In Our Time - Pliny's Natural History

Episode Date: July 8, 2010

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Pliny's Natural History.Some time in the first century AD, the Roman scholar Pliny the Elder published his Naturalis Historia, or Natural History, an enormous reference work which attempted to bring together knowledge on every subject under the sun. The Natural History contains information on zoology, astronomy, geography, minerals and mining and - unusually for a work of this period - a detailed treatise on the history of classical art. It's a fascinating snapshot of the state of human knowledge almost two millennia ago.Pliny's 37-volume magnum opus is one of the most extensive works of classical scholarship to survive in its entirety, and was being consulted by scholars as late as the Renaissance. It had a significant influence on intellectual history, and has provided the template for every subsequent encyclopaedia.With:Serafina CuomoReader in Roman History at Birkbeck, University of LondonAude DoodyLecturer in Classics at University College, DublinLiba TaubReader in the History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge UniversityProducer: Thomas Morris.

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For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, sometime in the middle of the first century AD, a retired Roman lawyer and soldier called Gaius Plinius Secondus, known to us today as Pliny the Elder, started work on an ambitious work of scholarship, Nothing quite like it had been attempted before.

Pliny's Natural History is a vast and comprehensive encyclopedia. The author attempted to include information on every subject of contemporary knowledge. His topics range from astronomy to zoology, medicine to metallur. There's even a section on art, the earliest detailed writing we have on that subject. The natural history is one of the most substantial surviving works of ancient literature. It was also one of the most influential. Isidore of Seville, the Venerable Beed and Plutarch were among later scholars who read it, and it provided a model for modern-day encyclopedias

with its wide range of subject matter, careful index and list of sources. We'll mean to discuss Pliny the Elder's natural history, a Seraphina Cuomo, reader in Roman history at Birkbeck, University of London, Lieber Taub, reader in the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge University, and O'Dudey Lecturer in Classics at University College, Dublin. Seraphina Cuomo, can you tell us a bit about Pliny's background

and the context into which he was born? Yes, he was born in Com. only Como in northern Italy. So he had what we could call an Italian provincial background. His family belonged to the elite, but not to the very top. So it belonged to what was called the equestrian order, which we could characterize as a kind of lower aristocracy. It has been said that if one only had this book, the natural history,

he would imagine Pliny the Elder as a kind of bookworm. So it's a bit surprising to know from biogyn. graphical sources that it was actually a very active man. He had a number of posts in the army. So he was active on campaigns in Germany, for instance. And it is during his military career that he met and became friends with the people who were going to be emperors later, like Vespation and Titus. It was also very active later on when after Nero's death, the Spatian came to power.

And so it was part of what we could call the inner circle of the emperor. So he was both a scholar and a politically and militarily active man. He was sent out as governor, as what we were now called a governor to various places. Yes, yes. So he was given a lot of responsibility. His travels were also an opportunity to gain further knowledge about different places, different people, different trees. and animals and everything that goes into the book. We know quite a lot about him,

and it comes from basically one source, his nephew, Pliny the Younger, doesn't it? Could you tell us about him and how we know so much about Pliny the Elder? Pliny the Young, his nephew, became a senator and was again quite close to the Emperor of his time, Trajan. He wrote a lot of letters,

so ten books of letters have come down to us. Two letters are almost exclusively dedicated to talking about his uncle. So the main biographical source for Pliny the Elder is his nephew. That means that the account may be biased towards a more positive picture. One letter describes Pliny the Elder's death. And another one is about the style of his life. And they picked him as a bit of a workaholic.

Because in that letter, Pliny says that his uncle spent every moment doing a list two things. having a bath and having a book read to him, moving through town to get to a certain place and having a book read to him. So he was trying to be active intellectually as well as on other fronts all at the same time. He got very little sleep. He got up at dawn to do his work. And he would complain to his nephew that every moment not spent doing something was a moment wasted. Leibateau, at some stage, we don't know when exactly, he sat down to write the natural history.

Do we have any idea why he sat down to do it? Well, it's not entirely clear. I mean, he doesn't tell us explicitly himself what he was intending to do, but he does give us some hints in the preface to the work. For example, he tells us that he's read books by 100 different authors, 2,000 different books. He also explains that he's collected. a lot of information. He gives us a figure in the preface of 20,000 pieces of information. And it's something that's a pattern throughout the work, is that he keeps telling us how much information

he's given us at different points. So there's a sense that he's collected a lot of information, and Sarah Afina explained. He was constantly having books read to him, and he'd collected all of this information and that he wants to make it accessible to others. And at the very end of the preface, he explains that he's put a table of contents at the beginning of the work and that it explains in great detail all of the contents so that if people are interested in a particular subject, they can go straight to that part of the work and ignore the rest. So one of his motivation seems to be to give access to all of this information he's accumulated. He also very clearly wants to celebrate nature, his conception of nature, and also Rome, Rome's achievement.

And at different points in the work, he makes it clear that he hopes that other people will also do research and contribute to our knowledge of the world. These numbers it keeps ringing out, and they're classifying, spoken sort of starkly on this program, it seemed like boasts, but in fact they need all underestimates, as I understand it. He said he found 20,000 new pieces of information. people like you and discovered that in fact it was near a 37,000.

What's going on there? Well, I don't know if it's a sort of modesty or not or if he's just using round numbers, for example, but I mean, he certainly is fascinated by numbers. He doesn't always give a round number also. I want to make that clear that sometimes it will be, it will seem to be a very

precise number. But as you've suggested, they don't add up to the number of 20,000. and it's much more than that. So he's in some cases explaining, as you indicated in the introduction, that he's done something that no one else has done before. He's accumulated all of these pieces of information, these observations and investigations.

And we get a sense that the weight of the numbers is meant to the authority, meant to add to the authority of what he's doing. Who did he think he was writing for? That's also not clear. He addresses the work to Titus, the emperor, but he says also in the preface that it's not a high-brow work that if farmers would read it or various artisans, that would be a good thing as well. It's very likely that he intended other men of his own order, other equestrians, other busy men with very busy, active, and

practical lives in the civic arena and elsewhere to make use of the book. And I want to emphasize make use rather than read, because he doesn't seem to expect that anyone will sit down and read through the whole work. So he expects if you're interested in farming, you'll pull out that section in agriculture and you read that and that'll do. Exactly. You get back to farming. And he took Hesiod's poem from that, didn't the 8th century.

And he... Exactly. In century BC, but yeah. He at one point suggests that, well, that he see it as the father or the grandfather of farming, and we can learn a great deal from him, even though he was Greek. But there's not a sense necessarily that you're going to read all of the works, all of the section of the work on agriculture. You might just only go to the sections that you're interested in.

Oh, Doody, are there any precedence for a work of this kind or on this scale? Any pre-1st-century-A. works that he might have drawn from? He tells us that there aren't. He tells us in the preface that he's the first Roman to do this, that he's the first of the Greeks also to attempt something on this scale that deals with all these topics. But we can see him standing really in two traditions. On the one hand, a Roman tradition of scholarship

that goes back to Cato the Elder, Varo, Kelsus to some extent. And these are figures that Pliny himself refers to probably the most often over the course of the work. And these are Roman scholars who are trying to talk about a lot of different branches of knowledge. So we see Cato beginning a tradition where he talks about agriculture. He writes on law. He writes on warfare. Varro also writes in a great range of subjects, including mathematical subjects, though that's lost.

And Pliny wants to be part of a Romanizing tradition of scholarship. But on the other hand, he's writing on nature, which is not a topic except in relation to farming that these other scholars seem to have dealt with. And in the tradition of writing on nature, he's looking back to great Greek precursors as well as a more recent Roman tradition. So people like Aristotle, like Theophrastus,

are great heroes for him in his work. People who he draws on looks back to. And Aristotle, I suppose, those would be one model for a writer who's interested in things. So in the biological or the theological works, we find Aristotle telling us bits of information about animals, about how they work. But in Aristotle, that's aiming out a conclusion.

He's gathering this information. He's creating a taxonomy in order to then make some sort of generalizing point. Pliny doesn't do that. For Pliny, he satisfied, as I believe we was saying, with these 20,000 facts. There's 37,000 facts and observations and so on. He wants to present this information on nature in a way that's usable, but he doesn't seem to have any grander purpose than making it available. And that seems to me to be quite new,

to be able to conceptualise nature as a series of, of discrete pieces of information that are observable. Did he take his passion for classification from Aristotle? Perhaps. He does have more recent Roman writers who are talking about nature. Seneca, only 15 years earlier, has done the natural questions, but that's a very different sort of work

that is much more interested in theorizing and ideas, concepts, Pliny is less interested in those sorts of discourses. I mean, to give the list of some idea of the vastness of it, he will tell us there are 36 different sorts of lettuces. And then next minute he'll be talking about the cosmology, not the next minute, of course not, in a different section of the book. He is really covering the ground of current knowledge, isn't he?

He is. Where did you get it all from? Well, he tells us... And we heard about the books, but again, he underestimated the books we're told. Anyway, never mind. Lots of books he read all were read to him. Yeah. And he tells us that it's very important to name your sources.

Pliny's concerned about plagiarism, which is nice to see even then. People were, he says he's read these books, and in reading them, he's noticed that recent scholars are taking information from elder scholars almost verbatim and not mentioning it, and that he thinks this is rude and bad practice and unscholarly. So he gives us the names, he says, in the beginning, of all the things that he has read. Now he doesn't necessarily tell us over the course of the work

where each individual piece of information is coming from but he has at the outset put his cards on the table and say I'm getting this from these writers and he divides them into foreign and Roman which is part of the sort of patriotic project that Levin mentioned So it is Rome versus the world is it really to show in a sense like the British Empire and there's a comparison isn't there

Most of the foreigners, the externi are actually Greek. And perhaps calling them foreign is a way of maybe disguising or glossing over a direct Greece versus Rome. So compiling it, there's the reading and there's the being read to.

And as Seraphina said at the beginning, and you're a picture, there's a going around the place as a governor, so seeing and getting reports on, well, when he was in the Bay of Naples, on the eruption of Vesuvius, which did for him. But that's one of reasons he went across just to look closely so what really happened. So those

are the sources and did people start sending stuff into him? Did people know that this man doing this thing we will send him material? We don't know I mean he certainly mentions recent bits of information that we have heard and it's not clear whether that's he

personally has heard it or it's come to the attention of people who know such things in Rome Seraphina now this is this is a big one I'm afraid but we've got to tackle it. It's made a bit of 37 separate books of natural history, and including the preface, which Leibis talked about. Could you give us some outline summary of what's contained in it?

I think it did it once or twice from lettuces to cosmology, but can you just do a much better job than that? The other two will correct me if I get this drunk. So after the introduction, there's a book on cosmology slash astronomy, which is also about divinity, because of course if you talk about the universe, You have to discuss God. And it's also about the earth, or more specifically, Mother Earth, as Pliny the Elder calls her.

After Book 2, we move down, if you like, from the universe down to Mother Earth. And there are several geographical books, which cover pretty much the extent of the known word. Pliny the Elder is very interested in the fringes as well. So in the so-called geographical books, we also have descriptions of strange. people who live down in Africa or as far possible in the direction of Asia as is possible to travel. And they're all rather unusual in that they have one foot or they have eyes in the middle of their stomachs and something like that. He talks very briefly also about Italy and Rome and he says he can really do justice to the subject, seen as Italy and especially Roma

at the center of the world. After that, he talks about animals, subdivided into aquatic animals, insects. Then he moves on to plants. And there's a lot about domestic plants such as the olive tree. One book is almost entirely dedicated

to vines, different qualities of wine and so on and so forth. He then has the so called the medical books, which are devoted to drugs that you can get from various sources, drugs taken from plants, drugs taken from animals and so on. And the last section is devoted to metals, gems, stone, types of stone. And it's there in this last book from 33 to 37 that he also talks about art.

because he talks about statues in the book that is devoted to different types of stone he talks about painting in the book that's about pigments and colours so the books about materials are also about the artistic work that can be derived from those materials well that was terrific thank you very much

uh... what's his attitude to the sources is rather discursive isn't he when he talks about girl design understand it. He, you think he's going to investigate gold and then he gives the Romans a telling off for wearing gold rings that the first person who wore a gold ring committed a crime against nature and so he's, in one sense, he's all over the place, although he holds steady to his purpose. But the all over the placeness gives it its flavor and some of it is lasting significance. I think you're exactly right when you say he's all over the place. And I think

that that's part of his purpose. I mean, as Seraphina indicated, I mean, he wants to to include everything that he can in his account. You mention of his deriding Romans for certain practices. That's also a theme throughout the work, and it's a very Roman sort of theme. Ode mentioned Cato the Elder, and he's probably looking to Cato as his guide there, admonishing his contemporaries for not doing enough work.

So when he says, I want more people to do more work, to read more books, he criticized his nephew, as we know, for not reading enough. But in terms of his sources, his attitude varies. In some cases, he's very believing of his sources. In other cases, he's not quite certain. And he'll say, I'm not quite certain whether or not we should believe this. He makes it clear that he wants to include as much information as is out there.

And I think that's a little bit about him being all over the place. He wants to include it all. But he's got a taste for the freakish, doesn't he? As Serafina indicated. Yes. And I think, you know, Serafina's mention of, you know, the fringes and the margins. This is also him being all over the place and wanting to include it all. So even stories that he's not quite certain about. So, for instance, at one point he tells us about different sorts of things that have rained from the sky. He tells us that blood rained from the sky, wool rained from the sky, bricks rained from the sky. In that small section there, in each case, he tells us that blood rained from the sky, he tells us that blood rained from the sky, he tells us. He tells us that blood rained from the sky, he tells us he said, he tells us he said, he said, he case, he tells us essentially when and where it was noticed that this happened. Almost that if you don't believe me, you can go and check. He doesn't give a source, but he says on this date and in this place. So he's making it clear that he might be a little skeptical.

And if we had to say one thing about the book, it's a book of ancient science, the bringing it together of the state of science at the time. What does it reveal about the state of scientific knowledge about 2,000 years ago? Well, I'm not sure that Pliny is very scientific in our terms. Obviously, it's difficult to go back and say what's science and what isn't in antiquity. But I think what's different about Pliny's take on this as opposed to even Seneca, is that he is more interested in gathering information than he is in telling us, you know, generalizing from that information. so that for us Pliny is terribly useful because we can see information from other sources coming through.

We can find out, well, this is one method that they use to do mining. We can find out this is an idea of, this is some sort of cosmological theory that we wouldn't otherwise have access to. But it's not in Pliny's text universalized into any sort of. of concrete theory. So he's more, we can find out some stuff from him, but not maybe what Pliny's own theory is. Pliny's idea of nature, even, which you think in a book on natural history,

he would at some point tell us what he means by nature. He doesn't. I mean, he refers to nature in different ways over the course of the work. Nature is both a, as, semi-divine figure and also something that is inherent in each individual object that he talks about. So plenty is more useful for us getting to other sources,

but not necessarily a statement, certainly not in his own right, of what science might have meant for a first century Roman. I'd like to come back to nature in a moment, but Serafina, can I just ask you to give us more detail on one of the, book. Say the book on astronomy. Just to tell listeners the detail he went into what world he was talking about what knowledge came to him and so on.

If you could just spend some time on what he had to summarize what he had to say about astronomy. So the book is an interesting mix because he seems to have had access to some what we would call good scientific sources. So for instance, he cited

Aparkos was, we could say, the main astronomer before Ptolemy came on the scene. And the first two hipparchus more than once, almost as if he was actually familiar with his work. There is some mathematics in it. Again, we tend to think of scientific astronomy as mathematical astronomy. And book two does contain some measurements to do with the cycles of the planets, the orbits, how long the time is that the planet takes to come.

back to its original position, things like that. But at the same time, this is mixed in, as we would see it, with a lot of other considerations. He talks about religion. It talks about the role of men in nature and in the universe. He comments on the appropriateness or morality of engaging in some parts of astronomy, such as, for instance, measure in the universe. He thinks it's not okay to measure the size of the universe.

it's madness because doing that man is overstep in his boundaries. He also talks about what we could call meteorological phenomena, such as earthquakes, thunderbolts. And he gives natural explanations for them. So while talking about divinity, the God that he has in mind is basically identifiable with nature herself. is a rather more skeptical about the traditional gods. So he explains why the thunderbolts got attributed to Jupiter.

That's because maybe through a chain of causes, thunderbolts are physically caused by the planet, Jupiter, and that's what led to the myth. So on our terms, as Od was saying, maybe that's not what we would call astronomy. It doesn't normally get included in histories of astronomy. But if we are just interested in what they saw as knowledge, I think it's actually very representative of an attitude where science is not separated from ethics.

Knowledge is always seen as a moral enterprise. You always have to reflect on the moral consequences and implications of what you're doing. And nature is justice isn't this separated thing out there. that you observe, men and nature are totally meshed with each other in an ambiguous way. So by knowing nature, you're really knowing also yourself. Can we just take that further? One of the government concepts is nature. What did he understand by the term and how did it influence his approach?

Serafina set us in that direction. Can we just push it on a bit? Well, yes, absolutely, and I'd like to refer both back to what Serafina and Ode mentioned in terms of the idea of the diviners, of nature, the pervasiveness of nature. Ode suggested that he doesn't ever give us a very clear-cut definition. Serapino was referring to book two. At the very beginning of that book, he says that his project is about the world and that the world is divine and that it's finite but it has some qualities of being infinite. Can we just say the born thing? When he's saying divine, he's living in

the Christian, where it's the beginning of the Christian era, is it divine in the Christian sense or is divine in the Romans worshipping their own God's sense? What does he mean by divine? I think what he means by divine is that it's eternal, that it's not going to end. And that it also,

and I think this is a way that we can almost understand what he's doing as praising nature, almost hymning nature. His work is certainly to praise nature. And as Serafina was indicating, human beings are part of nature and for Pliny very central to nature. And that interaction between humans and nature is a lot of what he is addressing and the ethical component, not in our sense necessarily of ethics, but in how we do things. So I mentioned Cato the Elder earlier, doing serious work, working hard, not being lazy.

Ode mentioned Seneca. he also has these themes in his work on the natural questions. So this is all of a piece. And the idea that nature is beneficent towards us, because we're the center of nature, we're the focus of nature for plenty, but also nature might be cruel or ignorant of us at certain times. I don't think that it's worship in the Christian sense of worship,

but it's also a sense of awe. and you mentioned earlier that there are sometimes these quite amazing things that he describes, and he wants us to be amazed, that diversity and richness of nature is something to be admired, praised, and taken notice of. Just to maybe push that a bit further even, does he see nature, he sees nature as something existing, of course, but that can be disrupted and disturbed and even destroyed? If I'm right, you think taking minerals out of the earth is depriving the earth of something that it should not be deprived of. Yes. Pliny sees a world in which humans are at the centre

and as Levis said, nature has organised the world for the benefit of humans. But the trade-off is that humans can't go against nature and mining, seafaring, being too ingenious, Serafina was saying in trying to measure the universe, these are acts that are impious in a sort of a way that are going against the proper relationship between humans and nature, because nature is personified to some extent. She, and it's a she, is called a creator, a nurse. she's given qualities like being amused by things that she's created

created things for her own excitement like when he talks about insects as giving us insight the intricacy of the form of these tiny creatures gives us insight into the majesty and the creativeness of nature so nature is personified to some extent

and humans also have to live in accordance with nature. You use the phrase, I think, about the proper relationship with nature. Who measured it? How do you get his measurement about the proper relationship? Why did that come from? He never tells us. That's the way to do it? People have suggested that he's influenced by Stoic philosophy.

This is Mary Began, has talked about this. That Pliny is following in a tradition that Seneca again is, probably the most famous, certainly the most famous Roman that we have, to have also talked about nature in this tradition, and it may be chiming in with that. Sharifina. He also insists on the notion of utility or usefulness. So anything that's done to nature in the name of just pleasure or luxury or greedness,

that's wrong. But if something is done for usefulness, then that's right. Again, he doesn't really define usefulness, but that's one set of terms that he uses quite a lot. When he talks about art and architecture as a spin-off from talking about minerals and matter, he also brings in the comparisons between Greece and Rome. The Romans wanted to look down on the Greeks but found, damn it, they couldn't, because the Greeks were very good at all this sort of stuff. So can you discuss that a bit?

the intellectual rivalry? Yes, the intellectual rivalry had been going on for a really long time, so it doesn't start with Pliny. But Pliny is very well aware of what has gone before him. So, in Osat, he's threading a very fine line and a line that has been walked on before. His characterization of the Greeks is often not very complementary, so he says that they're vain,

that they're always ready to praise themselves, but at the same time, he has to acknowledge all that they've done, especially in a field like art and architecture. I think one of what this is as the unique selling points of the Romans that the Greeks didn't necessarily have in his view is again utility and closeness to nature. When he talks about architectural marvels, he knocks down not literally, things like the obelisks, okay, that's Egyptian, because they were just created for the vanity of kings.

But the greatest architectural marvel of all is the sewers in Rome, the cloaca maxima, which was produced actually quite early, still under the kings of Rome. That's not what you would call beautiful, but if you look at the usefulness of that, that should be praised and appreciated about, a lot of other things. Can we come to

the, sorry, did you say some? I was just going to say that one of the things that he expects or wishes would happen is that Romans would use the opportunity of empire to gather and progress their knowledge of the natural world.

And he looks back though to a Greek, to Alexander the Great as a model for how this might happen. So even there, he sees a Greek model for how Romans ought be doing things. Partick of Alexander took artists with him. Yes. Yes. Can we talk

about the dramatic end to his life, starting with you, Leiber? We have an eruption. Pompeii erupt. He's commanding the fleet. He certainly did many things. At that stage, he's going to Orgy Townes. He's commanding the fleet at the northwest of the Bay of Naples. He sees it.

He wants to go and examine it immediately, with his slave, I suppose, talking about volcanoes in his ear as he goes at. But then he discovers it's a bigger thing, So he takes the fleet over to try to save as many, actually save as many people. And he himself is overcome and discovered dead with pencil and which hold notebook in his hand. Can you describe that rather better than I've done? Well, I don't know that I can, but I'd like to add a little bit to your account of it,

which is something that we get from his nephew, pointing out that it was not actually Pliny who first noticed what was going on, but Pliny's sister, his nephew's mother, that he was, I don't remember if he was in his bath, or about to take his bath, as usual. And actually she noticed that there was a large smoky cloud and mentioned this, and he had a look and thought, hmm, I'd like to investigate this a bit more, and went to do that.

And as you say, I think this is also a very important point that sometimes is alighted that he wasn't doing this out of scientific curiosity, a scientific investigation. He was also very keen to help people, to help rescue people as well. And there's that side of the story that is sometimes missed out, that human ethical part of it as well, not just something purely intellectual or purely about curiosity. And there are different explanations that are given for his death. And I don't think that we exactly know what caused it, whether or not it was the inhalation of noxic fumes. Some people have suggested a heart attack.

We don't really know. And I think the main point is that there have been different myths almost that have risen up around his death. But as you yourself indicated, it's not just him that's part of this. It's all of the people around him as well. I'm sorry, I didn't mean that. Sorry, did he, in fact, did his fleet, in fact, rescue people? Did they save a lot of people?

The only record of that? The only record we have is that letter that Pliny the Younger wrote. And he mentions that he did, but it doesn't really give you a lot of detail on that. The letter is addressed to Tacitus, the historian, which is also interesting, because Pliny really wants the achievements of his uncle, not just the literary achievements,

but the human ones, if you like, to go down in his story. And did that act amplify his reputation? It certainly did with later generations. We don't know much about the generations immediately after him, but already if you look at some 18th century paintings of the volcano erupting, there was a great century for the Vesuvians, a lot of them represent a historical scene with a little pliny the elder in the background about to die. So yes, I think he made him a famous.

figure. Can we talk about his work in subsequent generations, how it played into subsequent scholarship? I mentioned in the introduction Isidore of Saville and Plutarch and Bede as three of the scholars who appear to have read it. Which one of you, do you like

to start on that? Well, Pliny's information is hugely important to medieval scholars, and it breaks, the tradition early on goes in different ways. So on the one hand, you have the whole text of the natural history being transmitted, but he becomes part of other people's stories. So you have Isidore of Seville using him, Vincent of Beauvais and so on, but he also, different

parts of the book, get transmitted separately. So you have from the fourth century a medicine of Pliny, you've got astronomical excerpts, and you have him moving into the medieval bestiary traditions. And these were books that talked about, nature, but gave his information on animals that could be understood allegorically. So you mentioned Pliny in a Christian tradition, and this is where we start seeing his information becoming used in a Christian context. So something like the story of the elephant and the snake, which Pliny tells in book 8, where you have this combat between snakes and elephants in India where snakes hide up in trees

and jump down on elephants, and they fight together. like a gladiatorial pair for nature's amusement, and the elephant bashes the snake off the tree, and so on. In this new context, that becomes a metaphor for Jesus and the devil, where Jesus is an elephant. I'm not entirely sure how it works,

but Jesus is an elephant and the devil is the snake. So we find his information surfacing in new contexts that make a different sense of what he told us. Would you like to take that on? Well, I think one of the things I'd also like to emphasize and going back to Pliny's own emphasis on numbers, is that it was a very widely disseminated work. There are over 200 manuscripts of it that survive,

and that is really a huge number. I mean, we have some very important ancient works of which there's only two manuscripts, for instance. So that it was being copied and used by so many people is really very extraordinary and also of a very long period of time. And as Ode has indicated, in some cases only certain sections were copied out.

And this goes back to Pliny himself in his preface, saying you may only be interested in a certain section. You can go to the table of contents. And if you wished, that's the section you could ask your servant or slave or hire someone to copy out for you. Sir David? Yes. I mean, also the moment the work was printed for the first time, which is the second half of the 15th century, by the time the 15th century, by the time the 15th century was over, 15 editions had been produced and reprinted. So in terms of numbers, there was a huge dissemination,

both in the manuscript and in the printed tradition. When did his observations begin to be severely questioned and his status as an observer, as a scientist, if we can use that word as yet uninvented at that time, actually brought low. When was that? Well, it's a long process, but one very significant moment is just with the end of the 15th,

century where you have what was called the attack on Pliny by a scholar called Leonocino who is the professor of medicine of Ferrara and he's possibly the first to start noticing mistakes in Pliny that he says are not just in the text

but actual Pliny has made an error in his understanding and that's a big moment. We know that Pliny sometimes criticized people for mining and interfering with nature in that way but I think we can also criticize ourselves as historian and not only ourselves, in terms of going to Plinyan mining the text for certain information,

having said that for some subjects, for instance, the art of the ancient world, he continues to be a very, very important source. So even though some of his information has been discounted for a long period of time, in other areas it's still taken very, very seriously. Would it be true to say that even though some of his information has been disproved, The fact that he and that a lot of others believed all that, 1,500 or 2,000 years ago, is in itself a culturally important fact. Oh, definitely, definitely.

In a sense, it's been around a lot longer than some of our scientific theories. I mean, quantum theory, who knows how long that we like, don't quote me on that, but you see what I'm saying. And also, what will always fascinate people and fascinated people through the generations, even when his mistakes were discovered was the curiosity that animated all of it. I was reading somewhere yesterday that Pliny walked around

in a permanent state of astonishment at what he was seeing. And that attitude of curiosity, which Aristotle also talked about, is I think still today something that scientists can identify with. And it was the basis of the formation of the role? society, wasn't it? 350 years ago.

That very word was used. Finally, briefly, do you think it could be called an encyclopedia? I'm afraid to have it be very brief. I've messed this timing up. Yes and no. Are you on the yes or the no side, Seraphina? No. I'm on the north side just because it's being called an encyclopedia far too often. I'm on the yes side, actually. I think that I'm with plenty in terms of saying that he was doing something new and something different, and that his method of organization and giving

us the table of contents for ease of reference, recognizing that we may not wish to read a whole thing, but just dip in and out, I think that was innovative. I think from our perspective, it's an encyclopedia, but it's not something that he would have had a concept of at the time. Thank you very much, O'Duddy, Safina Cuomo and Liba Taub. That's it for this season. We'll be back in September with a program on imaginary numbers. Thanks for listening.

If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others, such as Thinking Aloud, where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research. To find out more, visit bbc.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4.