Vita Vigilia Est
The strange life of the world’s oldest encyclopedia and its author, Pliny the Elder
Gaius Plinius Secundus--legionary officer, governor to four of the Emperor’s provinces, admiral of the Misenum fleet, friend of Emperor Vespasian--died choking on the toxic ash of Mount Vesuvius in the great eruption of AD 79, though unlike most of the dead, he was one of the very few who died while rushing towards the volcano. With his fleet already stationed at the Bay of Naples, he ordered his boats to approach Pompeii and Herculaneum and conduct rescue operations. Privately, he was also hoping to see something of a real volcanic eruption and write about it in his book.
It was an unusual book, just as Admiral Plinius was an unusual man. We know of no wife or children, no lovers, investments, entanglements, poetry, sports, or any of the other hobbies common to Roman aristocrats. He had a single, abiding passion: to learn about the natural world, and write it all down in one place. Plinius Secundus did not survive Vesuvius, but his little book did, all two thousand-odd pages of it, covering everything from the nature of the stars to the medicines of Egypt to a list of the happiest men who ever lived. Although volcanoes are absent, for obvious reasons, there isn’t much else that Plinius Secundus didn’t know about or record in his personal encyclopedia, the first of its kind, the Naturalis Historia.
We know it as Natural History, and its author as Pliny the Elder. (His nephew, Pliny the Younger, was a prolific writer of letters and provincial governor, best known today for his eyewitness account of Vesuvius’s eruption (he watched his uncle sail away to his death) and reports to Emperor Trajan concerning a troubling new cult in Bithynia that worshipped the dead rabbi Chrestus.) When we want to know what the ancient Greeks and Romans knew about nature--about geography, medicine, zoology, astronomy, anthropology, physics, botany, mining, magic, and more--we turn to Pliny the Elder. Casually skimming the book, which is the best way to read it, we learn about the spherical shape of the world, (II.1), the peoples of China, who grow cotton in their forests and shun the world (VI.54), the history of papyrus paper and the only account of its production still extant (XII.68), and the nature of elephants (VII.1).
Elephants are perhaps the best window into Pliny’s curious view of the world. Like many of the Romans, he is fascinated by them, sharing with obvious delight what he knows (and what he thinks he knows) about elephants. They are, he writes, the wisest animals: they understand human languages and customs; pray to the gods and perform sacred rites, especially to heal the sick; can distinguish between a human who is hunting them (they break off their tusks and flee, knowing that ivory is the hunter’s goal) and who is simply passing through (they offer directions, pointing with their trunk); they can learn table manners, daintily picking up hors d'oeuvres with their trunks; and mate in secret, because of their modesty, which is exemplary.“Indeed,” Pliny writes, “the elephant has qualities rarely apparent even in man, namely honesty, good sense, justice, and also respect for the stars, sun, and moon.” He is the first author to write that elephants are afraid of mice.
However much poetic or moral truth their might be to his writings on nature, Pliny is obviously wrong about a great deal of things. He lists his sources when he can (473 sources, all Greek and Roman, by translator John F. Healy’s count), cites hearsay when he cannot, and gives no citations at all when he seems to think something is obvious or beyond dispute, as when he writes that “Man is the only animal whose first experience of mating is accompanied by regret” (X.171). He occasionally makes Stoic asides on the weaknesses and stupidity of Romans today and their silly, feminine habits, like wearing cotton (XI.78), but for the most part, Pliny restricts himself to the facts, such as they are--all 20,000 of them, by his estimate.
But for all its facts and obsession with recording the oddnesses and extremities of the world, the weirdest thing about the Naturalis Historia is the book itself: its publication, its transmission, its author, and just what, exactly, he thought he was doing.
Everything we know about Pliny the Elder (AD 22 - 79) comes from the Natural History and a few pages of recollection by his nephew, Pliny the Younger (62 - c. 117). The elder Pliny was born around the year 22 to an aristocratic family in Como, at the northern edge of Italy. He was trained in the law, served as a military officer in Germany, and worked for some years as a lawyer. Harboring literary ambitions, but afraid to publish in the dangerous climate of the Julio-Claudian Caesars (Caligula, Claudius, Nero), he stuck to neutral topics like grammar and rhetoric. His fortunes were raised in 70 when his friend Vespasian became emperor, appointing Pliny to a string of high-profile governorships in France, Spain, and Africa. He died in the eruption of Vesuvius, as we have seen. Sometime in that last decade, between his governorships and his death by volcano, Pliny managed to write an entire encyclopedia by himself.
Unusually for an ancient author, we know something about his working methods. In Natural History’s introduction, Pliny claims that he did all of his writing during his terms of public service by squeezing it into nights, holidays and non-business hours, never wasting a single taxpayer’s sestertius. He hated sleep, preferring work. “Vita vigilia est,” he wrote--to live is to be awake. In all things, Pliny’s goal was efficiency: simple meals, cold baths, brief conversations, so that he could more quickly return to his notes and his writing. His servants were always reading to him as he ate, bathed, dressed, and traveled (he chastised his nephew for walking everywhere, preferring to take sedan chairs instead so that he could write on the go). He was always reading, writing, listening, gathering. Pliny the Younger was present for many of his uncle’s working sessions, always urgent and focused:
I remember once that one of his friends told a reader to go back and repeat a word he had mispronounced. ‘Couldn’t you understand him?’ asked my uncle. His friend admitted that he could. ‘Then why make him go back? Your interruption has lost us at least ten lines.’ (Letters, III.5)
By the time he died, Pliny had written seven books comprising 102 volumes. If Natural History’s 37 volumes are representative, then the complete published works of Pliny would probably run between five and six thousand pages. He also left his nephew 160 writing tablets, each covered on both sides with notes, data, and quotations. All of this was accomplished by the age of 55, in the off hours from his day-job as governor.
We know almost nothing about the first editions of Natural History: its price, availability, popularity, or readers. We don’t even know when it was published, or indeed if it was in a finished state when Pliny died. It must have been huge, though, with its 37 volumes, and horrendously expensive to copy out by hand, as all books were in Rome. The 2,000 or so Latin pages of the modern Loeb Library edition, if stapled end to end, would form a continuous scroll about 750 feet long (Loeb editions always feature the original language on the left, so there are no verso/recto considerations here). Roman scrolls were about twice as high, though, and spaces hadn’t been invented yet, so with the increased amount of writing per square foot, we’re probably looking at something closer to 300 feet. At 37 volumes, that’s around eight feet per scroll--but that’s very dense writing, with no spaces or paragraph breaks, a literal wall of text. No accounts survive of how proud owners of the first edition of Natural History carried their sets around, or kept them organized.
Ever the efficiency nut, Pliny must have known better than anyone how difficult his book was to handle. Most of the first volume, after the dedication and introduction, is dedicated to a table of contents and an index. This is more significant than it sounds: Pliny’s intra-book navigation guides are the earliest surviving models of a table of contents and index in western literature. Although we know that catalogues and lists for multiple books had existed centuries before, in the Library of Alexandria, the only surviving reference to a table of contents and index for a single book before Pliny the Elder is to the lost works of the grammarian Soranus--which we only know because Pliny tells us he’s using him as a model. No earlier index or table of contents in classical literature has been found or mentioned.
Needless to say, it’s not quite an index as we know it. Pliny lists the contents of the book volume by volume, describing the sections of each one in sequence from beginning to end. To go back to our favorite Volume, VIII, we read, in Philemon Holland’s Elizabethan translation:
Of land creatures: the good and commendable parts in Elephants: their capacity and understanding.
When Elephants were first yoked and put to draw.
The docilitie of Elephants, and their aptnesse to learne.
The clemency of Elephants: that they know their owne daungers. Also of the felnesse of the Tigre.
And so on down to the end of the volume, #58, Of beasts that live not in some places and #59, Of beasts hurtful to straungers. Then you get the contents of Volume IX from start to finish, and so on all the way to the end of Volume XXXVII. A reader of Pliny’s original Natural History would, most likely, keep the scroll of Volume I on hand at all times to consult. By the Middle Ages, when books were made in the familiar codex form instead of scrolls, the index was copied out after the introduction, which even in modern editions with small print would run to dozens of pages.
Needless to say, this wasn’t the easiest way to navigate a text. Without alphabetization or a clear organizing principle, the only way to “search” the index for a specific topic is to check the contents of any volume that might contain what you’re looking for, then scan the dozens of topics listed within. Sometimes this is simple, but often Pliny’s organization is haphazard and redundant; if you’re looking for information on, say, whales, are they with Volume IX, “Sea Creatures,” or Volume XXXI, “Aquatic Creatures”? Even within the index, the gap between the two would be several feet of papyrus to unroll, scan, and reroll. (For the record, whales are in Volume IX. Their mouths, Pliny writes, are on their foreheads.)
Even when you’ve narrowed it down to one volume, navigating Natural History’s index and contents is still a headache. Let’s say you want read the section in Volume II called Conjuring for to raise lightning. You’d roll up Volume I, grab Volume II, and start unrolling it, scanning the Latin wall of text from left to right. When the text starts to mention lightning, slow down; if you hit the section known in the index as Of monstrous and prodigious showres of raine, namely of milke, bloud, flesh, yron, wooll, bricke, and tyle you’ve gone too far. This would all take a bit longer than searching Wikipedia.
To be fair, Pliny was only doing the best he could with the only form of book he knew, the scroll. It would be centuries until the widespread adoption of the codex and alphabetization would allow the kind of book-spanning indices we’re used to, which allow easy cross-referencing and quick information retrieval. When all books are piles of scrolls laboriously copied by hand, you can hardly ask somebody to read through all 300 feet of them to count how many times Aristotle comes up, then back up and do the same for Armenia, Aruntius, Arsinoe… it’s no wonder nobody tried writing encyclopedias before Pliny.
Or did they? Here we enter a surprisingly contentious area of Pliny scholarship, at least historically. (I am especially relying here on Aude Doody, who writes as though this has been largely resolved in recent decades.) Was Pliny the inventor of the encyclopedia, or just the lucky survivor of a much larger tradition? There is a common notion, going back centuries, that Pliny was working in a Roman encyclopedic genre, with the authors Varro, Cato, and Celsus especially coming up as antecedents who also wrote exhaustive compilations of facts, data, and information for readers to retrieve in pieces rather than read entire. Almost nothing survives of these writers except for descriptions of their work, but if these can be trusted, then Pliny’s book is a different beast. Doody:
Recent work on Pliny's Natural History [has] divided ancient encyclopedias into two groups: those which deal with the natural world, and those which [discuss] the various arts - 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 20,000 facts but makes no attempt to teach anyone a particular discipline
As far as we can tell, Pliny is the first Roman author to present just the facts, give or take pages of Stoic digressions. But these aren’t the point as they are in Varro and the rest, who seemed to present their big compendia as school courses with definite moral and intellectual goals. Pliny states outright that the reason he designed the index was for all his readers “who do not need to peruse the whole work, but only have to look for whatever each needs.” This would hardly do if Pliny intended his whole book to be read in full. After all, he explicitly introduces his index as a tool to help readers so that they “do not need to peruse the whole work, but only have to look for whatever each needs” (I.33). We should trust Pliny, then, when he writes that “No Roman author has ever attempted the same project, nor has any Greek treated all these matters single-handed” (I.14). (As for the Greeks, there are plenty of other possible encyclopedists, especially Democritus, Aristotle, and the librarians of Alexandria, but what we have from each of them suffer the same constraints as Varro and the other Latin authors: their work cannot be skimmed like Pliny’s.)
Those Greeks and their tricky language seem to be the source of all this confusion. In his introduction, Pliny says that his book covers everything that the Greeks call an “all-around education” (I.14), using the Greek ἐγκύκλιος παιδεία. Enkyklios paideia--say that five times fast and you might see where this is going. In the Renaissance, when Pliny’s stock was high and imitating the ancients was all the rage, European scholars read Pliny’s introduction and assumed, when he used the Greek, that he was being fancy; Roman used Greek much as snobs use French in our era. They figured that Pliny was referencing a whole enkyklio-paideic tradition, and before too long, the word “encyclopedia” was entering all the European languages and straight-up encyclopedias were proliferating on shelves. Doody has good, exhaustive reasons to believe that ἐγκύκλιος παιδεία really just meant something like “education about all the usual stuff.”
For Pliny, there was no tradition, no genre, no predecessor: Natural History came first, not the encyclopedia. Wikipedia, Britannica, and all the other gigantic compendia of facts presented without (too much) editorializing, pedagogy, or grand conclusions come from the passions of Pliny the Elder.
OK, his book does have a relatively grand conclusion: “Greetings, Nature, mother of all creation, show me your favour in that I alone of Rome’s citizens have praised you in all your aspects” (XXXVII.205). One can imagine Pliny putting this down at the end of his great project and heaving a great sigh in the pre-dawn light before the day properly begins, with its meetings, memos, and all the other thousand tasks that would occupy his public hours that day, closing up his writing tablet for the last time, though of course his project was never done. It is, after all, conspicuously quiet on the matter of volcanoes.
Sources & Further Reading
Primary Plinies:
Natural History: A Selection (Penguin Classics, 1990) translated by John F. Healy. If you’re reading Pliny for pleasure or casual interest, you need an abridged version. Healy’s selection cuts out the dull bits of Pliny (there are many), focusing on the good, the weird, and the historically relevant, where Pliny is our major (or only) source, as in his description of papyrus. Healy’s translation is clear and natural, though he occasionally smooths out the Latin or cuts references that make it harder to read alongside specialist research.
The Historie of the Worlde, Commonly Called the Naturall Historie (1601, online), Philemon Holland’s freewheeling 1601 translation, which I have used a few times here mainly for the sheer, wild fun of its language. Start with his version of the elephants and tell me I’m wrong.
I don’t read Latin (yet…) but occasionally it was necessary to consult the original text of Naturalis Historia. The handiest online version I found was Bill Thayer’s at the University of Chicago’s website (link), typed from the original by hand (!!!).
All quotations from Pliny the Younger come from The Letters of the Younger Pliny translated by Betty Radice for Penguin Classics, specifically his letter about the elder Pliny’s working habits & bibliography (III.5) and the eruption of Vesuvius (VI.20).
Secondary Sources:
Daisy Dunn’s The Shadow of Vesuvius: A Life of Pliny is a model of Roman popular history which guided me to many of the more interesting bits of both Plinies and put their achievements in context.
My confidence in the relative lack of alphabetization and other textual organization in Classical literature, and why that makes Pliny so special, comes from A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order by Judith Flanders.
For the final section, I am quoting & working with Aude Doody’s ‘Pliny's "Natural History: Enkuklios Paideia" and the Ancient Encyclopedia’ from the Journal of the History of Ideas, January 2009, Vol. 70, No. 1, pp. 1-21. Stable link here.
All illustrations are drawn from this 1467 Florentine manuscript version of Naturalis Historia, scanned and preserved by the British Library here. This version belonged to the Medici family, and it shows. With the first printed version coming only two years later, this is likely one of the last manuscript versions ever copied out. You almost feel bad for the scribe.