopas – Sellers, Eugenie (Mrs Arthur Strong) –, –, ,  The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art –, , – see also Quellenforschung; Extracts, Book of Seneca , ,  Seznec, J.  Sillig, J.  Small, Jocelyn Penny  Smellie, William  snakes , –, – Solinus  Soranus  sources – Greek , , –, – Roman – Varro as ,  see also Quellenforschung specialist discourse and approaches to the Natural History –, – and books of extracts –, – vs encyclopedism , ,  Sperlonga  Spira, Johannes de , , , –



Index

Spivey, N.  Stewart, A.  Stoicism , , ,  Strabo , ,  Suetonius summarium of the Natural History and capitula (chapter headings) –, – in early printed editions – in modern critical editions – page layout of – transmission – usefulness as retrieval device –, –, – Susemihl, F.  Sweynheym, C. , , 

Varro Disciplinae –,  admired by Pliny – admired by Voltaire  as encyclopedist , – and enkuklios paideia –,  mocked by Pliny ,  as polymath ,  as source for Natural History , ,  Vasari, Giorgio ,  Vesalius, Andreas  Vidoueus, Petrus ,  Vitelli, G.  Vitruvius , – Voltaire , –,  Vons, J. , 

Tacitus , ,  Taub, L.  Theophrastus , , , , ,  Thorer, Alban (Torinus) , –,  Titus , –,  Traube, L. 

Wallace-Hadrill, A. , ,  Wikipedia ,  Winckelmann, J. , , ,  Winkler, R. , –

Ulrichs, Heinrich , 

Xenocrates – Zani, B.  Zeuxis –