Natural History

"The Natural History , written before 79 AD, is one of the key works of European Classical Antiquity, a foundation of the tradition that later became known as natural philosophy and that we now call science. Among Roman authors perhaps only Lucretius, who argued the world was made of atoms, has been as influential. The first thing to say about Pliny’s work is what a delightful and odd read it is. This huge compendium, which aims to describe the entire world, was, for the most part, taken as truth for nearly fifteen hundred years. To modern eyes it contains much that is bizarre or ludicrous as well as beautiful, and it shows a way of organizing knowledge that is very different from what we are used to today. Italo Calvino catches its essence in the introduction he wrote for the 1982 Italian translation, notably what he calls the Natural History’s “wealth of unexpected juxtapositions.” So, for example, Pliny classifies fishes as “Fish that have a pebble in their heads; Fish that hide in winter; Fish that feel the influence of stars. Extraordinary prices paid for certain fish.” A good example of bizarrely improbable claims is that the goby, a small fish that lives in a burrow on the seabed, could stop a fully manned trireme under full power from moving. But it would be a mistake to ridicule or belittle the Natural History . Yes, Pliny can be credulous. He reports that in Ethiopia there are winged horses with horns, and mantichora, which have the face of a man, the body of a lion, and the tail of a scorpion. There is also the catoblepas, to look into whose eyes causes the looker to fall dead. In India there are locusts three foot long and people use their legs for saws. But when it comes to matters he has seen with his own eyes, Pliny is generally a much better guide. He tries hard to get things right, and shows some very modern “common sense” in, for example, an outright dismissal of astrology. Pliny can be marvellously expressive. Calvino highlights, for instance, his account of the moon, “where the tone of heartfelt gratitude for this ʻsupreme heavenly body, the most familiar to those who live on earth, the remedy of darknessʼ joins with the agile functionality of the sentences to express [its] mechanism with crystal clarity.” For Pliny, Calvino writes, “nature is eternal and sacred and harmonious, but it leaves a wide margin for the emergence of inexplicable prodigious phenomena.” And it is his awareness of both that gifts us his over-riding quality: a sense of wonder. Pliny wrote of “magna ludentis naturae varietas” – “the great variety of nature at play” – and though of course ignorant of the mechanism of natural selection he had a sense of the grandeur of a process in which, as Charles Darwin put it, endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. And he would, I think, have agreed with Bertrand Russell’s observation of a “world full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.” Russell, a mathematician and logician, didn’t mean magic of the abracadabra kind or mysticism, but the miraculous in the original sense of that word as that which should be looked at in wonder and astonishment. (The Latin root, mirus , is thought to be derived from the Indo-European smei – to smile or laugh.) Pliny fits my theme because enthusiasm and joy about the astonishing nature of actual existence – and, indeed, the astonishing existence of actual nature – are needed in dark times as much as in times of hope. I think the Anthropocene is both. Not coincidentally, Pliny was a Stoic who, if we are to believe the account by his nephew, showed courage and kindness as well as enduring curiosity when his expedition to investigate the eruption of Vesuvius led to his death."

"Pliny covers a lot of ground! The Natural History was written in the first century AD and is a bit like going on a fantastical adventure trail through the natural world. He writes in detail about bees, covering everything from the division of labour inside the hive—some build, others polish…others prepare food — to the origin of honey: it is the saliva of stars, he writes, or the perspiration of the sky, or some kind of moisture produced by the air purging itself. Many Classical thinkers wrote about honeybees, and I especially love reading their descriptions for the role that their imaginations played. With Pliny, you can almost feel him filling the gaps in his knowledge with flights of fancy as he writes that honey falls to earth from a great height, picking up a great deal of dirt on the way down, sliding over foliage and becoming tainted by the juice of flowers—thereby explaining its different colours, scents and consistencies. Sometimes this guesswork proved surprisingly accurate. Aristotle wrote that honeybees are deaf—and so it was found, some thousands of years later, they lack an auditory system. In her book Bee, Claire Preston describes a common folklore belief that bees were terrified of thunder and lightning—and in fact they can sense when a storm is coming. So perhaps imagination can help lead us into new truths sometimes. A little fantasy has its place."