Pliny the Elder's Natural History: The Empire in the Encyclopedia

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P L I N Y T H E E L D E R ’ S N A TU R A L H I S T OR Y

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Pliny the Elder’s Natural History THE EMPIRE IN THE ENCYCLOPEDIA

TREVOR MURPHY

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Saõ Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York ß Trevor Murphy 2004 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 0–19–926288–8 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Typeset 10.5 on 12pt by Kolam Information Services Pvt. Ltd, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn.

For My Wife and Parents


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is a pleasant task to thank those who have helped me in writing this book. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust, and the Andrew Mellon Foundation provided financial support in writing the first version, and the University of California gave me a Humanities Research Fellowship to help me revise it. I owe a great debt both to John Henderson, my first reader, and to Shadi Bartsch, the chair of my dissertation committee. I am grateful to Rainer Hatoum in Berlin for invaluable bibliographical assistance, and to Ruth Jewett-Warner in Berkeley for her work in compiling the index. I have profited from the kindness and the suggestions of Maurizio Bettini, John Ferrari, Don Fowler, Laura Gibbs, Crawford Greenewalt, Mark Griffith, Charles Murgia, and Kate Toll. Lastly, my greatest thanks go to my wife, Yasmin Syed, whose criticism and advice have improved this work at almost every point.


CONTENTS

Abbreviations

x

Introduction:

Encyclopedia as Artefact

1

I. Reading the Natural History 1. The Shape of the Natural History 2. Knowledge as a Commodity

II.

29 49

The Ethnographies of the Natural History

3. Reading the Ethnographies 4. Triumphal Geography 5. After Rome: The Ends of the World

77 129 165

Conclusion:

194

Encyclopedias and Monuments

Bibliography

217

Index

225

ABBREVIATIONS

CIL CP CQ CR CW FGH

FHG GGM HRR HSCP ILS JRS Norden, Germanische Urgeschichte

RE

RhM Roscher

Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (Berlin, 1862–) Classical Philology Classical Quarterly Classical Review Classical World Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, ed. F. Jacoby, part I–II (Berlin, 1923–30); part III– (Leiden, 1940–) Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum, ed. C. Mu¨ller (Paris, 1874–83) Geographici Graeci Minores, ed. C. Mu¨ller (Paris, 1855–61) Historicorum Romanorum Reliquiae, ed. H. Peter (Leipzig, 1870–1906) Harvard Studies in Classical Philology Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae, ed. Hermann Dessau (Berlin, 1892–1916) Journal of Roman Studies E. Norden, Die germanische Urgeschichte in Tacitus Germania (Berlin, 1923) Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Enzyclopa¨die der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (Stuttgart, 1894–1978) Rheinisches Museum fu¨r Philologie W. H. Roscher, Ausfu¨hrliches Lexicon der griechischen und ro¨mischen Mythologie (Leipzig, 1884–1937)

Introduction: Encyclopedia as Artefact

A book that consists only of lists of facts can reveal as much about the culture that created it as a novel, a sculpture, or a tragedy. If there were such people as archaeologists of reference books whose purpose was reconstructing lost civilizations from no evidence but their encyclopedias, they would need two skills. The first would be inductive reasoning, the power of concentrating on the specific items in the lists so as to build up a society. But the bare information-content of the encyclopedia would take them only so far. Just as necessary would be the skill of looking at the principles on which the encyclopedia is constructed and deducing them from what does not appear in any list: the logic of that culture. The lists of facts would tell you the lost civilization’s place-names, its resort-towns, mines, and railroad schedules, but the principles that the encyclopedia uses to classify, group, and sequence information will tell you how it made sense of the world. In this way of reading, reference books, which we commonly think of as models of dullness and unreadability (as in ‘You might as well read the phone book’), can turn out to be extremely rich cultural artefacts. The structure of an encyclopedia’s taxonomies, its practical strategies for classifying knowledge, can betray a culture’s conceptions of what was similar and what was dissimilar, what belonged together and what was separable. Simply by including one thing and not another, a reference book marks subjects as either important, not-to-beacknowledged, edifying, or trivial. Omissions reveal what was too familiar or obvious for the encyclopedist to include. By ordering things in a certain sequence, the encyclopedia furnishes evidence about relative importance and grouping, distinguishing the necessary from the supplementary.

Introduction

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The earliest encyclopedia to have survived from the ancient world is a 37-volume book from first-century ad Rome, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History. Since it consists mostly of lists of facts, it has for a long time been rarely read, or more precisely, it has been read only for its information-value. Only recently has its richness as a cultural artefact begun to be appreciated. An exhaustive survey of the phenomena of nature, this encyclopedia is also an unparalleled guide to the cultural systems which the ancient Romans used to understand their world. It collects the phenomena of the universe and reassembles them as a universal Latin text, a book patterned after the vast empire that has made the universe available for knowing. It immerses the reader as no other book can in the traditions, fantasies, and prejudices through which the ancients observed the world. This is why I want to read the Natural History as a source for ancient Roman culture. 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. p l iny t h e eld e r To an archaeologist of reference books, the life of Pliny the Elder, the author of the Natural History, would be a profitable subject of study. Pliny’s implication in the dominant ideology of his time is clear not only in his encyclopedia, but also in his political career, his other writings, and even in his working habits. Pliny was born in Comum (modern Como) in northern Italy in ad 23 or 24, in the reign of the emperor Tiberius.1 He 1

The ancient sources for Pliny the Elder’s life are (a) three letters of his nephew, Letters 3.5, 6.16, and 6.20; (b) a capsule biography attributed to Suetonius; and (c) what has been inferred from brief remarks by the way in the Natural History. This last class of evidence is subject to some argument, because Pliny’s use of words and phrases like ‘I have seen’ (vidi) does not consistently mean he has seen something himself.


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was a wealthy man of the equestrian class, of which his career was a typical example:2 at first an officer holding different posts in the armies of Germania Inferior and Superior, he became a procurator—a civil service administrator acting as a financial agent for the emperor—in various Roman provinces. The provinces are not known for certain, but they included Spain (Hispania Tarraconensis) and Africa, and probably also two parts of Gaul (Gallia Narbonensis and Gallia Belgica).3 Eventually he returned to Italy to serve as some sort of adviser to the emperor, as well as being in charge of the Roman fleet at Misenum on the Bay of Naples. In addition to his official duties, he pleaded cases and was also a very prolific writer: besides the Natural History, he wrote books on history, the education of orators, linguistic problems, military tactics, and a biography of Pomponius Secundus, of consular rank, his patron. Thanks to a letter of Pliny’s nephew Pliny the Younger (Letters 3.5), we know more about the working habits of Pliny the Elder than those of any other ancient author. When not at his official duties, he devoted almost every moment to study. Sleeping little, he read or had a slave read to him continuously, and dictated excerpts of whatever caught his interest to a scribe.4 By keeping these teams of readers and scribes employed at note-taking continually—he preferred being carried in a litter to walking because he could not be read to while he walked— whether he was being massaged after a bath, eating, or travelling, he produced an immense quantity of notes, the raw materials of his books.5 Of his voracious reading, he said that no book is so bad that some part of it may not be put to use. 2 For a detailed reconstruction of Pliny’s career and associates, see Ronald Syme’s articles, ‘Pliny the Procurator’, HSCP 73 (1969), 201–36; and ‘Carrie`re et amis consulaires de Pline’, Helmantica, 38 (1987), 223–31. John F. Healy’s Pliny the Elder on Science and Technology (Oxford, 1999), 1–22 provides a recent conjectural survey of Pliny’s life, travels, and career based on references in the Natural History. 3 Syme, ‘Pliny the Procurator’, 208–18. 4 Raymond J. Starr, ‘Reading Aloud: Lectores and Roman Reading’, Classical Journal, 86 (1991), 339, 342. 5 Klaus Sallmann, Die Geographie des a¨lteren Plinius in ihrem Verha¨ltnis zu Varro: Versuch einer Quellenanalyse (Berlin, 1971), 171 provides a useful analysis of Pliny’s method of compilation from multiple sources, disproving the charge of earlier source critics (e.g. M. Rabenhorst, ‘Die indices auctorum

Introduction

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Pliny the Younger’s letter implies that his uncle prudently kept a low profile during the reign of Nero. After professional and literary retirement under Nero and the civil wars of a d 69, Pliny attracted the favour of the new Flavian rulers, Vespasian and his son and co-ruler Titus, whom Pliny had known in his early days in the army. Between 70 and 76 he held a series of procuratorships in various provinces.6 After this he seems to have been back in Italy again in a position as counsellor to Vespasian and Titus—his nephew calls it amicitia principum, ‘the friendship of the emperors’.7 This involved a standing appointment to confer with Vespasian, an early riser like Pliny, in the hours before daylight (Letters 3.5.7–9). He was also commander of one of the two imperial fleets of Italy, at Misenum on the Bay of Naples (Letters 6.16.4). This was an important office for a man of Pliny’s rank, but Syme speculates that it was not the most prestigious post he might have expected, and may have been a disappointment.8 At Misenum he witnessed the eruption of Vesuvius on 24 August, ad 79, the disaster that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum. Having approached to observe the eruption, he died, as his nephew tells us, when he was asphyxiated by volcanic gases. The pathos of Pliny’s death—the Roman student of Nature dying a martyr to scientific curiosity—is probably the most famous thing about him, but not many have noted that he meant not only to observe the eruption but also to rescue others in the neighbourhood (Letters 6.16.8–9). The image of Pliny as a protomartyr of empirical observation is appealing as an icon of ancient science, and as such it was the subject of many pictures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but it is misleading if taken as proof of the importance of the first-hand observation of nature in the Natural History. The science of the Natural History is much more a product of literary tradition than direct observation.9 I have said that Pliny’s career was typical of his class, but it was also very good preparation for writing a book like the und die wirklichen Quellen der Naturalis Historia des Plinius’, Philologus, 65 (1906), 567–603), that Pliny was dependent on a single source. 6 7 8 9

Syme, ‘Pliny the Procurator’, 210, 224–6. Ibid. 227. Ibid. G. E. R. Lloyd, Science, Folklore and Ideology (Cambridge, 1983), 136.


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Natural History. As stated above, the Natural History owes more to literary tradition than empirical observation. Instead of experimenting on or analysing what was under his nose, Pliny collated and repeated the descriptions of earlier writers. As regards factual content, almost all of the Natural History could have been written by a man who never set foot outside his library. But Pliny was not always in his library. As a Roman eques, he had spent a lifetime in the service of his empire, upholding and managing its power at both its periphery and its centre. At first a cavalry officer, then a provincial financial administrator, in direct contact with subject peoples, he would have had first-hand knowledge of the military and fiscal instruments that created and sustained Roman power. Then, far from the frontiers, as a counsellor helping to make policy for the Flavian emperors, he would have seen how government was conducted, and authority transmitted, over vast distances. In sum, he would have seen how knowledge of the periphery was gathered, how it was used locally, in what shape it was sent to the centre of power, and the uses to which it was put when it arrived there. His encyclopedia reflects this experience: for the Natural History, Roman power is what has united the world and opened it up to be looked at: Who would not suppose that when the world had been unified by the greatness of the Roman empire that life improved because of traffic of goods and the fellowship of a celebratory peace, and everything that had previously been hidden put forward for all to know? (14.2)10

This triumphalism is fundamental to the Natural History. Everything that was to be known about the world was only available in the first place to be collated and transmitted in an encyclopedia because of Roman power, to which, in turn, the encyclopedia was devoted to supporting. As I will show in Chapter 4, the authority that the Romans hold over the world the text describes is a recurrent theme of the Natural History. The stated subject of Pliny’s encyclopedia is Natura, Nature. The topics covered under this word include the cosmos, which in Pliny’s usage means astronomical, meteorological, and 10 All citations of the Natural History are from the Teubner text of Jahn and Mayhoff (1899–1906); translations from Greek and Latin, except as specified, are my own.

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Introduction

geological phenomena; the geography of the Earth; the diverse forms taken by human life, its achievements and limitations; animals of land, sea, and air; comparative anatomy; the vegetable kingdom; medicines; and last of all, minerals and metals, under which rubric fall the uses of metals and minerals in painting, sculpture, and architecture. These topics are distributed unevenly over thirty-six books. Beginning with the cosmos (bk. 2), the Natural History goes on to survey world geography (bks. 3–6), human beings (bk. 7), animals of land (bk. 8), water (bk. 9), and air (bk. 10), insects and anatomy (bk. 11), plants (bks. 12–19), medicines (bks. 20–32), and at last minerals (bks. 33–7).11 Within categories there are subsidiary movements: from starting-points in the west, the books of geography skirt the coasts of the world, go round the continents and come back again; animals are ranked from large to small (the elephant comes first in the book on land animals, sea-monsters and whales in the book on aquatic animals); minerals are ranked from precious to base (the first of the minerals to be treated is gold); and chronological order is also brought into play in the accounts of art history (in one section, 34. 49–93, the artists are even catalogued by their date, merit, and position in the alphabet).12 The first of the thirty-seven books is a long table of contents arranged according to book and subsection. Accompanying this list of contents is a list of the sources from which each book was compiled, book by book, which divides authors into Romans and foreigners. This immense table of contents is preceded by a preface addressed to Vespasian’s son Titus, which outlines the merits of Pliny’s work in very deferential tones. the natural histor y and th e r oma n imagina tion Because of its sheer size and breadth of coverage, the Natural History is an extremely important artefact of Roman culture. Insofar as it accommodates the banal as well as the grand, it has 11 There is a convenient illustration of how the Natural History is organized in Jacob Isager, The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art (Odense, 1991), 49. 12 William D. E. Coulson, review of J. J. Pollit, The Ancient View of Greek Art, in CW 69 (1976), 405.


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no rival as a guide to the cultural meanings of everyday things in ancient Rome: home remedies, insects, the eloquence of Cicero, fishponds, sewers, kitchen gardens, and Caesar—the heroic, the trivial, and the disgusting. In the pursuit of cultural meaning, fish and sewers are as valuable as Caesar and Cicero: they are all surrounded by fantasies, prejudices, and traditions. In the Natural History you can read about fish as portent, as commodity, as food, as medicine—not fish as they are, in short, but fish in their importance to the Romans. Italo Calvino has rightly termed Pliny’s books on animals an extension of the natural history of man, saying that in these books what Pliny is doing is taking us on a guided tour of the human imagination. An animal, whether real or imaginary, has a place of honor in the sphere of the imagination. As soon as it is named it takes on a dreamlike power, becoming an allegory, a symbol, an emblem.13

As Calvino points out, animals (and not just animals but also other phenomena of nature and cultural products—think of fire, wine, lightning, or gold) are bearers of cultural meaning. They live in the collective repository of our symbols as well as in the real world. These symbols can of course be studied for the qualities they denote individually (love, courage, greed, etc.) but also, and more interestingly, as game-pieces in larger systems of the imagination. Animals, plants, the elements, and other similar symbols are counters or vehicles that enable certain patterns of thought. When they are studied for what they enable us to think, these imaginative systems can lead us on in turn to important patterns of culture, the rules according to which the game-pieces are to be moved. This is just as true for us as for the ancients, but we know much less about the symbolic culture of antiquity than that of today because of the aristocratic bias of the surviving literary sources. The oratory of courts and schools, epic poetry and imperial history imply versions of Roman culture, but they value certain tones and registers and suppress others, embracing tragic and heroic codes while they exclude the banal, the commercial, the technical, and the trivial. Comedy and satire 13

Italo Calvino, ‘Man, the Sky, and the Elephant’, in The Uses of Literature, trans. Patrick Creagh (New York and London, 1986), 329.

Introduction

8

are more tolerant of trivialities, but they are bound to other, equally restrictive literary codes. The unique advantage of the Natural History lies in its comprehensiveness. If you want to know about how ancient mines in Spain were organized, or how wine caused the Gauls to invade Italy, or the uses of mugwort as a cure for disorders of the womb, you will find the answers here. They are not, in our terms, necessarily the right answers (I hope that no one these days is relying on the Natural History for medical advice), but they are Roman answers. It is the capaciousness of the Natural History that lets us see fantasy, science, prejudice, and tradition circulating inside the live organism of Roman culture. This is our opportunity to explore the symbolic world of the Romans in fields beyond the filters of more restrictive literary genres. In applying this kind of attention to the Natural History my approach differs from the two most thoughtful long studies on the subject, those of Sandra Citroni Marchetti14 and of Mary Beagon.15 The appearance of these books marked a departure from the methods of earlier readers of Pliny; they are distinguished by the unprecedented seriousness of their intellectual involvement with the Natural History, and my work owes much to their interpretations at several points. Both engage with the encyclopedia on its own terms in order to demonstrate its connections with Roman intellectual life, and in this my approach to reading the Natural History is much in their debt. In describing the relationship of Pliny to his intellectual background, both attempt to build up a coherent picture of Pliny from his book, surveying the text for given themes, collecting instances, and adducing parallel passages from other ancient texts for comparison. Here is where I take a different approach. In reading the Natural History it is of course natural to wonder how much of its author it reveals, or how far Pliny stands behind what he says. If the Natural History reports that the emperor Claudius owned a dead Egyptian centaur preserved in honey, it is natural 14

Sandra Citroni Marchetti, Plinio il Vecchio e la tradizione del moralismo Romano (Pisa, 1991). 15 Mary Beagon, Roman Nature: The Thought of Pliny the Elder (Oxford, 1992).


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to ask how Pliny knew this story or whether he believed it. An unbelievable report like this prompts us to wonder whether we are dealing with an individual voice, a unitary and coherent personality who stands to some degree as the guarantor of what we read. The man who wrote what we are reading, we would like to assume, speaks from an authority founded on some experience of the subject, preferably personal experience, or at least the experience of another source he trusted. It is natural to want to draw a conclusion about Pliny’s critical intelligence, Pliny’s credulity, Pliny’s credibility. Unfortunately the contours of Pliny’s relationship to his intellectual background are very hard to define, not so much because the intellectual background is in doubt, but because Pliny is. Remember what Pliny the Younger tells us about his uncle’s method of composing. The Natural History is the creation of a man who dictated to a slave on his right hand at the same time as he listened to a slave reading on his left. It is hardly surprising that it presents a surface that is uneven and inconsistent. The Natural History was less written than it was assembled, and as a consequence of this a unitary authorial voice is present only at intervals. Pliny’s book does not offer many fixed points for examining the intellectual profile of its author, because the author is to a large extent absent from the text. It is very difficult to recover a set of attitudes that are consistent and at the same time sufficiently individual to be regarded as evidence for the author’s own views. Truth is local in the Natural History. To make a rhetorical, moral, or scientific point, Pliny will accept a story as true in one place while sceptically dismissing it in another. To some questions of his belief or scepticism there are no answers. Can the tiny echeneis fish stop a ship in its course by clinging to its hull? Yes and no, says Pliny (9.79 vs. 32.2–4).16 Does the cinnamolgus bird weave cinnamon-twigs into nests that locals knock down with leaded arrows in order to get the spice for trade? The story 16 In the course of his survey of aquatic creatures (9.79), he is sceptical about the power of the echeneis to hold back ships by attaching itself to their hulls; in the preface to book 32, a purple passage in praise of the power of water, he has no doubts that one of these fish hindered Caligula’s ship as it sailed from Asturia to Antium (32.2–4).

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Introduction

is both false and true (10.97 vs. 12.85).17 Sandra Citroni Marchetti (p. 32) acutely observes that these self-contradictions often originate in the conflict between different rhetorical discourses of the Roman moralizing tradition, and sees the contradictions as obstacles to understanding the real core of Pliny’s thought. To my way of thinking, however, the problem is more complex. Where we might prefer a self-consistent and continuous voice, the Natural History is many-voiced: its authority is rooted in no single person’s experience of the world. It comes neither from life-experience nor from recognizable individuality, but a collage of cuttings from many different authorities, from Zoroaster, 5,000 years before the Trojan War, to Domitian, first- or secondor third-hand. Of the arranger of this collage there is precious little sign. Upon each reading, questions inevitably arise: how much of what he described had Pliny seen? How far did he test the statements he repeated? What did he believe? As a consequence, readers who want to find a unitary Pliny at the bottom of the Natural History will be driven to making an arbitrary division between the surface of the text, to be dismissed as merely rhetoric or tradition, and the real thoughts of the author. This means privileging whatever passages can be found that may contain authorial reflection—Pliny’s digressions, his preface to the Natural History, and the prefaces to each individual book—mining for a voice, a consistency, an individual perspective that is not elsewhere in evidence. However, what are taken to be Pliny’s real attitudes, when his rhetorical postures have been subtracted, can just as well be read as traditional rhetorical statements. All these privileged passages are expressed in the language of rhetorical exercises of previous generations. Though they may be stated in the first person, they are not necessarily more representative of the ‘real Pliny’ than the rest of the text, and there are no good grounds for privileging them over the rest of the book. There is more 17

At 10.97 Pliny says that cinnamon twigs are woven by the cinnamolgus, an Arabian bird, into nests, which the locals shoot down with leaded arrows for purposes of trade; at 12.85 he tells the same story only to deny it. These are only two of the instances where different passages in the Natural History contradict each other. Some other instances: 6.70 against 7.26 (location of the pygmies); 8.72 against 10.136 (pegasi).


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than one ‘Pliny’, that is, more than one perspective on Nature authorized by the text. Any reading that isolates a single passage from the Natural History and says of it ‘this is what Pliny thought in his heart’ risks limiting what is really a many-voiced text. The harder one looks for the real Pliny the farther he seems to retreat into clouds of self-contradiction, and the more any attempt to describe his intellectual position has to resort to terms like ‘eclecticism’ or ‘pragmatic Stoicism’. For this reason my interest is not in ascertaining the contours of an individual personality from the various intellectual postures of the Natural History, but in the encyclopedia itself, as a cultural artefact. The Natural History was never a pure vessel for transmitting knowledge, created in a vacuum for its own sake. It was an instance of knowledge given institutional form, for a purpose, created under particular social and political circumstances, and it still bears the marks of that creation. the wor ld, t h e bo ok , a n d t h e r e a d e r It is useful to ask whether the Natural History can accurately be referred to as an encyclopedia. In calling it this I may seem to be guilty of anachronism, an ahistorical attempt to map the values and assumptions attached to encyclopedias in modern times onto an artefact of ancient Roman culture without adjustment. The most cursory glance at the Natural History shows that it differs profoundly in organization, taxonomies, and referential scope from what we think of today as an encyclopedia. It is in many ways foreign to modern sensibilities, and hard for us to read; exactly how strange it is I will discuss in detail in Chapter 1. That said, it will be convenient to go on calling the Natural History an encyclopedia if we can define what we mean by the word. As a working formula I will define an encyclopedia as a selfcontained book that encapsulates a total or universal body of knowledge, organizing it in order to preserve it and make it accessible to a large audience.18 The Natural History deserves a 18 I have taken this definition, with additions and modifications of my own, from Anna Sigridur Arnar, Encyclopedism from Pliny to Borges (Chicago, 1990), p. xi.

Introduction

12

place in the history of such books, despite its obvious differences from modern encyclopedias. Like a modern encyclopedia, it aims at preserving and encapsulating a body of knowledge it deems comprehensive. Also like a modern encyclopedia, it imposes a kind of system on knowledge, demonstrating how a survey of the natural world can be broken down into different fields of inquiry. Admittedly, it does little to define the relations of different fields of knowledge in relation to each other, certainly much less than is customary in modern encyclopedias. Pliny’s book is more a series of lists of facts than a reasoned synthesis of the branches of knowledge, but all encyclopedias fall somewhere on a continuum between cataloguing the particularities of individual subjects, on the one hand, and, on the other, subordinating those particularities to the absolutism of an overarching classificatory system.19 Again like a modern encyclopedia, Pliny’s book is strongly marked by its function. It is meant not just for reading, but for a particular kind of reading, that is, reference or reading for use. Its form is intended to help the reader to catch sight of a subject and to isolate it from other subjects. To this end it includes a list of its own contents, explicitly marked as a means for readers to search the book (on tables of contents in antiquity, see Ch. 1, n. 1). Demarcating knowledge is a large part of the book’s function, a subject to which I shall return. Finally, the very terminology of encyclopedism reminds us of the continuity between Pliny and ourselves. We call comprehensive reference books ‘encyclopedias’ and not ‘Gardens’, ‘Theatres’, ‘Specula’, or ‘Syntaxes’ (to name just a few of ‘encyclopedia’s’ historical rivals), and so assimilate our books to the Greek tradition of encyclios paideia, ‘general education’ or ‘the knowledge befitting a free man’. In doing so, we also follow Pliny, who in his preface (14) defined the subject of his book as encyclios paideia. What Pliny meant by announcing this is not an easy question, and will be dealt with at the beginning of my Conclusion, but for now at least the linguistic coincidence between our term and Pliny’s is worth noting. The history of reference books goes back before the Romans, but encyclopedias in the sense I have just defined them do 19

Arnar, Encyclopedism, 11.


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not.20 The ancient Greeks, as Pliny says (pref. 14), did not write encyclopedias. For them, the idea of a single book with an allembracing referential field did not yet exist. This was an innovation in the packaging of knowledge for its consumers that was left for the Romans to make. The first Roman encyclopedia may have been written by Cato the Elder in the second century bc, but the evidence is doubtful. The Disciplinae, the first encyclopedia that is securely attested, was written by the polymath Marcus Terentius Varro at the end of the Republic. The second encyclopedia, titled Artes, was written a generation later by A. Cornelius Celsus in the reign of Tiberius. In the late Republic, Roman authors were still digesting the collected scholarship of Greece and the Hellenistic kingdoms even as they accumulated new knowledge of their own. They had only begun to bring about a synthesis between these new ideas and traditional Roman culture. The early Principate saw the achievement of that synthesis. Writers like Varro, Celsus, and Pliny gave written form to the traditional learning the Greeks called encyclios paideia, and pieced together the beginnings of a new intellectual tradition. These encyclopedias mark the intersection of the learning of Classical and Hellenistic Greece with the old traditions of Rome. To this mixture Pliny added new knowledge brought back from the ends of the world by Roman traders and armies. Given that the first known encyclopedias were Roman, and that the first surviving encyclopedia is Pliny’s, an understanding of the Natural History seems particularly important for the study of Roman culture. There is something peculiarly Roman about encyclopedias. We may note first the authoritarian relationship between the encyclopedia and the knowledge it contains. This can be perceived in the encyclopedia’s aspirations toward rounded perfection, that is, its ambition to describe everything about a subject, to circumscribe and parcel it into useful categories and subcategories. Consider in particular the way in which the encyclopedia objectifies knowledge by removing it from the uncertain sphere of play and speculation, and 20 For a general survey of ancient encyclopedic books and authors with what may be called encyclopedic tendencies, see Pierre Grimal, ‘Encyclope´dies Antiques’, Journal of World History, 9 (1966), 459–82.

14

Introduction

rendering it stable and quantified. The tacit promise of the encyclopedia is completeness, reliability, and authority: that is, the authorized version of knowledge. Ostensibly, reference books are only about knowledge. The form of a reference book directs the reader toward knowledge and away from questions of how the knowledge is transmitted, or why these facts are to be transmitted but not those; it is a form premised on the assumption that knowledge is to be used and valued for its own sake, as a thing discrete from the text that delivers it. But reference books are also a species of institutional knowledge. It is legitimate to note of them how and to what ends these books function in their social context, regardless of the truth or usefulness of their contents. As institutional knowledge, these texts carry on certain tacit negotiations with their readers, asserting and sustaining their authority, implying or inscribing their proper use and audience. This way of studying institutional knowledge is associated above all with Michel Foucault,21 but has also been applied to the field of Roman history with outstanding success by Claude Nicolet, who has studied the function of the discipline of geography in Roman political culture, analysing the iconography of portraits of Pompey and Caesar, the world-map of Agrippa, and Augustus’ great sundial on the Campus Martius, in their social context.22 Andrew Wallace-Hadrill has also applied this kind of reading to the institutional knowledge of ancient Rome.23 Analysing the nature of cultural change in Rome between the late Republic and the early Principate, he locates it in a change in the sources of intellectual authority. The most tangible cultural revolution of Augustus’ time was, according to WallaceHadrill, in the sources of authority in disciplines of knowledge like jurisprudence, divination, and geography, where sources of authority shifted from the aristocrats who had controlled know21

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York, 1970). Claude Nicolet, Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire, trans. H. Leclerc (Ann Arbor, 1991), 15–24 for Porticus Vipsania and the Res Gestae. See pp. 37–41 for the use of images of the orbis terrarum by Pompey and Caesar. 23 Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Mutatio morum: The Idea of a Cultural Revolution’, in Thomas Habinek and Alessandro Schiesaro (eds.), The Roman Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, 1997), 3–22. 22


15

ledge in the Republic to specialists publishing their knowledge under the aegis of the emperor. In this functionalist analysis, we can imagine a triangle existing between the Natural History, the world that it described, and the rulers to whom the book was dedicated. If the natural phenomena of the world were the Natural History’s subject, it was, as I shall discuss in Chapter 3, the military, political, and commercial power of Rome that made the world available as material for the book. The role of the encyclopedia in its turn was to assimilate the diverse kinds of information that Pliny’s research had turned up and to express them in terms digestible by Roman culture. In this manner new knowledge was integrated into the received wisdom, tradition, prejudice, and different scales of value that, taken as a body, are the shared symbolic system by means of which every culture functions. The Natural History was a filter through which new information passed to become part of the collective intellectual property of the Roman empire. It was also a convenient repository for preserving what was long familiar: much of the contents of the Natural History was already common knowledge to its original audience. In addition to their function of transmitting what is unfamiliar, reference works have value for their users insofar as they impose system on, and provide easy means of reacquaintance with, what is already known. So Pliny’s encyclopedia repeated orthodox knowledge and judgments as well as information that would have been new to its first readers. In some cases, Pliny says that he is divulging facts never known before. When, for instance, he describes the island of Taprobane (modern Sri Lanka), in one of the ethnographies I consider in detail in Chapter 3, he distinguishes his account from all those that have gone before: ‘This much about Taprobane has been recorded by the ancients, but more accurate news reached us in the reign of Claudius, when ambassadors from that island actually made a voyage here’ (6.84). In the case of this land, which was new and strange to the original audience of the Natural History, beyond the horizon of their experience or at its unfamiliar periphery, the function of the encyclopedia was to assimilate the unfamiliar to the operating system of Roman culture.

16

Introduction

In other cases the function of the encyclopedia is to repeat reassuring touchstones of received wisdom. This is the effect of the Natural History’s encomium of Cicero, which occurs in the context of a long survey of outstanding persons from Roman and foreign history. The purpose of this survey is to define the extremities of the human condition: the strongest men, people who never laughed, persons with remarkable wisdom, marvellous powers of sight or memory, spontaneous changes of sex, and many other anecdotes (7.81–164). In the course of this, among many facts of a bizarre and surprising character, Pliny stops to praise Cicero as the supreme example of Roman intellectual achievement: How could I forgive myself if I omitted you, Marcus Tullius? . . . From your genius Catiline fled into exile, you had Mark Antony proscribed. Hail to you, first to be named ‘Father of the Fatherland’, first to have earned a triumph in civilian dress and the laurel crown of speech, parent of eloquence and of the literature of the Latins. Equally, as the dictator Caesar, once your enemy, wrote of you, you won a laurel crown greater than that of any triumph, insofar as it is a greater thing to have expanded to such an extent the boundaries of the Roman intellect than the boundaries of its power. (7.116–17)

This judgment is qualitatively different from the multitude of astonishing anecdotes in Natural History 7. The reading public of the Flavian period would not have been astonished at Pliny’s evaluation of Cicero, which is just an elaborate way of restating a commonplace truth. The effect, which unites reader and author in shared recognition of a traditional standard, is to provoke not wonder, but complicity. Repeating pillars of consensus like this implies the existence of a community of readers with a shared identity, united by their acceptance of certain familiar touchstones of cultural value. So the function of the encyclopedia in this case is to establish the identity of its readers as participants in the same culture; that is, Roman culture. Complicity of this sort, if well established, might in turn make readers more receptive to the truth of the newly acquired knowledge the encyclopedia had to impart.


17

mastery As an author who was continually reading, being read to, taking notes, or giving dictation, Pliny can be imagined as the still point at the centre of a furious dance of knowledge gathered from several disciplines. His literary career was the point of convergence for different fields of knowledge, which he collated in order to synthesize his own books. His nephew’s sketch of Pliny’s working life (Letters 3.5) emphasizes not only what a hard worker he was, but also his diverse interests as an author: as well as the Natural History, he wrote a biography of his patron Pomponius Secundus, and books on cavalry fighting technique (De Iaculatione Equestri, one book), correct Latinity (De Dubio Sermone, eight books), the education of an orator (Studiosi, three books in six volumes), the military history of the empire’s north-eastern frontiers (Bella Germaniae, twenty books), and the political history of the Julio-Claudian principate (A fine Aufidi Bassi, thirty-one books). The common denominator of all these lost books is a single subject: power. The biography of Secundus described the life of a Roman consul; the two histories dealt with the authority of the empire at war and at home, while military technique, language, and rhetoric, the topics of the three handbooks, were all disciplines of selfadvancement for all ambitious Roman men of Pliny’s time. Pliny the Younger describes his uncle’s decision to write on language and rhetoric as a way of staying out of trouble in the reign of Nero ‘when our slavery made every discipline that was a little too free or proud a risk’ (Letters 3.5.5). However, though these were topics less likely to give offence to the emperor than history, they were not in the broader sense apolitical. To learn first the rules of correct speech and then the principles of rhetoric was the greater part of a Roman education: no man of the elite classes could perform the functions of his rank, let alone hope to advance to a higher rank, without thorough training in these disciplines. We may conclude that power was the common denominator of all Pliny’s lost works, and his literary career was devoted to weaving together and synthesizing various Roman disciplines and practices of mastery. What about the Natural History, then? As an ordered redaction of the world’s natural phenomena,

18

Introduction

its simple existence is a demonstration of great authorial power. In addition, it is my contention that ethnographical and geographical digressions, the wonder-tales of distant lands and nations that make up a large portion of the Natural History, are instrumental in supporting this power. It is in these passages that the book demarcates the fields of knowledge over which it claims authority. It is when Pliny’s encyclopedia ventures into the margins of knowledge, that is, into descriptions of freaks of nature, distant peoples, and the fringes of geography, that the political dimensions of this ancient reference book are most easily seen. the necessity of marvels The point of a reference book is to show mastery over knowledge and aid the reader to similar mastery; the reference book makes knowledge available to the reader by dividing, subdividing, and delimiting it, as well as by organizing it around a central point, and it is a curious fact that one means of achieving this mastery consists of the wonder-tales that occur on nearly every page of the Natural History. To illustrate the process of the division and subdivision of knowledge in the Natural History, and the role of the wondertale in supplementing this process, let us look at four short passages from book 11 that come from a long account of animal anatomy. In the first of these, we are introduced to the bladder: ‘No egg-laying animals have bladders except the tortoise, no animals except those that have lungs containing blood, no animals except those with feet’ (11.208). This establishes a field of reference, the set of animals having bladders, in a manner much like that of Aristotle (compare On the Parts of Animals 3.8).24 What must be noted here is the importance of negation and contrast in establishing this field of reference. As I shall show in Chapter 1, antithesis and contrast are essential organizational tools for the Natural History, and their import24

For a more detailed account of principles of classification in Aristotle’s books on animals, and the specific uses to which he put differentiae and dichotomies, see Roger French, Ancient Natural History (London and New York, 1994), 44–5, 56–8.


19

ance explains many of the book’s structural peculiarities. Now, it is as an extension of such contrast that wonder-tales come into play: contrast with the abnormal circumscribes the limits of the field of the normal by implication. See, for instance, the function of the unusual anecdote in how the Natural History introduces the topic of the arm: ‘Not everyone has arms of equal length; it is a fact that in Caligula’s gladiatorial school the Thracian Studiosus had a longer right’ (11.245). So the limits of what may be known about the arm are defined when what is normal is established by contrast with the extreme. The same is true for the hand: ‘Some people have six fingers on each hand. It is recorded that Marcus Coranius, of patrician family, had two daughters called Six-Fingers for this reason’ (11.244). So certain limits of possibility are established—it may be conceived that a hand may have six fingers, but it is not to be conceived that it has toes, or eyes, or ears. This is the functional importance of the wonder-tales that crop up everywhere in the Natural History: for each field of reference, they circumscribe a defining limit, a decorum of the imagination. A final example from book 11, Pliny’s account of cheese (a subset of lactation), illustrates the same tendency: How strange that the barbarian tribes that subsist on milk either have not known or have scorned for so many centuries the benefit of cheese, but in general coagulate milk into a tasty sour substance and fatty butter . . . [one sentence on butter is omitted ] . . . The cheese most highly prized at Rome, where the goods of all nations are judged side by side, is from the provinces of Nemausus . . . [a list of other notable cheeses] . . . It can be understood that there is salt in pasture grasses, even when not apparent, because all cheeses become saltier as they age, even as they regain their fresh taste when soaked in vinegar and thyme. They say that Zoroaster lived for twenty years in the desert on a cheese so compounded as not to suffer the effects of age. (11.239–42)

This describes cheese not only in terms of its qualities (where the best cheese comes from; different varieties; the effects of age on the taste and how to reverse them) but also by contrast with what it is not (barbarians make curds and butter instead of cheese) as well as by a wonderful story (Zoroaster in the desert) that establishes by implication the limits of cheese’s longevity and nourishing power. Notice also how clear the Natural History is about the central point around which knowledge is

20

Introduction

organized: it is Rome. Rome is the place to which everything flows, where everything is present for the having, where the value of the good things of all countries is unequivocally established.25 In this the Natural History is like an ancient map of the world: taking Rome as its centre, it surrounds the kingdom of certain knowledge with a border of exotic and wonderful tales. It is a picture very much like the world-maps described by Plutarch in a preface to his Life of Theseus, who, being a figure from legend rather than history, provides Plutarch with an opportunity for clarifying his methodology: Just as in geographies historians squeeze what they don’t know into the outer fringes of the maps, appending explanations such as ‘Beyond are waterless beast-infested sands, or obscure marsh, or Scythian cold, or frozen sea’, so regarding the writing of my Parallel Lives, in passing through the periods accessible to probable argument and reachable by circumstantial history, it was well for me to say of the earlier epochs ‘Beyond are the regions of drama and marvel, where poets and mythologists dwell, and there is no reliability or certainty.’ (Plutarch, Theseus 1.1)

So Plutarch sorts knowledge into two categories: what can be reliably known, history, as opposed to the uncertain margins of knowledge into which he is now venturing. He goes on to acknowledge that despite his best attempts to refine myth into truth, the mythical element cannot be entirely expunged from his Life of Theseus. Nevertheless, the attempt is still worth making: the series of Parallel Lives must have a starting-point, as the map must have an edge. The inclusion of Theseus in the Parallel Lives, along with the equally dubious Romulus, Numa, and Lycurgus, demonstrates that such unverifiable knowledge has value, although of a different kind from the value of more verifiable knowledge. It is not truth, but a gesture signifying completeness. The strange mixture of truth and marvel in the Natural History is not as singular as it may seem at first, as a brief consideration of ancient intellectual history will show. Many 25 For a discussion of the Rome-centred universe of Strabo, which resembles Pliny’s in many ways, see Katherine Clarke, Between Geography and History: Hellenistic Constructions of the Roman World (Oxford, 1999), 216–24.


21

of the authors credited in antiquity with the definitive accounts of important fields of knowledge are also associated with unbelievable stories. Though lying and telling the truth are regarded as incompatible, the two have always shared a surprising amount of common ground; this is true especially of the books that laid the foundations of institutional knowledge in the ancient world. Long before Pliny, unbelievable tales about wonderful things were a familiar feature of the foundational texts of Greek literature. The poems of Homer and Hesiod were at the same time regarded as definitive authorities in the field of myth-history,26 and also notorious for telling terrible lies about the gods;27 similar attacks were levelled at Herodotus, author of the foundational history-book.28 In ancient historiography, Herodotus’ History set a precedent for digressive narratives; the thread of his history wandered repeatedly into fields of wonderful and marginal knowledge, accommodating in the central frame of the war between the Persians and the Greeks varied accounts of the geography and ethnography of Egypt, India, Libya, and Scythia. After Herodotus, geographical and ethnographical digressions, often of a fantastic and entertaining character, were an expected feature of ancient histories. In the Hellenistic period appeared the first works of paradoxography, as the genre is called by modern scholars; compilations of strange anecdotes whose formal aim was nothing more than popular entertainment, they were entirely concerned with this sort of material.29 By and large these paradoxographic books are lists of striking or wonderful phenomena unconnected by commentary. This item from Antigonus of Carystus is typical: ‘Heracleides the critic in his book on the cities of Greece says that all over Mount Pelion there grows a fruit-bearing thorn, and if anyone crushes the fruit in oil and water and 26

The classic statement is that of Herodotus (2.53), who credits Homer and Hesiod with having given the Greeks ‘the origin of the gods, differentiating their names, honours, skills, and indicating their appearances’. 27 For example, Plato, Republic 2.377–8; Euthyphro 5e–6d. 28 Starting with Thucydides (1.20.3–21.1), who attacks ‘some of the Greeks’ with neglecting the pursuit of truth in favour of ‘the legendary element’ (to muthodes). 29 For an introduction to paradoxographic literature, see William Hansen, Phlegon of Tralles’ Book of Marvels (Exeter, 1996), 1–22, and Mary Beagon, Roman Nature, 8–11.

22

Introduction

anoints his own or another’s body, he will be immune to cold in winter.’30 Callimachus, author of the Pinakes, the catalogue that imposed a definitive taxonomy on the body of ancient Greek literature and so made it accessible for the first time in a systematic way, also composed the single most influential paradoxographic collection of antiquity.31 There is a functional logic in the pairing of Pinakes and the book of wonder-tales, as P. M. Fraser saw in describing Callimachus’ paradoxographic work as an extension of methods of his pinacographic works.32 The connection is not simply formal, in that both texts consisted of long lists. Rather, wonder-tales, by their simple presence in a text, implied the extremities of what can be known. Part of the pleasure of reading about wonders is that, after the initial effect of strangeness and astonishment, they are reassuring and even soothing. Despite its sensationalism, paradoxography has a conservative tendency. Reading about the uncertain margins of knowledge contributes by contrast to the solidity of the familiar and the close-at-hand. By way of example, there is another paradoxographic work, On Marvellous Things Heard, which is attributed to Aristotle,33 and admirers of the philosopher have deplored the attachment of this shapeless and credulous treatise to the body of his works. But On Marvellous Things Heard was attributed to Aristotle for a reason. In fact, this book of marvels is wholly compatible with the Lyceum’s project of inquiry and research. Shapeless and credulous it may be, but its marvels imply certain boundaries around what may be known about natural phenomena. By the logic of the mastery of knowledge in antiquity, On Marvellous Things Heard was in fact a fitting supplement to Aristotle’s body of authoritative works in a variety of disciplines. map, tr iumph and encyclop edia I have already compared the Natural History to an ancient map, a kernel of secure knowledge delimited with wonders. It can also 30 Antigonus no. 19, in Alexander Gianni, Paradoxographorum Graecorum Reliquiae (Milan, 1965), 130. 31 Gianni, Paradoxographorum, 15–20. 32 P. M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria (Oxford, 1972), i. 454. 33 Gianni, Paradoxographorum, 221–314.


23

be usefully compared to another institution for knowing the world, the triumphal procession. As I shall show in Chapter 4, map, triumph, and encyclopedia are all premised on the centrality of the city of Rome. As in a map of the world, the universe of the Natural History is surveyed from the perspective of Rome, and in fact the world is visible precisely because of the light shed by Rome, while the margins of the known are demarcated by wonder-tales. Nicolet asserts that the origins of Roman mapmaking are to be found in ‘the triumphal exhibition in temples of maps of victories’,34 and in addition to this genealogical similarity the map and the triumph had similar functions in Roman culture. The Roman triumph, which is usually thought of in ceremonial and religious terms, as a way of marking the return to the city of Rome of a victorious commander and his army, was also an instrument for educating the Roman people about the lands and nations newly added to its dominion. In the triumph, the fringes of the Roman world were exhibited to the centre, not just as plundered coin, works of art, and other treasures, but also as river-gods from the conquered territory, great maps on placards, images of mountains and cities, trains of handsome captives, exotic animals and plants never seen before in Italy. There are suggestive connections between these three ancient technologies for knowing the world, maps and triumphs, on the one hand, and the Natural History, on the other. The Natural History used maps and triumphs as documentation: the Fasti Triumphales (official records of triumphs) are cited by Pliny as source-material; so is the definitive world-map of Pliny’s time, the one set up (7–2 bc ) by Augustus and his son-in-law Marcus Agrippa in the Porticus Vipsania next to the Campus Martius.35 Furthermore, map, triumph, and encyclopedia were all educational media, and as such functioned as intermediaries between the authority of Rome and the world it ruled. As Nicolet has suggested,36 Agrippa’s world-map, which was intended to ‘set 34

Nicolet, Space, Geography, and Politics 111. Nicolet, Space, Geography, and Politics, 99, citing Pliny, Natural History 3.16–17. Nicolet’s interpretation of this monument as a world-map has been challenged by Kai Brodersen (Terra Cognita: Studien zur ro¨mischen Raumerfassung (Zurich, 1995), 268–87), who sees it as an inscribed list of distances and place-names. See Ch. 4, n. 57 for further discussion. 36 Ibid. 114. 35

24

Introduction

the world before the eyes of the city of Rome’ (Natural History 3.17), was intended by Augustus to be a pictorial appendix to his Res Gestae inscription; it was a public monument illustrating the achievements of the princeps, a contribution to his iconography.37 Like this map, triumphs were products of Roman power that took place only in the event of the conquests they performed and documented. But they were also educational instruments that smoothed the way for further expansions of power, in that they acquainted the city with new fields that it had come to possess for exploitation and administration. So I have chosen to concentrate on the importance of ethnography and geography in the Natural History. The function of a reference book is to digest knowledge, assimilating it into something useful to the culture of its readers; this is a process especially visible in the case of knowledge of the foreign, that is, the fields of geography and ethnography. Taking as my evidence the geographical and ethnographical elements of the Natural History, I will make a case for interpreting Pliny’s encyclopedia as both political document and artefact of empire. The Natural History is inextricably bound up with Roman power; it is the symbol and fruition of that power. A triangle existed between Pliny’s book, the world that it describes, and the ruling powers to whom the book was dedicated. If the world was the encyclopedia’s subject, it is the military, political, and commercial power of Rome that made the world available as material for the book. In turn, the raw data that the world provided were assimilated by the encyclopedia and integrated into the ideological order of the Roman empire, the shared symbolic system of Roman culture. summar y A brief summary of my argument. Chapter 1 examines the taxonomies on which the Natural History is built, and argues that contrast, antithesis, and the association of ideas are essential principles of how the encyclopedia arranges its contents. The deep structure of the encyclopedia is determined by an aesthetic that prizes metaphor and associative drift, variety of 37 Nicolet, Space, Geography, and Politics, 15–24, citing Pliny, Natural History 3.16–17.


25

content and arrangement. Chapter 2 addresses the mutually beneficial relationship between Roman expansionism and the Natural History. It is Roman power that is credited with allowing the encyclopedia’s global design to be executed, but at the same time the knowledge made accessible by Roman power is thought to be in danger of being erased by the pressures of a unified world. Chapter 3 turns to the ethnographies themselves and demonstrates my approach to reading them. In this chapter I look at five ethnographies as examples of rhetorical discourse, all of them working out various moral problems that preoccupied the Roman imagination. In Chapter 4 I consider metaphors of geographical description in the Natural History, and explore how the text imposes narrative form on geography by personifying rivers and mountains. This personifying geography owes much to the spectacular display of rivers and mountains in the Roman triumph, which united theatre and science in the display of conquered territories. In Chapter 5 I take up the question of primitivism in the Natural History by examining Pliny’s account of the primitive Chauci, inhabitants of the north-west German coast. The hostile description of this tribe draws on a long-established discourse about the watery chaos beyond the limits of the world. In this way the text equates the cosmos as it is ordered by nature with the world as it is ordered by the Romans, with their genius for imposing stability on chaos—a talent exemplified in the story of how the Cloaca Maxima was built. Finally, my Conclusion considers the conceptual importance of the Roman emperor as arbiter of what might be known about nature, the unspoken tension between the Natural History and the emperor, and the question of on what the encyclopedia’s authority was thought to rest.


part i Reading the Natural History


1 The Shape of the Natural History

In order to examine Pliny’s Natural History as a cultural artefact, it is necessary to say something first about the logic on which the encyclopedia is constructed. How does it classify and structure the knowledge it presents? What taxonomies does it use? The answers to these questions cast an interesting light on how the encyclopedia frames knowledge for consumption by a Roman audience, and have a particular bearing on my interpretation of the ethnographic matter in the Natural History. As will become clear in the course of my argument, the central organizing principle of the encyclopedia is to divide things into categories by contrast, but this is a principle that is often complicated by an opposing tendency to recognize affinities across divisions. The thirty-seven books of the encyclopedia articulate the world as a web of divisions and affinities, and often move from one subject to another not in order to develop an argument or in a logically sequenced survey, but according to analogies or contrasts between things to be described. Further complications arise from an aesthetic (which the Natural History shares with other texts of its time) that prizes structural intricacy and variety, evident in a profusion of bravura transitions between unlikely topics. Even more complicated is the consequence of the very transparency with which Pliny collated his sources in compiling his book. As discussed in the Introduction, contrast is the fundamental means by which the Natural History builds classifications: the field to be classified is defined by contrast with what is not to be included. Since the intended referential field of the Natural History is very large, including the whole cosmos, some of these divisions are correspondingly broad. You can understand the structure of Pliny’s encyclopedia as a series of such divisions. If you begin by dividing the cosmos into heaven and earth, then earth and its contents into animate (humans,

30

Reading the Natural History

animals) and inanimate (plants, minerals), you arrive at the rough outline of the book’s table of contents: the heavens in book 2, geography in books 3–6, humans and animals in books 7–11, plants in books 12–32 (including the medicinal uses of plants and animals in books 20–32), and metals and minerals in books 33–7. The Natural History reconstitutes the world as a series of classifications built on contrasts or antitheses. obstacles However, this brief summary gives a misleadingly tidy picture of the Natural History’s structure. As anyone who has looked into it can testify, Pliny’s encyclopedia can be confusing to read, especially if it is read sequentially at any length, when it can bring on a referential dizziness. The book does have organizing principles, a broad hypotactic architecture, which is laid out in great detail in book 1, the index, the Natural History’s skeleton. On this level its contents are subordinated to a definite taxonomic syntax, as I have described above. But what you actually encounter when you read the body of the book sequentially is detail juxtaposed with detail, parataxis, particularity, multiplicity, and self-contradiction. The train of thought is often interrupted, since Pliny is usually willing to be diverted from the topic in hand in another direction by association of ideas. Often, having set out to consult the Natural History for the answer to a particular question, I have arrived on the far periphery of what I wanted to know unsure of how I got there, dazed by the charms of a dozen irrelevant facts. An animal may suggest a medical cure; an item of trade, a place; a place, a story about a king. In book 8, on land-animals, for example, the animals are theoretically ordered in descending order of size and nobility: elephants, being in Pliny’s opinion the animal most like humans, come first, then lions, and so on. But this sequence is interrupted immediately by the association of ideas: the mortal enemy of the elephant, the animal antithetical to it, is the serpent, and so the eternal war between serpent and elephant must bring the chapter to its close. This digression on serpents in turn justifies the inclusion of a long section about them (8.35 ff.) before the thread is taken up again with the introduction of the lion. Or consider an example from book 7, on human

The Shape of the Natural History

31

life. A section dealing with tribes that possess remarkable powers like the evil eye or immunities to snake-bite or fire is interrupted by a note on the astonishing toe of King Pyrrhus of Epirus (7.19–20): Not far from Rome in the Faliscan countryside are a few households of the name of Hirpi; at the annual sacrifice to Apollo on Mount Soracte they walk over a burning pile of wood and are not burned, and thus by a perpetual Senatorial decree are exempt from military service and other duties. Some people are born with parts of the body with astonishing uses: for instance, the big toe of King Pyrrhus’ right foot, which healed diseases of the spleen with a touch. They say it could not be cremated with the rest of his body, and was kept in a strong-box in a temple.

So the catalogue of wonderful tribes and their immunities is interrupted by the story of a single man’s toe, because of a simple association of ideas: fireproof feet suggest a wonderworking toe. Again, in the zoology of the Natural History there is a large section devoted to the reproduction, sensory faculties, nutrition, sleep, and dreams of animals in general (10.169–212). You might expect these general zoological reflections to exist in the text as a formal division of the study of animals, but in fact they belong to a hypertrophic digression that grows out of a section on the reproduction of birds (10.143–68). More than half of the neighbouring book, which is ostensibly about insects, is devoted to a digression on the comparative anatomy of all animals, from the top of the head to the feet (11.121–284). Likewise, in a complex knot of associations, book 18 interleaves practical advice on agriculture—growing grain, turnips, and trees—with moralizing observations on Roman history and instructions on making a solar compass (18.326–33). Interwoven among the nut-bearing trees is the history of wreaths of honour (16.6–14). Ethnographies that might have been included more pertinently in book 7, which deals with human life, come up unexpectedly in discussions of botany or agriculture. One of the Natural History’s most detailed ethnographies, which I will consider at length in Chapter 5, is a description of the inhabitants of the treeless mud-flats of coastal Germany (16.2–7). This ethnography owes its presence to an association

32


of ideas that is typical of the Natural History in that, like the connection between the serpent and the elephant, it is antithetical. At the beginning of his book on forests, Pliny is ‘compelled to turn aside . . . to the question of what sort of life they live who inhabit lands devoid even of shrubs’ (16.1). Such examples could be multiplied indefinitely. The Natural History is so diffuse and miscellaneous that there is hardly a single long description of any subject that is not at some point interrupted by a digression, and even short discussions of simple subjects meander or trail away into other topics without marked transitions. In fact, most of the ethnographic matter that I will discuss in this book comes from such digressions. Usually, a reader wants to understand a book as a whole in order to get a sense of how it ought to be read—or at any rate a sense that how it ought to be read is in some way determined. In the face of such a digressive structure, a reader might be tempted to look to the Natural History’s title, preface, or conclusion for some programmatic statement. Ordinarily, if you need guidance on how a book is meant to be read, a sign of the interior necessity that shaped the book, you can look for it at either the beginning of the book or the end. In the Natural History, however, no one passage at either the beginning or the end offers itself as a vantage point from which to take in the work as a whole, excepting the ‘table of contents’ provided by Pliny in book 1. That the book has both a beginning and an end seems due more to accident than to interior necessity. At the beginning, the ‘table of contents’ (also known as the index or summarium; Pliny himself gave it no name) is outside the body of the book, a prosthetic device, so to say, meant to help you enter it, but it gives you no clue to how to interpret what you read.1 On the other hand, at the end of the last book there is a short ‘judgment of things and lands’ (37.201–4), where the most precious substances in each kingdom and the most productive 1 On the history of tables or summaries of contents in antiquity, see Leofranc Holford-Strevens, Aulus Gellius (London, 1988), 23 and n. 21, as well as Bianca-Jeanette Schro¨der, Titel und Text (Berlin, 1999), 106–15. On the function and various forms of the table of contents and other paratextual matter in early printed editions of the Natural History, I have had the benefit of reading the unpublished Cambridge dissertation of Aude Doody, ‘The Encyclopaedic Reader: Changing Approaches to Pliny’s Natural History’.


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countries are totted up (Italy, not surprisingly, is the best country, with Spain a close runner-up). This is too short to give much help, a perfunctory gesture in the direction of closure, not an adequate survey or summation of the whole. It is only a superficial attempt at surveying the contents of the encyclopedia, and evaluates what has come before with a monetary scale that up to now has not been a decisive factor in determining the book’s structure. You might also expect the book’s title to provide a clue to its formative principles, but in this respect Naturalis Historia is not much help. The only clue to his intentions that Pliny reveals about his choice of title (pref. 24–6) is that he chose it because, unlike the showy titles of Greek books like Violets, the Meadow, or the Honeycomb, it was businesslike, and unpretentious. Naturalis Historia can be translated as ‘inquiry into nature’, but what Natura means to Pliny is very broad: ‘Nature, that is, life, is my subject’ (rerum natura, hoc est vita, narratur, pref. 13). Mary Beagon has aptly commented that for Pliny, Natura means nothing less than ‘the world, both as a whole and as its separate components; she is both the creator and the creation. The comprehensiveness of Pliny’s analysis defies further comprehension: Natura is everything.’2 And in fact, considering how little use the title is as a programmatic guide on how to read the book, we might just as well translate Naturalis Historia as Inquiry into Everything. Pliny goes on to say that he will treat what the Greeks call encyclios paideia (pref. 14). This term is used by other ancient authors in the sense of ‘general training or education’, ‘the usual everyday education received by all’, but in Pliny’s book it seems at times to mean nothing less than the totality of human knowledge. He describes the limits of his task only in the most general way, without specifying anything that resembles modern conceptions of either nature or of science: It is a difficult matter to give novelty to the old, authority to the new, polish to the shopworn, light to the obscure, charm to the tedious, plausibility to the doubtful, and indeed to give to everything its nature and to nature all her own possessions. (pref. 15)

2

Beagon, Roman Nature, 26.

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This description of the encyclopedist’s job is general to say the least. At times, the Natural History does seem to take all human knowledge as its province, at least rhetorically: it introduces new subjects with formulas like ‘these figures must be reported, because they have been reported’ (prodenda quia prodita sunt, 2.85) or ‘there is furthermore, so that I may not knowingly omit anything I have ever come across, a new method of grafting’ (17.137) which leave the impression that the only principle governing the book is to include every fact Pliny ever read. Elsewhere in the preface, reckoning up the number of the book’s discrete components, Pliny seems concerned only with particulars at the expense of form: ‘From a reading of approximately 2,000 volumes . . . written by 100 select authorities, I have comprised in 36 volumes 20,000 things worthy of consideration— since, as Domitius Piso says, we have need of storehouses, not of books’ (pref. 17). In short, the encyclopedia’s preface prizes sums of facts and source-books over thoughtful categorization, storage over coherent argument. To judge from hints like this, the Natural History has no rationale other than the will to get larger, and owes its shape more to whimsical gigantism than designing intelligence. The prose in which these passages are written reinforces the impression of diffuseness. For hundreds of years Pliny’s Latin has been the target of much harsh criticism from judges of ancient prose style.3 The language of the Natural History is 3

e.g. Melanchthon, Elementa Rhetorices (1519), xiii. 495 (cited in Norden, below): Pliny is among the writers who ‘coacervant sententias male cohaerentes et in his ipsis saepe grammaticum vocum ordinem perturbant hyperbatis’. E. Norden, Die antike Kunstprosa (Leipzig and Berlin, 1898), i. 314: ‘Sein Werk geho¨rt, stilistisch betrachtet, zu den schlechtesten, die wir haben. Man darf nicht sagen, dass der Stoff daran schuld war . . . Plinius hat es einfach nicht besser gekonnt, so wenig wie Varro, an den er u¨berhaupt erinnert: wer so unendlich viel las, wie diese beiden, der konnte nicht gut schreiben.’ J. Wight Duff, A Literary History of Rome in the Silver Age (London, 1927), 308: ‘Pliny’s frequent curtness does not make for limpidity. Too often he writes as one in a hurry, with the result that both expression and structure suffer. The ordinary Plinian sentence, in its badly fitted series of condensed clauses and phrases, forms a great contrast to the finished Ciceronian period; it loses proportionately in rhythm, logic and clearness.’ F. R. Goodyear, in The Cambridge History of Classical Literature, ii: Latin Literature (Cambridge, 1982), 672: ‘Here . . . we may see the contortions and obscurities, the odd


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remarkable for its instability, its sentences that seem to race headlong after a completeness always out of reach. Sentencestructure is often loose, clauses abrupt and asymmetrical. Within a single sentence, the grammatical subject can change as much as two or even three times, and his sentences are often compressed to the point of unintelligibility, as in this story of a boy and his pet serpent: Democritus tells the story of how in Arcadia Thoas was rescued by a serpent. As a boy he had brought one up and lavished much love on it, but his parent, from fear of the serpent’s nature and size, had taken [it] off into the wilderness, where he [the serpent] came to the aid [of Thoas], recognizing [his] voice when [he was] set upon by an ambush of bandits.4 (8.61)

Here the grammatical subject changes twice in three clauses, and Thoas goes from nominative subject in the first to dative object in the last. The result of this loose sentence-structure and seemingly interminable strings of ablatives is an oddly indeterminate style. It gives us the impression of the half-finished work of a writer pressed for time. The style sometimes feels provisional, which is perhaps the reason for Pliny’s apology that ‘I myself allow that my work admits the addition of many things’ (pref. 28). Sentences are not usually rounded off with well-carpentered periods; they meander, trail away, or, just on the point of ending, start to life abruptly with an infusion of fresh ablatives: For this reason let there be honour even for these [i.e. garden vegetables], and let things be not robbed of prestige by their low price, particularly since we see that from this source arose even aristocratic names, and it caused no shame in the family of the Valerii to bear the name Lactucinus [lettuce-like], and may there be some thanks for my pains and labour, with even Vergil having admitted that it is difficult to endow such small matters with dignified language. (19.59) combinations of preciosity and baldness, and the pure vacuity to which rhetorical prose, handled by any but the most talented, could precipitously descend and would indeed often descend again.’ Healy, Pliny the Elder on Science and Technology, 79–99, provides a discussion of such stylistic criticism. 4

[Democritus] Thoantem in Arcadia servatum a dracone narrat. nutrierat eum puer dilectum admodum, parensque serpentis naturam et magnitudinem metuens in solitudines tulerat, in quibus circumvento latronum insidiis agnitoque voce subvenit.


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As, it would seem, no limit is fixed or predetermined for such a sentence, so they mirror the loose structure of the Natural History, the limits of which are set only by its potentially infinite subject-matter. metap hor and an tith esis Why is the Natural History arranged in this way? Beginning my line of interpretation from the remarks of two Italian readers of Pliny, Gian Biagio Conte and Italo Calvino, I suggest that we must recognize the importance of metaphor and antithesis in how the book is shaped. What sets Calvino’s essay5 on the Natural History apart from all previous readers is that he is not afraid to say he perceives beauty in it. Having a modern writer’s taste for literary play, it is precisely for its discontinuous and apparently random movements that he prizes Pliny’s encyclopedia: ‘One cannot neglect book I, the summary of the whole work, the interesting thing about which is the wealth of unexpected juxtapositions: ‘‘Fish that have a pebble in their heads; Fish that hide in winter; Fish that feel the influence of the stars; Extraordinary prices paid for certain fish.’’ ’6 There is, Calvino says, a poetic quality to the Natural History, of which these unexpected juxtapositions are just one aspect. It is not just a question of how the encyclopedia moves from topic to topic, but also the sorts of explanations it prefers: it makes sense of the world by positing correspondences and analogies between all sorts of things. For Calvino, the science of the Natural History is determined by ‘a whole network of traditional analogies and values that does not clash with Pliny’s rationalism, almost as if the latter were based on the same foundations’ with the result that many of the encyclopedia’s explanations of phenomena are ‘poetic or philosophical’.7 As an example of this blend of poetry and philosophy he adduces an observation about how the corpses of the drowned behave in water: drowned men float on their backs, but drowned women on their faces, as if Nature were taking mercy on the modesty of dead females.8 By Calvino’s line of 5 6

Italo Calvino, ‘Man, the Sky, and the Elephant’. 7 8 Ibid. 316. Ibid. 321. Ibid. citing NH 7.77.


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reasoning, there is not much of a difference between the poetics of the Natural History and its philosophy. Pliny’s willingness to see significant correspondences between different phenomena underlies both his preferred mode of explanation as well as his penchant for making transitions between unexpected topics. Conte has also demonstrated that appreciating Pliny’s propensity for analogy is a prerequisite to understanding how the Natural History is arranged, remarking that ‘features of analogy with another phenomenon, another creature, another medical discovery, or another cultural practice are enough to throw a series into disorder, authorizing an insertion or an entirely gratuitous digression’.9 To account for this, he speculates that such analogical groupings have a practical purpose: Pliny classes domestic animals or timber-producing trees together pragmatically, with an eye to the encyclopedia’s potential users. ‘His true principle is the immediate practicality of his partitions: animals of the earth, water, air, then insects, all occasionally useful to man in various ways.’10 I would agree that it is correct to speak of the practicality of the encyclopedia’s partitions, its larger structural divisions, but this argument cannot account for much of what we find within those partitions. Most of the Natural History’s analogical leaps and digressions have no utilitarian justification. The Roman history that Pliny writes into his descriptions of wheat, rye, and barley casts an interesting light on his understanding of Roman society, but can have been of no practical use to farmers. Pragmatism does not account for connections so unlikely and so diverse, or such apparently random meanderings. This tendency to digress is something no reading of the Natural History can disregard. It is not superficial but part of the encyclopedia’s deep structure. In his preface, Pliny claims that in this book he will abstain from digressions together with marvellous tales: they are both literary pleasures excluded by his pedestrian subject-matter (pref. 12–13). But in fact the Natural History welcomes both marvels and digressions. Its taste for the marvellous on the level of content is paralleled by 9 G. B. Conte, ‘The Inventory of the World’, in Genres and Readers: Lucretius, Love Elegy, Pliny’s Encyclopedia (Baltimore, 1994), 101. 10 Ibid. 100.


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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 toward a goal. The ordered structures of knowledge promised by the encyclopedia’s general outline disappear behind a profusion of bewildering details. intricacy as an aesthetic The sheer persistence of the book’s tendency to digress convinces me that it is both deliberate and artistic, an aesthetic choice that in the vocabulary of Greek literary criticism had the formal name of poikilia, ‘intricacy’.11 With regard to structure, the Natural History has much in common with many other ancient poems or prose compilations that combine an interest in the curiosities of nature with a taste for digression and convolution. Calvino is of course informed by a modern aesthetic in making a case for the appeal of the Natural History’s collage-like surface, but this is not an aesthetic that belongs to the twentieth century alone. We might profitably compare the Natural History to the poetics of Lucan’s Bellum Civile, in which narrative progress is playfully foiled by a taste for the grotesque and the exotic, while excursuses on naturales quaestiones continually deflect the movement of the story. We might also compare it to the narrative structure of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, with its baroque frames of tales within tales, its catalogues of mirabilia, and bravura transitions between the least likely topics. For instance, the Natural History’s accounts of painting and sculpture, an extensive and detailed account that is a prime source of evidence for modern researchers, make their way into the encyclopedia as subordinate parts of Pliny’s account of metals and minerals (books 34–7); a structural choice that carries more than a whiff of bravura. Some prose texts on the natural world explicitly defend their meandering structures as conscious aesthetic choices. So Aelian explains his literary practices in the end of his work on animals: 11

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, De Compositione Verborum 11.


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I know too that some will not praise this work because I have not divided my discourse according to each animal, and have not given the individual characteristics of each in its own place. Instead, I have mixed the varied facts in varied measure in the course of describing many animals. Here I leave the discourse about some given animals, there I turn back and connect other facts about their nature . . . Pursuing the charm that comes from variety in reading, and avoiding repellent monotony, I thought it best to weave and braid my narrative so as to resemble a meadow or a garland beautiful in its varied colours, with the many animals, so to speak, contributing the flowers. (De Natura Animalium, epilogue, Hercher p. 435)

A discourse that prizes variety of content and arrangement (as Aelian puts it, ‘I have mixed the varied facts in varied measure’) and seeks the effect of a many-coloured garland—here we approach the literary sensibility of the Natural History. Organizing one’s book to give it a charmingly miscellaneous quality was common especially among the authors of learned compilations, as Leofranc Holford-Strevens has shown: Aulus Gellius, Clement of Alexandria, and Solinus all used variety as a means of enticing their readers, and Pliny’s own nephew claimed to have published his collected letters in chance order (Pliny the Younger, Letters 2.5.7–8; 4.14.3; 8.21.4).12 Though the Natural History was intended to be useful in ways that the works of Ovid and Aelian were not, structurally they are very close. The resemblance is more notable than that between Pliny and the biological works of Aristotle, to which the Natural History is so often compared.13 Aristotelian works (where they are not incomplete, interpolated, or textually corrupt) are so framed that 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. This explains why the Natural History, unlike an Aristotelian treatise, or, for that matter, the vast majority of ancient texts, was given a table of contents. As it stands, if the Natural History is to be at all useful as a work of reference, it cannot do without one. But given the encyclopedia’s convolutions, the table of contents—it is long and detailed enough to occupy the whole of book 1—is 12

Holford-Strevens, Gellius, 25–6. As, for example, in Roger French, Ancient Natural History, ch. 5 on Pliny, passim. 13

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surprisingly useful. The table of contents is a nod in the direction of utility, compensating for Pliny’s playfully drifting aesthetic. nietzsche on metaphor This tendency to digress along lines suggested by perceived correspondences may seem alien to us, but in fact similar aesthetics have been seriously promoted in modern times. In particular, it corresponds closely to the aesthetic enunciated in Nietzsche’s ‘On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense’,14 the subject of which is the importance of metaphor to epistemology. In this essay Nietzsche equates intellect with the human capacity for metaphor, a capacity which, he says, can be used in two ways. First is the utilitarian use of metaphor, as a practical basis for knowing the world. Without an ability to recognize the similarities in different things we could not sort the various stimuli that fall on our senses into the pattern of orderly categories that constitute our perceived world. So, for instance, from the resemblance one leaf bears to another we construct the class ‘Leaf’; likewise, by putting side by side similarities we note between particular experiences, we develop abstract ideas like ‘Red’ or ‘Honesty’. Nietzsche emphasizes the pragmatic nature of this process—its end is survival, and beyond this, gain. From this comes the vast structure of classes, categories, and abstractions necessary to us as we carry out our profitable tasks. The world as we know it, sorted into the complex hierarchy of knowledge Nietzsche sarcastically calls the ‘columbarium’, depends on our constant recourse to metaphor in the face of what we perceive. On the other hand, the second use of metaphor is impractical and playful, a joyful flirtation with chaos. Metaphor does not simply create logical categories, in a utilitarian exercise of the intellect; it also disrupts them. At play, the intellect takes perceived similarities as an opportunity for ironic juxtapositions and combinations of the categories established by pragmatism. These are metaphors used for their own sake, not for gain: they unite sets that ought 14

In Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Workbooks of the Early 1870’s, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1979).


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not to belong together to create something new and strange, violating the utilitarian sense of how things are. To jumble together the contents of our mental pigeon-holes in the construction of new and alien edifices—this is art. Nietzsche’s idea of art as metaphor directed toward the disarrangement of conventionally useful categories is particularly close to what I have identified as the structural aesthetic of the Natural History. From our distance, Nietzsche’s battle-cry— metaphor for its own sake—can be seen to fit easily into the larger ethos of nineteenth-century Aestheticism, and indeed the Natural History did hold a special piquancy for the taste of the fin-de-sie`cle. Oscar Wilde, for instance, gives Pliny a distinguished place among history’s great liars in his essay ‘The Decay of Lying’.15 But he could do so only because in his time no one took Pliny seriously. The culture of science had long before done for the Natural History as an authority worth consulting on any question but the antiquarian, and the nineteenth century felt no connection to a tradition of Plinian encyclopedism. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Natural History had done good service; to judge from the number of its medieval manuscripts, it was a popular book indeed.16 But succeeding revolutions in intellectual history had altered the concept of an encyclopedia beyond recognition from that of their Roman ancestor, until its digressive aesthetic was no longer appreciated. To most of its later readers, not as tolerant of playful intricacy, the Natural History was at best merely quaint, at worst unreadable. It is this reputation, not the sorties of Nietzsche or Wilde, that has determined most subsequent readings of Pliny. sticking to your principles As I have shown, analogy plays an important role in the Natural History’s structure. Its importance can be explained as a result of the encyclopedia’s reliance on antithetical distinctions. As 15

‘The Decay of Lying’, in The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellman (Chicago, 1968), 304. 16 H. Buttenwieser, ‘Popular Authors of the Middle Ages: The Testimony of the Manuscripts’, Speculum, 17 (1942), 52–3.

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I have said above, the entire universe is recreated in the Natural History as a series of classifications built on contrasts or antitheses. Dividing the phenomena of life into contrasted pairs in this way is an elementary strategy of reasoning, basic to both ancient Greek philosophy and subsequently.17 Pliny might have taken one or two antitheses and used them systematically as modes of organizing his encyclopedia. The text abounds in analogies that might have been the foundations of powerful taxonomic structures: for instance, ‘the popular belief that anything created in any division of nature has its counterpart in the sea’ (9.2–3) might have been the basis for a symmetrical division of the world into land and sea, with the contents of each analogous to those of the other. Or, to take ethnography, Pliny might well have constructed a comprehensive taxonomy of humans out of an analogy between mankind and animals, plotted against the dichotomy ‘domestic/wild’. This is an idea that Pliny toys with briefly, saying that wild animals are to domestic species as the savage races of mankind are to civilized nations. Taking the relationship between boars and domestic pigs as his model, he theorizes that ‘Not only in pigs, however, but also in all animals too, if there is a tame sort of animal one finds a wild sort of the same species, as is natural since even in the case of human beings it has been predicted that an equal number of wild races exist’ (8.213). This analogy could have led to an exhaustive range of animal–human analogies, coordinating a survey of the world’s peoples with Pliny’s books on zoology: as wild boars are to pigs, for example, so the Germans are to the Romans, etc. While this may seem an unexpected way to make a space for ethnography in the encyclopedia, it would have been no more far-fetched than assigning art history a space as a subset of mineralogy and metallurgy, as Natural History in fact does. Other analogies could have provided a taxonomy for ethnographic classification. At 2.189–90 Pliny lays out a summary of the kind of environmental determinism traditional to ancient anthropologists, the lore, as he calls it, of climata (‘climates’). 17 On this pattern of thought among the Greek philosophers, see G. E. R. Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy: Two Types of Argumentation in Early Greek Thought (Cambridge, 1966).


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This doctrine has a long history in classical thought.18 It first appears in Herodotus (9.122), who used it to explain how the Persians changed from a severe, warlike nation into a soft, luxurious one when they left the barren highlands of their home for fertile valleys; and at about the same period it was set out at length in the Hippocratic treatise On Airs, Waters, Places. The first principle of this doctrine is to assume an analogy between the mixture of a country’s weather and the bodies and temperaments of its population. As the constituent polarities of the world—the cold, the hot, the dry, and the moist—prevail in the climate of a given region, so the inhabitants are born proportionately dark- or light-skinned, tall or short, bold or clever. As might be expected, the Greeks occupied the most favourable position in the scheme of the Hippocratic writers, who asserted that Europe’s varied climate bred people more courageous and warlike than the uniform climate of Asia (Airs, Waters, Places 23). After the Hippocratic writers, the idea was taken up by the Hellenistic philosopher Posidonius, to whom it owed its definitive form,19 and then by the Romans. In Roman versions of this doctrine, needless to say, Italy occupied an advantageous position, possessing a favourably blended climate that gives the Romans a temperament superior to any in the world.20 So the superiority of Italy to other lands was explained by its location in the most temperate and equitable of the world’s climatic zones by Varro (Res Rusticae 1.2.3–7), Vergil (Georgics 2.136–76), Vitruvius (6.3–12), and Pliny himself at 37.201–3. But the doctrine of climata occupies barely more space in the Natural History than I have just given it, set out as it is in a book 18

See Katherine Clarke, Between Geography and History, for discussions of environmental determinism in Polybius (pp. 87–91), Vitruvius, and Strabo (p. 218). 19 Fragment no. 49 Edelstein–Kidd. See now the cogent discussion of how theories of environmental influence on human development were applied to ethnography in Maria Michela Sassi, The Science of Man in Ancient Greece (Chicago, 2001), 101–39 and of Posidonius’ theory in particular, ibid. 125–36. 20 That the balance of the seasons is a conventional term in the rhetoric of praising places is evident from Menander Rhetor I.348. Compare the praises of the climate of Tarentum in Horace, Odes 2.6. 17–18, and see Nisbet and Hubbard on this passage (Commentary on Horace Odes Book 2 (1978), 95) for a survey of the tradition of the praise of places.

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on cosmology, where it competes for attention with subjects ranging from astronomy to earthquakes. Had this kind of analogical reasoning been integrated into what follows in books 3–6, an exhaustive geographical survey of the inhabited world, it might have formed the substructure for a methodical and complete classification of humanity. But the doctrine of climata reappears only once outside of book 2: in the last section of the work Pliny briefly resurrects it to account for Italy’s superiority to the rest of the world.21 As to the rest of the Natural History, the analogy remains unused, and the taxonomy is never constructed. Like many principles enunciated in the Natural History, it has no application to the rest of the encyclopedia. In fact, failure to proceed according to set principles is a general characteristic of the Natural History. The principle of antithesis has another dimension, essential to making sense of the construction of the Natural History, which is most easily understood in terms of rhetorical theory. In the language of rhetoric, antithesis presumes similarity, because difference alone is not enough to establish an antithesis. The two terms of an antithesis must always be linked, as in metaphor, by at least one point of similarity.22 All metaphor works in this way, establishing similarity between dissimilar terms, wrestling two different things towards each other to yoke them together, if only for a while. The difference between a metaphor and an antithesis is that in the latter case the gap between the two terms is more prominent than their simi21

Klaus Mu¨ller, Geschichte der Antiken Ethnographie und ethnologischen Theoriebildung, ii (Wiesbaden, 1980), 148, argues that the hypertrophied monsters of India (7.2) and Ethiopia (6.35) can be explained as the result of climatic extremes; however, this explanation is not used in the Natural History. 22 Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York, 1983), 105: ‘Any term which helps to define the value of another within the same system is paradigmatically related to it. In order for one term to be of such assistance to another, it must have points of divergence as well as points of coincidence. Some paradigmatic sets are characterized by the fact that they overlap at more points than they differ, and others—whose relationship is generally described as binary opposition—by the fact that they differ at more points than they overlap. But in each instance there is an implied comparison, and an implied distinction.’


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larity.23 In an antithesis, the nearer the similarity between the two terms, the more marked the contrast: so in rhetoric, verbal balance, parallelism, and rhyme lend an antithesis point. On the other hand, suggesting or gesturing toward antithesis immediately provokes one to scan two divergent elements for likeness. So there is a tension in the Natural History between the two different uses of metaphor described by Nietzsche, the practical metaphor that allows the intellect to posit general categories aggregated from particular sense-perceptions, and the playful metaphor that posits correspondences between different categories. While the classes and divisions necessary to an encyclopedic description of the world could hardly have been constructed without analogy, the insistent pursuit of the similarities between different things continually threatens to disrupt the integral coherence of those classes. It is one thing to constitute the category Bird on the basis of traits shared by the sparrow, the chicken, and the ostrich, and quite another to digress from fire-walking to the king of Epirus because the king and the fire-walkers both had unusual feet. harmonious antithesis In the Natural History there is a repeated tendency for antithetical distinctions not only to mark difference but also to draw attention to similarities on either side of the division. In this respect Pliny’s encyclopedia is not unlike the naturalists of the Renaissance, for whom the doctrine of convenientia, the meaningful juxtaposition of dissimilar terms, was a means of discerning the logic of the universe. For them, as Foucault describes them, ‘in this natural container, the world, adjacency is not an exterior relation between things, but the sign of a relationship, obscure though it may be’.24 As we have seen, something very much like this principle is at work in the Natural History, which is always seeing correspondences between the contrasted halves of antithetical pairs. Its 23 24

Aristotle, Rhetorica 1410a; Quintilian 9.3.81–6. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, 18.

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description of the Bosporus, the straits separating Europe and Asia (6.2), is a visual emblem of this tendency. It is a description of a landscape that is amenable to description precisely because it is antithetical. For Pliny, the Bosporus and Hellespont are a consequence of a primeval conflict between land and ocean: The Ocean was not satisfied to have girdled the earth and to have stolen away a portion for the increase of its empty space, nor satisfied to have rushed in through broken mountains, ripping Gibraltar away from Africa and swallowing spaces so much greater than what it left behind, nor to have poured through the Hellespont to flood the Propontis, once again devouring the land. Even beyond the Bosporus the Ocean spreads out into another desolation, not to be appeased until Lake Maeotis unites its plunder with the spreading waters. (6.1)

The breach so made between the lands is irreparable but not impermeable. A geographical division like this provokes the imagination: what would it be like if the separated parts were rejoined? Narrow straits dividing mighty continents, like thin isthmuses dividing important seas, exercised a perennial fascination on the Romans. Cicero commented on the wonder sightseers felt at the Straits of Gibraltar, apparently one of the tourist attractions of the ancient world.25 The strait between Sicily and Italy provided Sallust, Vergil, and Lucan with an occasion for displaying their literary virtuosity, as each imagined a time before Sicily was split from Italy by the contest of earth and sea.26 Lucan and his uncle Seneca both brought the Isthmus of Corinth into their poetry, each speculating on 25

Tusculan Disputations 1.45: ‘People think it an achievement to see the mouth of the Pontus, where Argo passed, and Ocean at the point where Africa and Europe join, adducing no mythological association.’ Polybius (3.57) lists ‘the mouth of the Mediterranean at the Pillars of Hercules’ among the geographical wonders historians were expected to describe. It is significant that when the victorious Aemilius Paulus toured Greece after its conquest (Livy 45.25–8), the natural features that interested him were the Euripus and the Isthmus, both notable because of their functions as barriers and connections, divisions and links between land and sea. 26 Sallust, Historiae 4 fragment 26 Reynolds ( ¼ Servius on Aeneid 3.414); Vergil, Aeneid 3.414–19; see also Lucan 2.435–8 with Elaine Fantham’s commentary.


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what it would be like if that thin bridge between the lands were erased by encroaching seas or made wider by their retreat.27 In each of these cases the thinness of the separating limit tempted an ancient author to imagine removing the division and combining the parts into a recreated whole. So it is with Pliny’s account of the Bosporus. What was once a unit has been forever separated by a war between land and water (the dimicatio naturae discussed further in the section on mountains in Chapter 4) into Europe and Asia, two opposites facing each other across a difference which is real but tantalizingly small: It is evident that this took place against the earth’s will from the great number of straits, and the smallness of the intervals left by Nature’s resistance. At the Hellespont the breadth of the strait is 875 feet, and at the Thracian and Cimmerian Bospori the distance can be crossed by cattle—from which fact both straits take their name. Yet another proof is a certain convergent affinity in their separation: in fact from one side of the strait one can hear birdsong and the barking of dogs on the other, and even the exchange of human speech is possible, for conversation between two worlds can be held when the winds do not carry off the sound. (6.2)

Even though the two continents are irremediably parted, each can still recognize itself in the other. Across the straits come the sounds of birds or dogs—dogs and birds just like ours. The gap has the surprising quality of also being a conduit. Standing on one shore, if the winds are kind, you can talk to someone on the other. The two worlds can even now recover something of their original unity, ‘a certain convergent affinity in separation’, quaedam in dissociatione germanitas concors. This intimate account of a geographical immensity illustrates how affinity is a necessary element of any antithesis. Even across the natural barriers that divide the cosmos (mundus) into different worlds (orbes) tribes and nations do speak to each other. As the continents face each other across the straits, 27 Lucan 1.99–106 (a simile comparing Crassus in his relationship between Caesar and Pompey with the Isthmus as a barrier between the Corinthian and Saronic Gulfs: the seas are imagined as clashing when the barrier is removed); Seneca, Thyestes 110–14 (among other portents, the seas recede from the Isthmus in a reversal of the natural order).

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so the ethnographer faces the nation he describes. The two are locked in place, opposites, each confronting the other, but not as far away as each believes. The straits are not wide enough to prevent the shock of recognition, the sound of a voice coming over the water.

2 Knowledge as a Commodity

Considered in isolation from its claims to truthfulness, a reference book has value insofar as it is separate from other books. An encyclopedia is appealing to the degree that it imposes on its contents a unity and coherence peculiar to itself, distinct from the outer darkness of mere information. The value of a work of reference like the Natural History lies not in the uniqueness of its contents (absolute uniqueness is something to be abhorred in encyclopedias, even in our encyclopedias) but in how it stamps them as belonging to its encyclopedic project. What interests us is demarcation: how the text manifests a sense of its own distinction, how it demarcates its facts from one another and from all facts outside itself. So our reading of the Natural History must begin with demarcation, that inner sense it bears of itself as an encyclopedic project. We must learn to direct our questions to the connection between the book’s referential power and the culture that surrounded it. un ity As we have seen, the Natural History has set upon its contents an obvious and pervasive stamp—a drifting structure that leads the reader from one topic to another by means of the least likely connections, and makes any sequential reading of the text vertiginous. It approaches, as I have said, the derangement of conventional mental categories that Nietzsche extols—an aesthetic flirtation with chaos. But there is a tension between the book’s structure and the circumstances that made its writing possible. As we noted earlier, the Natural History could only have been written at the intersection of the accumulated learning of the past with the vast and hierarchical power of Roman imperium. Only where these intersected could one collect the

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world in its particularity, past and present, and classify it, giving its immensity a centre. Pliny’s encyclopedia could only be written because Roman power had already organized the world for it. In his lifetime, to an extent previously inconceivable, centuries of thought, the knowledge of three continents, and of their mountains, herbs, seas, animals, and histories, became available to be apprehended by a single mind. And this hypothetical single mind, if it ever existed, belonged to Pliny, who occupied a particularly favourable vantagepoint. For beside Pliny the scholar, the voracious reader taking notes far into the night, we must keep in view Pliny the civil servant, the traveller, soldier on the German frontiers, procurator of Hispania, Gaul, perhaps of Africa, the intimate of emperors. If the Natural History has a circumstantial explanation, we shall find it in this: the fortuitous conjunction of a Roman trove of knowledge with a writer who could coin it into negotiable currency. If the Natural History has a unity, it is the unity of Roman power; for the limits of the world, of Roman imperium, and of knowledge are all the same. But what kind of unity is this for a text? What form, if any, does Roman power give to the Natural History? roman power Roman power gives the contents of the Natural History an ideological unity. Though knowledge is not, at the level of the text, submitted to a totalizing structure, it is totalized ideologically. Despite its restless drift along the webs of separation and affinity, there is no doubting that the Natural History has a centre, a point of anchorage, in Rome. The all-embracing appraisals with which the encyclopedia closes, the evaluations of all the empire’s parts as weighed in the balance against Italy— these presuppose the universal availability to the centre of countries and their resources, without qualification (37. 201–5). The centrality of Rome underlies every part of the Natural History, weaving into its fluid metaphoric drift the movement of all things from the periphery to Rome. By showing how the elements of the world first entered Rome, and so connecting them with contemporary Roman life, the Natural

Knowledge as a Commodity

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History gives its topics an immediate relevance to its Roman readers. This figure repeats itself so often that it takes on the status of a pattern. Every book of the encyclopedia demonstrates the city’s unmistakable position in the middle of the universe: the biological books are punctuated by notices of triumphs in which this animal or that plant was first brought to Rome; the books on art are studded with references to masterworks brought to Rome as plunder in the train of victorious generals.1 A tree, an architectural feature, a medicine, a food; no matter how distant the point of origin, everything known can be integrated into the biography of the city—to know a thing is almost to possess it. how mon archs engineer t he world Take, for example, the Natural History’s account of obelisks, the first division in a series of monuments (36.64–75). The series on monuments itself centres on Rome, moving from the antiquities of Egypt to the wonders of Hellenistic Asia Minor, to conclude with a description, much longer than the two previous combined, of the buildings of Rome. The obelisk sequence demonstrates precisely the same movement. This sequence is actually concerned less with describing obelisks than with describing how they may be manipulated—a sequence of narratives demonstrating how monarchs engineer the world. The kernel of each narrative is the problem of moving an immense obelisk, and the dramatic interest lies in the ingenious tricks invented to solve each problem. To erect an obelisk so heavy that it threatens its scaffolding, Rameses II ensures that his workers will not relax their attention for an instant by tying his own son to the peak; to load a supine obelisk onto the barges that will bring an obelisk from the quarry to Alexandria, Ptolemy Philadelphus digs a canal under the middle of the obelisk, weighing down the barges until they ride low enough in the 1

Some plundered artworks at Rome: 34.39–40 (statue of Capitoline Apollo brought from Pontus by Lucullus; statue of Hercules brought from Tarentum by Verrucosus); 34.64 (Lysippus’ turma Alexandri brought from Macedonia by Metellus); 35.24 (King Attalus’ painting brought from Pergamum by L. Mummius); 36.39 (the Carthaginian Hercules). For a thorough discussion of the subject, see Isager, Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art, 70–4.

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water to slip beneath the monument. Augustus and Claudius employ enormous ships, feats of engineering ‘more wonderful than anything ever seen before at sea’, to bring obelisks to Rome, where they are installed in the Circus Maximus and the Vatican Circus, among other places: Beyond all other difficulties was the problem of moving such obelisks to Rome by sea, in ships that were utterly remarkable. Out of gratitude for the wonderful achievement, the divine Augustus dedicated the ship that brought the first of his two obelisks in a permanent dock at Puteoli. (36.70)

Note the sequence of these narratives: we move from pharaohs of almost mythic antiquity in the City of the Sun, to a Ptolemy who ships an unused obelisk from Upper Egypt to Alexandria, to a climax in the most quintessentially Roman of places—the Campus Martius, where Augustus puts an obelisk to use as the gnomon of a monumental sundial: To the obelisk in the Campus the Divine Augustus gave a wonderful function: to intercept the shadows of the sun and thus take the measure of the days and nights. With an eye to the height of the obelisk, he had pavement laid so that the obelisk’s shadow would be equal to it at midday on the winter solstice. And thus the shadow would gradually shrink and then grow again day by day, the increments being marked by bronze measuring-rods contained in the pavement. (36.72)

Unfortunately, the Natural History adds, the sundial’s readings had failed for the past thirty years to match up with the calendar. What was important, however, was the obelisk’s presence, not its accuracy. Erected by an Egyptian monarch for one purpose, it had been taken by Augustus from its distant home and employed for a wholly different function. It demonstrated how things flow to Rome, marking it as the centre of the world’s power.2 c r ed i t a n d d e b t Writing on the Natural History, G. E. R. Lloyd makes a persuasive case for seeing Pliny the Elder as a victim of literary 2 See also Clarke, Between Geography and History, 219–23, for similar descriptions by the geographer Strabo of the constant stream of imperial resources into Rome.


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tradition, an investigator who spent too little time in the direct observation of nature and too much time reading what others had written about it. Pliny’s researches were ‘overwhelmingly literary’;3 that is, when he wrote invenio or reperio (‘I find’) he usually meant that he found a certain fact not by personal observation, but among his literary authorities.4 Not only did Pliny spend too much time reading, Lloyd argues, but he was reading the wrong sources: to good authorities like Aristotle and Theophrastus, Pliny added poets (Homer, Aeschylus, and Vergil), Presocratic philosophers (dubiously excerpted), and a variety of kings and princes cited honoris causa.5 He could have given more accurate accounts of nature had he devoted less time to books and more time among the illiterate country-folk (agrestes, litterarumque ignari) who had direct experience of his subjects. But the written culture of knowledge (if not knowledge itself) had developed enormously since the investigations of Aristotle and Theophrastus. In Pliny’s case, the world-intext was an obstacle to independent research, and literary tradition excluded an empirical treatment of nature.6 Lloyd is, of course, interested in the relative fortunes of empirical science and theory in the history of ancient thought. But Pliny, far from prizing first-hand knowledge, gloried in the fact that most of his material was gained second-hand. Calvino has drawn attention to the irony that this assumes in view of the manner of Pliny’s death: For a tireless seeker such as he, a protomartyr of experimental science, destined to die asphyxiated by the fumes during the eruption of Vesuvius, direct observations occupy a minimal place in his work, and are on exactly the same level of importance as information read in books—and the more ancient these were, the more authoritative.7

Certainly, Pliny depended on literary tradition for what he wrote about nature; in this he was no different from other writers like Lucretius, Seneca, or Aelian. What is unusual is how explicit he was about his dependence—he almost boasted about it. Unlike most ancient authors he cited his sources: together with his table of contents, they are arranged for us in 3 4 7

Lloyd, Science, Folklore and Ideology, 136. 5 6 Ibid. 137. Ibid. 136. Ibid. 148–9. Calvino, ‘Man, the Sky, and the Elephant’, 321.


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a massive display (the proverbial ‘parade of sources’ is no exaggeration) that takes up book 1 of the Natural History. In case the reader nods, he even adds them up: From a reading of approximately 2,000 volumes . . . written by 100 select authorities8 I have included in thirty-six volumes 20,000 things worthy of consideration—since, as Domitius Piso says, we have need of storehouses, not of books. (pref. 17)

No claim to elegance or originality here, and certainly no apology for lack of first-hand knowledge. What does this bland totting-up of facts say about the expectations that surrounded the production of such a work? An anecdote from Pliny’s life may hold the clue. nat ura l history as commodity Instead of the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, we might well have had the Natural History of Larcius Licinus. In a letter to Baebius Macer, consul ad 103, the portrait of the life of Pliny the Elder we have discussed above, his nephew Pliny the Younger tells the story of how his uncle was once given an unusual opportunity: he could have sold the contents of his encyclopedic Natural History to another man.9 In Spain as procurator in charge of the imperial finances of the province, Pliny was in his spare time also at work on his book, then still in progress and by no means as large as it would eventually become.10 He was approached by one Larcius Licinus, who wanted to buy the notebooks Pliny was assembling, and offered 400,000 sesterces for them. It must have been a tempting prospect. 400,000 sesterces was a substantial sum, in fact the minimum property qualification of a Roman eques—had Pliny not already been one, he could have earned the right to the title 8

But Klaus G. Sallmann, Die Geographie des a¨lteren Plinius, 171, counts 146 Roman authors and 327 Greeks; Pliny’s stated total of 100 authorities is to be explained as the number consulted directly. William D. E. Coulson, ‘The Reliability of Pliny’s Chapters on Greek and Roman Sculpture’, CW 69 (1976), 367, counts 453. 9 Pliny the Younger, Letters 3.5.17. 10 A. N. Sherwin-White, The Letters of Pliny: A Historical and Social Commentary (Oxford, 1966), 223.


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now. What is more, Licinus, a man of praetorian rank and legatus Augusti propraetore of Hispania Tarraconensis, occupied a position in the hierarchy superior to Pliny’s.11 But Pliny refused him, and even took some pride in refusing him, it seems, because afterwards he made a habit of telling the story (referebat ipse, says his nephew). That his work had attracted an offer of such value—it would be simple enough to assume that he was proud of this. But it is more complex than a matter of 400,000 sesterces. For Licinus merely to propose such a transaction was in itself offensive. It may seem strange that in the ancient world a man might offer to buy an author’s notes for a book in order to pass the book off as his own, but there are a number of parallel examples in Suetonius’ Lives of the Grammarians, scandalous cases of men who coveted or appropriated the intellectual property of others. Servius Clodius, an early Roman grammaticus, was disgraced and went into exile when he was denounced for having plagiarized a book written by his father-in-law, Lucius Aelius Stilo.12 In a case much like Pliny’s, a grammarian called Marcus Pompilius Andronicus was forced by poverty to sell the text of his book on Ennius’ Annales to an unknown buyer, who seems to have bought it for the purpose of suppressing it (De Grammaticis 8). From all this it is clear that a written work, and the prestige associated with it, was the object of contest in much the same way as material property. What Licinus was offering Pliny was not unprecedented, then—but deeply offensive all the same. What we know about Larcius Licinus from other sources (he is mentioned in the Natural History, in Gellius’ Noctes Atticae, and another of the younger Pliny’s letters) makes it clear that he was a self-assertive man with literary ambitions, and as a result was not much liked.13 He had a bad reputation among writers of the Flavian period that remained attached to his memory thereafter. Like many other writers of the first century ad, Licinus 11 There is some difference of opinion about Licinus’ exact position: Sherwin-White, The Letters of Pliny, 223 takes him to have been the governor; Syme, ‘Pliny the Procurator’, 216 calls him iuridicus, a separate job description. 12 Suetonius, De Grammaticis 3. Saevius Nicanor, a later grammarian, was also attacked on the charge of plagiarism (De Grammaticis 5). 13 On Larcius’ writings, see Leofranc Holford-Strevens, Gellius, 152.


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reacted against Ciceronian canons of Latinity, and wrote a polemic against Cicero’s style titled Ciceromastix (‘The Scourge of Cicero’). This was enough for Aulus Gellius, always a faithful defender of the old against the new, to call him a blasphemer as bad as a mortal who disparages the gods.14 But this was not his only sin. On the authority of his teacher Quintilian, Pliny the Younger reports that Licinus was the first orator to practise what grew into the pernicious trend of hiring a claque to applaud one’s own speeches, whose ignorant hooting and clapping had disfigured oratory ever since.15 Gellius, Quintilian, and Pliny the Younger agree in finding Licinus guilty of bad taste in general, a famously offensive person, and the story of his offer to Pliny fits neatly into this portrait. By the standards of literary courtesy, his ambition of purchasing Pliny’s stock of facts outright was, as I shall show, offensive on a colossal scale. And though his nephew does not report that Pliny showed any outright indignation, the Natural History itself testifies that Pliny took a dry kind of revenge on Licinus—by writing him into the stock of stories he wanted to buy. The would-be owner of the Natural History became a subject member of it when Pliny wrote him into the book in the form of two anecdotes, in both of which he appears as a helpless and pathetic butt for Nature’s power. The first of these, which shows him in a ridiculous and humiliating light, occurs in Pliny’s description of the truffle: ‘A few years ago, Larcius Licinus, praetorian official responsible for the administration of justice at Cartagena in Spain, found a coin enclosed in a truffle he was biting when he bent his front teeth on it’ (19. 35). Pliny’s second anecdote comes as the rather sinister punch-line to a description of the three springs of the Cantabrian river Tamaris. Their varying flow was thought to predict the future, and Pliny says ‘it is a terrible portent if the water stops flowing for someone who wants to see these springs; this happened recently to the praetorian Larcius Licinus, and was confirmed by what happened to him after seven days’ (31.24). Precisely what happened to Licinus after seven days Pliny does not say— maybe it was then that he bent his teeth on the truffle—but the language of the passage (dirum est, ‘it is a terrible portent’) 14

Noctes Atticae 17.1.1.

15

Letters 2.14.9–13.


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suggests that he died.16 In any case, in both of these anecdotes Licinus functions as an object for marvellous forces of nature to work on, demonstrating their power, and so vindicating the importance of Pliny’s subject. Pliny had put Larcius Licinus decisively in his place. Seen in the context of the times, Larcius Licinus’ desire to buy Pliny’s stock of facts outright is completely understandable. Paradoxography, the branch of literature that dealt with mirabilia, the tales of exotic nations or curiosities of nature that make up such a large part of the Natural History, enjoyed considerable popularity in Rome. Long before Pliny curiosities were suitable subjects for writers of miscellanies: from the sources Pliny cites, we know that aristocratic Romans toured the East to see the quaint collections of ancient kings or garner anecdotes for gentlemanly works on the world’s marvels. Pliny cites one of these works, by Licinius Mucianus, no less than thirty-two times. In the next generation, Licinius Sura, a consular, orator, and an intimate of Trajan, one of the correspondents of Pliny the Younger, is known to have taken a cultured interest in mirabilia including ghosts and marvellous springs.17 For those whose interests were not philosophical or literary, there was at Rome a place where deformed slaves were exhibited to potential buyers, a market of monstrosities (teraton agora) where the curious could gawk at the legless, the armless, and the three-eyed (Plutarch, De Curiositate 520 c). Even Vespasian’s son Titus is known to have taken an aristocratic interest in relics and marvels. Dispatched by Vespasian to pay homage to Galba, he found that he had to delay his arrival in Italy to avoid a potentially awkward moment in the struggle between Otho and Vitellius. To effect a delay, Titus diverted his voyage to Cyprus to examine the antiquities and strange rituals of the temple of Venus at Paphos, very much in the role of tourist (Tacitus, Histories 2.1–4). 16

This is the interpretation of Sherwin-White, The Letters of Pliny, 223, and of Syme, ‘Pliny the Procurator’, 215. In the original, the anecdote runs dirum est non profluere eos aspicere volentibus, sicut proxime Larcio Licinio legato pro praetore post septem dies accidit. 17 Pliny the Younger, Letters 4.30 and 7.27; Syme, ‘Pliny the Procurator’, 202.

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But the breach of etiquette Licinus committed is evidence for much more than the popularity of this kind of writing. It also casts some light on the culture and practice of literature at Rome. It is instructive to compare Larcius Licinus as an aspiring authority on natural history with the scholar and antiquarian Aulus Gellius. Though he acted from similar motives, it will be seen that Gellius, in appropriating such stories for his own use, showed a good deal more reverence and bashfulness toward his sources than Licinus intended. A desire to read mirabilia seized Gellius when he was visiting used book dealers at the port of Brundisium, and he gave in to the temptation to buy a bundle of old books by paradoxographers (writers on wonderful things). Reading through these authors over two consecutive nights, he transcribed their stories into his own notebooks until the sickening fascination of cannibal Scythians, the evil eye, monocular Arimaspi, monsters, and dog-headed men finally made him ashamed. All the same, he could not stop himself from transcribing even more bizarre stories (including anecdotes about spontaneous reversals of sex that he took from book 7 of Pliny’s Natural History), and cobbling them together into a chapter of the Noctes Atticae (9.4). In effect, despite his claim that it was against his better judgment, Gellius used his collection of old mirabilia to punctuate the sober antiquarian tenor of the Noctes Atticae with a racy and colourful excursus into the grotesque. The effect is to vary the texture of his book, so that reading the Noctes Atticae becomes a more intricate and curious experience—qualities Gellius prized in his own reading. Holford-Strevens, on the other hand, sees the paradoxa in Gellius as serving a pragmatic purpose, suggesting that Gellius included grotesque material for his readers’ social convenience. You should have some acquaintance with tall tales in order to hold your own in polite society, and this is a need that Gellius takes it on himself to fill, even while affecting disgust at Pliny’s credulity.18 But whatever our interpretation of Gellius’ purpose, what we ought to note is that though he wove his chapter out of other writers’ raw material—as Larcius Licinus had hoped to do with Pliny—Gellius was careful to cite all his 18

Holford-Strevens, Gellius, 30 (‘social convenience’ of the reader); 121 (Gellius’ affected disgust).


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sources, all of whom are recognized authorities, and all long dead. The very acknowledgement of his squeamishness serves to distance him from his authorities, a kind of proleptic defence. Licinus’ attempt to take stories by purchase was offensive because it was in contradiction of a singularly aristocratic feature of Roman literary culture, the exchange of text and of story to mark the social circulation of favour and power. In this respect, Pliny’s book is deeply conservative. The Natural History embodies many of the politenesses of the literary class of Rome in the Flavian period and, a descendant and an example of the kind of literary exchange that benefits the honour of both giver and receiver, also invokes the aristocratic customs of the Republic. Pliny is at pains to demonstrate his book’s debts to aristocratic and scholarly literary social circles, and to embed in it something of his interactions with other writers of the past and present. Katherine Clarke has recently shown how Strabo took similar pains to create an intellectual persona for himself in his Geography, a scholarly figure among other writers and philosophers.19 But the classic example of this kind of selfportraiture is the preface to Cicero’s Brutus, where the acts of writing, dedicating, and accepting literary texts mark off a circle of aristocratic friendship existing between Cicero, Atticus, and Brutus, who dedicate books to one another and turn by turn are spurred to literary activity by the works dedicated to them: Your book, Atticus, advised me to take from you something to restore myself, and to repay you, in a measure you may like even if it is not equal—although the learned praise Hesiod’s advice, to pay back what you got in equal measure, or if you can with even more. (Brutus 15)

Throughout this passage (Brutus 13–19) Cicero plays on the conceit that my writing a new book for you, friend, discharges the debt I incurred when you wrote your last book for me. Such an exchange was part of the Roman system of aristocratic privilege, an adjunct of amicitia, and a marker of social alliance among nobles. To dedicate a book to someone, or to receive or transmit a story, were all ways of distinguishing the bond of friendship. 19

Katherine Clarke, ‘In Search of the Author of Strabo’s Geography’, JRS 87 (1997), 98, 108–10.

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To take a later instance of this kind of literary exchange, in one of his letters (9.33) Pliny the Younger passes along to his poet friend Caninius Rufus a story about a remarkable dolphin in Africa that would swim into a shallow bay and play with children, re-enacting the myth of Arion. The gift of this particular story, offered as a subject for a poem by Caninius, serves to mark the friendship between the two literary men. The story of this dolphin is of particular interest to us because the younger Pliny appropriated it in fact from his uncle’s Natural History (it appears in NH 9.26–8). He was motivated to pass on to Caninius this curiosity of natural history because stories about wonderful things, or mirabilia, were in themselves collectible entities, and within the channels of a privileged friendship might circulate as tokens of esteem. But if it was a polite mark of amicitia to receive stories from one’s friends, or to give them, it was offensive to want to buy them. It was a vulgar thing to buy stories, quite another to receive them from one’s friends. Hence the importance of giving credit to one’s sources, if one was in the habit of exchanging stories with those of high rank. Understanding Pliny’s old-fashioned sense of honour with regard to other writers is necessary to understanding the way he cites his sources, which is, as Klaus Sallmann has compellingly argued, remarkably transparent.20 This is recognition that Pliny gladly gave his sources, and in so doing advertised his social connections with the inner circles of the powerful at Rome. In fact Pliny drops enough names that one may, as Ronald Syme has done,21 build up from them a substantial picture of Pliny’s career and professional connections. It was undoubtedly a matter of no little pride to Pliny that he could count among his authorities the emperor Titus, the emperor’s younger brother Domitian, and Licinius Mucianus. Titus, who as we have noted was known to have an interest in antiquities and marvels,22 contributed a note about comets (2.89); Domitian is a source for book 33, on precious metals. Licinius Mucianus, the consular who played kingmaker to the 20

Sallmann, Die Geographie des a¨lteren Plinius, 180, contrasting Pliny’s openness in citing with Seneca’s Natural Questions and Vitruvius. 21 Syme, ‘Pliny the Procurator’, 201–36. 22 Tacitus, Histories 2.4.


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Flavian party in the wars of ad 69, is described by Syme as in charge of the Flavian party’s affairs and appointments during Vespasian’s absence in 69, and so probably deserves credit for helping Pliny out of retirement and into his first procuratorship.23 Mucianus had spent time in Asia and compiled a collection of mirabilia from which come thirty-two anecdotes quoted in the Natural History: these include notes on art, architecture, springs, marine and terrestrial animals, and spontaneous changes of sex. Notable among Mucianus’ collection is the description of an enormous Lycian plane-tree inside which he once held a banquet (12.9).24 Add to these the many informants from Pliny’s own social class, ‘well-known authorities among the equestrian order’ (auctores in equestri ordine splendentes), procurators and other equestrian officials in the imperial service who relayed from their provinces reports of sea-monsters in Spain (9.10–12; 9.89), the geography of Mauretania (5.12), or abnormally developed children in Gaul (7.76). Among these are numbered the encyclopedist Celsus, Columella, the writer on agriculture, and Pomponius Mela the chorographer; less well-known equestrian sources include C. Julius Graecinus, Turranius Gracilis, who contributed reports on sea-monsters (9.11), Cornelius Valerianus, cited for a report about the Phoenix of Egypt (10.5).25 There is also Antonius Castor, whom Pliny calls the most famous botanist of his time, in whose specimen-garden he learned much of what he knew about plants (25.9). This glowing citation is an example of what Pliny called (as we shall see) a ‘loan repaid with interest’, marking his gratitude to the old botanist at the same time that it calls attention to the importance of his own connections. Similarly, we may see in the dedication of the Natural History to Titus the last link in this chain of transactions, a final exchange that rounds off the contributions of others and enacts, as Pliny hopes, a connection between himself and his ruler. 23

Syme, ‘Pliny the Procurator’, 203; 210–11. Licinius Mucianus is one of Pliny’s favourite Roman sources, cited for books 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16, 19, 31, 33, 35, 36. For a complete list of his fragments (as preserved by Pliny) see Peter, HRR ii (1906), 101 ff. 25 See Syme, ‘Pliny the Procurator’, 219–25, for prosopographical analysis of these sources. 24


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th e prodigal text As we have seen, Pliny is unusual among ancient writers in devoting a special portion of his book to listing his authorities. He justifies his practice with a metaphor that deserves extended consideration: ‘Surely it is the mark of a slavish mind and an unhappy nature to prefer being detected in a theft to returning what you borrow, particularly when capital comes from the interest’ (pref. 23). The choice of a financial analogy to describe an author’s relations with his sources has some striking implications. Deferring for the moment the puzzling question of ‘capital coming from the interest’, I wish to examine the first premiss of the metaphor, that to construct such a literary work as this, one must be either a borrower or a thief, and that a person of liberal status—such as our author must surely be— naturally prefers to borrow. Note that the terms in which we moderns imagine originality—the idea that authors are neither borrowers nor thieves, but creators—does not enter the question. This has some bearing on what readers such as Lloyd have perceived as Pliny’s own lack of originality. Nature is, as Pliny shows it, finite and changeless—we mortals may discover or forget things about her, but there is nothing new under the sun. In writing about nature, consequently, literary ‘capital’ is a finite and changeless sum, admitting neither creation nor destruction, merely redistribution from one author to another. Calvino has correctly expressed Pliny’s conception of his duty as an author in writing the Natural History: He is in fact scrupulous about inserting as little of himself as possible and sticking to what his sources tell him. This conforms to his impersonal concept of knowledge, which excludes individual originality.26

It is instructive to compare this with the views of other ancient writers on nature. Aelian, for instance, rounds off De Natura Animalium, his survey of the wonderful behaviour of animals, with a proud announcement of his complete lack of novelty: I cannot justly be criticized for repeating what all, or at any rate most, writers have said already. After all I could not create other animals, though I have given evidence that I have known a great many. (De Natura Animalium, epilogue, Hercher p. 436) 26

Calvino, ‘Man, the Sky, and the Elephant’, 317–18.


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Seneca, in a letter of advice to Lucilius on how he should go about writing a description of Mount Aetna, makes the point even clearer: He who writes last comes off best, for he finds the words ready to hand and, if he arranges them differently, they have the appearance of being new: nor is he laying hands on what belongs to another, since words are common property. (Letters 79.6)

Common to both these passages is the assumption that the writer’s task is not to create knowledge but to arrange it. Note the premiss of this assumption: that the sum of knowledge is accessible, and that there remain no significant obstacles to its collection. Such confidence in the knowability of the universe reflected an equal confidence in the universality of the Roman empire. The limits of the world and the limits of empire are the same: as Cicero said (De Re Publica 3.15.24), ‘our nation . . . within whose authority (imperio) the world is now contained’. To paraphrase the apocryphal boast of the Victorian sage Benjamin Jowett,27 what lay outside the limits of empire was not knowledge. Assuming that the sum of knowledge has been made available, gathered thus within the empire, what more is there to be added? For Pliny the art of describing nature would lie, like the art of collage, in the combination of previously existing pieces. This is after all the man who wrote thesauros oportet esse, non libros—‘There ought to be, not books, but treasure-houses’ (pref. 17). We have not finished unpacking Pliny’s financial metaphor: there remains the question of repayment. What does Pliny mean when he says (pref. 23) ‘capital comes from the interest’ (sors fiat ex usura)? The money will not be coming to him—he is the borrower, and it is the capital of someone else that will increase. We would expect Pliny to claim that he is repaying his loans because it is necessary, or that by doing so he somehow benefits himself, but to claim that he repays his loans in order to benefit his creditors is unexpected, to say the least—being generous to your creditors does not rank very high in the modern 27

In a Victorian undergraduate jingle reported by Jan Morris, Oxford (Oxford, 1968), 184: ‘Here come I, my name is Jowett; j There’s no knowledge but I know it, j I am the Master of this college. j What I know not isn’t knowledge.’

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list of civic virtues. Pliny’s proclaimed lack of self-interest might strike us as odd, or even naive. It would not have appeared so to a Roman. For the Romans, as for us, lending and borrowing had moral as well as financial significance. Money transactions were an index to the characters of those who participated in them. To lend money at interest (faenerari) was not exactly consistent with a Roman noble’s honour: the injunctions of Cato the Elder against it had the status of proverbs,28 and embarrassed those aristocrats who did indulge in usury. They had either to avoid the appearance of lending for outright gain29 or hide behind middlemen—as Brutus, most notoriously, employed intermediaries in lending money at 48 per cent interest to the town of Salamis in Cyprus, to Cicero’s acute chagrin.30 Behind this ethic lay a general principle of the proper use of wealth: to accumulate wealth in order to spend it for the enjoyment of others (as in a political career one normally spent one’s wealth on feasts, spectacles, games, gifts, doles, and public works) was a mark of nobility, and so acceptable—a traditional way of getting public recognition.31 There is an important distinction to be observed here: ‘The Roman people hates private luxury but loves public display’ (Cicero, Pro Murena 76). To heap up 28 Cato, De Agri Cultura 1.1: ‘Our ancestors thus considered and effected it in laws, that a thief be fined at double rate, a money-lender (faenerator) quadruply. From this one can infer how much worse a citizen they thought the money-lender than the thief.’ Cicero, De Officiis 2.89: ‘When he was asked the best way of profiting one’s estate, Cato answered ‘‘Raising cattle well.’’ The second-best way? ‘‘Raising cattle moderately well.’’ And third? ‘‘Raising cattle badly.’’ And fourth? ‘‘Growing crops.’’ When his inquirer asked ‘‘What about money-lending (faenerari)?’’, Cato replied ‘‘What about homicide?’’ ’ This anecdote is repeated by Columella (book 6, pref.) and Pliny (NH 18.29). 29 Atticus’ loans are portrayed by his biographer as acts of philanthropy. See Nepos, Atticus 2.4–5: ‘When necessity compelled the Athenian state to borrow money and they could not get favourable terms, Atticus always came to their rescue, and in such a way that he never took unfair interest from them nor let the loan go beyond the term agreed. Both circumstances were to their benefit: for he did not allow their debt to grow old by indulgence, nor to increase by accumulating interest.’ 30 Cicero, Ad Att. 5.21; 6.1. 31 On the Roman ethic of largesse, liberality, and display (‘euergetism’) and its use by Roman aristocrats of the late Republic, see Paul Veyne, Bread and Circuses (Harmondsworth, 1990), 246–52.


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wealth for its own sake was miserly and ignoble. Misers are constant figures of fun in Roman poetry, drama, and satire; avarice, the recurrent object of moral writers’ scorn. To spend for others, even if it meant incurring debts, was more noble in Roman eyes than to hold on to money for its own sake, or to grub for it in some illiberal way. Plutarch’s contrasting biographies of Crassus and Caesar make the ethics of spending and holding quite clear. Crassus was a man of great potential virtues, all of them overshadowed by his one vice: love of money. It was enough to hold him back from the public recognition he desired. Though in pursuit of public acclaim he spent sums that would have beggared anyone else, he never spent so as to reduce his personal wealth, for shortly before his death his fortune had grown from a beginning of 300 talents to 7,100 (Plutarch, Crassus 2.1). Plutarch’s Caesar, on the other hand, dwells much on Caesar’s vast borrowing and liberal spending: in quest of popularity Caesar ran up debts of 1,300 talents before he entered his first magistracy, and as a junior magistrate he lavished so much of his money on roads, gladiatorial games, shows, parades, and feasts that he eclipsed all his predecessors. ‘Spending recklessly, he seemed to be buying a brief and passing fame at a great price, but in truth he was buying the greatest things of all cheap’ (Caesar 5.8). For Plutarch, Crassus is absolutely hapless as a politician, his promising qualities overshadowed by his avarice, seduced by his unfulfilled desire for popularity into a foolish campaign that proved to be his death. Caesar, of course, is the type of the astute and successful politician: his early debts are cleared by the mature success which they have paid for, and Caesar, liberal even in death, leaves every Roman citizen a substantial gift (Caesar 68.1). By describing his literary debts in the language of finance, Pliny evokes this very ethic of borrowing. He assimilates himself to the man who borrows in order to spend liberally for the public, the aristocrat who acquires only so that he may be prodigal with his store. He writes contemptuously of those who know but who out of envy never pass on their knowledge to others—scholars who will never become auctores: ‘And so to be sure those who have learned even a few things hide them away, grudging them to others, and to be nobody’s teacher serves as attestation of one’s learning’ (25.2). This is an aristocratic rather than a commercial

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model of exchange, in which the goal is not to increase the amount in the cash-box at the end of the day but to demonstrate one’s greatness through munificent behaviour. The difference here is that the unit of exchange is not money, but facts. Pliny is not one to grub dishonourably for his stories; he borrows them nobly and returns them freely to those who gave them, with interest added in the form of fame—his citations. He does not husband his data jealously; instead, he spends them on us, his readers, with a prodigal hand. In Plutarch’s Lives of Caesar and Crassus, the language of credit and debt has a political meaning, and for Cicero and both the Plinys, it describes the social logic of literary exchange. As there is an economy of fame, so there is also an economy of story. It is not surprising that in the Natural History, Pliny also uses this economic language to describe man’s relations with Nature. For example, at 2.155 Pliny praises the Earth’s beneficence to man in a way that may seem paradoxical, making man the lender and Earth the debtor: But she, kindly, gentle, indulgent, always the handmaid of mortals, what does she produce under compulsion or pour out voluntarily, what perfumes and flavours, what juices, what things to touch, what colours! How faithfully does she return the capital (faenus) lent to her!

The word that I have translated here as ‘capital’ (faenus, the more usual meaning of which is interest on capital, or a debt carrying interest)32 is of course a metaphor for seed, which Earth gives back as crops. It may seem strange that Earth should be described as in man’s debt, but Earth is for Pliny yet another, and perhaps the ultimate, example of that traditional aristocrat, the honourable debtor who repays her lenders with lavish interest. It is simply a matter of seeing the more honoured member of the equation in the debtor’s position. the decay of knowledge Having borrowed these items from various luminaries, Pliny is prodigal with them—a spendthrift of facts. He lavishes them on 32

Faenus in the sense of capital lent on interest is also found in Plautus, Mostellaria 3.1.101.


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us from his diligently accumulated store, involving his readers in the social mesh of reception and repetition. Those, on the other hand, who keep what they know to themselves—those who hoard their knowledge, so to speak—are objects of Pliny’s repeated scorn. They violate the ethic of knowledge set up by the Natural History, an ethic that maps openness in giving and receiving knowledge onto an idealized Republican paradigm of an aristocrat’s openness with his property. This ethic is, as we have seen, nostalgic, looking back to the friendships and alliances of the gentlemanly speakers of Cicero’s dialogues. We have only to compare Pliny with a passage from Cicero’s De Oratore (1.161–2) to see the family resemblance. At this point in the dialogue, C. Aurelius Cotta, a young aristocrat and political friend of Lucius Licinius Crassus (140–91 bc: not Caesar’s rival Marcus Licinius Crassus, but an aristocrat of an earlier generation), having heard Crassus speak about the scope of an orator’s education, politely presses Crassus to make his views more explicit. He has been tantalized, Cotta says, by what Crassus has said, but he has been too brief, and, comparing Crassus’ speech to a tour through a friend’s richly furnished country-house, he conflates wealth, display, power, and learning: As if I had come into an opulent and well-furnished house when the fine cloths were not out of storage and the silver not on the table, when the paintings and statues were kept out of view, but all these many brilliant things were wrapped up and stored away, so I have just now in what he said glimpsed the wealth and splendour of Crassus’ mind as if through wraps and coverings. (De Oratore 1.161)

Crassus cannot possibly refuse Cotta’s request: it is only polite to unroll the carpets, open the windows, and have the sculptures moved into the sunshine, and so Crassus is obliged, not against his will, to extend his discourse. The metaphor, though Cicero has given it in typically ample length, is much like the one already invoked by Pliny in the preface to the Natural History as his justification for writing: ‘There ought to be not books, but treasure-houses’ (pref. 17). Like Crassus, Pliny plays the part of an aristocrat displaying his property: unlike Crassus, he opens his store not just to select friends, but to the public at large. Unfortunately, there would seem to be learned men who do not follow this Ciceronian ethos. Pliny is loud in his claims of


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authorial transparency: he condemns scholars who decline to be equally transparent. As avarice led Crassus to part with no more than a small fraction of his fortune, so their selfishness has led specialists in varying fields to keep their knowledge to themselves: The ancients left nothing untried or untested, and then they kept nothing whatever secret that they wished to be of benefit to their descendants. But today we are eager to conceal and suppress their discoveries, and to cheat life even of the good things that others have contrived. And so to be sure those who have learned even a few things hide them away, grudging them to others, and to be nobody’s teacher serves as attestation of one’s learning. Our customs are so far from devising new methods and improving life (and this has long been the highest object of our talents) that between the individual memories of the learned, the achievements of the ancients are falling into oblivion. (25.1–2)

These experts conceal useful information peculiar to themselves, giving them mastery over us, the public, while hastening the decay of knowledge. Bereft of the knowledge of their native traditions, the Romans have entered a time of dangerous dependency on others: So it surely is, the customs of the Roman nation have died out because of its immensity, and in conquering we have been conquered. We take the orders of foreigners, and in one of the arts [i.e. medicine] they have come to command even their commanders. (24.5)

It is a sentiment familiar to readers of Roman poetry—think of Horace’s ‘Captured Greece took captive her wild conqueror’33—as rewritten with an alarmist, xenophobic point. So Pliny justifies his encyclopedic project. The concentration of learning in the hands of the few and the foreign undermines Roman self-reliance, endangering the public good. The purpose of technical writing is to put mastery back in the hands of the Roman reader—presumably the adult, male, and citizen— by searching out and divulging the peculiar knowledge of others. By outsiders I mean above all the overlapping categories of Greeks, slaves, and doctors, for whom Pliny cherishes a particular distrust: 33

Horace, Epistulae 2.1.156: Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit.


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The desire for life was never greater, the care we take for it never less. We believe that to take care of our lives is someone else’s task, that others manage it without even so much as a command from us, and that the doctors have taken precautions against diseases. For our own part, we take delight in our pleasures, and—I consider nothing more shameful—live relying on the trustworthiness of others. (22.14–15)

This fear—that knowledge is slipping irrevocably out of Roman hands—expands into a dread of knowledge’s general decay. At the bottom of the project the Natural History sets itself lies an urgent preoccupation—for time and human idleness have combined to erode history’s stores of learning. So the Natural History is in a breathless rush to include everything. It may seem counter-intuitive to speak of urgency in an encyclopedia thirty-seven books long, but remember the mannered insistence of Pliny’s style: the spiralling, open-ended sentences; the ablatives absolute piled in heaps of particulate knowledge, with no apparent limit set to their accumulation; formulas like ‘lest I knowingly omit anything I have ever come across’ (17.137). These are the stylistic mannerisms of a text in a hurry toward plenitude. Pliny sees himself confronting the world’s knowledge in a narrow window of opportunity, defined on one edge by the expansion of Roman power, and on the other by the inexorable decay of knowledge: I cannot cease to be astonished that the memory of certain species, even the memory of their names, handed down by earlier writers, has vanished. Who would not have supposed that, since the grandeur of the Roman empire brought the world’s different parts into connection, human life has made progress through the interchange of goods and the association of men in joyful peace, and that all knowledge, even what was hidden before, has been divulged for common use? But, by Hercules, one cannot find people who know much of what was recorded by the writers of old. (14.2–3)

It is another version of a complaint typical of the Romans, but as given a particular twist by a scholar: the world-empire has been ruined by success, displaced from the centre of importance by the expansion of the world, and the Romans undermined by their own achievements.34 Pliny goes on to explain that, 34

Beagon, Roman Nature, 57–63, has an important discussion of this passage from another angle, as evidence for Pliny’s concept of progress in knowledge.

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paradoxically, the fertility of the human mind in earlier times was fostered by the many political divisions of that age: So much more productive were the enterprises of the ancients, or so much more fortunate their assiduity, when a thousand years ago, at the dawn of writing, Hesiod began to disclose his teachings to farmers, and no few writers pursued his enterprise. Hence our work has increased, since we must not only seek out the discoveries of more recent times, but also seek again what the ancients already discovered, for the idleness of history has decreed the utter destruction of memory. Who will find a cause of this failure except the common problems of the world? Certainly new customs have succeeded old, the minds of men are preoccupied with what is new, and the arts of acquisition are the only arts that command respect. Previously, when nations were parcelled off from each other into separate realms, their native talents were as well. A certain barrenness of fortune made it necessary to keep the gifts of the mind hard at work. Then the honour of the arts was the instrument for doing reverence to countless kings, who used to put these treasures on proud display, thinking by such means to extend their immortality. (14.3–4)

Note how, by a typical turn of thought, medicine, herb-lore, farming, and art-objects, which are very different branches of knowledge, are assimilated into a single category, ‘the gifts of the mind’, which Pliny has marked off as the province of his book. As he has already stated, the purpose of the Roman empire seems to Pliny to be to increase the world’s stock of knowledge by promoting the communication of its parts. But the effect of increased communication has instead been to promote the interests of the wealthy. By educating the appetites of the victors, and making it easier for them to indulge in luxury, wider Roman mastery has established a perverted set of values that has no use for the merits of scholarship. The passage just quoted continues: For this reason both the works of life and its rewards were many. But to succeeding generations the opening up of the world and the enlarged range of possessions have done an injury. The senator began to be selected for his wealth, the judge appointed for his wealth, and wealth was the only recompense for ministers and generals. Childlessness became the highest form of influence and power, legacy-hunting the most effective source of gain, and our only joys lay in owning. At that time life’s rewards were lost, and all the liberal arts, so named


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from liberty, the greatest good, collapsed into their opposite, for it was only through slavery that one made any progress. This was revered in various ways by various people, for various objects, but a single desire—to possess—extended to everyone’s ambitions. Everywhere, indeed, even honourable men preferred cultivating foreign vices to the good things that are their own. And so, by Hercules, pleasure has begun to live, while life itself has ceased. (14.4–7)

We see once again Pliny’s hostility to avaritia, whether it applies to the selfish hoarding of knowledge or, as here, the greed for luxury goods. In the context of this passage, native Roman lore, varieties of vines, species of plants, and breeds of animals have fallen out of sight as foreign (and hence luxurious) breeds have replaced them. So avarice hastens the disappearance of knowledge from the sphere of the Roman public. The idea that mere wealth has displaced true values is a traditional theme of Latin poetry.35 But this is not only a polemic against luxury, just another among many in the Natural History: it is a theory of history that polarizes time into two periods on either side of Rome’s entrance into history. There was the period when humans were parcelled off into small nations and were accordingly more self-reliant; and there is the time since Rome erased the divisions and opened up communication between the various nations. As a consequence, knowledge specific to individual lands decays as the horizon of human experience widens to international scale. the encyclopedist ’s dilemma Hence the encyclopedist’s dilemma. Like ancient paintings exposed to air and light, knowledge will be destroyed by what made it accessible. This dilemma is what gives rise to the tension we noted earlier between the text’s divagating aesthetic and its totalizing, Romanocentric universe. After all, the Natural History could not have been written if the world had not been made available for writing by expanding Roman power; but this very power, which has erased the boundaries between individual nations, threatens to erase valuable indigenous knowledge at the same 35

Compare, for example, Ovid, Amores 3.8; Fasti 1.217–18.

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time. Most alarming of all, it is not just the knowledge of others that will be erased, but Roman traditions too, unable to compete with the attractions of foreign luxuries or the pressures of commerce. It is another version of the old complaint: Rome has been ruined by success, displaced from the centre of importance by the expansion of the world. This was not empty rhetoric: slightly before the writing of the Natural History, political upheaval had dealt Roman self-esteem a serious wound—the humbling, frightening truth, demonstrated by the accession of Galba, that emperors could be made outside Rome. As Tacitus formulated it (Hist. 1.4), this event was the revelation of ‘a secret of the empire’. It must indeed have seemed the case that ‘in conquering we have been conquered’, as Pliny says, vincendo victi sumus (24.5). Rome was powerful, and as a direct consequence Rome’s own traditions were vulnerable. A predicament not unique to the Romans, it is a besetting anxiety of modern life, vividly expressed by Claude Le´vi-Strauss: In Martinique, I had visited rustic and neglected rum-distilleries where the equipment and the methods used had not changed since the eighteenth century. In Puerto Rico, on the other hand, in the factories of the company which enjoys a virtual monopoly over the sugar-production, I was faced by a display of white enamel tanks and chromium piping. Yet the various kinds of Martinique rum, as I tasted them in front of ancient wooden vats thickly encrusted with waste matter, were mellow and scented, whereas those of Puerto Rico are coarse and harsh. We may suppose, then, that the subtlety of the Martinique rums is dependent on impurities the continuance of which is encouraged by the archaic method of production. To me, this contrast illustrates the paradox of civilization: its charms are due essentially to the various residues it carries along with it, although this does not absolve us of the obligation to purify the stream.36

Mysteriously linked by the bonds of civil life, the members of a society all conspire wittingly or unwittingly ‘to purify the stream’, to eliminate extraneous cultural particles, the fragrant residuum of their own past. For the Romans, the success of their civilization meant decay for traditional elements in it—at 36

Claude Le´vi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. J. and D. Weightman (New York, 1974), 384.


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least, this is how they loved to portray themselves, at once pained and fascinated by the loss of the past. A yearning for bygone glories pervades their poems and histories at what we moderns see as the apex of Roman culture, and denunciations of present luxury only fuel an interminable nostalgia. Writers of the Principate look back fondly to the Republic; writers of the Republic look back to the time before Hannibal. In this respect, Pliny is only a typical Roman; being a collector of knowledge, it is the decay of native learning that he fears the most. So above all it is the indigenous, particulate knowledge of Roman tradition that the Natural History hopes to incorporate before it is lost—we see it in the preoccupation with obscure charms, obsolescent crops, and antiquarian remedies. Hence another reason for the text’s digressive, drifting structure, so hostile to the logical imperatives of category and class, so contrary to the organizing imperium that made its writing possible, but so hospitable to peculiar and idiosyncratic morsels of knowledge. The book’s structural convolutions, which are in contrast with its totalizing view of the world from the central perspective of Rome, shelter obsolescent knowledge in their vagrant nooks and crannies.


part ii The Ethnographies of the Natural History


3 Reading the Ethnographies

ancien t e thnography The ethnographies in Pliny’s Natural History belong to a literary tradition stretching back to Homer that can be found in one form or another in texts of almost every classical literary genre. In the study of ancient ethnography, no very firm line can be drawn between Greek and Roman accounts of actual foreign peoples, on the one hand, and wonder-tales, descriptions of Utopias, and nostalgia for various Golden Ages, on the other. As a result, the truthfulness of ancient ethnography has been a perennial question. It was a conservative tradition, of which the interests and formal characteristics were fixed early on and did not change for hundreds of years. What is more, ethnographic writers can be found repeating unaltered details first put forward by their predecessors centuries before. In the past the study of classical ethnography has tended to concentrate on the strength of this tradition: in order to assess the truth-value of a given ethnography it has first seemed necessary to gauge its dependence on stereotyped elements derived from previous ethnographers. However, recent scholarship has seen a shift from measuring the reliability of ethnographies as guides to the lives of actual barbarians to examining them as artefacts of Greek and Roman culture. The ethnographic writings of the Greeks and Romans are pictures from the contact zones between the classical civilizations and nations alien to them, the peoples the Greeks and Romans called ‘barbarians’. The kinds of contact that eventually found representation in literary ethnographies were various. Trade was obviously important as an inducement for Greeks and Romans to travel ‘outward’ from home and for foreigners to travel ‘inward’ to the Greeks and Romans. It is significant that Herodotus, when locating the starting-point of

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the history of conflict between Europe and Asia (and of his Histories as well) settled on the arrival at Argos of a tradingship from Phoenicia (Histories 1.1). Though much of this travel was over long-established trade-routes, some very important routes were opened only in the first century ad (notably the amber route from Pannonia down the Vistula to the Baltic1 and the use of monsoon winds to trade with India).2 Contact also occurred in the course of war, which, in the literature of antiquity, was the historian’s favourite occasion for an ethnographical excursus, whether it was the barbarians who were making an incursion into familiar territories (the description of the Suebi in Caesar’s Gallic War 4.1–3 is motivated by Ariovistus’ invasion of Gaul) or the reverse (e.g. Caesar relates the ethnography of Britain in the process of invading it, Gallic War 5.12–14). As opportune sites for trade, war, and the intermingling of peoples, Greek colonies in North Africa, western Europe, and the Black Sea were another important part of this contact zone (see, for instance, Herodotus’ stories about the foundation of Cyrene in Libya, 4.156–61).3 There were even a few individual writers who ventured outside the periphery of the familiar and recorded new knowledge about the geography of the world: for instance, Pytheas’ exploration of Atlantic Europe outside the Pillars of Hercules,4 Posidonius in Gaul,5 or the half-legendary Aristeas of Proconnesus in central Asia.6 The commonness of ethnographies in literature would seem to prove that Greeks and Romans at all periods from Homer 1

NH 37.45. Strabo 2.118 and 17.798; NH 6.101–6. See Lionel Casson (ed., trans., and comm.), The Periplus Maris Erythraei (Princeton, 1989), 11–12. Large-scale trade between Rome and India began with the Augustan period. 3 See Carol Dougherty, The Poetics of Colonization: From City to Text in Ancient Greece (Oxford, 1993), 162 and n. 8. 4 Pytheas’ fragments are collected in Hans Mette (ed.), Pytheas von Massi¨ bungen, 173; Berlin, 1952). See now lia (Kleine Texte fu¨r Vorlesungen und U the reconstruction of Pytheas’ journey proposed by Barry Cunliffe, The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek (New York, 2002). 5 J. J. Tierney, ‘The Celtic Ethnography of Posidonius’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 60 (Sect. C) (1960), 189–275; L. Edelstein and I. Kidd (eds.), Posidonius (Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries, 13 and 14; Cambridge, 1972–88). 6 J. Bolton, Aristeas of Proconnesus (Oxford, 1962). 2

Reading the Ethnographies

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until late antiquity felt a lively curiosity about the peoples on the peripheries of their civilizations. Descriptions of or allusions to faraway lands and their inhabitants crop up with great frequency in all kinds of texts: they are common in epic, didactic, lyric, and elegiac poetry; in tragedy; in philosophical and medical treatises (Airs, Waters, Places in the works of the Hippocratic writers). They are particularly common in historiography, where ethnographic writing is often used to supplement the narrative, satisfying the expected demand for the description of regions that establishes background for the actors.7 In Greek literature, probably the best-known ethnographies are those that punctuate Herodotus’ Histories, especially the vivid descriptions of the Egyptians, Scythians, and of the nations that paid tribute to Darius.8 In Latin, perhaps the best-known ethnographies are the accounts of the Gauls, Britons, and Germans in Caesar’s Gallic War (because of its use as a teaching text),9 along with the Germania of Tacitus, the only surviving ancient book devoted entirely to ethnography.10 Despite the many and varied kinds of contact between the Greeks and Romans and the foreigners they wrote about, ethnographers differed very little from each other in how they selected and presented ethnographic information.11 The different modes of contact did not result in different kinds of representation. Against the widespread ethnographic curiosity about barbarians that we noted above, we must set the conventionality of ethnographic writing. Greek and Roman ethnography was regulated by conventions and expectations comparable to those of a literary genre, with the result that, regardless of whether the intentions of their authors were to praise the barbarians or 7

The technical phrase regionum descriptio is used by Cicero, De Oratore 2.63. Compare Polybius 3.57 and Lucian, How to Write History 57. 8 Egyptians: Histories 2.2–182; Scythians: 4.5–82; tributaries of Darius, including India and Arabia: 3.89–114. 9 Suebi: Gallic War 4.1–3; Britanni: 5.12–14; Gallia and Germania: 6.11–28. 10 On the purpose of Tacitus’ Germania and the question of whether it was in fact intended to stand as an independent work of ethnography, see J. B. Rives (trans. and comm.), Tacitus: Germania (Oxford, 1999), 48–56. 11 For an excellent survey of the ancient ethnographic tradition, with special reference to ethnographies of Northern Europe, see the extensive discussion of Rives, Germania, 11–21.

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blame them, to be soberly truthful or outrageously fantastic, most ethnographies share a marked family resemblance. In the nineteenth century classical philologists began to catalogue the formal characteristics of the tradition of ethnography.12 Again and again we find descriptions of the same cultural and geographical features: the land and climate of the nation are described, along with that land’s agricultural and mineral products; the origin of the people; their appearance and their social institutions, including housing, marriage, religion, education, and war. Sallust’s ethnography of Africa (Jugurthine War 17–19) exemplifies most of these features. First Sallust describes Africa’s location: In dividing up the world most authorities make Africa the third part, but a few hold that there are only Asia and Europe, with Africa as a part of Europe. It is bounded on the west by the strait between our sea and Oceanus, on the east by a broad descending slope which the inhabitants call Catabathmos. ( Jugurthine War 17)

He then describes the qualities and resources of the country: The sea is hostile, without havens; the land is productive for cereals, good for herds, unproductive for trees; both sky and land are poor in water.

This is followed by the qualities of the inhabitants: A breed of men physically vigorous, quick and tough. Most die in old age, those that steel or wild beasts do not kill, for disease does not subdue many. Moreover, there are great quantities of vicious animals.

Sallust goes on to review the origins of the inhabitants in detail, telling the history of the country from mythic times and tracing its present nations back to peoples both aboriginal (Gaetulians and Libyans) and immigrant (Persians, Medes, Armenians, and Phoenicians). Scattered through this review are remarks on the cultural institutions of the different nations: 12 A. Riese, Die Idealisirung der Naturvo¨lker des Nordens in der griechischen und ro¨mischen Literatur (Frankfurt, 1875); Karl Tru¨dinger, Studien zur Geschichte der griechisch-ro¨mischen Ethnographie (diss. Basel, 1918); Alfredus Schroeder, De Ethnographiae Antiquae Locis Quibusdam Communibus Observationes (diss. Halle, 1921); Richard Thomas, Lands and Peoples in Roman Poetry: The Ethnographical Tradition (Cambridge Philological Society Supplement, 7; Cambridge, 1982).


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In the beginning Africa belonged to the Gaetulians and Libyans, wild and uncivilized peoples who ate the flesh of wild animals and the grasses of the field, like cattle. They were controlled by no custom, no law, no authority of any man; wandering, roaming, their only homes where night brought them to a stop. (Jugurthine War 18)

Not every ancient ethnography has all these features; many of those in the Natural History are nearly as elliptical as Homer’s description of the Abioi, which I discuss below. Pliny’s ethnography of the Arimphaei, a tribe just as primitive as Sallust’s Gaetulians but viewed in the light of the Golden Age, may stand as an example: The severe climate and the range of the Ripaean Mountains come to an end at the same time, and there, I have read, live the Arimphaei, a nation not unlike the Hyperboreans. For homes they have the woods, for their food, berries; long hair is thought equally disgraceful for women as for men; their customs are mild. And so it is said that they are considered holy and inviolate even by the wild neighbouring tribes, not only they themselves but even those who have taken sanctuary with them. (6.34–5)

Not only were the outlines and descriptive categories of the typical ethnographic report fixed, but to a certain extent the contents were too. Ethnographers persistently observed the same details about different nations. The same things, often given a moralizing point, were said to apply to widely separate nations: that certain races built no temples and made no images of their gods, for instance, or fought fiercely because they were convinced of the immortality of their souls.13 While curiosity impelled audiences to read, and authors to write, about foreign peoples, direct observation and accurate description were uncommon. Not many authors had travelled to the 13

No temples or images: attributed by Herodotus to the Scythians (4.59) and the Persians (1.131); attributed to the Germans by Tacitus (Germania 9 and 43); to the Jews by Tacitus (Histories 2.78). Bravery in battle because of belief in immortal soul: attributed to Getae by Herodotus (4.93–4); by Pomponius Mela (2.18); attributed to the Gauls by Strabo (4.197) and by Caesar (Gallic War 6.14). For these topoi see Schroeder, Observationes, 2–3, 10–11. The older commentary of J. G. C. Anderson, Cornelii Taciti De Origine et Situ Germanorum (Oxford, 1938), pp. xxvii–xxxviii has a good discussion of the topoi relevant to Tacitus’ Germania, to be read in conjunction with Rives, Germania, 56–7, 61–4.

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lands they described. Progress towards accurate description and breadth of coverage was by no means steady. Even as what was known of the world’s geography beyond the familiar confines of ‘the inhabited world’ (in Greek, oikoumene) increased through colonization, trade, and war, writers were often satisfied to repeat previous statements about a place without independent verification. Once set, an observation about a given people was hard to supplant, no matter how misinformed. When certain expectations about human development became established, observations were adjusted to fit theories, with the result that (for example) the Chinese could be described as taller than ordinary humans, with red hair and blue eyes, a description that put them in the class of the Scythians, Celts, Germans, and other inhabitants of the north.14 Strictly accurate observation, it must be noted, was often not the point. Ethnography was a matter of literary convention, and as such, convenient for scoring rhetorical points or moralizing reflection. On the one hand, the fantastic or grotesque features attributed to various foreign tribes lent themselves to sensational paradoxographic uses; on the other hand, faraway peoples could be idealized as noble savages, opening the door for literary treatment by the creators of Utopias. The more exotic the people or the more primitive, the more suitable for idealization.15 We have already seen an example of such Golden Age primitivism in Pliny’s ethnography of the Arimphaei (6.34–5), quoted above; the Natural History contains a more extensive example, an ethnography of the Hyperboreans (4.89), which will be discussed in depth on pp. 118 ff. The tendency toward primitivism is already apparent in an early ethnographic vignette, Iliad 13.1–7: When Zeus had brought the Trojans and Hector to the ships, he left them there to have labour and suffering uninterrupted, and himself turned away his shining eyes apart, looking down over the land of the Thracian horse-herders 14 This appearance is attributed to the Seres (normally identified with the Chinese) in Natural History 6.88. This passage is discussed later in this chapter at greater length. 15 A collection of idealizing ethnographies is conveniently available in Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Documentary History of Primitivism, I; Baltimore, 1935).


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and the Mysians, hand-to-hand fighters, and the noble Hippomolgoi, who drink milk, and the Abioi, most just of men. No more did he turn his shining eyes toward Troy.

To idealize faraway tribes is typical of ancient ethnography.16 For the Odyssey, the Ethiopians are both ‘the most distant of men’ and evidently the happiest, as they share their banquets with Poseidon in person (1.22–6). The same degree of idealization is applied to the Ethiopians by Herodotus, who describes them as a nation of long-lived supermen (3.17–25). Returning to Homer’s Abioi, it is also typical of ancient ethnography that the description of foreign races comes as a withdrawal from the immediate object of attention. From its very beginning, literary ethnography was a turning away. There is also a significant contrast between the far-away and the matter at hand. In this case, Zeus is looking out to the edge of the world for a respite from violence, for consolation for the tedium and horror of the fighting around Troy. The Abioi (though the poem only hints at where they live or what they are up to)17 are the ‘most just of all men’. Living on the edges of the earth, they are blessedly innocent of the turmoil Zeus has been watching up till now and to which he will eventually turn back. The function of the ends of the earth here is to provide an idealized contrast to, and an implicit moral comment on, the action. This kind of pointed contrast is the fundamental principle of Utopian writing. Ethnography was a literary tradition, not a watertight genre: its boundaries were porous and changeable, overlapping considerably with the description of various Golden Ages or Utopias. For the Greeks, describing the outlines of an ideal commonwealth was an established way of provoking new thinking about existing political forms, contrasting the familiar social conventions of the Greek polis against an imaginary model. Plato was a creator of famous Utopias, the ideal states of the Republic and the Laws, and Atlantis in Timaeus and Critias.18 But Plato was not the first or the only Utopian. His city-states 16

Schroeder, Observationes, 35–9. Riese, Idealisirung, 7–8. The Hippolmolgi are certainly exotic, as indicated by their diet of milk (food being a strong marker of cultural difference), and are to be located in the North (as the proximity of Thracians suggests). 18 John Ferguson, Utopias of the Classical World (Ithaca, NY, 1975), 61–79. 17

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were only a few of the army of competing models on offer, most of which are obscure today: the philosophers Antisthenes, Diogenes, and Zeno all had Republics of their own.19 Some authors took a real city as their ideal (Sparta was always a favourite)20 while others were frankly imaginary. Still others used the conventions of ethnography to couch their states in terms of real geography, positing recently discovered continents on the far side of the Atlantic or islands in the Indian Ocean. This kind of Utopian ethnography was fashionable in the Hellenistic period: Euhemerus (late fourth to early third century bc) described the imaginary land of Panchaia in great detail as a frame for his famous theory of the origins of the Olympian gods.21 The historian Theopompus (fourth century bc) described the two cities of Eusebes (Pious) and Machimos (Warlike), on a continent so big as to make the oikoumene look like an island by comparison: there people and animals are twice as big as in the world we know, and live twice as long. Of the two great cities on this continent, the citizens of Pious enjoy life in the style of the Golden Age, but the citizens of Warlike are conquerors impervious to iron.22 Another Hellenistic Utopia was the Round Island of Iambulus,23 who combined diverse social perfections with memorably grotesque details: [The inhabitants of this island] have a peculiarity about their tongues that is partly natural and congenital, partly a deliberate contrivance. For a certain length their tongues are forked, and they extend the division to the inner part so that the tongue is doubled up to the root. So their voices are extremely intricate: they imitate not only every human and articulate language but even the varied tones of the birds and generally can utter every property of sound. The most amazing thing is that they can speak perfectly well to two people at once, answering and conversing appropriately with the present circumstances, using one fold of the tongue to speak to each interlocutor. (Diodorus Siculus 2.56)

19

Ferguson, Utopias, 52–5 (Antisthenes); 89–97 (Diogenes); 111–15 (Zeno). See also Schroeder, Observationes, 39–45. 20 Ferguson, Utopias, 29–39. 21 Ferguson, Utopias, 102–10. 22 Aelian, Varia Historia 3.18; Ferguson, Utopias, 122–3. 23 Ferguson, Utopias, 124–9.


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Few ancient ethnographies are entirely devoid of fantastic or paradoxographic details like this. And in their turn, more purely paradoxographic writers whose intention was simply to astonish and entertain also exploited the ends of the earth, their flora, fauna, and nations. There is little in the way of form or structure to distinguish ethnography, on the one hand, from paradoxography or Utopian writing, on the other. In terms of structure, any given ethnography in Herodotus resembles the stories of Ctesias (late fifth century bc), famous for his fantastic reports of India. He was the first to describe monsters that were to enjoy long literary careers, such as the unicorn and the manticore. He is also the authority for the Indian tribe called the Cynocephali: In these mountains live men with the heads of dogs. They wear clothes made from the hides of wild beasts and do not converse in speech, but howl like dogs and thus understand each other. Their teeth are bigger than those of dogs, and their nails are like dogs’, but longer and more curved. They inhabit the mountains as far as the Indus river. They are black and exceedingly just, like the rest of the Indians, with whom they associate. They can understand what the Indians say, and though they themselves cannot converse, with their howling and with their hands and fingers they make signs like deafmutes. The Indians call them the Calystrii, which in Greek means Dog-Heads (Cynocephali).24

In the eyes of later writers on marvels (and among them was Pliny, who repeated the story of the Cynocephali) Herodotus and Ctesias were functionally equal: they were both serviceable quarries for material. This taste for marvels can even be found in the geographical or ethnographic passages of historians whom we usually see as sober and realistic. Polybius, for instance (8.48), describes two versions of a story about how nomads cross the river Oxus in central Asia without getting wet. In one version they cross at the foot of a certain cliff over which the river hurtles in a waterfall so violent that the stream hits the ground one-eighth of a mile away; in the other version, which seemed to Polybius the more plausible, the force of the waterfall hollows out the boulders beneath it, so that the river flows underground and the nomads 24

Ctesias fr. 45, FGH III C 688.

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cross above it. In Caesar, another writer usually thought of as cool-headed, the ethnography of the Germans extends to a geographical description of the Hercynian Forest and its marvellous animals, including the elk: There are likewise the animals called elks (alces) much like a goat in shape and particoloured coat, but slightly bigger. They have stunted horns and no joints or knots in their legs; they do not lie down to sleep and cannot get up or raise themselves if they ever fall by accident. For beds they use trees: sidling up close they lean only a little against the trunk and fall asleep. When hunters have tracked them and discovered their dens, they loosen the trees by digging at the roots or cut into them so far that they only seem to stand. When the elks lean against them as usual, their weight brings down the weakened trees and the animals collapse as well. (Gallic War 6.27)

Opinions differ on whether this story was really written by Caesar; certainly it seems hard to reconcile with the usual picture of him as a serious, humourless, calculating writer.25 Some scholars base their objections to the passage on stylistic grounds, but the fact is that, while the story would not seem out of place in the classical authors traditionally thought of as ‘credulous’ (like Pliny or Herodotus), Caesar has always seemed to belong to a more sceptical class. The note of fantasy in this story simply does not seem compatible with the Caesar we imagine on the evidence of the rest of the book.26 But whether or not the story is Caesar’s work, it is important evidence for the strong connection between ethnographic writing and the marvellous. Ethnographic digressions with paradoxographic features were a traditional ingredient of histories, a concession to 25 Some editors reject all the ethnographic passages in Caesar. For the history of the question see Otto Seel’s preface to his edition of the Gallic War (Leipzig, 1961), pp. lviii–lxv, and the comment in his apparatus criticus to 6.24–7, p. 192. 26 The comment of Dittenberger–Meusel (Comentarii de Bello Gallico, erkla¨rt von Fr. Kraner, W. Dittenberger, und H. Meusel, Zurich, 1967), on 6.27.2, crura sine nodis articulisque, is ‘eine solche Fabelei soll Caesar geglaubt und ohne die leiseste Andeutung eines Zweifels weiter erza¨hlt haben?!’ They reject the entire description of the Hercynian Forest (6.25–8). The uncomplicated view of Caesar as an objective and trustworthy recorder of fact has recently come into question: see Kathryn Welch and Anton Powell (eds.), Julius Caesar as Artful Reporter: The War Commentaries as Political Instruments (London, 1998).


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readerly pleasure. It seems entirely possible that Caesar may not have believed, with his modern critics, that duty required him to exclude from the Gallic War an expected feature of the ethnographical tradition. On the other hand, if the passage is an interpolation, it may have been inserted by a reader of Caesar who thought that this part of the book, being in the ethnographic vein, demanded it. Considered from the point of view of the consumer, the anecdote may not have seemed at all inappropriate to its context. Most of us read Caesar today with expectations very different from those with which we read Pliny or Iambulus, but not every ancient reader would have drawn a distinction between the intentions of Caesar and those of Pliny or Iambulus. The ethnographic portions of the Gallic War were just as capable of being read for pleasure as those in any Utopia or paradoxographer. p linian eth nograph y Among the Greek and Roman books that contain ethnographic matter, the Natural History does not make an overwhelming first impression. Brent Shaw has compared the amount of ethnographic material in Pliny’s book unfavourably to Strabo, and argues from this that the Flavian Romans were less concerned about barbarians than earlier generations.27 And it is quite true that ethnographic passages appear only intermittently in the Natural History, with no particular sequence or connection marked between them. They relate to each other in no obvious way. Descriptions of different races and their customs occur here and there among long stretches of nonethnographic material, and none of them approaches the schematic concentration of book 2 of Herodotus’ Histories, which is devoted entirely to Egypt, or of book 4, which catalogues the tribes of north-west Asia in progression from the solid and familiar towns of the Black Sea coast to the fantastic territories of the distant north, where men have the feet of goats and sleep for six months of the year.28 27

Brent Shaw, ‘Rebels and Outsiders’, Cambridge Ancient History, xi: The High Empire, A.D. 70–192, ed. A. Bowman, P. Garnsey, and D. Rathbone (Cambridge, 2000), 374. 28 Herodotus 4.17–25.

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While individual ethnographies in Pliny may be vivid, they are not arranged to make a pattern: they are neither so similar to each other as to belong to an obvious continuum, nor do they show salient differences that would provoke a reader to view them in a gradation. As we saw in Chapter 1, Pliny describes various schemes by which he could possibly have classified the nations of humanity, but leaves them unused; he does not categorize races by analogy to animals, by effect of climate, or geographical register, despite the theory of climates sketched out in book 2 of the Natural History. No race is distinguished as outstandingly civilized, and surprisingly few are marked as particularly barbarous.29 Gian Biagio Conte has remarked that for the Natural History the idea of the primitive ‘has no meaning as a criterion of cultural distinction, and so the uncivilized must still be organized within known forms, halfway between man and animal’.30 When the Natural History does settle down to pay some considered attention to man as an object of natural history (7.6–32), Pliny says explicitly that he will not write what we would call a cultural anthropology: ‘I shall not be dealing with ways and customs, for they are countless, almost as many as there are gatherings of humans’ (7.6). In book 7, which is devoted entirely to facts about mankind, he writes only of normal human beings, on the one hand, and spectacularly monstrous races, on the other, with no categories in between. In Natural History, book 7, as Italo Calvino has observed, ‘the human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines’.31 The Natural History’s method here is to sketch out the extremes, with Caesar and Pompey and Cicero representing the heights of human achievement, and bestial half-men at the furthest edge of culture and physiognomy. The homes of these half-human nations are assigned mostly to India and Ethiopia, and the descriptions of them derive ultimately from Greek writers on the East, the books about India that appeared in the wake of Alexander’s campaigns, and from 29

The one nation whose low level of culture is so marked are the Chauci of the distant north-west in 16.2–7. See the beginning of Ch. 5. 30 Conte, ‘Inventory of the World’, 98. 31 Calvino, ‘Man, the Sky, and the Elephant’, 323.


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Ctesias and the paradoxographers I mentioned in the Introduction.32 To these monstrous races the Natural History attaches some qualifications; Pliny prefaces his catalogue of them with the disclaimer that ‘in most of these cases I will not pledge my trustworthiness, preferring to transfer responsibility to the authorities who will be listed in all doubtful matters’ (7.8). But the spectacle of what follows (7.9–32) had in fact an extremely wide influence among later readers, and came to be of great importance in the history of European ethnography. Although this material is unmitigated paradoxography, the exotic peoples listed here entered the mainstream of later ethnographic writing and formed the basis of much of the medieval world’s ideas about India and the East.33 In these pages the Natural History describes cannibal nations of the far north (7.9–11); men with their feet turned backwards behind their legs (7.11); nations immune to snake-bites, or who can cure them with a touch (7.12–15); tribes of androgynes; tribes possessing the evil eye or with immunity to fire (7.15–20); and above all these, India, a repository of marvellous nations (7.21–32), where trees and dogs grow to enormous size, while some inhabitants are seven feet tall and never spit; where a caste of philosophers, the Gymnosophists, stand unmoving for days on end with their eyes fixed on the sun, and there are dog-headed men and eight-toed people (7.22). In one Indian tribe, children are born old; another tribe, the Sciapodae (‘Shadow-feet’), who are one-legged, lie on their backs and shade themselves each with a huge single foot; west of these are neckless people with eyes in their shoulders (7.23). Some Indians, the Choromandae, with hairy bodies and doglike teeth, lack the power of speech, but scream horribly (7.24); some lack mouths and live off the smell of fruit, but can be killed by an irritating odour (7.25); 32 Rudolf Wittkower, ‘Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 5 (1942), 159–97. 33 See Wittkower, ‘Marvels of the East’, 159–97. Book 7 of the Natural History was so important as a conduit through which the wonders of India passed from Classical Greece through to late antiquity and the Middle Ages that John Block Friedman labelled the animal-men of the East the ‘Plinian Races’ in his The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 5–25. See also Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia, 1964), 22–42.

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some are pygmies (7.26–7); some live 130 or 140 or 200 years, being born with white hair that turns black while they age, while others live for no more than 40 years, their women giving birth at the age of 7 (7.27–9). Instead of a catalogue raisonne´ of cultures, Pliny has assembled here a gallery of prodigies culled from Homer (Cyclopes and Laestrygones), Herodotus (Arimaspi and cannibal Scythians), and from retailers of the marvels of India, on whom he draws most heavily, Onesicritus, Ctesias, and Megasthenes. The significance of this parade of monsters is not at first clear. This is the only considered and extended passage of ethnography in the Natural History, but it draws no conclusion applicable to the study of man in general: ‘These and like things nature in her cleverness has made as diversions for herself, as objects of marvel for us . . . to appreciate her power, it is enough to see that she has put among her monstrosities entire nations’ (7.32). This is a conclusion that concludes nothing: it makes no inferences, and forms no general principles. By cataloguing only the most bizarre shapes in which the human race appears, and then invoking the marvellous (miracula) and the monstrous (prodigia) to explain these strange and divergent instances, the Natural History in fact makes analysis impossible. The emphasis on the bizarre seems to defy attempts at further explanation.34 No underlying pattern is to be found in humans beyond an intention to surprise: the author supplies none, and as a reader, you may as well give up too. In The Eye of the Beholder, his survey of ancient attitudes toward the deformed and disabled, referring to these pages of the Natural History and similar accounts in Strabo and St Augustine, Robert Garland attempts to explain why belief in such deformed races was widespread in antiquity.35 He proposes that the shapes of the monstrous races derive from encounters with actual misshapen people or with animals, misunderstood or exaggerated by the travellers who first encountered them. The dog-headed men of India, he suggests, were really baboons or other apes sighted from a distance; the 34

Klaus Mu¨ller, Geschichte der Antiken Ethnographie, ii. 144. Robert Garland, The Eye of the Beholder: Deformity and Disability in the Graeco-Roman World (Ithaca, NY, 1995), 160–70. 35


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neckless men with eyes in their shoulders were tribes that ‘painted heads on their chests or wore costumes over their heads with sockets for their eyes to peer through’; the Sciapodae can be explained as Hindus seen in a yoga position.36 To account for the considerable differences between the monstrous races of paradoxography and their models in the real world, Garland suggests that ‘many encounters with the monstrous races probably took place at a distance’ and that ‘an encounter with the unknown is a profoundly alienating experience which taxes the subject’s ability to articulate what he has witnessed’.37 I would suggest another line of interpretation. If encounters between ancient travellers and apes or yogis were so distressing to the travellers that they could frame no accurate description of them when they came home, how can we account for the fact that the reports about grotesque half-men have come down to us in the same books as matter-of-fact, more-or-less accurate accounts of apes and yogis, described as such, in the Natural History and many other ancient books?38 Why did the true accounts not drive out the distortions? Why were the exaggerations repeated over and over until in the Middle Ages they all but replaced the truth? How can we account for the popularity and persistence of these monsters? I would not deny that encountering a baboon or a man with a costume over his head may be astonishing or distressing, but there is something more at work here. It is natural to deal with these stories by trying to sift out a kernel of truth at the bottom of them, assuming that the story can be explained by its origin; once an authentic experience has been found to lie at the back of the exaggeration, we will have satisfactorily accounted for the story. But asking ‘how true is this story?’ does nothing to explain the appeal the stories evidently had for readers in antiquity. I am less inclined to attribute the popularity of these monsters to their origins in hypothetical real-life encounters than to the tendencies of the human imagination. In the course of life, every human being 36

Ibid. 161. Ibid. 169–70. 38 The Gymnosophistae, the ‘Naked Philosophers’, are customarily identified as ‘Sky Clad’ Jains; based on Pliny’s account of their unearthly postures (7.22), they were evidently also practitioners of yoga; for apes, see 8.215–16. 37

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experiences bodily changes that are not to be easily explained: the body grows and shrinks, loses teeth and grows new ones, changes texture and colour, becomes more and less hairy. It is natural to extrapolate such changes, or to ask oneself whether change may ever extend beyond what is known. In the monsters of Natural History book 7 we have examples of the human body being run by the imagination through a schematic series of variations. The subject of this gallery is the human body in its every permutation and extreme, forms as bizarre among humans ‘as tigers or peacocks are among animals’ (7.7), distant nations differing from us by bodily subtraction (they are pygmies, or lack necessary parts), addition (they are giants, or have extraneous animal parts like dogs’ heads, hairy hides, magic eyes, or feathers), or inversion (their feet point backwards; they switch from one sex to the other; or are born old and age in reverse, growing black-haired in old age). Their diets are either excessively gross (they eat humans, inspiring the same disgust as Polyphemus in Homer’s Odyssey) or excessively refined (they eat rarely, or live only on the scent of flowers, outdoing even the vegetarianism of Pythagoreans). These pages from the Natural History’s ‘anthropology’ are sensational, fascinating, and disgusting for the same reasons that the life of the human body fascinates and disgusts us. Aulus Gellius read them and was nauseated—an appropriately physical response—but not enough to keep from retelling them.39 The notoriety that these images achieved among the readers of antiquity was not due to any historical connection to actual baboons or yogis encountered by hypothetical travellers, but to the imperative curiosity and speculation that the human body provokes in its owners. When it comes to these ethnographies, then, trying to separate truth from falsehood is not as productive an approach as trying to relate them to the cultural preoccupations of the ethnographer. This is an appropriate point to say a word about the precedents for my approach to the ethnographies in the Natural History. For a long time, the most pressing question of readers of ancient ethnographies was ‘how true is this?’ That is, could any Greek or Roman description of a given 39

Gellius, Noctes Atticae 9.4.11–13.


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nation or tribe be trusted as an accurate picture? In recent years, however, interest has begun to turn from the object of the description and towards the writer doing the describing; the question ‘how true is this?’ has been supplanted by ‘what does this piece of writing presuppose?’ Outside Classics, there has been increasing awareness of the tacit ideological content of fields traditionally regarded as politically neutral and objective: geography and anthropology have been chief among these.40 As a consequence, there has been more interest in the interaction between these disciplines and the values of the cultures in which they were formed and pursued. As regards modern anthropology and geography, interest has grown in the political ramifications of the practice of these disciplines, and in their ideological debts to the cultures from which they arose. At the same time, scholars of ancient Greece and Rome have become interested in the ideological dimensions of anthropological writing in the ancient world. A decisive change in the way ancient ethnography was read came with the publication of François Hartog’s The Mirror of Herodotus.41 Based on an analysis of Herodotus’ ethnography of Scythia and account of Darius’ invasion of it (Histories 4.1–142), Hartog’s argument set a compelling precedent not only for later readers of Herodotus42 and Tacitus,43 but even for how to interpret Renaissance ethnographers.44 Hartog’s method is Structuralist. Unlike earlier readers of Herodotus’ ethnographic passages, he is not interested in evaluating their 40 e.g. Annie E. Coombes, ‘Ethnography and the Formation of National and Cultural Identities’, in Susan Hiller (ed.), The Myth of Primitivism (London, 1991), 189–214; also J. Clifford and G. E. Marcus (eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986). 41 Originally published as Le Miroir d’He´rodote: Essai sur la repre´sentation de l’autre (Paris, 1980); Eng. trans. by Janet Lloyd (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988). 42 Susanna Stambler, ‘Herodotus’, in T. J. Luce (ed.), Ancient Writers: Greece and Rome (New York, 1982), 209–25 (see esp. the discussion on pp. 221–5); James Redfield, ‘Herodotus the Tourist’, CP 80 (1985), 97–118. 43 E. O’Gorman, ‘No Place Like Rome: Identity and Difference in the Germania of Tacitus’, Ramus, 22 (1993), 135–54. 44 Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago, 1991).

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reliability in an archaeological sense, and sets aside questions of their truth-value. What interests him was the Scythians as an idea, and the place they fill in the symbolic system of Herodotus’ book. He argues that for Herodotus the Scythians were ‘good to think with’ in the same way that totem animals were, in Le´vi-Straussian terms, for the cultures of South American Indians. Hartog understands the salient thing about Herodotus’ Scythians to be their nomad way of life, their existence without fixed homes. They signify an idea that was fascinating and paradoxical to the ancient Greeks: carrying their homes with them, the Scythians live nowhere and everywhere at once. In Herodotus’ book, the problem about which the Scythians are ‘good for thinking with’ is the different ways of winning a war, the continuum between holding fast at home and fleeing, staying fixed and retreating. As combatants in the Persian Wars, the Scythians can retreat without abandoning their homes, and thwart the Persians by wearing them out; as a sign in Herodotus’ text, they open up a space for a new, more complicated notion of ‘home’. Far from being a digression only marginally relevant to the war between the Greeks and the Persians, Herodotus’ main topic, the Scythian ethnography is shown by Hartog to be an integral part of it, an anticipation of the game of strategic retreat that the Athenians play with the Persians during the invasion of Attica. Hartog’s line of reasoning has an obvious advantage for an interpretation of Pliny’s encyclopedia as a cultural artefact, since it treats ethnographies as windows into the culture of the ethnographer. The category ‘foreigner’ in itself assumes the idea of ‘home’, a pre-existing, unspoken norm with which the self identifies. The foreigners in the Natural History were not foreigners absolutely; they were Rome’s foreigners. And if foreign cultures can only be described in the vocabulary of home, then it may be concluded that, in order to be described, the behaviour, institutions, and social organizations of the foreign had first to be broken down into categories formed from the values and experiences of home. So in the Natural History, Roman life is an implicit presence against which all other peoples in ethnographic descriptions, subject and free, are measured. The reverse is also true: by meditating on how societies are organized and on modes of organization alternative


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to the Roman social order, the Natural History implies a specific identity for its readers, as Romans and citizens of a successfully expansionist empire. When the ethnographies in the Natural History are looked at not for their information-value, as truthful reports of what Pliny was able to find out about the world, but as evidence of cultural values and preoccupations, patterns begin to emerge. All the ethnographies of the Natural History carry out one of the following tasks: they either describe the limits of geographical knowledge, or they describe extreme forms of the human body, or they portray non-Roman economic behaviours that define Roman culture by contrast. In all three cases, the ethnographies provoke the reader to wonder and to speculate, whether about the furthest limits of what human life is permitted by Nature, or the limits of what moral men permit themselves as consumers and users of Nature. The Natural History is deeply interested in man as a moral creature, and its ethnographies are rhetorical elaborations of this interest, which work out the implications of moral problems that preoccupied the Roman imagination. registers of ethnogr aphy Various ethnographies in the Natural History can be classified under different registers in the encyclopedia’s rhetorical index: the register of luxury, for example. The morality of consumption and the value of luxurious goods are recurrent themes of the Natural History, and questions of value and economy unite different ethnographies of the distant East—for Pliny’s book, pre-eminently the home of luxury. These eastern nations are described as counterpoints to the Roman morality of good consumption, the rhetoric of these ethnographies serving to work out points of uncertainty in Roman ideology. Next to luxury in this metaphorical index we might put the register of suicide—luxury and suicide both being part of a larger moral question, the cultivation and maintenance of the self. In a book as engrossed as the Natural History is in the workings of medicines and poisons, the theme of suicide has an inevitable importance. Since, from the moral perspective of the Natural History, medicines are instruments for the control and

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cultivation of one’s self, suicide inevitably has a place in the encyclopedia as another such instrument, corollary to them. Like the nations under the register of luxury, certain nations of the encyclopedia come together under the register of suicide, and their customs of voluntary death form a counterpoint to Roman ideology and practice. Neither luxury nor suicide, as we shall find, is simplified by the rhetorical ethnographies of the Natural History. Like light dispersed in a prism, these themes are resolved by ethnographies into their different components and displayed in all their complications. luxury Frankincense, purple dye, and amber are products of Natura that haunt the moral imagination of the Natural History.45 Much of the ethnographic, geographic, zoological, and medical parts of the encyclopedia is framed as a response of one kind or another to the complex and slippery questions posed by luxury, which holds an ambiguous place in the text. On the one hand, luxuries like gold and purple are traditional markers of honour among the Romans, ancient and necessary signs of social distinctions, integral to the authority of the senatorial class, and the encyclopedia allows such luxuries a legitimate place in society. For instance, it is demonstrated with much elaboration that the wearing of the senator’s purple-bordered robe can be traced all the way back to the Etruscans and, in Rome’s regal period, to Tullus Hostilius (9.136). After all, purple dye ‘marks off the senate from the class of knights, is called on for help in appeasing the gods, brightens every kind of clothing, is combined with the gold worn in triumphs; for which reasons we must excuse even the mania for purple’ (9.127). And as we have seen in the previous chapter, ostentation and display are hardly foreign or repugnant to the aesthetic of the Natural History. On every page the book displays the prodigal sensibility of a spendthrift writer unembarrassed at how much he owes to his sources. The 45 On luxury as an organizing and motivating element of the Natural History, see Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Pliny the Elder and Man’s Unnatural History’, Greece & Rome, 37 (1990), 80–96. Beagon, Roman Nature, 76–9 has a useful general discussion of luxury as a perversion of human ingenuity.


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scholarly economy of the encyclopedia demands that what is accumulated be spent at once, not saved but shown off for others to see. Likewise, more material kinds of ostentation, used for the proper ends and by the proper persons, have their place when they reinforce traditional distinctions of Roman culture. As the end of learning lies in its being displayed, so the end of purple lies in useful forms of social display: to mark off the less distinguished from socially privileged categories such as those of the senator, the gods, and the triumphator. But when diverted from these traditional and legitimate uses, this same purple stands as a supreme example of useless luxury. The shellfish that produce the purple dye as well as Roman couches double-dyed in purple come in for vituperation dressed in the purplest of prose (9.105, 127)—for Romans who indulge in luxury invite in retaliation equally indulgent rhetoric. In political terms, if luxurious display is sometimes the prerogative of the good, it is a privilege more often usurped by the bad.46 As Jacob Isager has noted,47 there runs through the books on art history a strong vein of satire against luxury and avarice, in which the indulgences of Mark Antony, Caligula, and especially Nero are contrasted with the self-control of Augustus, Vespasian, and the senatorial order. Foreign luxuries make Rome effeminate, undermining its moral stability, sapping its authority as they drain the Mediterranean economy of cash: At the lowest reckoning India, China, and the Arabian peninsula remove 100 million sesterces from our empire every year: this is the cost to us of our luxuries and our women. (12.84)

Any part of nature that man uses, from trees (12.1 ff.) and flax (19.1) to stones (36.1), can be an opportunity for a diatribe on human perversity. Whether, with Conte, we explain it as a 46

Different aspects of the topos of luxury in Roman literature are collected in Mu¨ller, Geschichte der Antiken Ethnographie, 146, and Jasper Griffin, Latin Poets and Roman Life (Chapel Hill, 1985), 5–15, which breaks the topos down into the following categories: Rome’s physical fabric; the country villas of the wealthy; Greek art; travel to and life in Greek cities; wine; clothing; cosmetics; perfume; cooking; jewellery; associating with actors; gambling; music; and large retinues of household slaves. 47 Isager, Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art, 223.

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conservative reaction to sudden economic changes48 or, with Wallace-Hadrill, as a rhetorical means of engaging the reader in scientific inquiry,49 the theme of luxury provokes and fascinates. Diatribes against luxury are a way of displaying learning. Gold, silver, snow-chilled water, indigo, and oysters—if they must all be stripped of their glamour, they must be understood. Knowledge exorcises luxury—knowledge of luxury goods from the inside. And so the Natural History frames luxury items as mysteries to be solved, and in doing so gives narrative tension to factual exposition. In the case of amber, for example, it is only after listing many earlier theories, the erroneous stories and explanations of the Greeks, and proving them all mistaken that the Natural History patiently untangles its real nature by tracing it back along the trade-routes to its point of origin.50 As we shall see, the encyclopedist also frames frankincense within layers of mystery, and then resorts to ethnography to tease the truth gradually out of its esoteric centre. To know its origin is to control it, to explain it, account for its fascination, and possibly—though there is no escape from luxury, only greater or lesser understanding—to free oneself from the desire it awakens. Knowledge of luxury goods can dispel desire for them because most are in origin far from desirable. But to demonstrate this specialized knowledge is necessary, particularly knowledge of an ethnographic kind, since most luxuries come from foreign lands: ‘Hatred of luxury is in no way more easily justified than if one travels there [to the East] in one’s mind and contemplates what is sought there by trade, how it is obtained, and for what reason’ (6.88). Accounts of distant places allow the use of rhetorical paradox against luxuries, to turn them inside out, proving the innate cheapness of what is thought precious, and showing in turn how the perverse elevation of the base perverts Roman values. Expense cheapens, finery degrades—because these delicacies are cheap and base in origin. Goods valued by the 48

Conte, ‘The Inventory of the World’, 81. Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Man’s Unnatural History’, 95. 50 The history of amber takes up all of 37.30–51, and begins (37.31) with ‘Here’, says Pliny, ‘is an opportunity for exposing the fatuity of the Greeks.’ 49


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Romans as luxuries, when tracked down to their source, are found to be ignoble and disgusting offscourings of other places. Their ‘value’ is only an incidental effect of their having moved great distances as they were carried to Rome. Even snow, which is worse than valueless in its place of origin, becomes a luxury when carted down from the tops of mountains to chill oysters for a banquet, ‘bringing mountain peaks and the depths of the sea together’ (32.64), or when to cool drinks in the summer, ‘turning what is the scourge of mountain regions into delectation for the throat’ (19.55). When items of luxury are actually used, applied, or consumed by Romans, their ignoble nature can reassert itself, degrading those who use or consume them. For example, the Natural History identifies the source of Indian indigo as a kind of ‘mud that sticks to the foam on reeds’ (35.46) and goes on to show how its use degrades the arts—‘when purple moves to walls, and India contributes the mud of its rivers and the blood of its elephants and serpents, there is no noble painting’ (35.50)— another example of how, by inverting normal economic values, foreign luxuries confuse moral standards as well. The account of the Arabian trade in frankincense (tus in Latin) at Natural History 12.51 ff. is an ethnographic description of how nature’s creations become luxuries. Here ethnography is combined with a detailed account of the process of importing incense from the East to Rome. As we watch frankincense transformed from one nation’s sacred tree to another nation’s commodity, we can see how the successive exchanges and re-evaluations of the incense trade change the normal values of cultures—for in the country of its origin frankincense is neither base nor luxurious. Here the text works out certain problems of definition posed by luxury: is it the consumption of items from far away (which would mean that everything the Romans regard as a luxury can be shown to be essentially base), or the consumption of inherently expensive items? If luxury is a matter of context, how can there be luxuries in the East? Can the nations of the East be luxurious? a rabian frankin cens e The ethnography of Arabia shows that luxury is contextual, a value that is added by trade and by the crossing of boundaries

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physical, national, and religious. The Arabians, the ethnographic subject here, are primitives, and not at all luxurious. Surrounded by what will be sold as a luxury in Rome, they estimate its value in a very different way. They have their own uses for frankincense, and have no part in the Roman culture of frankincense consumption.51 The way the Natural History describes frankincense makes it clear that it is a problem in need of solution. Frankincense is a luxury and a mystery as well. No one in the Mediterranean world knows how to grow it, or for that matter even what a frankincense tree looks like. The Natural History reports various conjectures, but the botanical mystery of the source only deepens as we read the many contradictory positions of his authorities: There is no agreement about the tree’s appearance. We have conducted campaigns in Arabia, Roman arms have penetrated much of it, and indeed Gaius Caesar the son of Augustus pursued fame there, yet no Latin writer to my knowledge has reported the appearance of these trees; the descriptions of the Greeks do not agree. (12.55)

King Antigonus compares the tree to a terebinth, King Juba to a Pontic maple, and others to a bay-tree, while ‘the Arabian emissaries who have come to Rome in my time have only made everything even more obscure’ (12.57). But this spice of Arabia holds an undeniable fascination because of its mystery and above all its expense: as a boy Alexander the Great was criticized by his tutor for using frankincense like a spendthrift at sacrifices—an insult he paid back after he got power over Arabia, sending his tutor a ship laden with frankincense and telling him to worship the gods lavishly (12.62). In the context of this story, it is worth noting that Alexander does not appear to be a passive victim of luxurious tastes, but instead figures as a heroic spendthrift like Plutarch’s version of Caesar (see Chapter 2). It was stories of Arabian wealth like this one that incited Gaius Caesar’s desire to invade Arabia (12.56). But frankincense is also glamorous because its source is inaccessible, a 51 For an overview of the trade in cinnamon, myrrh, frankincense, and other spices in southern Arabia in antiquity, see Jean-François Breton, Arabia Felix from the Time of the Queen of Sheba, trans. Albert LaFarge (Notre Dame, Ind., 1999), 53–73.


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remote and narrowly guarded secret. The language of the account emphasizes the remoteness of the incense-growing region, as well as the secrecy and the exclusivity of the nation at the heart of the trade: The pre-eminent products of that land [Arabia] are frankincense and myrrh, the latter of which Arabia shares with the Trogodytes. But frankincense comes from Arabia alone, and not from all Arabia at that. In the neighbourhood of central Arabia live the Atramitaeans, a canton of the Sabaeans, the capital of whose kingdom is Sabota, on a high mountain, and a journey of eight daily stages from here is the frankincense-growing district, named Sariba—a name that the Greeks say means ‘secret’. This place faces the risings of the summer sun and is surrounded by impassable cliffs, while on the right the rocks of the sea prevent approach . . . The Minaeans, another canton, also neighbour on this district, and they take the frankincense out along a single narrow path. (12.51–2)

The physical restrictions of the road into this secret country is echoed by the social exclusiveness of the Arabs who gather the incense, for they are a very select tribe within a tribe, circumscribed themselves by religious and sexual taboos: The Minaeans originated the trade in frankincense and it is they above all who pursue it; from them it is called ‘minaeum’. Among the Arabs, the only ones to see the frankincense trees are the Minaeans, and by no means all of them: it is said that no more than 3,000 families claim that right, which is passed down by inheritance. For this reason they are called holy, and while they are cutting the trees or harvesting the frankincense they are not defiled by contact with women or the corruption of death—and so the awe that surrounds the merchandise increases. (12.54)

The road by which the frankincense is exported is interior, secret (the Natural History uses the word penetrare to describe Roman expeditions into Arabia), and so mysterious. The whole passage is shaped as a narrative, the narrative tension coming from this journey first into and then away from the mysterious heart of Arabia: The harvested frankincense is taken by camel-train to Sabota, where a single gate is opened for it. The kings have made deviating from the path punishable by death. There priests take a tenth of it, reckoned by measure and not weight, for the god they call Sabis (to sell the incense

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before this is forbidden) and this tithe goes to cover public expenses, for on a certain number of days the god also provides liberal feasting for his guests. The frankincense can only be taken out through the country of the Gebbanitaeans, and yet another impost is paid to their king. Thomna, their capital, lies [ . . . ]52 miles away from Gaza, a town in Judaea on our coast, a journey of 65 daily stages by camel. Fixed shares are given to priests and scribes of the various kings, but besides them sentinels, henchmen, gatekeepers, and attendants pillage the caravans. Moreover, they pay wherever the road takes them, here for water, here for fodder or their lodgings at each stage, as well as various tolls, until the expense amounts to 688 denarii per camel on reaching our coast, where yet another sum is paid to the tax-gatherers of our empire. And so the best frankincense costs 6 denarii a pound, the second-best 5 denarii, the third-best 3 denarii. (12.63–5)

The Natural History presents us with a back-to-front geography of the frankincense trail which we must laboriously disentangle: first the frankincense forests; then the Minaeans, the harvesters; then Sabota,53 eight days’ travel outward; this town is in the canton of the Atramitaeans, near central Arabia; then the Gebbanitae, and so on to Gaza. These stages of travel are both stages of initiation (for Pliny’s hypothetical traveller, becoming more deeply schooled in the nature of incense as he goes in) and stages of monetary appreciation (for the frankincense, as it goes out). As the incense crosses various political and religious boundaries on its way from the frankincense forest to the Roman frontier, it loses sanctity and gains value as a luxury. Frankincense is precious to the Minaeans, as it is to the Romans, but it is precious to them in different ways. In the frankincense country it is a commodity in a religious economy, not to be put on the market or measured by weight, but given to a god. Its mystery is a reflection of its holiness. The Natural History can only describe it by first describing the concentric circles of initiation that surround it, with the Romans on the outermost level of initiation. No Roman has described it; the Greeks cannot agree on what it looks like; the tree grows only in Arabia, but in only one remote, interior part of Arabia; of the inhabitants of this inner 52

The number supplied by the manuscripts is corrupt. Identified by Tkacˇ (RE 1557–60) with Sabbatha/Shabwa, the capital city of the Hadramawt in southern Arabia. 53


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Arabia, only the Minaeans have seen frankincense; but not all the Minaeans, only the male members of a certain caste. Contact with the tree puts the harvesters above ordinary men; they are not to be defiled by sex or the corruption of death.54 In the process of leaving Arabia it loses its divine quality stage by stage and becomes an item to be bought or sold. At Alexandria, where it is first processed for the consumption of the Mediterranean world, it is coveted and stolen; in the frankincense forests it is sacred, and being sacred, confers sacredness on its harvesters: The forest of frankincense is divided into fixed allotments and protected by the mutual integrity of its owners. No one stands guard over the trees that have been incised, and no one pilfers from his neighbour. But at Alexandria, by Hercules, where the frankincense is processed, no attention can be enough to guard the workshops. The workers’ breech-cloths are closed with seals, and on their heads they wear masks or heavy nets; they must strip bare when they leave work. So much less trust does punishment command among us than trees do among the Arabs. (12.59)

One could take this as a bit of idealizing primitivism, the point being that the Minaeans, unsophisticated barbarians, are morally superior to the civilized and depraved Alexandrians. So Beagon interprets the passage, noting accurately that this is the only passage in the Natural History that praises barbarian simplicity at the expense of civilization.55 It is true that the Natural History has no taste for praising barbarians. The accounts of primitives show little patience for their faults and the encyclopedia is not much inclined to idealize them. A transalpine Gaul who is a drunkard is not better than the Mediterranean drunkard because he drinks beer instead of wine; on the contrary, he displays human depravity in a particularly 54 For similar cases of priests exposed to pollution by contact with death, see Servius on Aen. 3.64 s.v. cupresso, where a priest would be polluted by entering a domum funestam (house where someone had recently died), and on 11.2, where Horatius Pulvillus refused to recognize the death (funus) of his son until he had completed dedicating a temple. I am grateful to Charles Murgia for bringing this to my attention. 55 Beagon, Roman Nature, 78 n. 46: ‘the only hint of a sophisticated people being contrasted unfavourably with a simpler one’. She goes on to make the further good point that the morals of Alexandrians were generally criticized.

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ingenious form by perverting wheat from its proper use.56 The point of the remarks about the frankincense workshops at Alexandria is more complex than a simple contrast of simplicity and sophistication. For the Minaeans, frankincense is not to be stolen because it is a sacred and not a saleable commodity. It can only become a saleable commodity at Sabota, after a tithe of the harvest has been dedicated to Sabis. Even here it has only begun to assume value as a commodity, having assumed only a fraction of the price it will have when it enters the Roman world at Gaza. As the incense caravans travel from Sariba to Gaza their cargo increases in price as it shrinks in weight; they give up more and more of it to pay their way, so that value is added in travel as the substance of the frankincense becomes less and less. Note that payment in kind is exacted from the frankincense merchants on two levels: first, fixed portions are given up to a god, to kings, to royal scribes, and to priests, in the earlier part of the narrative; in the second part, functionaries and menials eat away at the substance of the caravans, as doormen, innkeepers, porters, and camp-followers demand payment for their services. Because of these exactions, by the time the incense reaches the greedy Alexandrians, it bears a well-defined and easily quantifiable price, not intrinsic, but extraneous. While frankincense does have an intrinsic value, it is religious, symbolic, and confined to central Arabia—the monetary value the Roman world attaches to frankincense being, on the other hand, incidental, external, and attributable to the circumstances of its importation. For the Minaeans, frankincense is simply holy; though Greeks and Romans may use frankincense to worship the gods, the story of Alexander the Great and his tutor (12.62: see above) shows that even at their sacrifices it is a commodity, an article for the display of pride, a perfume redolent of the wealth and arrogance of its owner. The ethnographic information in this picture of Arabia shows that frankincense is a more complicated thing than one might think. What to the Roman world is a commodity assessed at a definite cash value is esteemed on a very different scale in the incense country, and frankincense can be translated from its original significance as a holy article into a Roman luxury only 56

14.150.


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in the course of a long and dangerous series of exchanges, an airlock, so to say, between the two different cultures. th e r iches of tap roba ne In 6.81–91 the Natural History describes at length the distant island of Taprobane—the modern Ceylon or Sri Lanka.57 As with most places that produce luxury commodities, Taprobane is in the East, and inaccessible; but unlike Arabia, it is just on the outer fringe of knowledge, too inaccessible to trade directly with Rome, even along the longest caravan routes. If these two separate spheres were ever to make contact with each other, it could only come about by a wild stroke of chance—a shipwreck, as it happened. Hellenistic geographers had known about Taprobane, but detailed knowledge of this land had only reached the Roman world in Pliny’s time. Unlike much of what we read in the Natural History, this section reflects relatively new geographical knowledge, news from the reign of Claudius that has slipped in to find a place among the older ethnographic material of the Natural History. What is interesting about this report is how different it is from the conventional primitivism of much ancient ethnography. As has been exhaustively demonstrated by A. Schroeder, it is a commonplace of ancient ethnography that barbarians live in admirable simplicity, with no use for gold, silver, or other luxuries,58 and that the most remote of humans are also the most just, excelling all others in self-control and piety.59 But the Taprobaneans are more like the Romans: far from being the stereotyped primitives of ethnographic commonplace, who have no use for gold or silver, they are sophisticated users of luxury themselves. Unlike the Minaeans, for whom the Graeco-Roman economic significance of incense is alien, the people of Taprobane enjoy the goods of the East much as the Romans would. As the Natural History describes it, Taprobane is a land at the edge of the thinkable, ‘banished by 57

For other interpretations of this passage, see C. G. Starr, ‘The Roman Emperor and the King of Ceylon’, CP 51 (1956), 27–30 ( ¼ Essays in Ancient History (Leiden, 1979), 258–61), and Emilio Gabba, ‘True History and False History in Classical Antiquity’, JRS 71 (1981), 59–60. 58 Schroeder, Observationes, 33–5. 59 Ibid. 35–9.

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nature beyond the world’ (extra orbem a natura relegata, 6.89) and its inhabitants have a taste for luxury much like the Romans’ own. The ethnography of Taprobane is a positive answer to the question of whether luxury is visible in the places from which Rome imports its decadence. The account is put in the mouths of native Taprobaneans, that is, four royal envoys dispatched to Rome in the time of Claudius, but the perspective from which Taprobane is described is Roman. As long ago as 1956 Chester Starr observed that the account ‘throws much more light on the political thinking of the Roman aristocracy than it does on early Sinhalese organization’.60 His interpretation centres on Taprobane’s political features. He observed that the description of the monarchy of Taprobane reflects the wishes of the Roman senatorial order, faced with an autocratic and hereditary principate: in Taprobane (6.89–91), kings are said to be elected on the basis of their mild dispositions (clementia) and their power to try citizens for capital crimes is strictly controlled by a body of thirty counsellors (rectores).61 But there are many other respects in which Taprobane seems to be the antithesis of Rome. The Taprobaneans’ commercial habits and attitudes to luxury are explicitly compared with those of the Romans. Geographically Taprobane is a distant reflection of Rome, a reverse but analogous image: in geographical terms, the Rome of another hemisphere. The Natural History tells us that older geographers conceived of it as ‘an entirely different world (orbis terrarum), by name the country of the Counterlanders’ (6.81). Geographical and cosmic differentia demonstrate the truth of this. Like Rome, Taprobane is a great power, central to its own orbis. The kingdom comprises an island with 500 towns and a central metropolis that contains the king’s palace (6.85); it lies on the far side of the earth, so far south that the residents see the moon only for two weeks of the month, and in the absence of the moon the star Canopus lights their way. Their shadows fall not towards the north, as with us, but to the south, and the sun rises on the left hand and sets on the right, an inversion of the Mediterranean sky (6.87). 60 61

Starr, ‘The King of Ceylon’, 27. Ibid. 29.


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But they are very like Romans, as the Natural History says, in their indulgences: despite living outside our world, they suffer from ‘our failings’ (nostra vitia, 6.89). The Taprobaneans have similar tastes in luxuries as the Romans, it is true, but the scale of their indulgences is quite different. They take delight in the usual luxuries, gold, silver, marble, pearls, and gems (6.89), and as might be expected of the East, they affect flowing, effeminate robes (their king dresses like Dionysus, the commoners like Arabs, 6.90). They delight in holidays spent hunting tigers and elephants, the most exotic creatures of this other world (6.91); and in fishing for giant tortoises, whose shells they use to roof their houses (6.91). The royal envoys tell Claudius that the people of Taprobane are in fact ‘even wealthier than the Romans—though they do not get as much use out of their luxuries’ as do the Romans (6.89: ipsorum opes maiores esse dicebant, sed apud nos opulentiae maiorem usum). In fact, they have nothing like the Roman sense of proportion when it comes to expense, because in Taprobane luxury proliferates naturally. A nation that uses something like tortoiseshell, the most expensive product of the sea by the Natural History’s reckoning (37.204), for so low an end as roofing a house can afford to do things on a very generous scale. Whereas the Romans must exploit tortoiseshell intensively because it is rare, and its value is further increased by the cost of bringing it back from distant places, the Taprobaneans live in a land where tortoises grow so big that they have no need to scrimp or stretch. In this land of natural abundance, it seems only reasonable that an average lifespan is a hundred years (6.91)—an obvious instance of wishfulfilment. This abundance, which makes the anxious exploitation of nature unnecessary, even makes the Taprobaneans seem rather admirable. Easy luxury makes them so relaxed (6.89) that they start to resemble the virtuous primitives so common in ancient ethnography: no one keeps a slave, for instance (the implication being that no one needs to work very hard), or builds houses very high (land must be plentiful), sues his neighbour, or raises the price of grain (no scarcity). In this respect Taprobane actually does conform to that commonplace of ethnography, the distant Island of the Blessed where life is long, the weather evenly tempered, and

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the earth sends up crops unsown.62 These Utopian wishes are realized in ethnographies like the Natural History’s account of the Hyperboreans, which we shall examine later in this chapter, in Plutarch’s description of the Atlantic Islands (Life of Sertorius 8), and in the Fortunate Isles of Horace, which recollect the effortless fertility of the Golden Age—a conjunction of natural abundance with divine approval and human honesty: No disease blights the herd, no constellation parches the flock with blazing cruelty: Jupiter hid away those shores for an upright race when he stained the Golden Age with bronze. (Horace, Epodes 16.61– 4)

But Taprobane is no fragment of the Golden Age. In addition to their taste for gems and precious metals, they are afflicted with the usual unremarkable social ills: they have capital punishment there, for example, and to prevent the monarchy from becoming hereditary, they make a practice of deposing their king if he has children (6.89–90). the seres Among their other sophisticated vices, the Taprobaneans are also a trading nation. Like the Mediterranean traders whose imports have so complicated the Roman world, the Taprobaneans are a commercial people whose merchants sail great distances, to India and north to the land of the Seres, the normal Roman name for the Chinese. In fact, the father of Rachias, the chief of the Taprobanean ambassadors, traded with the Seres himself, and gave the following report of them: The Seres themselves are of more than human size: their hair is golden-red, their eyes are blue, the sound of their voices rough, and they exchange no words with merchants. The other details agree with what our Roman businessmen say: on the far bank of a river, the merchants set down an offer next to the goods for sale, and if the exchange appeals to the Seres, they take up what is offered, with a hatred of luxury that can be in no way more easily justified than if one 62 On this commonplace in ancient ethnography, see Schroeder, Observationes, 39–45.


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travels there in one’s mind and contemplates what is sought there by trade, how it is obtained, and for what reason. (6.88)

The implications of this ethnography within an ethnography are interesting. Note first of all the appearance of the Seres. Huge, reddish-blond, and blue-eyed—if the envoys from Taprobane were trying to describe the Chinese, then, as Starr remarks, something went wrong with the translation.63 But these are exactly the terms that Greek and Roman writers use again and again in stock descriptions of northerners like the Scythians, the Gauls, or the Germans.64 Rachias’ father’s account of the Chinese fits the climatological theory of human development that was prevalent among the Romans, of which the Natural History sets out a version in 2.189–90, according to which all northerners must be tall and fair. Vitruvius explains the same theory in terms remarkably similar to the Natural History’s account of the Seres, down to the detail about the voice: In cool regions, because of the great distance from the south, the moisture does not evaporate from their complexions, but the dewy air of heaven steeps the body in moisture, making their frames bigger, and their vocal tones deeper. Hence too the tribes that are nourished in the north have been moulded with enormous bodies, bright white complexions, straight reddish hair, blue-grey eyes, and ample blood by the abundant moisture and the coolness of the sky. (Vitruvius 6.1.3)

So the Seres conform in every way to a Mediterranean theory of what people are like at the northern fringe of the world. If Taprobane is analogous to Rome, occupying the centre of its own orbis, then the Seres are the Gauls of this Counterland, primitive and rough-voiced giants. Even more interesting than the appearance of the Seres is their behaviour toward traders from Taprobane or Rome—for, as we shall see, the two are equivalent powers in their relationship to the Seres. Rachias’ father notes that the Seres exchange no words with traders (nullo commercio linguae) but barter goods in silence, making their appraisals in isolation from the 63

Starr, ‘The King of Ceylon’, 28. See, for instance, Herodotus 4.108 (of Scythians); Tacitus, Germania 4.2 (of Germans); Norden, Germanische Urgeschichte, 54, 67 ff. 64

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outsiders, who must keep a river between themselves and the Seres. This separation is confirmed by the testimony of Roman merchants. For this we may see the Seres’ own page in the Natural History’s gazetteer, which combines the description of silk with a typically moralizing comment on Roman consumption of Eastern luxuries: One comes first to the people known as the Seres, famous for the wool they get from trees, who soak the white fuzz on the leaves in water and then comb it off . . . Obtained with such complicated labour, it is imported from so remote a world in order that Roman matrons may sport transparent dress in public! The Seres are indeed mild, but like wild animals, avoiding meetings with the rest of humanity and waiting for trade to come to them. (6.54)

At all costs, it seems, they must insulate themselves from the traders. Why? They have adopted this peculiar way of trading as a precaution against the contagion of foreign luxury, for, strange though it is to say this of the people who make silk, it is the Seres who are the unsophisticated primitives, hating luxury with the hatred that is justified by life in the luxurious East. And though the Seres themselves are not luxurious but like animals, to want to trade with them—to get transparent silks for women to parade in—is unmistakably a sign of luxury. So the sophisticated merchants of Taprobane find themselves on the same side of the river as the Romans, excluded in case they should infect this animal-like nation with their desire for luxuries. In this way the Seres maintain the same kind of barrier between themselves and the buyers of their silks that insulates the hieratic economy of the Arabs from the civilized consumers of Arabian frankincense. tap roba ne rev isited But the Natural History’s account of Taprobane describes how the Roman and a foreign system of value once came together with no such buffer between them. If a long and gingerly series of negotiations lay between Rome and Sabota, then Rome came into contact with Taprobane abruptly and by accident, in the chance encounter of a shipwrecked public servant and a king—a collision resulting in mutual misunderstandings. Once the Nat-


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ural History has dealt with earlier descriptions of the island, the ethnography begins as follows: Thus much about Taprobane has been recorded by the ancients, but more accurate news reached us in the reign of Claudius, when ambassadors from that island actually made a voyage here. It happened this way: there was a contractor for the taxes of the Red Sea from the imperial treasury named Annius Plocamus, and a freedman of his was driven off course by stormwinds as he was sailing around Arabia. Driven past Carmania, he was blown for fifteen days till he came to Hippuri, a port city of Taprobane. There he was entertained for six months by the clement hospitality of their king; he learned their language, and afterwards described the Romans and Caesar in answer to the king’s questions. Of all he heard, it was the justice of the Romans that the king admired wonderfully, because the denarii among the money carried by his captive were all of equal weight, though the different pictures showed they had been coined by many different emperors. So he was moved to become our friend, and dispatched four envoys to us, with Rachias as their chief. (6.84–5)

Taprobane is a different kind of country from Arabia or the Atlas mountains, as is at once implied by the status of the man who first brought Rome into contact with it. He was a freedman of Annius Plocamus, a tax-farmer.65 This in itself is important to note: it was not a Suetonius Paulinus, a consul at the head of invading legions, who brought these two nations together, or a King Juba, a client king reconnoitring for the imperial family, but a tax-gatherer’s servant with a sackful of denarii. Between these two nations the first intermediary was not noble or military, but ignoble and commercial, as appropriate to a commercial country like Taprobane. But the story of how the king of Taprobane admired Roman coinage, on the surface not much more than a simple story of how the merits of Roman civilization strike an innocent observer, says as much about the Romans as it says about the residents of Taprobane. It is honesty in coinage that the king singled out as Rome’s great virtue—not an irrational reaction (honesty was a virtue Romans appreciated), but very naive by any measure. The king’s judgment is bathetic and slightly 65 There is epigraphic evidence for one P. Annius Plocamus in inscriptions in a cave shelter on the Berenice road to the Red Sea, datable to ad 6. See Starr, ‘The King of Ceylon’, 28.

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comic. For the king of Taprobane, the Romans are the people of coins, a just and consistent people—a singularly naive observation, in view of how tirelessly the Natural History berates Rome for its indulgence, its luxury, and its perverted standards. As we have seen, it is the very consistency of Roman standards of value that was distorted by foreign luxury when they began to pay enormous sums for snow to chill a drink, and to daub their walls with snake’s blood and mud from Indian rivers. Furthermore, the king’s praise seems even more disappointing if we think of what leads up to it. The freedman has described ‘the Romans and Caesar’, that is, the institutions of Rome, Roman history, and government—and then the king compliments him on his coins. Among all the achievements of Rome—the conquest of the Mediterranean world, and the administration of it as a vast empire extending as far as the Red Sea that is the premiss of the tax-gatherer’s story—to be praised for the consistent weight of coins? For Taprobane the signifier of the honesty of Rome is not its history or governance, but something incidental, an accident dependent on the ex-slave’s job, the chance baggage of a rather sordid traveller. The ‘justice’ of the coins is even more problematic if one considers the honest faces on them, which would have included emperors hardly to be praised for iustitia—Caligula’s, for instance. As the average coin-user knows, coins are worth the same regardless of the rulers on them, and a coin makes no distinction between an admirable man and a tyrant. It is unfortunate but nonetheless true that when reduced to a face on a coin, every personage of history has equal weight, and Caligula will buy you just as much as Augustus. The more you think about it, the more naive the king seems, and the Roman reader is left in the uncomfortable position of having seen the limitations of someone who admires him. It is pleasant to hear yourself praised, but less pleasant to see that the praise comes from someone who misunderstands you. If coins of equal weight are an object of wonder in Taprobane, what does this tell us about Taprobane? Their system of values must be very different from that of Rome. We have already seen that though the Taprobaneans have more luxuries at their disposal than we at Rome, they get less use from their luxuries. If these Counterlanders had any currency (perhaps they still


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traded by barter, in which case coins would have been even more fascinating) it would be mutable, fluctuating according to the whim of the coiner, debased year by year. We are left wondering if they have any consistent economic standards at all. After all, inconsistent standards is what we expect of the luxurious; we have seen that it is the consequence of luxury for the Romans. The structure of this anecdote is circular, and this gives it a satiric edge: the Roman who reads this story imagines the Taprobaneans, and at the same time they imagine him through the medium of the castaway’s description; the Taprobaneans praise the Romans, but at the same time we can tell that the Taprobaneans are not themselves exactly deserving of praise.66 The king of Taprobane’s quickness to praise shows only that he has misunderstood the Romans. The delicate airlock between Rome and the East has collapsed. Roman cash, when taken directly into the home of the alien, brings forth only incomprehension. In the end we have to doubt the success of Rachias’ embassy: the Natural History does not tell us what became of the ambassadors, but one wonders whether they found the Romans to be as just as they imagined. the essenes These accounts of the Arabians and Taprobaneans, though very different, share a common thread in the denunciation of luxury. The ethnographies of the Essenes and the Hyperboreans, on the other hand, show how the Natural History can celebrate luxury and revile asceticism, when luxury happens to confirm the moral universe of Roman power and asceticism threatens it. 66

There are suggestive similarities between this passage and the dialogue in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (part 2, chapter 6) of Gulliver, marooned in the land of the Brobdingnagians, and his host the king. The king of Brobdingnag asks Gulliver to give him an account of the government of England, and Gulliver obliges. He praises England’s wealth, power, Parliament, courts, and history in a long panegyric. Then the king easily punctures his pretensions with a few sharp questions that expose the corruption, idleness, and frivolity of English public life. However, he says to his guest, by spending most of his life on voyages, Gulliver has no doubt escaped the bad influence of his native country.

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In ad 70, seven years before Pliny dedicated the Natural History to him, Titus conquered Jerusalem, putting an end to the Jewish War. We may form some idea of how this event was presented to the people of Rome from the public iconography of the Flavians: in 71, for instance, Vespasian issued a series of coins displaying the defeated country as a woman, bound and captured or mourning beneath a palm tree or military trophy under the legend Judaea Capta.67 An even more striking icon of Judaean defeat, as we shall discuss in the next chapter, is a relief on the Arch of Titus that shows the river-god of the Jordan being carried in the triumph of Vespasian and Titus over Judaea in 71. As Pliny’s contemporary Josephus describes, it was accompanied by moving stages showing the consequences of war to the land: Among these spectacles the construction of the moving stages was a particular cause for wonder . . . The war was divided into various episodes by many representations which afforded an extremely vivid view of its course: one could see prosperous land laid waste, entire contingents of the enemy slaughtered, some in flight, others led captive . . . houses demolished on top of their owners, and, after much desolation and sorrow, rivers flowing not through cultivated land, not giving drink for humans or domestic animals, but through a country still on fire in every quarter. (The Jewish War 7.139–45)

The Natural History’s account of Judaea echoes these pictures of wasted landscape in subtle ways. Keeping in mind his dedicatee Titus, a reader who knew Judaea very well from the perspective of a hostile general, he circumspectly avoids mention of the Jewish War, of politics, or even of the Jews. Like most of the accounts of places in books 3–6 of the Natural History, this description is for the most part a simple enumeration of districts and towns. For that matter, it avoids any mention of Jews. As a description, it evades describing with remarkable success. The effects of the recent war appear as if by omission. The one nod to recent history in this account is in reference to Jerusalem, which exists only as an absence, in the past tense:

67 Harold Mattingly, Coins of the Roman Empire in the British Museum, ii: Vespasian to Domitian (London, 1930), plate 1, nos. 10, 12, 13; plate 2, nos. 10, 14, etc.


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Below these there used to be the town of Engada, second only to Jerusalem in its fertility and its plantations of palm-trees, now only a second pyre. (5.73)

It is the landscape of Judaea that is politically eloquent, particularly the river Jordan, and the lake the Natural History calls Asphaltites, our Dead Sea. Though the Natural History’s description of Judaea deflects our attention away from the obvious source of attraction, political history, it departs from its tone of careful circumspection in the account of these mirabilia. Both are emblems of waste and poisoned fertility—overtones lacking in the corresponding descriptions of the river and the lake by Diodorus Siculus (19.98) and Strabo (16.2.42). From the Roman perspective, the Jordan and the Dead Sea reflect the history of the revolt—an ambitious and wasteful denial of a province’s potential to the empire’s greater whole. Asphaltites is remarkable for its source, the river Jordan, and its nature, which is grim and unhealthy: The river Jordan rises from the spring of Panias, which gave to Caesarea its second name, to be described later. The river is charming and as winding (ambitiosus) as the terrain allows, offering itself to those who live beside it as if it heads against its will toward Asphaltites, a lake of dreadful nature, by which it is finally swallowed up, losing its much-praised waters, which intermingle with the lake’s toxic currents . . . Lake Asphaltites produces nothing but bitumen, from which it gets its name. It does not allow entry to animals’ bodies, and even bulls and camels float; whence comes the story that nothing can sink in it. (5.71, 72)

The description of this river, like those of many rivers in the Natural History, has definite political undertones. As we shall see in a later chapter, rivers in Latin literature often embody national characteristics and participate in the social or religious concerns of the lands through which they run,68 and many of the rivers in the Natural History’s geography are as interesting to an ethnographer’s eye as are the nations described. 68 Mary Beagon, ‘Nature and Views of her Landscapes in Pliny the Elder’, in Graham Shipley and John Salmon (eds.), Human Landscapes in Classical Antiquity (Leicester–Nottingham Studies in Ancient Society, 6; New York, 1996), 288–9, has remarked on the contrast between Pliny’s descriptions of the pleasant Jordan river and the inhospitable Dead Sea. For a view of the more

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In the case of the Jordan, the river’s path from its source to the Dead Sea reflects the history, as seen from a Roman point of view, of the rebellious province of Judaea. A river of delightful quality, obedient and conducive to the fruitful development of the larger whole at its beginning, is lost in sterility in the end, just as Jerusalem, once by far the most famous of the cities of the East, is now only a charred pyre. The potential economic benefits of both river and land are lost, or rather withheld. The Natural History describes the Jordan as ambitiosus (5.71), both ‘ambitious’ and ‘winding’; in the first sense, a word that applies as much to the province’s inhabitants as to the course of the river.69 The description is given form by the history of the Jewish revolt, a wasteful, foolish, ambitious withholding of a province’s potential from the greater whole of the empire. The Jordan’s destination is also significant in the light of recent history. Asphaltites drinks up (ebibit) the whole of the Jordan, a river which is delightful and offers itself up to be used for human productivity, giving nothing in return but bitumen. What the Jordan gives to the communities of Judaea, its ‘much-praised waters’ (and with them water for consumption and irrigation, and the fertility of plant and animal life), Asphaltites withholds. It drinks, but it cannot be drunk. It refuses even the normal function of water, to submerge what is put in it. The only thing it will accept, the pleasant Jordan, is just what it ought not to take. Great rivers are impatient, like the Euphrates, which forces a way through the Taurus mountains to reach its goal: ‘At Elegea the Taurus mountain-range comes to meet the river, but does not bring it to a standstill, although it is outstandingly strong and twelve miles in breadth. They call the river Omma where it breaks into the mountain-range, but next, where it bursts through, they call it Euphrates’ (5.84). Similarly, the Jordan ought to be flowing to the sea. Instead, it must flow to a lake ‘ominous in its nature’ (dirus natura), the wrong destination, and can only buy time by meandering as much as the country allows. general cultural significance of rivers to the Romans, see the descriptions of the river Clitumnus by Vergil (Georgics 2.146–9) and Pliny the Younger (Letters 8.8), which emphasize its importance to Roman ritual, religion, and war. See also my longer discussion of this topic in Ch. 4. 69

I am grateful to Kate Toll for pointing this out to me.


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Near Asphaltites dwell the Essenes. Like the lake, it is their power to accept one thing and to reject another that makes them wonderful: On the west, the Essenes shun the shores [of Asphaltites] as far as its poisonous influence extends, a lonely nation and wonderful beyond all the others of the world. They live without women, rejecting carnal lust, without money, keeping company with the palm-trees. Day by day these refugees are replenished to an equal number by throngs of newcomers, those whom the vicissitudes of fortune have driven, weary of life, to adopt their way of living. And so through thousands of ages, incredible to say, a tribe in which no one is born exists forever. So fruitful for them is others’ distaste for life! Below these there used to be the town of Engada, second only to Jerusalem in its fertility and its plantations of palm-trees, now only a second pyre. Next comes Masada, a stronghold on a crag, itself not far from Asphaltites. And this is the end of Judaea. (5.73)

Like Asphaltites, the tribe of the Essenes is infinitely capacious and selfishly barren. In their endless ability to accept new citizens, this tribe removes from society men who would otherwise carryout the normal human functions of production and reproduction, and secludes them in sterile isolation. The Essenes have removed themselves from all productive exchange, sexual as well as economic, ‘without women, rejecting carnal lust, without money’. The encyclopedia emphasizes the complete sterility of their society with a pun: ‘so fruitful for them is others’ distaste for life’ (tam fecunda illis aliorum vitae paenitentia est, 5.73). The Essenes take without giving, swallowing the throngs of the world-weary just as Asphaltites swallows the Jordan, accepting the women and money that normally bind communities in ties of reciprocal commerce no more than Asphaltites accepts the bodies of camels and bulls. For the Natural History, the Essenes are not mystics who pursue some inner-directed goal; they are not Gymnosophists. Rather, their asceticism is directed outwards, a marker of their disgust for the life the rest of us lead. It is a token of their rejection of the world, of their repentance of life. As the swallowing of the Jordan by the Dead Sea is a comment on the futility and wastefulness of the Jewish revolt, so the description of the Essenes also comments on this idiocy. It is no accident that the Natural History juxtaposes the ethnography

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of the Essenes with places associated with death: immediately after the pun about the fecundity of the Essenes comes the comparison of Engada and Jerusalem to two charred pyres, quoted above, and then a description of Masada, of whose notoriety as the site of the mass suicide of Eleazar’s Sicarii (Josephus, Jewish War 7.275–406) Pliny must have been aware. Though we have seen that the Natural History constantly preaches against luxury, it has very little good to say about these ascetics. The portrait is hostile: Pliny emphasizes their selfishness, their sterility, their refusal of life and the duties, careers, and civic engagement that come with it. The Essenes are to all intents already dead, having refused all interaction with the world. Unlike Josephus, who defines the Essenes by contrast with the normal Jewish community (Jewish War 2.119–61), the Natural History describes their withdrawal from life in only the most general terms. There is no normal Jewish community present in this description of Judaea for the Essenes to renounce, and for the Natural History, it is not so much the life of Jewish provincials that the Essenes reject as life itself. The encyclopedia expresses this rejection in Roman terms: vitae paenitentia, ‘repentance of life’. This phrase is reminiscent of the moral philosophy of Seneca, who says (Letters 24.24) ‘On certain men there steals up a feeling that they have had their fill (satietas) of doing and seeing the same things: I will not say a hatred, but a weariness (fastidium) of life.’ It is more appropriate to this very Senecan theme than to the realities of Jewish asceticism as we know them from Philo or Josephus. the hyperbor eans The Natural History’s Essenes are one side of a coin, the Hyperboreans, described in book 4.89–91, the other.70 To draw up a list of the differences between the colony of the Essenes and the Hyperboreans could hardly be easier: the Essenes live in a poisonous desert, the Hyperboreans a garden; 70 On the Hyperboreans generally, see O. Crusius, ‘Hyperboreer’, Roscher 1.2, 2805–35; James Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought (Princeton, 1992), 60–7.


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the Essenes are weary of life, the Hyperboreans live happily and without care; the Essenes are ascetics, the Hyperboreans indulge in luxury. Yet despite these differences the two communities are rigorously parallel; their similarities are much more suggestive than their differences. Each nation is an exercise in paradox, and each in its paradoxical quality demonstrates a different way of posing a single dilemma. Like the Essenes, the Hyperboreans inhabit a place where humans ought not to be able to live, territories from which ordinary nations have been excluded by the imbalance of the elements. Both of these tribes live in neighbourless places, the hostility of Natura drawing an enchanted circle around the secluded tribe. The ‘where’ of the Hyperboreans is at the same time inevitable—they live beyond the North Wind, of course, as the usual interpretation of the name implies71—and yet contrary to expectation. As you reach the Essenes by going west from Asphaltites to a point just out of reach of its harmful shores (usque qua nocent), so you come to the Hyperboreans only after crossing the Ripaean mountains, where snow falls unceasingly in uninhabited darkness. This is Pterophoros, ‘part of the world condemned by Nature’, the home only of the North Wind, Aquilo. Once over, though, you come to a sunny land with a delightful climate: Behind the [Ripaean] mountains and beyond the North Wind is a blessed tribe, if we are to believe it, called the Hyperboreans; they live exceedingly long and are renowned for strange wonders . . . For them, the sun rises but once a year, at the summer solstice, and sets once too, at the winter solstice. Their country is open to the sun, with a blessedly moderate climate and never a harmful gust. Forests and groves are their homes, they worship the gods singly and in companies, and they know neither strife nor sickness of any kind. (4.89)

Both Essenes and Hyperboreans are sheltered from the hostile environment (noxa) that in turn protects them from the rest of the world. Now that you have found this paradoxical warm land behind the snows, you can enjoy a simplicity that is rustic, in fact almost primitive, without having to give up civilized complexity. Here the people live in forest groves, much like the prehistoric savages of 12.1, who depended on trees for their 71

Herodotus 4.32.

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every need, and nevertheless can still enjoy extravagant revels, ‘with banquets and an old age anointed with luxury’ (epulatis delibutoque senio luxu). This is an Isle of the Blessed for mortals, with all conveniences included. The weather is pleasant, sickness is unknown, and as far as religion is concerned, you can have as much or as little social organization as you like, since the natives worship both ‘singly and in congregations’ (et deorum cultus viritim gregatimque). Conflicts among the natives are as unknown as sickness. This is a vision of community without the tensions inherent in any gathering of real human beings: Hyperborean society is a formless blank upon which to project desires. Here we can imagine simplicity without privation, extravagance without consequences, life without illness, the enviable without the excluding (a benefit of a nation with no neighbours is that it needs neither frontiers nor armies to keep them out). What is most striking about this Utopia, and what connects it again to the Natural History’s Essenes, is the voluntary nature of membership in it. Since there is no illness or strife, and death by accident is presumably rare, when you quit the Hyperboreans you must do so in a very deliberate manner: Death there is none, except from a feeling that they have had their fill of life (satietate vitae); then, after banquets and an old age anointed with luxury, the end comes to them when they leap from a particular crag into the sea. This sort of burial is most blessed. (4.89)

Of all the marvels of this marvellous nation, nothing is as marvellous as how you leave it. What is especially remarkable about the Hyperboreans’ death by suicide is that it is attested first in two Latin sources of the first century ad. Of all extant accounts of the Hyperboreans, this leap from the rock is peculiar to the Natural History and in Pomponius Mela, the chorographer of the time of Claudius: They dwell in groves and forests, and when they feel not so much averse to life as satisfied with it (vivendi satietas) they cheerfully crown themselves with garlands and throw themselves headlong into the sea from a particular crag. (Chorographia 3.30)

The description in the Natural History follows Mela (cited in Pliny’s index as a source for this book) very closely. The other


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accounts describe the Hyperboreans as ageless and immune to sickness (e.g. Pindar, Pythian 10) or just as very long-lived (e.g. Hecataeus of Abdera fr. 2, FHG ii. 386; Strabo 15.1.57), as Pliny does himself (4.89: annoso degit aevo), but no one else implies that they kill themselves out of some need to counteract their long life-spans. No earlier sources transmit this fact about the Hyperboreans, although one nineteenth-century authority ascribes the motif, without firm evidence, to the Hellenistic writer Hecataeus of Abdera.72 The absence of other sources, however, suggests to me that this motif appealed particularly to the Roman imagination. Could it be a marker of the significance of the idea of suicide in the culture of Roman aristocrats in the early Principate? It is only to be expected that in paradise death should be somehow mitigated or annulled. To cite the most obvious example of the idea, in Hesiod’s account of the Golden Age73 death comes only as a gentle sleep. But why should death’s manifestation among the Hyperboreans be suicide, and only suicide? It should be noted that suicide is mentioned in the Natural History with consistently positive associations; Mary Beagon has demonstrated how often and how vehemently Pliny maintains that it is a blessing.74 There is a prominent strain of rhetoric in the encyclopedia, of which the following passage is a typical example, that discusses suicide as the supreme gift of God to mortals: Indeed, in the case of man, the following is the greatest consolation for nature’s imperfection: not even God can do all things. For even should he wish it, God cannot put an end to his own life—the best gift he has given man among the great trials of life. (2.27)

Pliny’s reasoning is that suicide is the ultimate guarantor of personal freedom: its availability grants you a certain power over life, in that you are able to take leave of it when you choose: 72

O. Crusius s.v. ‘Hyperboreer’, Roscher 1.2, 2827. Hesiod, Works and Days 109–20. Similarly, on the Round Island of Iambulus, already noted in this chapter as an example of paradoxographic ethnography, the crippled, the infirm, and those who have lived to the maximum age of 150 years all take their own lives painlessly by going to sleep on a soporific plant (Diodorus Siculus 2.57). 74 Beagon, Roman Nature, 238–9. 73

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‘Of all the good things which nature has allotted to man nothing is better than a timely death, and best of all in this respect is that every one can provide it for himself’ (28.9). For the Natural History, taking leave of life in due season is often necessary because life by itself ‘is such as to make death often seem like a shelter, even for the best men’ (25.24). The real tediousness of life is that in the end you have so little power over it. seneca and suicide This strain of thought in the Natural History is consistent with what we may call the early imperial ideology of suicide, the philosophical or quasi-philosophical tendency to exalt suicide as a noble means of preserving one’s autonomy and dignity in extreme circumstances. It is not difficult to find elements of this discourse in the literature of the early Principate, as for instance in Lucan, Tacitus, and Plutarch’s biographies; it is particularly pronounced in the writings of Seneca, who repeatedly writes of suicide as an instrument of glorious self-assertion, a universally accessible road to freedom, a means of escaping from and at the same time showing one’s superiority to the tyranny of Fortune. Seneca draws our attention to the Stoic matrix of the idea of suicide in the Natural History and helps explain why it is included in the Golden Age society of the Hyperboreans, even though the Hyperboreans are free from both sickness and tyranny: Whoever says that suicide is accursed fails to see that he shuts himself off from the road to freedom. No creation of the everlasting law is better than the fact that it has given us only one way into life, but many ways out. Am I to wait for the cruelty of sickness or a man when I can take my leave in the middle of my agonies and bring my miseries to nothing? . . . If you wish it, nothing keeps you from breaking out and leaving. It is in an open place that nature holds us prisoner. (Seneca, Letters 70.14–15, 24)

As the deliberate choice of a rational person who is faced with otherwise overwhelming circumstances, suicide has Seneca’s full support. The letters of Pliny the Younger also contain commendations of the bravery of those, both historical figures and personal acquaintances, who took their own lives in the face


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of either political tyranny or incurable disease: the language of some of these letters is close to accounts of medical suicides in his uncle’s Natural History.75 In view of this, the suicides in Pliny’s Hyperborea cannot seem surprising. Many parallels can be adduced from the literature of the time: it is a highly visible subject. Take, for example, the Hyperboreans’ final banquets and the ‘surfeit of life’ (satietas vitae) which (in the absence of other problems) is their only motive for suicide. This is a motif with a philosophical background: it is a topos of Seneca’s philosophy to compare the soul to a guest at a banquet of life who will reasonably take his leave when he is satisfied: ‘The heart is never more godlike than when it contemplates its own mortality and knows that man was born on this condition, that it come to the end of life, and that this body is not a home, but a guesthouse, and a temporary one at that, which you must leave when you see you are a burden on your host’ (Seneca, Letters 120.14). The reasons that Seneca adduces for such a decision are the standard two: incurable disease or unavoidable suffering at the hands of a tyrant. He draws from the recent history of Rome many examples of suicides of both types. Among Seneca’s many inspiring examples of suicides committed to avoid tyranny, the classic one is that of Cato the Younger; Seneca also adduces the examples of Drusus Libo and of barbarian gladiators who killed themselves to assert their freedom from control.76 In one such passage, a suggestive parallel to the Roman myth of the Hyperboreans, he employs the image of a leap into freedom as a metaphor for suicide: ‘If my body is unfit for service . . . if old age has begun to degrade my mind . . . if it has left me, not life, but breath, I shall take a flying leap from the rotten and crumbling structure’ (58.34). Although suicide was spoken of as a way for any free man to assert the integrity of his selfhood in the face of hostile 75

Compare Pliny the Younger, Letters 1.12; 3.7; 6.24, with NH 20.199: ‘In the same way [by an intentional overdose of opium], as we know, the father of P. Licinius Caecina died, a man of praetorian rank, in Hispania Bavilis, when an intractable disease had made life hateful to him; likewise with very many others.’ 76 Seneca, Letters 70.6–10; 70.19–20; 70.23; 70.26. Compare Seneca, Letters 78.2, and see also Nepos’ Atticus; Pliny the Younger, Letters 1.12, 3.7, 6.24; Martial 1.78.

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circumstance, free man here ought to be read as aristocrat. Anton J. L. van Hooff’s monograph on suicide in antiquity has detailed the richness of the Roman discourse of suicide, the proliferation of synonyms for self-killing and the stylized rituals by which aristocrats of the early Principate committed suicide.77 The more of these Roman accounts one reads, the more visible the subtext of class becomes, and suicide looks more and more like a behaviour peculiar to the Roman aristocracy. Its function as a class-marker is unmistakable. Self-killing is not only a guarantor of personal freedom but also a mark of a noble soul, and the moral nobility that his act confers on a suicide is not easy to separate from the social nobility he already, in most cases, possesses. In the ideology of self-killing, it was common for aristocratic suicides to assume (metaphorical) haloes of the sort that in Christian discourse are associated with martyrs. In connection with suicide as a means of protecting or asserting one’s honour, one thinks above all of Livy’s chaste Lucretia (1.58–9). Another cliche´ of this discourse is the suicide of Cato the Younger at Utica (Plutarch, Life of Cato the Younger 64–71), a political death that became an emblem of resistance to tyranny. In the historiography of the early Principate, suicide was a dramatic way for members of the aristocracy to assert a resistance to the emperor that could no longer be expressed through military action.78 Van Hooff remarks on how positively eager authors like Lucan and Tacitus are to record suicides among the aristocracy as a way of signifying the ruin of political freedom in this period.79 So the Hyperboreans of the Natural History die in a way that glorifies the only dignity that an emperor left to many of the victims of his suspicions: the dignity of the deliberate and considered choice of taking one’s own life. By killing themselves 77 See Anton J. L. van Hooff, From Autothanasia to Suicide: Self-Killing in Classical Antiquity (London, 1990), 51–2. A Latin vocabulary-list of terms for suicide is given in appendix C, pp. 246–50. It is interesting to note that, according to van Hooff’s statistical tables (p. 234), the late Roman Republic and the early Empire (that is, from 200 bc to ad 192) account for by far the most attested suicides in Greek and Roman antiquity: 419 attested cases out of a total of 884; 9,057 countable individuals out of a total of 9,639. 78 Ibid. 52, 190 (Cato); 50 (Lucretia). 79 Ibid. 10–11.


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after luxurious banquets, the Hyperboreans demonstrate the same control over their lives that senators opposed to the emperors claimed (or were thought by others to have claimed) in their own suicides. One wonders whether Petronius had some such report of the Hyperboreans as Mela’s in mind when, at Nero’s orders, he arranged to kill himself in the elaborate and stylish manner recorded by Tacitus (Annales 16.19). In the course of a luxurious banquet, Petronius opened his veins, then had them bandaged up, and passed the remainder of the party alternately enjoying himself and letting his blood drain out. Mutatis mutandis, he staged his exit very much in the manner of a Roman Hyperborean. In such a light the suicides of the Hyperboreans and the approval with which Pliny mentions suicide in the Natural History seem consistent with the culture of the early Principate. There is an important complication to be taken into account here, one that prevents a simple interpretation of the Hyperboreans as senatorial Romans glorified by their transposition to the fringe of the world. Despite the many occasions on which Pliny mentions suicide with approval, he omits to do so in the context of imperial tyranny or political resistance, as has been pointed out by Beagon.80 This despite the high probability of his having been familiar with political suicides simply as a Roman man in a time famously dangerous to politically active men of his class: he had, after all, survived the reigns of Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. Not only had he outlived them, he had written the history of his times, ‘A Continuation of Aufidius Bassus’ (A fine Aufidi Bassi). The book is no longer extant, but it was one of the sources of Tacitus’ Annales, and of course political suicide is a frequently repeated note in Tacitus. It is even possible that Pliny’s history was the source for Tacitus’ famous descriptions of the suicides of Seneca and Petronius. Whether this is true or not, their deaths are not to be found in the Natural History. It is reasonable to wonder why the Natural History is silent on the subject, if Pliny’s account of Hyperborea is really consistent with the aristocratic ideology of heroic, self-assertive suicide I have described. Beagon finds an explanation in the politics of Pliny’s time: in the eyes of Pliny’s contemporaries, descriptions of political 80


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suicides may have been seen as allusions to resistance to the Flavian dynasty.81 Thrasea Paetus, a senator who took his own life in ad 66 at Nero’s orders, became for later writers a famous example of principled resistance to tyranny (Tacitus, Annales 16.21–35; Pliny the Younger, Letters 3.16.10 and 8.22; Martial 1.13). He is not alluded to by Pliny, probably because of his sonin-law Helvidius Priscus, a senatorial critic of the Flavians (Tacitus, Histories 4.6–8, 43); they had Helvidius himself exiled and then executed at about the time the Natural History was being written (the two senators are paired as martyrs by Tacitus at Agricola 2). This political interpretation of Pliny’s omission seems plausible; I would expand it by considering the conflict between individual self-determination and imperial authority at a more general level. An instructive way to think about Pliny’s silence on the political suicides is to compare the Hyperboreans with their opposite numbers, the Essenes. The Natural History describes the Hyperboreans with envy, the Essenes acidulously, but they resemble each other in many ways. As the great wonder of the Essenes for the Natural History is that they perpetuate their tribe without sex or birth, so the wonder of the Hyperboreans is their death by suicide, and the two mirabilia are in fact parallel. Only in these two nations are the citizen’s coming into or passing out of the community not left to chance. In these societies they are normally matters for the individual’s discretion. The death of a Hyperborean is as voluntary as the birth—that is, the initiation—of an Essene. But if joining the Essenes is much like being reborn, it is also like killing yourself—a permanent removal from the world. What makes a Hyperborean want to die is much the same as what makes another man want to become an Essene. The ‘surfeit of life’, satietas vitae, that the Natural History ascribes to the Hyperboreans (4.89) could easily become the nausea of overindulgence, ‘repentance of life’ (vitae paenitentia, 5.73), that he sees behind the living death of the Essenes.82 That one can belong voluntarily not only to a community, but even to a life, 81

Beagon, Roman Nature 239. See Seneca, Letters 24.24: ‘There steals up on certain men a feeling of having had enough of doing and seeing the same things, and, I will not call it a hatred, but a weariness of life.’ 82


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casting away or taking up an existence at will, is the idea that connects the Hyperboreans with the Essenes. But if the descriptions of both these nations are fantasies of individual control over society and life, the Natural History does not look upon them with equal favour, and the significant difference between the two tribes is their relationship to authority. The Hyperboreans inhabit an ahistorical dream of selfmastery. Assigned to no accessible place in the empire of the Natural History’s geography, they are as much beyond ruling or being ruled as they are beyond sickness and war. They exist only to govern themselves in an apolitical space free from the interference of neighbours, tyrants, and Fortune. The Essenes, on the other hand, are of course historical; for Pliny, they are the emblem of a subject nation that in ad 64–70 did a real injury to Roman authority. In this respect, the Essenes must be read in close connection with the Jewish nation as a whole, which is otherwise absent from Pliny’s Judaea, and Essene asceticism assimilated with the Jewish revolt. Both of them are associated by the Natural History with sterility and waste. Both Essenes and the other Jews are subjects who assert an autonomy that is blameworthy. They claim as their own a freedom that does not belong to them, a dignity that is the traditional prerogative of their rulers, and unsuited for the ruled. Their self-chosen death is a fitting punishment for the crime of withholding their productivity. In the case of the Hyperboreans and Essenes, how Pliny depicts tribes with the power of self-determined death (or birth) depends on whether that tribe stands in an actual relationship to Roman authority (subordinate to it, rebelling against it) or is imagined as inhabiting a land permanently inaccessible to it. This conclusion calls to mind the Natural History’s own relationship to Roman authority. What unites the myriad particular facts of the Natural History is nothing but political power; as a collection of the world’s knowledge, the foundation of the book, the means of its existence, is Roman authority. The wide range of Pliny’s survey is a monument to the power of Rome and a demonstration of how much of the world it had made accessible. But the relationship between Pliny and his emperors Vespasian and Titus, as I shall discuss in the Conclusion, is not a simple one. In particular the preface

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of the Natural History gives evidence of the delicacy with which Pliny had to negotiate for himself a position as an authority (within his book), but still appropriately subordinate to the authority of his emperors. As I will argue at length at the end of the book, Pliny was careful not to be seen to arrogate for himself the power, thought of as an imperial prerogative, of publishing and giving authoritative interpretation to knowledge about nature. That Pliny was careful to subject himself to imperial authority is a possible reason for his silence about political suicide, explaining why he can describe suicide as a general benefit for humanity but does not specially mention it as a means of selfassertion against tyrants or other political domination. In Tacitus, as we have seen, Petronius is admirable because he is an individualist, demonstrating in death that his allegiance to his own character is greater than his fear. In Seneca, a man who takes his own life in reaction to imprisonment, sickness, or tyranny also represents an absolute and final assertion of selfhood. ‘Now,’ as Cato the Younger says in Plutarch (70), testing his sword’s sharpness, ‘I belong to myself.’ Suicide is for all these authors a way of speaking about individuality. Such individuality would sit uncomfortably in the Natural History, which is interested not, as the next chapter will show, in how people can come to belong to themselves, but in how the world has become available to the central authority of Rome, through the achievement of great conquerors.

4 Triumphal Geography

In books 3 to 6 of the Natural History the goal is a survey of the orbis terrarum, the inhabited world, and the complete enumeration of its contents. This survey, we are told in the preface to the gazetteer as a whole (3.1–2), is limited in its aim. For the moment, since we are dealing with the whole world, the encyclopedia will catalogue the bare names of its parts without referring to the reasons for their fame, names without history: The bare names of places I shall set down as briefly as I can, postponing their renown and the reasons for it until the proper occasions; for the world in general is now the subject of my discussion. Please understand me, then, as if I were listing names void of fame, just as they were in the beginning, before history, and as if, though an endowment of names did indeed exist for these places, it pertained only to the universe and to nature. (3.2)

Each of the indices to these books in the table of contents (that is, book I of the Natural History) begins with this promise: ‘This book contains locations, nations, seas, towns, havens, mountains, rivers, measures, peoples who exist or who have existed.’ These are the elements of the Natural History’s geography: the orbis terrarum is a sum we will achieve by adding them up one by one. Each index ends with an enumeration, the invoice of a promise kept: this book contains so many towns, so many races, so many famous rivers, so many famous mountains, so many islands, so many extinct towns and races—an enumeration as complete as Pliny can make it. As promised, the geography is timeless: although the Natural History cannot ignore history, its will toward complete enumeration resists it. This is to be a survey of the whole world, and the Natural History will call up even the parts of it that have dropped out of sight to account for themselves:

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To this land [the south of Arabia] as yet only Aelius Gallus, of the order of knights, has brought Roman military force; for Gaius Caesar, the son of Augustus, only saw Arabia from afar. Gallus destroyed the following towns that have not been listed by previous authorities: Negrana, Nestus, Nesca, Magusus, Caminacus, Labaetia, Bariba, which I have mentioned already, a town six miles in circumference, and likewise Caripeta, the farthest point he reached. (6.160)

In the case of these towns, we learn of their presence in the world only after the Natural History tells us they no longer exist—their destruction is the necessary precondition of our being informed.1 That such complete information should be available to the Natural History is a consequence of the spread of Roman authority, which has opened up the orbis terrarum to expeditions such as that of Aelius Gallus. The reader can go anywhere he likes, and the encyclopedia’s intent is to show him what it will look like when he gets there. Grant that the world is open, then. The question remains, how do we get into it? Where do we start? From what point of entrance is this sum, this newly opened world accessible to us? The work of Nicholas Purcell has demonstrated that for the Romans, maps were not the everyday matter that they are for us, and the ability to read them something of a special skill: ‘Scholars have taken for granted the thought-world of easy, habitual map-literacy. It is hard for us properly to conceive of ancient geographical ignorance, which is a wholly different ignorance from that expressed by the words terra incognita on the maps of the late medieval and early modern periods.’2 The Romans, he says, ‘did not have the help of concepts like ‘‘Iberian peninsula’’ or ‘‘North German Plain’’’.3 Even awareness of the Italian peninsula as a unit, which seems obvious to us, only emerged gradually in the course of the third century bc.4 Instead of the map-conscious forms that underpin our knowledge 1 Compare the set of place-names without places in Pliny’s description of ancient Latium, 3.68–70. 2 Nicholas Purcell, ‘The Creation of Provincial Landscape: The Roman Impact on Cisalpine Gaul’, in Thomas Blagg and Martin Millett (eds.), The Early Roman Empire in the West (Oxford, 1990), 8. 3 Ibid. 9. 4 Ibid.

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of the world, he finds that the conceptual geography of the Romans was dominated by five imaginative modes: (a) imagining a region as the itinerary of a journey from sea to sea; (b) an imagined view from a high place; (c) zones defined by their typical soil and climate; (d) the nearest places to which Romans went: as, for example, the zone of the enemy Gauls; (e) a geometric schema described by symmetries of land forms and rivers.5 All of these modes of description occur in the Natural History, which, to make territory present to the eye in the absence of drawing or other graphic aids, must necessarily resort to metaphor. It is significant that the metaphor of the view from on high is frequently employed, and often in the encyclopedia’s most triumphalist passages. The Natural History, which is concerned to demonstrate to the reader the availability of things, describes geography so as to allow the reader’s eye to sweep over the orbis terrarum as a thing to be possessed. This kind of survey occurs often in the rhetoric of ancient history and poetry; these parallels in turn force us to think further about the political implications of such geographical description. the survey from on high The Natural History at times describes the world as laid open, as it were, to a single outward-looking glance. For example, at 27.2–3, Pliny assigns to the vast territory covered by his twelve books on medicine (books 20–32) a significance that allows him to assimilate it to the meaning of the Natural History as a whole. Here the world is a sum, legible to a single surveying eye, and available from a single point of vantage: The Scythian plant is conveyed from the swamps of Maeotis, euphorbea from Mount Atlas and from beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the very place where the laws of Nature lapse. In another quarter, britannica comes from islands of the ocean situated beyond our continent, aethiopis likewise from a clime desiccated by the stars. Other 5

Ibid. 9–10.

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medicines besides are conveyed from other quarters this way and that throughout the world for mankind’s well-being, as the limitless grandeur of the Roman peace displays by turns not only humans with their different lands and nations, but even mountains and eminences that rise to the clouds, and their products and plants! May this gift of the gods, I entreat, last forever! So truly do they seem to have given the Romans to mankind like a second source of daylight.

The teleology of this passage is basic to any understanding of the Natural History. The world, or at least the extremities of three directions, is seen at once as if from a mountain top.6 This perspective renders the orbis terrarum interpretable in every particular to a single, overarching system of meaning: it is, in a word, imperial. Nature is only visible to our surveying eye because the ‘limitless grandeur’ of Roman peace, like the sunlight, is there to display it to us (immensa maiestate ostentante). To the imagination of the ancients, surveying a place from on high is logically prior to owning or conquering it. For Aristotle, the idea of surveying territory is so naturally prior to ruling it that in constituting the ideal city-state he limits its population and territory to what is eusynoptos, ‘capable of being taken in at a single glance’ (Politics 1327a). From the same conception arises the topos in ancient historians of the enemy commander who looks down from the mountain ridge into the territory to be conquered. One thinks of Hannibal in Polybius, who rallies his weary troops by demonstrating to them the availability of Italy, spread out below their Alpine viewpoint like a town beneath a citadel;7 or of Philip V in Livy, who, when he meditates war 6

This passage fits into a topos of description of which there are many examples in Greek and Roman poetry, in which three extremes are covered. See Catullus 11, in which the geography is also triumphal: the ‘monuments of great Caesar’ include the real Rhine and Ocean because it could be anticipated that their images would be marched in Caesar’s triumph, as was the Nile (Cat. 11.8). This parallel was pointed out to me by Charles Murgia. 7 Polybius 3.54: ‘When snow was collecting on the mountain peaks, for it was close to the time of the setting of the Pleiades, Hannibal saw that the spirits of his troops had sunk because of the hardships they had already endured and those they expected to come. He called them together and tried to raise their morale, his only resource in this being the actual sight of Italy. For this country lies so close under the aforementioned mountains that when both are taken in at one glance the Alps seem to stand to all of Italy in the relation of a citadel above a town. Displaying to his men, therefore, the plains

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with Rome, leads his troops to the peak of Mount Haemus. From here, legend promises, he will be able to contemplate the Black Sea, the Adriatic, the Danube river, and the Alps all at once.8 The idea of reading landscape as Philip would, all at once from on high, is intimately connected with the idea of mastery. A couplet of Ovid’s exile poetry (Tristia 3.7.51–2) incorporates a familiar claim of poetic immortality within the image of the imperial glance of Rome, which extends from its mountainous home as far as the fringes of the world: As long as from its peaks triumphant Rome commands a view of all the mastered world, I shall be read.

From the hills beside the Tiber, imagined as a lofty central point, the gaze of power extends as far as the fringes of the world. Even in far Tomis, the poet is visible, and legible, to Rome. As we have seen, Pliny also applies this topos of the survey on high, but adds his own, characteristically baroque touch: Rome is not only the reader of this territory, but also the light, like a second sun, that makes reading possible. But apprehending all the world at once is not compatible with analysing it. For exposition of the details, the task of the Natural History, one needs a slightly different framework, something that tolerates a slower progress across the object of attention. t he per iplus For us, of course, a map is the medium for an analytical description of the world. A world-map illustrates the disposition of of the Po, he reminded them of the general good will that the Gauls who lived there had toward them. At the same time he also marked out for them the location of Rome itself, and in this way, to some extent, he restored their confidence.’ 8 Livy 40.21: ‘A desire for climbing Mt. Haemus to its summit had taken possession of Philip, for he trusted in the common belief that from the top one could view all at once the Black and Adriatic Seas as well as the river Danube and the Alps; he thought that having these places spread out beneath his eyes would be of no small importance for him as he plotted war with Rome. Making inquiries about ascending Mt. Haemus among those who had experience of the region, he found a general agreement that there was no way up for an army, but only for a few lightly armed troops, and that by a very difficult route.’ Pomponius Mela says the same thing about the view from Mt. Haemus (2.2).

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various masses of land and bodies of water toward each other by careful expression of their relative proportions, articulating them within the frame of latitude and longitude. By means of this medium we both apprehend the world at a single glance as well as analyse its parts. But this is not how the Natural History lays out the orbis terrarum for us. In this it is like most other ancient geographies. The lack of attention that nearly all geographical texts display towards the production or the use of maps never fails to surprise and provoke us.9 As we shall see, the rare maps that we know of in ancient Rome had a public and political function, having been made for the glorification of great commanders. But the limitations of our critical opinions should not blind us to what is present in the Natural History. As a geographer, Pliny was aware of certain basic cartographic principles. He was not ignorant of Eratosthenes’ method of imposing parallels upon the earth; he had too a conception, rough by our standards, of the relative dimensions of the continents he described. Precisely these subjects are described in 6.206–20, an appendix that supplements the three books of geography. Here are set out the relative dimensions of the seas and continents as well as the lines of latitude that segment the known world, ‘a branch of knowledge discovered by Greeks that displays a most ingenious cunning’ (6.211). But to the proportions of land and sea and the exposition of latitudes are devoted only two capituli, seven Teubner pages in all. They are only a tail-end to the gazetteer, a short supplement to his treatment of the earth, ‘so that nothing may seem to be lacking to our survey of the world’ (6.211 again). Far from being the foundation for scientific geography that it was for Eratosthenes and Ptolemy, the system of parallels represents one thing for Pliny: it allows comparison of the different hours of daylight that different places receive.10 The system possesses only astronomical interest; it is not a means for articulating 9 Strabo 2.5.10. Making a map is just faute de mieux for a globe. If the reader cannot construct a globe according to Strabo’s directions, let him at least sketch a map. For a text dealing with putting maps to use, we must go to Vegetius 3.6, who advises generals to direct their marches ‘by means of their eyes’ gaze’ (aspectu oculorum) with the aid of an itinerarium. 10 Compare 2.181, where the study of latitude is also treated as a branch of astronomy.

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world geography. Our tastes are not Pliny’s, and our means of exposition do not supply him with his paradigm for setting out the orbis terrarum. As the shape of the Natural History’s gazetteer shows, the point of entrance from which this newly open world is accessible to us can only be imagined as a coastline. To be specific, as the coastline of the Mediterranean. If we ask how the Natural History pictures the known world for us, we will find that it is as dry land bounded by networks of water. This metaphor, the shaping of geographical exegesis as if it were the itinerary of a voyage along a coast, was a very old tradition by Pliny’s time: this was the form in which Hecataeus of Miletus had cast his description of the earth,11 the organizing metaphor of the Chorographia of Pomponius Mela, the Natural History’s most recent predecessor, and of many works of geography in between.12 Taking this metaphor of the coastal itinerary, or periplus, the Natural History has organized the survey of the world in two journeys, and it is the coastlines of maritime countries that the narrative hugs, the description moving from land to land like an eye travelling over a map, winding from time to time up various rivers to explore their inland parts. The periplus is an organizing device native to geographies of the Mediterranean. Like Mela, the Natural History pushes it hard, by taking it from the shores of the inland sea and extending it to whole continents, for which, with their large landlocked areas, it is hardly apt. As the course is defined very much by the shores and peripheries of the continents, the path is looping and circuitous, crossing some places more than once in the course of these four books. The orbis terrarum is here articulated in two long parallel journeys across three continents, both beginning in the remote west, following the Mediterranean coast east to the Aegean and north to the Euxine, there to turn aside either west to circumnavigate Europe or east to encircle Asia, both ending roughly where they began.13 11

About 500 bc. Jacoby, FGH I, 1–47, with commentary pp. 317–75. On the periplus as the basic structure of Pliny’s geography, see Klaus G. Sallmann, Geographie des a¨lteren Plinius, 232–6, and Klaus Mu¨ller, Geschichte der Antiken Ethnographie, ii. 142–3. 13 First journey (bks. 3 and 4): bk. 3: from Baetica in southern Iberia, to north-east Spain, through Narbonne to Italy, the Alps, and nations of the 12

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Coasts and rivers are the bones of the Natural History’s narrative, the skeleton on which are hung the names of city and tribe. The object is to describe the lands between the waters, but it is on the watery interstices of the orbis terrarum that the itinerary depends for its order, navigating from the Pillars of Hercules in the far west through the world’s internal waters to the (imaginary) outlet between the Caspian Sea and the northern ocean (described at 6.36 and 6.38), coasting from there round the continental edges. Seas or rivers are the reference point for nearly every orientation. Although the Natural History must occasionally move its surveying eye across the dry land of the interior, it prefers to return to the sea, or at least to a river, to position itself before beginning an overview of a new land. When, for instance, the description of the Decapolis of Syria is finished, an account of the nearest adjacent country begins with the sentence ‘From this place we must go back to the shoreline and Phoenicia’ (5.75). Country after country is introduced to us as if we were tourists in a coasting ship: after completing his survey of Arabia Petraea, we are told that ‘next to this, Syria takes possession of the coast’ (5.66); shortly thereafter follows ‘the territory of Samaria along the coast’ (5.68). Where there is no coast, there are rivers, which in their progress to the sea give a means of surveying a country’s interior and listing its inhabitants, and when we are not touring along the coast we often sail upstream to view the natives. For example, part of Pliny’s gazetteer of western India (6.77–8) is organized around the Indus: ‘After this, as my survey of the inhabitants of the banks of the river Indus proceeds upstream, we find the Mathoae, Bolinae, Gallitalutae, Dimuri, Megari, Ardabae, Mesae, Abisari, and Silae . . . Having crossed the Adriatic coast. Bk. 4: Epirus, Greece (and islands), Macedonia, through the Hellespont, the Euxine (Black Sea) and islands, Dacia, Scythia, Germany, the north-western Ocean (including Britain), Belgic Gaul, Aquitanian Gaul, northern and western Iberia. Second journey (bks. 5 and 6): bk. 5: Mauretania, North Africa, Egypt, Syria, Judaea, countries of Southern Asia Minor, Ionia, Aeolid, Troad, islands of the west coast of Asia Minor. Bk. 6: the north coast of Asia Minor, east coast of Euxine, Lake Maeotis (Sea of Azov), Armenia, Caucasus, Caspian Sea, Media, China, India, Persian Gulf, Parthia, Mesopotamia, Arabia, Red Sea, the Trogodytes, Ethiopia, and the Fortunate (Canary) Islands. There is a convenient diagram of the two coastal itineraries in Sallmann, Geographie des a¨lteren Plinius, 104.

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Indus and sailing downstream with it, we find the Samarabiae, Sambraceni, Bisambritae, Orsi, Andiseni, and the Taxilae with their famous city.’14 And so the catalogues of landlocked peoples in, for instance, Scythia or Germany, are bracketed and punctuated by the names of the rivers that rise in or delimit their territory. See, for example, 4.81, on Germany: ‘Agrippa reports that this tract from the Danube to the Ocean is 1,200 miles long, 396 broad, from the Sarmatian wastes to the Vistula.’ Or a little further on (4.88) Scythia is articulated in this way: ‘From Taphrae the interior of the continent belongs to the Auchetae, in whose land is the spring of the Hypanis, and the Neuroe, where the Borysthenes has its source.’ geograph y as nar rativ e Recognizing the metaphor of the coastal voyage clarifies the order of exposition in books 3–6, but certain features of the Natural History’s geography still puzzle us. Although one might think that these books would be the most appropriate framework for ethnographic description, in fact very few extended accounts occur in this portion of the encyclopedia.15 Instead, these books are fascinated by rivers and mountains above all other topographical features,16 and obsessed with fame. In the geographical enumerations in the table of contents of the Natural History, mountains and rivers are always listed as clarus, ‘famous’, the only geographical features to be so described there. But the encyclopedia scatters the words clarus and nobilis around in a manner that seems promiscuous and often inexplicable when one is speaking of geographical phenomena. This is a habit shared by other Roman writers (Curtius Rufus, for example, describes the ‘many glorious rivers (amnes incliti) of India that spring from Mount Caucasus’, History of Alexander 8.9.3) but the consistency with which it appears in the Natural History seems unusual. What does it mean for a mountain or river to be famous? Although it may seem a truism 14 Or see the towns of Baetica in Iberia, ordered according to their locations on the Baetis, 3.11–12. 15 Mu¨ller, Geschichte der Antiken Ethnographie, 143. 16 Sallmann, Geographie des a¨lteren Plinius, 221–5 lists the most prominent topographical features of NH 3–6 as mountains, rivers, and coasts.

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to call the Rhine famous (4.99), why should this word apply to the river Parthenias (6.129), a tributary of the Tigris? Why is this attention paid to mountains and rivers rather than, say, islands and forests? How is this geography to be read? rivers We sometimes forget that for the Romans rivers were of great religious and symbolic significance. In the religious life of Rome, as is well documented, rivers were divine beings, their cult old and widespread.17 For example, the worship of rivers was sufficiently important to the Romans’ image of themselves for Vergil to assign the foundation of the cult of the Tiber to Aeneas (Aeneid 8.71–8). Even the rivers of barbarian lands were recognized by the Romans as divinities and accorded appropriate cult18 and, as we shall see, these river-gods were significant among the apparatus of the Roman triumph. By metonymy, rivers were also bearers of cultural identity both for Rome itself and for foreign lands. The ideological weight that rivers could bear is plain from the way they appear in Roman literary texts. The Tiber, the Roman river par excellence, is traditionally invested with autocratic language: Ennius calls it the ‘river most eminent of all’; Vergil, ‘the ruler of waters’; an unnamed orator, ‘the lord and ruler of circumfluent waters’.19 But the sentimental force with which Italian rivers could be regarded is clearer in a letter of Pliny the Younger’s, devoted to another Italian river, the Clitumnus (Letters 8.8). The rhetoric of this letter cloaks the river in awe (religio), sanctity, and nostalgia: 17

See, in general, Georg Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Ro¨mer (Munich, 1912), 119–225. Noteworthy among the many testimonia is the worship of the Numicus in connection with Aeneas as Jupiter Indiges (Dionysius of Halicarnassus 1.64). The cult of springs is attested in Suetonius, Augustus 57. Sources describing votive deposits of coins at the springs of Vicarello on Lake Bracciano are CIL xi. 3286 ff. and RhM 9 (1854), 20–8. 18 Most notably, a large number of Roman inscriptions invoke the gods of the Danube and the Rhine. Inscriptions invoking Danuvius: CIL iii. 3416; 5863; 10263; 10395; 11894; 1435927; inscriptions invoking Rhenus: CIL xiii. 5255; 7790 f.; 8810 f. 19 Ennius, Ann. 67 V; Vergil, Aeneid 8.77; the unnamed orator quoted by Fronto, p. 153 van den Hout.

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There rises a hillock, shadowy and thick with ancient cypresses. At its foot a spring emerges, welling up through many unequal rivulets, and bursting out of the pool it forms, it spreads out with a wide bosom so clear and brilliant that you can count the money that is tossed in and the glittering pebbles. From there it is set in motion not by the slope of the ground but by its own abundance and weight, so to speak: what was even now a spring is suddenly a most splendid river. It even bears ships, allowing them to pass as they go upstream, struggling against the current. This is so strong that boats need no oars to help them downstream, even over level ground, while going upstream needs hard work with oars and poles.

Realistic though they are, the details of this description strain toward the metaphoric, creating a picture that can be read two ways. The shadowy grove and the unexpected force of the newborn stream connote antiquity and the national myth of Rome’s own growth from small and inconspicuous beginnings. These connotations are extended in the description of the home of the river-god: The water could rival snow in sharpness and in colour. Near by is a temple, ancient and exuding an air of the divine. Here stands Clitumnus himself, wrapped in a purple-bordered toga for his decoration. The lots for divination bear witness that a god is here, one with oracular power. Many small shrines surround the place, and just as many gods. Each has its own cult and name, and some even springs of their own. For beside that well-known one who is, so to say, the parent of the rest, there are lesser streams with separate springs which lose themselves in the river before it passes under the bridge. This is the boundary between the sacred and the profane; below it you may swim in the river, but above it you may only go in boats.

The purple-bordered toga praetexta that the god wears, as well as the whiteness and purity of the river and its rank as the parent of its tributaries—these images evoke the powerful religious and emotional associations the Clitumnus has for Pliny at the same time as they assimilate the river to Roman national myth. The Clitumnus was equated in Umbria with Jupiter (Vibius Sequester 55) and its white waters are a topos of Augustan poets: from Clitumnus’ banks come the sacrificial oxen, immaculately white, to be led to the Capitol in triumphal processions (Propertius 2.19.25–6; 3.33.23; Vergil, Georgics 2.145–8).

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Since Italian rivers serve so well to evoke the religious and sentimental aspects of the countryside, the Clitumnus is prominent in the ‘praise of Italy’ (laudes Italiae) sequence of Vergil’s second Georgic (2.136–76) that describes the excellence of the Italian landscape in contrast to exotic landscapes from the fringes of the world. Rivers are put to a similar use by Lucan in the Civil War. Before setting in motion the war between Caesar and Pompey, Lucan creates a detailed geographical catalogue of Italy (2.396–438)20 that consists simply of a description of the Apennine mountain range and an enumeration of the rivers that flow from it. The effect is again to evoke a nostalgic picture of the beauties of the Italian homeland that establishes the value of what is about to be swept away by the crisis of civil war. Non-Italian rivers, on the other hand, are an important part of the iconography of Roman military culture. Characteristic of this metonymic use of rivers is the proliferation of images of the Danube under Trajan, all deriving meaning from his campaigns in Dacia and his creation of a Danube fleet. Various images show how Trajan domesticated the river and took it into service: Father Danube figures in the lowest band of Trajan’s column, complacently watching the arrival of the legions in Dacia, while various coins show him reclining happily in the classic pose of a river-god,21 or wrestling Dacia (in the person of a robed female) to the ground.22 A sestertius of 104–6 advertises the Dacian campaigns with the image of the bridge Trajan had thrown over the Danube at Drobetae.23 In ad 75 Trajan’s own father M. Ulpius Traianus had supervised the construction of a canal on the river Orontes above Antioch in Syria: the inscriptions24 in which he commemorated the construction illustrate that engineering a second path for the great river was intended 20 See Elaine Fantham’s commentary (Cambridge, 1992) on Bellum Civile 2.392–438. 21 Harold Mattingly, Coins of the Roman Empire in the British Museum, iii: Nerva to Hadrian (London, 1936), plate 15, no. 16. 22 Ibid., plate 28, no. 8, plate 29, no. 1. 23 Ibid., plate 32, no. 1. 24 D. Van Berchem, ‘Une inscription flavienne du Museé d’Antioche’, Museum Helveticum, 40 (1983), 186–96. Cited in Purcell, ‘The Creation of Provincial Landscape’, 7.

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to be read as a manifestation of imperial power over the landscape. Like the Danube, the Orontes was a natural marvel, and so a fitting symbolic field for the Romans to demonstrate their mastery.25 The canalization of the Orontes was to be read as a subjugation of nature by the emperor: in a similar mode of interpretation, Vergil’s commentator Servius read a half-line from the Aeneid, pontem indignatus Araxes (Aeneid 8.728: ‘Araxes, chafing at his bridge’) as a magnification of the glory of Augustus, who in legend had finally bridged the river, which had previously thwarted the efforts of Xerxes and Alexander.26 In the spatial imagination of Roman poetry, exotic rivers work as imaginative markers for geographic distance and conquest. Lucan can express the far travels and European conquests of King Sesostris of Egypt by stating that he drank of the Rhoˆne and the Po.27 In metaphoric speech, the connection of the river and its territory is very close: mastering the river implies taking the territory. This was no mere metaphor. In real life, certain rivers were to be mastered, their courses explored, their springs discovered, and the task was one for persons of the highest dignity. As I shall discuss below, Lucan speaks of the quest for the source of the Nile as the long-standing desire of kings like Cambyses and Alexander; but under Nero, the search for the springs of the Nile was actually a matter of imperial policy: Seneca (Natural Questions 6.8.3–4) says that ‘I myself have heard that Nero Caesar, devoted to truth in particular, as to the other virtues, sent two centurions to find out the head of the Nile.’28 So it seems entirely fitting that in Strabo the man whose eyes first uncovered the source of the Danube, penetrating the 25

Ibid. 7. Servius Auctus, Aeneid 8.728: ‘The Araxes here is a river of Armenia, which Xerxes attempted to surmount (conscendere) with bridges. Alexander the Great made a bridge for it, which the river destroyed in flood. Afterwards Augustus bound it with a stronger bridge. Hence ‘‘Araxes, chafing at his bridge’’ in order to magnify Augustus.’ 27 Bellum Civile 10.276–9: ‘Sesostris came to the West and the edges of the world j And drove his Egyptian chariot over the necks of kings: j But he drank of your rivers, Rhoˆne and Po, j Before drinking from the Nile’s spring.’ 28 On this expedition to discover the sources of the Nile see also Pliny, NH 6.181. 26

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natural fortifications (choria erymna) of the Hercynian Forest, was Tiberius, the emperor-to-be.29 In the Natural History’s survey of the orbis terrarum, rivers have two functions. They are, first of all, lines which mark boundaries, separating one space from another: All of Gaul known by the single name Long-haired is divided into three families of peoples, marked off in the first place by rivers: from the Scaldis to the Sequana there is Gallia Belgica; from the Sequana to the Garunna there is Gallia Celtica or Lugdunensis; and from the Garunna to the point where Mount Pyrenaeus invades the land there is Aquitanica, formerly called Aremorica. (4.105)

These are rivers as frontiers, rivers, we may say, as seen by a map-maker. Although the idea of river as boundary has implicit within it the idea of river as barrier, Pliny never deals with rivers as physical obstacles to motion. Unlike, to cite the obvious example, the Gallic War of Caesar, the Natural History seldom describes a river from the perspective of someone trying to cross it. Pliny never mentions fords, and rarely speaks of bridges.30 Instead, he represents rivers as means of travel, as connections between places. They are the rails on which his narrative slides. This is the second function of rivers in the Natural History survey: as roads, itineraries in themselves. In the Natural History’s descriptions of rivers, the adjectives meabilis (‘that may be gone through’) and navigabilis (‘navigable’) occur again and again.31 These are rivers as seen from a boat. It is in this aspect that rivers reveal their fugitive cunning and devious fluidity—the basis for their fame. The movement of a river from spring to sea is a story: it permits the insertion of narrative into geography. With rivers, geographical description approaches biography. For Pliny rivers are elusive, tricky, and hard to get hold of. Rivers are never at a loss, never caught in aporia: by definition, a river knows the way through. Descrip29

Strabo 7.1.5. When bridges are mentioned in books 3–6, it is as an index of the importance of a given town (e.g. the town of Zeugma (‘bridge’) on the Euphrates, ‘famous for the crossing of the Euphrates’ (transitu Euphratis nobile), 5.86), or of the commercial significance of a place. 31 See Beagon, Roman Nature, 194–5, for Pliny’s use of navigabilis for rivers. 30

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tions of rivers must reflect their evasive nature. The supreme instance of this is the Natural History’s account of the Nile, which is an expert at evading detection as well as at worming its way through formidable obstacles:32 faced with having to flow through places ‘sandy and waste’ on its way from Mauretania to Egypt, the Nile twice drops underground and flows beneath the sand, the second time for a journey of twenty days, until it reaches Ethiopia, where it is called back to the surface by the presence of humans (5.51–2). Despite all of the detail Pliny gives us in this section, he disclaims having complete knowledge of the source of the Nile, and modestly reports only as much as King Juba of Mauretania has been able to discover: 5.51: ‘The Nile, rising from springs unknown . . . has its origin, as far as King Juba could learn, in a mountain of Lower Mauretania not far from Ocean, and immediately collects in a still pool called Nilides.’ Although what he knows about the river’s source is actually quite detailed (the mountain is not far from Ocean; the lake Nilides is stagnant; the crocodiles in this lake prove its identity with the Egyptian Nile), Pliny repeats the formula ‘rising from springs unknown’ like a charm. For Pliny to claim absolute certainty here would not be decent. To know the sources of the Nile is, as Lucan made clear not too long before Pliny, one of the prerogatives of absolute power, the ambition of tyrants and emperors, a demonstration of control over the world up to its farthest edge. A mark of Alexander’s overweening ambition is that ‘he would have circled the axes of the world and drunk the Nile from its spring’ (10.40); a little later in the same book Lucan makes Caesar claim ‘Had I a certain chance of seeing the Nile’s springs, I would leave the civil war behind’ (10.191–2)—that is, the mastery implicit in this knowledge is a satisfactory substitute for domination of Rome; finally, the Egyptian priest Acoreus tells us that Caesar’s desire puts him in the same company as Alexander, Sesostris, and Cambyses (ll. 268–82), although the river’s ‘propensity for skulking’ (natura latendi) always defeated even these 32

Beagon, ‘Nature and Views of her Landscapes in Pliny the Elder’, 287–91, contains a useful survey of Pliny’s descriptions of rivers, considered from the point of view of their beauty and/or utility; see in particular 290–1, for the Nile as a farmer participating in a civilized landscape.

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conquerors. In the case of the Nile, then, it is not a desirable thing, even for a surveyor of the world like Pliny, to have defeated the river’s cunning. In his long essay on the Nile (Natural Questions 4A) Seneca does not even attempt to go farther toward its source than Meroe¨ (which he calls Philae; Natural Questions 4A.3). Although Seneca’s stated purpose is to account for the Nile’s flooding by tracking down its source (4A.3), he diverts the progress of his essay into digressions on ethnography (4A.6), agriculture (4A.9–12), and zoology (the crocodile: 4A.12–16). The Nile must remain elusive: this is the reason for its fame. To rob the river of its elusiveness, its fame, is to arrogate for oneself a fame equivalent to it. To assert control over the Nile is perhaps possible for an emperor (although this would have to be over Lucan’s objections), but for a private citizen, it is not even thinkable. When the Natural History describes a ‘famous’ river like the Nile, it is in a narrative of set pattern, a report of the river’s life from its source to its discharge into the sea, and these narratives glory in changes of shape and name, sudden descents into the underground and surprising emergence miles away. From a practical point of view, of course, the progress of a river is the Natural History’s primary means of surveying a country’s interior and listing the places it passes and the frontiers it defines. But rivers also deserve to have their life-stories told—they possess individual characters, they acquire property, and they exchange things with humanity. The Natural History’s stories about rivers that share channels without mingling their waters demonstrate that rivers are individuals.33 The account of the Tigris is quite typical of such river narratives, only more detailed—the Tigris flows through another river, a lake, a mountain, and a change of name without surrendering its identity: It rises in a region of Greater Armenia . . . while its current is still rather slow it is called the Diglitus, but where it flows faster it begins to be called the Tigris from its swiftness—for ‘tigris’ is the Median word for arrow. It flows into Lake Aretissa, which bears up all heavy 33 The earliest river to be so described is the Peneus (4.30), whose refusal to mingle its waters with a river from the Underworld is found in Homer (Iliad 2.751–2).

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bodies that are thrown into it and breathes out nitrous fumes. There is one species of fish in the lake, and it does not enter the current of the river as it flows across, and by the same token the fish of the Tigris do not swim out into the lake; the river hastens through, unlike in colour and in course. When it has completed its passage, encountering Mount Taurus it plunges into a hollow where it sinks underground, then bursts out from the other side. This place is called Zoaranda: that the river is the same is evident because it carries through whatever has been cast into it . . . the emperor Claudius holds that in the neighbourhood of Arrhene it runs so close to the river Arsanias that when both have flooded they flow together but do not join their streams, the Arsanias, which is lighter, swimming atop the Tigris for almost four miles, and then breaking away to be mingled in the Euphrates. (6. 127–8)

Like the Jordan (5.71, 72), the Tigris flows into a vaporous, inhospitable lake, but unlike the Jordan, which fails signally in its attempt to find a way through, the Tigris survives the ordeal intact, continuing on to the sea, its proper destination. Like the Nile (5.51–2), it drops out of sight repeatedly, but always vindicates its identity by the unity of its contents (or, in the case of the Nile, of its fauna). This is a narrative about the mysterious nature of identity: the river is threatened again and again with immobility (Mount Taurus), disappearance (beneath the ground), or dispersion (into other waters), but inevitably retains its continuity and unity. That rivers should have distinct identities makes the submission of one river to another (in those cases when waters do actually intermingle) a real matter of prestige, which Pliny emphasizes by always including a catalogue of tributaries in his river narratives. One river acquires another as a person acquires real property. These tributaries, rivers that themselves possess prestige (tributaries are often specified to be ‘famous’),34 in their vassalage increase the larger river’s status. Rivers have fame, which is to say definite standing in a socially ordered system of value. Rivers can be magnificus, ‘grand’ (the Sebou, 5.5), and clarus, ‘famous’ ( flumina clara: book 1, indices to books 3–6; amnes clari: the rivers of Germany, 4.100). In fact, rivers can even behave as monarchs, or as states themselves. To 34

For example, tributaries of the Danube, 3.147; and of the Tigris, 6.129.

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move from the rivers of foreigners to another Italian river, let us examine Pliny’s description of the Po (3.117–19): From a spring which well repays seeing, the Po streams out of the bosom of Mount Vesulus, an eminence in the highest elevations of the Alps in the territory of the Ligurian Bagienni. Concealing itself in a cavity of the earth, it rises again in the land of Forum Vibii. In fame it yields to no other river: the Greeks called it Eridanus, and the punishment of Phaethon magnified its reputation. At the rising of the Dogstar it swells with melting snow, and though it exercises violence more against the fields than shipping, the river claims no plunder for itself, lavishing fertility where it deposits its booty. To a distance of three hundred miles from its spring it adds eighty-eight by wandering, and it not only receives navigable rivers from the Alps and Apennines, but even immense lakes that discharge into it as well. It carries to the Adriatic thirty rivers in all, the most famous of which are the following: from the Apennine side, the Iactus; the Tanarus; the Trebia of Placentia; the Tarus; the Incia; the Gabellus; the Scultenna; and the Rhenus; from the Alps, the Stura; the Orgus; the two Durias; the Sesites; the Ticinus; the Lambrus; the Addua, the Ollius, and the Mincius. No other river grows so much in such a brief course.

Why should one pay a visit to the source of the Po? If we compare this account to Pliny the Younger’s description of a visit to the source of the Clitumnus, referred to above (Letters 8.8), we see that rivers in Latin literature are themselves readable. The spring is an index to the river’s character: the nature of the spring determines the significance of the river.35 It is not permitted to read the Po as the product of multiple sources, each contributing equally to the river: the Po has one spring and many tributaries. It is not difficult to recognize in the list of the Po’s tributaries a structural similarity with the list of subject nations in the Res Gestae of Augustus, or for that matter with the inscription on a triumphal arch in the Alps which the Natural History quotes only a few pages later (3.136–7), an arch marking the boundary that the Po itself once marked, the southern limit of the Alps.36 So for Pliny the Po is no longer the 35 The Tiber, for example, says of his own ‘Here is my great habitation, my source issues among lofty cities’, at Aeneid 8.65. 36 This arch listed the names of 45 defeated Alpine tribes, ‘all the nations from the Lower to the Upper Sea, brought by Augustus’ leadership under the rule of the Roman People’ (3.136). See Purcell (‘The Creation of Provincial

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border of the Alps, but now, incorporated into the homeland of the empire,37 ‘the most prosperous region of Italy’ as Tacitus says (Histories 2.17), it has a new importance. Purcell argues that the Po was originally promoted by the Romans to the class of world river, like the Danube and the Nile, with the conquest of Cisalpine Gaul: the Romans were in the habit of conferring such symbolic elevation to all their frontier rivers, and the Po’s source in the highest of the Alps, and its wonderful passage underground, are apparatus proper to its exalted status.38 The Natural History’s description is close in many respects to one by Lucan (Civil War 2.408–20), where the Po, under its Greek name Eridanus, occupies the climactic position in the geographical catalogue of Italy as a river comparable to the Nile or Danube. Like Pliny, Lucan’s emphasis is on the volume and power of the Po: And Eridanus (the earth dissolves itself into no other river more than this), rolls down shattered forests, drains away Italy itself with its waters.39

Pliny’s description of the river as a benevolent tyrant, ‘claiming no plunder for itself, lavishing fertility where it deposits its booty’, has an imperial flavour in its suggestion of taxes levied and revenues spent, for this river is as much a participant in the commercial life of the countryside as it is a road from the Alps to the sea—‘Father Po’, it is called on a votive inscription found near a village on what was once the river’s ancient bank.40 Exchanging the fertility of some fields for the soil of others, the Po partakes in the economic maintenance of the communities that border it, like the Jordan (5.71) and the Tiber (3. 54–5), which confers on Rome not only economic advantages (because of its navigability), but also aesthetic and religious Landscape’, 13) on the importance of this arch, which commemorated the conquest of the Alps from the Adriatic to the Tyrrhenian seas, to the creation of the concept of Cisalpine Gaul as a geographic unit. 37

And the homeland of Pliny himself, born at Comum in Cisalpine Gaul. Purcell, ‘The Creation of Provincial Landscape’, 11. 39 Bellum Civile 2.408–10. See Fantham’s commentary (Cambridge, 1992), 159–61. 40 Pado patri: Dessau, ILS 3903. Pater is the honorific traditional to rivergods: see Vergil, Georgics 4.369; Aeneid 7.685, 8.540. 38

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ones: its banks are pleasant for villas, and its floods give Rome omens. The reverential note that no other river becomes so great in such a short career echoes such histories of Rome’s rise to power as that of Polybius.41 The description is as political as the river is big, precisely because what is being described is a big river, the greatest river in a place that was once a borderland of Italy and is now an integral and commercially important part of it. What Pliny notices about this big river, the questions that he asks of it, and his presentation of the answers, are all determined by the concerns of his political life as a Roman. mountains Rivers, with their mobility, their evasiveness, and their power always to find a way through, are always ‘famous’ (flumina clara) in the geographic totals of the indices to books 3–6. Mountains make up the other element of geography which the Natural History counts as ‘famous’ in these passages. They are famous for their solidity, their stability, and their ability to keep one thing apart from another. They are, in short, the antithesis of rivers, with which they are eternally at war. In fact the real purpose of mountains is to restrain rivers and the other rootless components of the world: Up until this volume, everything I have examined can be seen as made with humanity in mind. Mountains, however, nature made for herself, as structural joints of a sort for pressing together earth’s inmost parts, and at the same time in order to master the rushing violence of the rivers, break surging tides, and control her most tumultuous parts with the hardest material of which she is comprised. (36.1)

This constant struggle between movement and stillness determines the form of the world. The Natural History often appeals to this battle, which is called the dimicatio naturae, the battle of nature (5.85), when it creates a narrative to explain a geographical phenomenon. It is almost as if the Natural History cannot cast geography into narrative form without invoking the antithesis of mountain and water. Each requires the other as its 41

Polybius preface 1.1.

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complement. So in book 5, for example, in which the shape of Asia is described, it must be described by telling a story, and the story goes like this: Asia is a continent dominated by mountains. The Taurus Mountains would have extended right across the middle of the continent, dividing it neatly in two, but Natura interposed oceans to halt their progress: The Taurus range rebounds toward the north and, curving, commences a vast journey, while, as if intentionally, Nature puts seas in its way again and again, on this side the Phoenician Sea, on that the Black Sea, there the Caspian and the Hyrcanian, and opposite these Lake Maeotis. And so the Taurus is twisted awry, battered between these obstacles; nevertheless it wins through and escapes on a tortuous path all the way to the kindred ridges of the Ripaean Mountains, distinguished wherever it appears by many and peculiar names: in its first section it is called the Imaus, then Emodus, Paropanisus, Circius, Cambades, Pariades, Choatras, Oreges, Oroandes, Niphates, Taurus, and where it excels even itself, Caucasus, where it throws out arms at intervals as if assailing the seas . . . (5.97–8)

The violence of the language here is remarkable: the mountain range ‘is twisted’ (torquetur); ‘battered’ (collisus); and ‘throws out arms’ (brachia emittit). As Mary Beagon points out, what we are reading here is less geographical description than the narrative of a battle.42 The water forces the mountains into evasive twists and turns; the mountain sends out promontories like arms to attack the water. Paradoxically, by making his account of the Taurus Mountains a narrative rather than a simple survey, the Natural History makes the range behave like a river. It has a beginning, travels in a given direction, evades obstacles, and reaches a goal. It is slippery, tortuous (flexuosus), and can change its name. This is very different from most of the descriptions of mountains, and in fact would seem to contradict the purpose for which, according to the passage I quoted above (36.1: ‘in order to master the rushing violence of the rivers, break surging tides, and control her most tumultuous parts’), mountains were created. For the most part, however, the mountains in the survey do a better job of holding their ground. They are seen from the viewpoint of someone trying to cross them, as monolithic obstacles, sturdy and unmoving. More typical of 42


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this kind of representation is the account of the river Euphrates, another passage where geographical description modulates into narrative: At Elegea the Taurus range meets the Euphrates and, though overpowering the river for an extent of twelve miles, does not bring it to a halt. Where the river breaks into the mountains, they call it Omma, but Euphrates where it bursts out, a rocky and turbulent stream on the other side as well . . . At Claudiopolis in Cappadocia it turns its course toward the setting sun. There, for the first time in their battle, the Taurus carries away the Euphrates. Though the mountain is defeated and sundered from itself, it wins in another way, thrusting out the broken river toward the south. So that famous struggle of nature is fought to a draw, the river going its direction of choice, the mountain keeping it from its route of choice. (5.84–5)

Here the Taurus range is the constraining force, rather than the constrained. All the same, once again mountains and waters are treated as necessary antitheses. To describe the Euphrates is to tell its story, and the story of the Euphrates is its struggle to get through the Taurus Mountains. From this description it would seem that the mountain and the river have no other function to fulfil than to fight each other—by eternally contesting the right of way they carry out the purpose for which they were created. In this respect, to mention another instance where Pliny chooses to describe a thing by telling a story about it, the Taurus and the Euphrates are like the elephant and serpent of book 8. This book is the beginning of the Natural History’s section on zoology, and the first animal described in it is the elephant, most important ‘because it is the biggest animal and most like humans in intellect’ (8.1). The account of the prime animal ends with the story of the ‘perpetual contest’ between the elephants and their natural enemies, the serpents (dracones): The most devious cleverness that every animal uses on its own behalf is wonderful. Climbing to such a great height is an obstacle for the serpent, so it keeps watch on the elephant’s trodden path to its pasture and pounces from a high tree. The elephant knows that wrestling with the coils is to his own disadvantage, and so looks for trees or rocks against which to rub the serpent. The serpents are on guard against this, and so shackle the elephant’s steps with their tails. The elephants untie the knots with their trunks. But the serpents insert their heads into the elephants’ very nostrils, shutting off the air and tearing their

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softest parts; when serpents are encountered in the elephants’ path they rear up against their opponents and go for the eyes particularly. So it happens that one often comes across elephants blind, consumed by hunger and wasting sadness. What cause could anyone adduce for such a battle other than Nature’s desire to pit equals against each other as a spectacle for herself? (8.33–4)

This battle goes on for another paragraph in the same degree of detail, but Pliny has already tipped his hand with the word ‘spectacle’ (spectaculum).43 It is the amphitheatrical specificity of the narration, which gives the particulars of every stage of the fight blow-by-blow, which gives this passage its meaning. Yet this specificity is qualified by a vague timelessness. This is not a battle that happened in a definite place on a definite date, but something that is always happening in an unspecified now, out there where elephants live. The idea that conflict is the most revealing index to an animal’s faculties and form, that animals somehow reveal their nature most clearly in fighting, goes back at least as far as Plato’s Timaeus.44 The elephant and the serpent are always fulfilling the roles Natura assigned to them at their creation, just as the Euphrates is always battling the Taurus. To describe only a mountain, or only an elephant, is not enough— the account is not complete without the river or the serpent. The first element must be pitted against its opposite, just as a gladiator is best displayed when matched against another specially equipped to exploit his weaknesses. Just as in the amphitheatre, the combatants are negligible as individuals, and what matters is the pair. The inhabitant of the role, or of the armour, can change just as the Taurus Mountains change from one role to the other, but the role must be played in accordance with the rules of the match. In the Natural History, geography makes most sense when it is narrated, and the favourite narrative is the spectacle, the fight in the arena, the battle of nature (dimicatio naturae). Not only do mountains act to hold the entirety of the world together and brace it against the shock of the tides, they also 43

As Beagon, ibid. 147–56, demonstrates, imagery of amphitheatrical spectacles is widespread in the Natural History. 44 Timaeus 19b: ‘I might compare myself to a person who, on beholding beautiful animals either created by the painter’s art, or, better still, alive but at rest, is seized with a desire of seeing them in motion or engaged in some struggle or conflict to which their forms appear suited’ (trans. Jowett).

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help to order specific parts of it. Like rivers, mountains form frontiers, but they do so far more effectively. Although the Natural History often describes rivers as borders between countries, we have seen that they are never confronted as physical obstacles to movement. The Natural History devotes much more energy to demonstrating the separative force of mountains, which, in the teleological scheme of things, ‘were established as boundary-stones for the division of nations’ (36.2). The Natural History’s survey of the world continually instances mountains as natural borders between countries. It was the Alps, in the Roman mind, that formed the pre-eminent international barrier, and their protective function was a literary commonplace.45 ‘As if by nature’s foresight, the Alps are in some places more than a hundred miles in breadth, where they ward off Germany from Italy, while they are quite slender elsewhere, not even amounting to seventy miles’ (3.132)— Natura has thoughtfully made the Germans more remote from Italy than the inhabitants of Gallia Narbonensis, literally warding them away (submovent). Likewise, to return to Pliny’s tour of the eastern Mediterranean, the natural border between the Decapolis and Phoenicia is provided by the mountains Libanus and Antilibanus (5.77), Phoenicia in turn is separated from Syria by Mt. Bargylus (5.78), and Mt. Amanus divides Syria from Cilicia (5.80). The separative force of mountains is not confined to political frontiers: as we have seen, the Taurus range divides almost all of Asia down the middle, forming a continuous line between north and south: Enormous in itself, arbiter between countless nations, when it first rises from the Indian sea it faces the north on its right, the south on its left, and stretching toward sunset it would split Asia in two if it were not for the seas that oppose it as it crushes down the earth. (5.97)

To move to a still greater separation, the hypothetical traveller can see the tangible division of night and day if he climbs to the top of Mt. Casius, a mountain in Syria. This is another of those mountains that turns those who climb it into readers of the world below, but here what is read is cosmic rather than polit45 Purcell, ‘The Creation of Provincial Landscape’, 11. Compare, for instance, Vergil, Aeneid 6.830.

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ical: ‘In the fourth watch of the night, its lofty peak sees the sun rising through shadows so that with a slight turn of the body you can view day and night at once’ (5.80). Since the purpose of mountains is to divide, to keep one thing from another, to cross the mountains is in a double sense to transgress the will of Natura. To cross the mountains was once an awesome thing (36.1), and to the ancient Romans the crossing of the Alps by Hannibal and the Cimbri ‘seemed almost an omen’ (in portento prope maiores habuere, 36.2). That such crossings are in fact unnatural is evident from the Natural History’s descriptions of mountain passes, the gates that permit access from one realm to another. These are places where mortals are allowed only on sufferance, small concessions to human mobility. The Taurus Mountains do gape open in a few places, but these passes are only ‘gates’, to use Pliny’s name for mountain passes. The range itself remains single and whole, the integrity of the fortress unimpaired: ‘Even where it gapes open and allows passage itself to the tribes, it still claims unity for itself by calling these openings ‘gates’; these are named in various places the Armenian, the Caspian, and the Cilician’ (5.99). The salient characteristic of these gates is their sheer intolerance toward human life; like the mountains themselves, they were not made for man (36.1). Crossing from one country to another at these points is difficult, and in the case of the Caspian Gates, even horrific: Here the mountain ridges are divided by a way so narrow that a single file of wagons can hardly pass; the whole track, an extent of eight miles, is man-made. Crags with a charred appearance overhang the way on both left and right, and for twenty-eight miles round about there is nothing to drink; the defile is blocked by a salty fluid from the rocks that collects into a stream and escapes by the same route. Furthermore, hordes of snakes make passage impossible except in winter. (6.43)

Here the operation of natural force has been extended by human art, but the essence of the place remains alien to humans and hostile to their attempts to cross. This is also true of another of the passes across the Taurus Mountains, the Portae Caucasiae, which split the inhabited world in two: In this place the mountains part abruptly, an enormous work of nature. Where a door is let into iron-covered beams, beneath whose middle

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flows an evil-smelling river, and on the nearer side the cliff-top stronghold called Cumania is fortified on all sides to bar countless nations from passage—there the inhabited world is kept apart by gates. (6.30)

In both these descriptions, the Natural History describes as barriers what one would normally think of as passages. The emphasis falls on the forbidding aspects of the passes: fortresses, hordes of snakes, burnt cliffs, iron-clad beams, waterless journeys, and stinking rivers. Contrary to what our intuition might tell us, Pliny does not say that a pass unites one half of the world with the other; in fact it divides them. The fortification of the passes of the Caucasus was traditionally ascribed to Alexander the Great, but it was also a contemporary issue for Pliny, because holding the Dariel Pass against the nomadic Alani was a political concern of Vespasian and Titus.46 These passes fulfil the same purpose as the triumphal arch erected by Augustus at the entrance to the Alps (3.136–7): they all look like simple points of transit (what is an arch but a doorway?) but actually serve to emphasize the difference between the one side and the other.47 The hypothetical travellers from whose perspective Pliny sees what he describes would seem to be a military expedition assessing the danger of a potential approach, and in fact some of the Natural History’s information about the Caspian Gates actually came from the Eastern expedition of Domitius Corbulo.48 triumphal exposition The narrative and biographical qualities of the Natural History’s geography suggest a reason for the prominence of famous mountains and rivers. In making the world present to the reader’s eye, the Natural History draws on the debt of traditional Roman geography to the institution of the tri46 In ad 70, despite the iron gates with which Alexander the Great sealed the Dariel Pass, the Alani, nomads of central Asia, poured through Mt. Caucasus to invade Media, a possession of the Parthian king Vologeses (Josephus, Jewish War 244–6). In 75, Vespasian, who had been helped by Vologeses in his struggle with Vitellius, assisted the client king of Iberia (i.e. modern Georgia) to fortify this pass (Dessau, ILS 8795). 47 The difference between the passes and the arch is, of course, that the inscribed arch is an overt terminus, the work of Augustus, not Natura. 48 He is cited at NH 5.83; 6.40.

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umph—that is, the spectacular display in triumphal processions of conquered territory in the forms of titles on placards, or of icons—maps, cities, mountains, and rivers.49 If we look at it in the light of this triumphal iconography, the biographical quality of the descriptions of mountains and rivers is easily understood. This is an imperial geography: the performers of geographical exploration are emperors; in the act of surveying their results, we who witness it identify ourselves as an imperial people. To begin with a well-known example: the most famous friezes on the Arch of Titus are inside the archway, the two scenes from the triumph of Rome over Judaea of ad 70. On one side Titus and Vespasian appear in their triumphal chariot, crowned by Victory as Domitian follows on horseback; on the other, a procession carries the treasures of the Temple of Jerusalem among placards (tituli) bearing the names of conquered cities. But this triumph is also the subject of a smaller and less famous frieze on the arch’s entablature. If you stand with your back to the Colosseum and look up at the east façade you will see the remains of this little frieze running in a narrow band under the inscription to Titus. Sacrificial oxen, soldiers, and senators in togas parade in high relief around the outside surface of the arch, enacting a stately progress toward an unseen Capitoline. In the left-hand portion of the frieze men bear a parade-float (ferculum) of the kind usual for displaying spoils, on which reclines a figure of heroic proportions, naked to the waist. Bearded, long-haired, and muscular, he holds a bunch of reeds in his lap and props himself up against a ewer from which a stream of water spills. With such attributes, in such a pose, this can only be a river-god—the River Jordan, carried through Rome by the victors of ad 70 along with the sacred apparatus of the Temple.50 Like the 700 prisoners of war Titus chose for their stature and beauty to be led in this triumph,51 the Jordan has fallen victim to a thoroughly Roman custom. The Roman triumph is occasion not only for displaying the bodies 49

On the significance of the triumph generally and as a means of presenting geography to the populus Romanus, see Nicolet, Space, Geography, and Politics, 31–2, 37–8, 69. 50 See Michael Pfanner, Der Titusbogen (Mainz am Rhein, 1983), plates 85–7, with descriptions pp. 84, 90. 51 Josephus, Jewish War 7.118.

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and the treasures of the conquered, but for parading captured geographies as well. The triumph is a species of theatre. The trend of modern scholarship has been to interpret triumphs in ritual and religious terms, but our literary sources make clear that it was as spectacle and education, not as ritual, that the triumph appealed to the Roman imagination. When the poets and historians describe triumphs they devote more time to theatre, to parades of cities and river-gods, than to the sacrifices on the Capitol. Before his audience, the city of Rome, the triumphing general (triumphator) performs the process of his conquest. As Polybius defines it (6.15.8), the triumph is a spectacle ‘by means of which generals bring visible evidence of their achievements before the eyes of their fellow-citizens’. The display of arms taken from the enemy, an unvarying element of every triumph, is eloquent witness to the truth of what Polybius says. From simple trophies, these displays of captured weapons were often extended into complete tableaux of battle.52 So, most notably, among the treasures displayed in the triumph of Titus and Vespasian were moving stages (pegmata) three or four storeys high, adorned with tapestries, ivory, and gold, showing episodes of the Jewish War: the laying waste of land, battles, captures of fortresses, cities razed: The artistry and painstaking construction [of the stages] showed the events of the war to those who had not seen them as if they had been there themselves. On each stage the general of the captured city was stationed according to the manner in which he had been caught. (Josephus, The Jewish War 7.146–7)

The line between tableaux like this and representations of conquered geography is a fine one. As early as 174 bc the triumphator Ti. Sempronius Gracchus hung a map of Sardinia in the temple of Mater Matuta as a memorial of his successful campaign in that island. This map had a double signification: on it were depicted not only the features of Sardinia, but also the battles in which Gracchus had taken it.53 Claude Nicolet has 52

Livy 26.21.7; Ovid, Ex Ponto 2.1.39–40; Appian, Punic Wars 66. Livy 41.28.10: ‘There was a map of the island of Sardinia, with battles represented on it.’ The famous map of Italy exhibited in the temple of Tellus (Varro, Res Rustica 1.2.1) was perhaps of this type. Corbulo brought back from his Armenian campaign ‘representations of places’ (situs depicti) that included the Caucasus (NH 6.40). 53

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explored in detail how Pompey, Julius Caesar, and Augustus put images of the world to similar use.54 Pompey adorned coins, trophies, and statues with images of the orbis terrarum to illustrate his boast of having extended the limits of Roman power to the limits of the world;55 Caesar had a triumphal monument on the Capitol showing himself in a chariot with the globe of the world at his feet.56 The world-map of Agrippa, completed by Augustus and displayed in the Porticus Vipsania,57 was likewise visible certification of the geographical claims Augustus made in the Res Gestae, such as the following: ‘my fleet sailed across Oceanus from the mouth of the Rhine towards the rising sun as far as the territory of the Cimbri’ (26.4); ‘our power extended into Ethiopia as far as Nabata, a town neighbouring Meroe¨’ (26.5). Triumphal exhibition also marks the reception of the conquered into the empire, a performance of the availability of new territory to Rome. Along with the gargantuanism of Vespasian’s moving stages goes a corresponding miniaturization just as ostentatious, provoking the spectator to imagine the containability of what has been conquered. Beside the tituli displaying the names of captured cities, miniature cities were carried on the fercula,58 sometimes even modelled in ivory—a medium that gestured in the direction of the great value of the conquest. These were from time to time replaced by icons more suggestive of 54

Nicolet, Space, Geography, and Politics, 37–41 for the use of images of the orbis terrarum by Pompey and Caesar; 15–24 for the Porticus Vipsania and the Res Gestae. 55 Diodorus Siculus 40.4; see also Dio 37.21.2. 56 Dio 43.14.6; 43.221.2. 57 As we know from Pliny himself, NH 3.17. The nature of Agrippa’s geographical monument in the Porticus Vipsania has been the subject of recent debate. The evidence on which Nicolet and others have reconstructed Agrippa’s monument as a world-map has been reinterpreted by Kai Brodersen, who argues that it was an inscribed list of landmarks delimiting the inhabited world (Terra Cognita: Studien zur ro¨mischen Raumerfassung, 268–87). See, however, the arguments of Benet Salway, ‘Travel, Itineraria and Tabellaria’, in Colin Adams and Ray Laurence (eds.), Travel and Geography in the Roman Empire (London, 2001), 29, in favour of the world-map hypothesis. Whether what was on display in the Porticus Vipsania was graphic (a map) or textual (a list), it is not disputed that Agrippa’s work was a monument of political geography, representing the world as revealed in the light of Roman imperium. 58 Cicero, Philippic 8.6.18; Livy 26.21.7; Appian, Punic Wars 66.

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place than the city’s own image would be, such as the Pharos burning with mimic flames that stood in for Alexandria in a triumph of Julius Caesar.59 The theatricality and obvious costliness of these exhibitions appealed to the instinct to covet, the precious intricacy of the display serving to instil a sense of ownership. We may put these miniature cities in the same class as the maps of conquered territories that triumphatores hung in temples as well as images of the rivers and mountains of their enemies that they carried in triumph. A modern parallel suggests itself in the mock ‘villages’ at the White City exhibition ground in London that represented for vicarious tourists of the early twentieth century ‘native life’ in West Africa, Ireland, or Ceylon.60 In either case, the object exhibited is represented as a tiny, costly emblem of itself. This serves to enhance the spectacle and fascinate the viewer, awakening ideas of possession. Such spectacular exhibition of the foreign, in both triumphal procession and in ethnography, instils in its audience a sense of the cultural divide between itself and what is on display. Triumphal exhibition makes even the living captives seem expensive and so puts them at a remove from reality: the disfiguring wounds on Titus’ Jewish captives were concealed beneath gorgeous robes.61 As with elephants or ‘camelopards’ in the amphitheatre, the act of exhibition heightens and confirms the strangeness of the object exhibited. The consequent estrangement and distancing of these captives finds expression in Latin literature when barbarians (even barbarians in their native lands) are compared to gladiators or to animals. Tacitus speaks of Romans watching German tribes at war with each other as though they were putting on a show in the arena, while to 59 Florus 2.13.88: ‘Caesar drove home victorious, first leading a triumph over Gaul, in which were the Rhine and the Rhoˆne and Oceanus, in gold, as a captive. His second triumph was over Egypt, in which were the Nile, carried on floats, Arsinoe and a facsimile burning Pharos.’ 60 Annie E. Coombes, ‘Ethnography and the Formation of National and Cultural Identities’, 192–4, with photos on pp. 205–8. As an example of the kind of spectacle provided, see Coombes’s citation of the beginning of the description of the ‘Kalmuck Camp’ from The Imperial International Exhibition, Official Guide (London, 1909), 45: ‘Entering their camp, we first detect them coming down the distant steep mountains with their camels and horses.’ 61 Josephus, Jewish War 7.138.

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Velleius Paterculus the Germans seem much closer to beasts than to men.62 Beside the frieze on the Arch of Titus, river-gods of conquered lands are displayed in the reliefs on the triumphal arches of Septimius Severus and of Constantine. In addition to these graphic records, Roman poets and historians also provide testimony for the triumphal display of mountains and rivers. The quadruple triumph in 46 bc of Julius Caesar over Gaul, Egypt, Pontus, and Africa was accompanied not only by the Pharos of Alexandria but also by images of the Nile, Rhine, Rhoˆne, and a golden icon of captive Oceanus.63 The triumph of Germanicus in ad 17 over the Cherusci, Chatti, and Angrivarii featured images of battles, mountains, and rivers among the train of spoils and captives (Tacitus, Annales 2.41). These processions, public and extremely visual realizations of the power of synecdoche, appealed to poets from Vergil to Claudian as imaginative vehicles for geographic and ethnographic display. The chief splendour of the triumph, for some poets, lay in these displays of geography (see Ovid, Ars Amatoria 1.219–29). The best-known instance is Aeneid 8.721–9, where Vergil has Vulcan hammer onto the shield of Aeneas a forecast of Augustus’ triple triumph in 29 bc for conquering Illyricum, winning the battle of Actium, and annexing Egypt. In the long line of conquered nations on the shield from the extremes of north, east, and west (Nomads, Africans, Lelegae, Carians, Geloni, Dahae: ‘conquered nations parading in long file’, incedunt victae longo ordine gentes in Vergil’s words) appear the humbled Euphrates, the two-horned Rhine, and bridgeresenting Araxes. Attempts to imagine triumphs over Germany, in honour of either Germanicus or Tiberius, are a recurrent theme in the exile poems of Ovid (Tristia 4.2.37–47; Ex Ponto 2.1 and 3.4.103–8). This lake, these mountains, all these forts, so many rivers were full of wild slaughter, full of blood. In these lands Drusus once won for himself a name, Drusus, a good son, worthy of his father. 62 Gladiators: Tacitus, Germania 33; Horace, Odes 3.8.17 ff.; animals: Velleius Paterculus 2.117.3. 63 Florus 2.13.88.

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The Ethnographies of the Natural History This, broken-horned and barely covered by green sedge, stained with his own blood, was Rhine. Look, even Germania is being carried; her hair dishevelled, She sits mourning under the unbeaten general’s foot Extending her proud neck to the Roman axe; the hand that once bore weapons now wears chains. (Ovid, Tristia 4.2.37–46)

There is a quality of the geography lesson about these parades of icons. This should not surprise us: to their first audiences, they were geography lessons of a very public order. These were Rome’s native geography lessons, and insofar as they were lessons about the world, they were similar in intention to the Natural History. the theatre of science This aspect of the triumph, the tituli, the icons on fercula, the maps of conquered territories dedicated by triumphatores— everything to which we might assign an educational function— goes much further toward explaining the narrating tendency of Plinian geography, its mountains and rivers doubly ‘storied’, than do the metaphors of the coastal voyage or the survey from on high. In fact, we can consider the triumph an organizing metaphor that works in the Natural History to oppose and complement the topos of the survey from on high. Both devices serve to make conspicuous to the reader the availability of the world: the survey looks outward from the centre to the fringes of Nature to emphasize the universal extent of Roman power; the triumph reverses this outward gaze and trains it on the city of Rome, where new discoveries have been brought in from the edges for theatrical display. As another of Ovid’s triumph poems puts it, the vast walls of Rome receive the entire world, the countless visitors who come to watch the spectacle of Germanicus’ return.64 Here, at empire’s centre, the triumph provides a setting for the collation and digestion of strange knowledge—a model for articulating and cataloguing the new. Triumphs appear again and again in the citations of the zoological, botanical, and geographical books of the Natural 64

Ovid, Ex Ponto 2.1.21–4.

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History. Like the commentarii of commanders rendering accounts of campaigns in foreign countries, triumphal displays were raw material for intellectual curiosity.65 To describe a part of North Africa at 5.36–7 the Natural History refers to the Fasti Triumphales66 for a report of the triumph of L. Cornelius Balbus over the Garamantes in 19 bc, the last triumph permitted a Roman senator (CIL2, p. 50): Our authorities relate that he took the aforementioned towns, and that, beside Cidamus and Garama, in his triumph he led the names and images of all the other nations and cities. They went in this order: Tabudium, a town; Niteris, a tribe; Miglis Gemella, a town; Bubeium, a tribe or town; the Enipi, a tribe; Thuben, a town; the mountain called Black Mountain; Nitibrum and Rapsa, towns; Viscera, a tribe; Decri, a town; Nathabur, a river; Thapsagum, a town; Tamiagi, a tribe; Boin, a town; Pege, a town; Dasibari, a river; and now a series of towns, Baracum, Buluba, Alasit, Galsa, Balla, Maxalla, Cizania, and Mount Gyri, preceded by a placard with the legend that jewels sprang from it.

The account here takes on the style of a parade of tituli, reproducing the source. It is not simply that Pliny relied on the information from the triumphs; he steered his description of the world toward the model they provided. In the zoological and botanical parts of the Natural History it is not sufficient merely to mark that a certain plant or animal exists: the account is not complete without the specification of when it was first seen at Rome. This tendency also appears in the account of cultural history given in NH 7, the book on man. When, at 7.211–15, the encyclopedia recounts the invention of institutions like the sundial or being shaved by a barber, the account (and the book) is tied off with a story of how these inventions were first established at Rome, assigning them a final significance, demonstrating the flow of things to the centre. So, when describing an exotic animal or plant, the Natural History usually states when it was first seen or known at Rome.67 The 65

Elizabeth Rawson, Intellectual Life in the Late Roman Republic (Baltimore, 1985), 257. 66 Called the Acta Triumphorum in the index (NH 1) to book 5. 67 R. French, Ancient Natural History, 216: ‘Perhaps the most obviously historical way in which Pliny treats natural objects is by the date of their first appearance in Rome. Returning emperors and other military commanders would often stage a triumph in which a display of strange things from distant

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occasion for exhibition is more often than not the triumph of a great general, or a wild-beast show in circus or arena following a triumph.68 To take the example of Pompey the Great, we learn that as one trophy among the many others in his triumph over Mithridates he introduced ebony to Rome (12.20) and exhibited the variety of fig now named after him (15.70); at the same occasion Pompey also displayed the first rhinoceros ever seen at Rome (8.70–1), along with the first of an obscure kind of lynx (the chama) and the even more mysterious cephi, ‘which Rome saw never again’. Only after they were displayed in Pompey’s triumph did pearls and gems begin to be prized at Rome; a portrait-bust of the victor made of pearls was part of the spectacle (37.12–17).69 It is the Natural History that tells us the pathetic story of how elephants (first seen at Rome in a triumph of 275 bc, NH 8.16) pleaded with the audience for their lives in a gladiatorial exhibition at Pompey’s games (8.21). In emulation of Pompey, Julius Caesar exhibited the first giraffe seen at Rome in a wild-beast show after his triumphs in 46 bc (8.69; cf. Dio 43.22–3). The first hippopotamus seen at Rome was displayed at the games of M. Scaurus in 58 bc (9.11). Whatever it is, the Natural History brings the thing home and endows it with some relation to its readers by integrating it into the story of Rome. No matter how distant their origin, their appearance at Rome gives these items relevance of a kind. Since these wonderful things are being led in the same processions as the kings, royal families, and generals of conquered territories, the political ramifications of this mode of exposition are even more obvious than the metaphoric connection between mastery and the geographical survey. The report on balsam, for example, states that ‘this plant was granted to Judaea alone on earth’ (12.111); it used to grow only in two gardens belonging to the king, as befits a plant superior in fragrance to all others. With the end of the Jewish War, however, ‘Vespasian and Titus territories emphasised their success and the military might of Rome. Some triumphs even displayed exotic trees, and the displays of wild animals like lions and elephants developed into a regular traffic for events in the circus.’ 68

Exhibition of animals at a triumph: Josephus, Jewish War 7.136. Sandra Citroni Marchetti, Plinio il Vecchio, 282–5, has an important analysis of Pliny’s criticism of the display of Pompey’s portrait in pearls at this triumph (NH 37.12–17). 69

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exhibited this plant to Rome, for it is remarkable to say that since the time of Pompey the Great we have led trees in triumph too. Now balsam too is enslaved and pays us tribute along with its nation.’ As the triumph provided poets with an imaginative vehicle for displays of ethnographic learning, so it also gives the Natural History a way of parading the world. The effect of this triumphal exposition is to represent the expansion of Roman military power as the pre-eminent source of new discoveries, and geographical exploration as the achievement of great conquerors.70 In addition to the Fasti Triumphales the Natural History often quotes from the commentarii of famous generals: Aelius Gallus on Arabia (6.160); Suetonius Paulinus on the Atlas Mountains (5.14); Domitius Corbulo on Armenia (5.83 and 6.40); Publius Petronius on Ethiopia (6.181). Expeditions sent by Augustus, Claudius, and Nero are cited so often that the exploration of the world seems the privilege of emperors. We have already seen how for Strabo, Seneca, and Lucan the exploration of great rivers was a task for princes, to be undertaken by Caesars. As we shall see in the next chapter, Pliny was himself inspired to write about Germany by a figure from this discourse of princely exploration, Drusus, the father of Germanicus and Claudius. In the Natural History the emperor is both the actor and beneficiary of geographical exploration: Augustus, who appears in the list of auctores for books 3 and 4, dispatches Dionysius of Charax and King Juba to write geographical accounts of the East in preparation for the expedition of his adopted son Gaius to Arabia (6.141), and under his auspices a fleet explores the German Ocean as far as the promontory of the Cimbri (2.167); Claudius is quoted as an authority on the geography of Egypt (5.63), Armenia (6.27), the Black Sea (6.31), and the Tigris (6.128), while presiding over the invasion of Mauretania and the exploration of the Atlas Mountains (5.11); Nero sends praetorian soldiers to reconnoitre Ethiopia (6.181, 184) and, in keeping with his luxurious tastes, a Roman knight to the Baltic to procure amber fittings for a gladiatorial extravaganza (37.45). 70

For a survey of geographical discoveries by Roman military expeditions from Augustus to Trajan, see Nicolet, Space, Geography, and Politics, 85–8.

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The Ethnographies of the Natural History the eye of th e ruler

We may conclude by recalling what the enterprise of surveying territory implies in ancient literature. The eye that reads the orbis terrarum is the eye of its ruler. Who is the reader of the Natural History? Pliny’s dedication inscribes one in the text: Titus, Pliny’s fellow-soldier on the Rhine, the son of Vespasian and sharer in his imperium. The world, as the Natural History tells us in book 2, used to be closed off against itself by war and piracy, parcelled out into kingdoms, ‘for the world was divided by strife and into kingdoms, that is, a body divided limb by limb’ (2.117). Now, however, the world is accessible to us. ‘Every coast offers a hospitable landing, every sea is opened up’ (2.118). Under the happiness of peace, and an emperor zealous for the advancement of knowledge,71 the world has become a safe and accessible place. Thanks to the rule of this emperor the whole of the orbis terrarum, past and present, can be enumerated and presented to the eye. This survey is possible because of political circumstance, and it serves a political end. The world is summoned up and sent on a slow procession, name by name, under the scrutiny of its ruler. 71

‘During so glad a peace, with an emperor so happy in the increase of literature and knowledge’ (2.118).

5 After Rome: The Ends of the World

Savages are a staple of ancient ethnography. They make convenient vehicles not only for escapist evocations of the Golden Age, but also for satire at the expense of more civilized societies—in the mouths of primitives, criticism of one’s own community can take on a sudden pointedness unavailable to a sophisticated speaker. But the savages of Pliny’s Natural History more often serve a different purpose. Savages embody various kinds of lack—lack of names, lack of dreams, lack of institutional virtues like shame, continuity, and stability, or a simple and final lack of humanity. From this comes their strangeness and power to excite wonder. By means of their various absent qualities savages mark out the margins between us and the animals, between order and chaos. The Cynocephali, Monocoli, and Struthopodes—the Dogheads, the OneEyes, the Sparrowfeet—all the half-animal tribes of India and Ethiopia, mouthless, noseless, forty or two hundred years in life-span, five cubits or twenty-seven inches tall, demarcate in their deformities the limits of the body and the biological confines of the human species in the continuum of Natura.1 But Pliny’s most detailed account of a primitive society is more complicated. His representation in 16.2–4 of the Chauci, two tribes of north-west Germany, locates them on the border between Roman power and the primeval disorder of Ocean, and in doing so raises political and philosophical questions about Rome’s own limits and stability. How far does Rome’s power to possess extend? How long can it continue to exist? What comes after Rome?

1 The tribes of India and Ethiopia: 7.21–32; the deformed peoples of southern Ethiopia: 6.189–95. See my discussion above, pp. 88–92.

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The Ethnographies of the Natural History the chauci in pliny and the historians

As a prelude to book 16, which is about forest trees, Pliny describes by way of contrast life in a place without any trees at all. His reason for doing this is wonder: ‘I am compelled to turn aside by a sense of wonder learned through experience (admiratio usu conperta) to the question of what sort of life they live who inhabit lands devoid even of shrubs’ (16.1). He has acquired this sense of wonder from experience of the Greater and Lesser Chauci of northern Germany, and his description of them differs strikingly from representations of them by less wondering authors, the historians who record these tribes’ wars with Rome.2 From these historians (and the geographer Ptolemy) we find that the Chauci live on Europe’s north-west fringe, bordered by the Saltus Teutoburgiensis on the south, the river Amisia (Ems) on the west, which parts them from the Frisii, by the Albis (Elbe) on the east, and that the river Visurgis (Weser) divides them into two tribes, Lesser and Greater.3 They first appear in history in 12 bc, when Tiberius’ brother Drusus invaded their territory at the start of three years of campaigning in northwestern Germany (Dio 54.32).4 Here his fleet was stranded by an ebb-tide (a detail which will assume some importance when 2 For an extended analysis of Pliny’s treatment of the Chauci in the light of Roman imperialism that differs from my own, see also Klaus Sallmann, ‘Reserved for Eternal Punishment: The Elder Pliny’s View of Free Germania (HN. 16.1–6)’, American Journal of Philology, 108 (1987), 108–28. 3 Tacitus, Annales 11.19, Germania 35; Ptolemy 2.11.7.2. 4 In one passage, Bellum Civile 1.463–5: et vos, crinigeros Belgis arcere Caycos j oppositi, petitis Roman Rhenique feroces j deseritis ripas et apertem gentibus orbem (Belgis is Bentley’s conjecture for the MSS bellis) Lucan implies that the Chauci were a threat to Rome in 49 bc and that legions were stationed on the Rhine as a safeguard against them: but there is no historical evidence for this undoubtedly anachronistic statement. The Chauci do not appear in Caesar. No one else testifies to the existence or the activity of the Chauci before the reign of Augustus. As we shall see, Velleius can say that their existence was a positive novelty in ad 5. Moreover, their homes, on both sides of the mouth of the Weser, were quite distant from the Rhine, and many tribes (according to Tacitus’ Germania, the Frisii, Chasuarii, Chamavi, Bructeri, and Tencteri) inhabited the land between. Lucan’s statement is, as W. E. Heitland said (CR 15 (1901), 79), a poetic and ‘rather ill-chosen pars pro toto’, the Chauci standing for all the Germani.

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we come to Pliny’s account of the Chauci) and he had to retreat at winter’s coming. Their reconquest in ad 5 by Tiberius is noted by Velleius Paterculus (2.106), who dwells on their remoteness, placing them among ‘tribes almost unknown even by name’ (gentes paene nominibus incognitae), and who emphasizes their ‘warriors of boundless number, enormous in stature, very well protected by their inaccessibility’ (iuventus infinita numero, immensa corporibus, situ locorum tutissima), all these details serving to exalt the achievement of Tiberius. No source represents the Chauci as having taken part in Arminius’ uprising against the Romans and his massacre of Quinctilius Varus’ three legions in the Saltus Teutoburgiensis (ad 9; Dio 56.18–24 mentions only Arminius’ tribe the Cherusci, neighbours of the Chauci). Most of the tribes west of the Elbe that Drusus had conquered between 12 and 9 bc were lost to Rome in the aftermath of this disaster, with the known exception of the Frisii and the Chauci (Tacitus, Annales 1.38, 60). Although they remained Rome’s allies in this period, Tacitus makes clear that their loyalty was dubious—Chaucian auxiliaries are said to have deliberately allowed Arminius to escape after Germanicus’ victory at Idistaviso (Annales 2.17)—and their posture towardotherGermantribesaggressive(Annales13.55,wherethey eject the Ampsivarii from their homeland). It is likely that the Chauci finally rebelled against Rome in ad 28 along with their neighbours the Frisii (Tacitus, Annales 4.72–4). They were at any rate in open conflict with Rome by 41, when they fought with Publius Gabinius (Suetonius, Claudius 24), who won a battle against them and recovered from their territory one of Varus’ legionary eagles (Dio 60.8.7), earning the cognomen ‘Cauchius’. Unsuppressed, they made raids on Germania Inferior in 47 (Tacitus, Annales 11.18), in reply to which Domitius Corbulo as legatus pro praetore launched a punitive campaign against them and the Frisii. Although Tacitus praises Corbulo’s military discipline and bravery, after the assassination of the commander of the Chauci this campaign ended in failure, with the complete withdrawal of Roman garrisons to the west side of the Rhine. Left to their own devices, the next generation of Chauci supported Civilis in the revolt of 69–70 (Tacitus, Histories 5.19). It is strange to read an account from the same author (Germania 35) of the Chauci as a secluded and

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populous nation ‘noblest of the Germani’, brave but never doing violence to their neighbours, respected for their just dealing and lack of aggression. As the historians portray them, then, the Chauci are tall, numerous, and live in a remote and inaccessible land from which they periodically emerge to go raiding, to evict other tribes, or to aid their neighbours in rebellions. Once subject, now free, they are both an embarrassment and a threat. With the exception of the account in Tacitus’ Germania, when they appear it is always either as enemies of Rome or as bellicose, untrustworthy subjects. As Eduard Norden has demonstrated,5 some of the raw material for these historical representations derives from Pliny himself, the twenty books of whose lost Bella Germaniae (Pliny the Younger, Letters 3.5) were a source for Tacitus’ accounts of events on the empire’s northern frontiers. Whatever use Tacitus made of the Bella Germaniae, it is clear that none of these historians has used the description of the Chauci in book 16 of Pliny’s Natural History. The contrast between the historical accounts and this representation is much too great. Here is Pliny’s description of the Chauci, their treeless country made the introduction to a book about trees. Moved by wonder to depart from the topic at hand (a rhetorical stance of which the entire Natural History can be seen as a series of variations following upon each other in seemingly infinite permutation),6 he extends his gaze to the edges of the earth (16.1–4): My next task would be an account of the nut-bearing trees, mankind’s primordial foster-mothers, givers of food in our helpless and wild state, were I not compelled to turn aside by a sense of wonder learned through experience to the question of what sort of life they live who inhabit lands devoid even of shrubs. I have already said that in the East, for example, several tribes near the Ocean live in such a state of destitution;7 in the North too I myself have seen the tribes of the Chauci, who are called the Greater and the Lesser. There, twice in 5

Norden, Germanische Urgeschichte, 207–311. In the view of Conte, it is Pliny’s ‘capacity to be astonished and the will to astonish’ that constitutes the only unity (and that an ‘involuntary’ one) of the Naturalis Historia; see Conte, ‘The Inventory of the World’, 104. 7 13.139: ‘But in the East it is wonderful that from the immediate border of Coptos throughout the wastes nothing grows except the thorn called ‘‘thirsty’’.’ 6


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every twenty-four hours, the Ocean sweeps with a boundless compass, rushing back and forth over an immeasurable extent and covering a space forever debated by Nature as to whether it belongs to the sea or to the land.

In the indeterminate quality of this region and the eternal war between sea and land for its possession we can recognize one of the Natural History’s characteristic rhetorical turns, the ‘battle of nature’ (dimicatio naturae), another example of which we have seen before in the account of the formation of the Bosporus and the Black Sea at 6.1–2 (pp. 46–48).8 Pliny continues with a description of how the Chauci themselves live: In that quarter, wretched tribe, the Chauci inhabit elevated hillocks or mounds like platforms, raised up by their own labour above the level of the highest tide they know. Setting up their huts on these, when the tide covers the surrounding region they ride out the waters like sailors; when the sea withdraws they look like shipwrecked men, catching the fish that escape around their cottages in the receding tide. It is not their lot to own flocks or cattle, nor to subsist on milk as the neighbouring tribes do, nor even to do battle with wild animals, for all woodland growth is far removed. From sedge and marsh-rushes they twist ropes to make nets for catching fish. With their hands they dig up mire, drying it not so much by the sun as by the wind, and by burning earth, for want of fuel, they warm their food and their guts, numb from the North Wind’s gusts. For drink they have nothing other than the rainwater saved in a ditch at the entrance of their house. And these tribes, if they are conquered nowadays by the Roman nation, say they are enslaved! To be sure, this is in fact the case: many are they whom Fortune spares as a punishment.

The Chauci are primitives lacking not only agriculture, but even the acorn-bearing trees that nursed mankind in its savage pre-agricultural infancy. Living in a treeless landscape, the Chauci are actually a step below Pliny’s normative savages, who in their ‘helpless and wild state’ take from trees their food, clothing, and furniture for their caves, considering forests the greatest gift of Natura (12.1). The phrase ‘wonder learned from experience’ (admiratio usu conperta) means that Pliny has come to know the Chauci at first hand (they are ‘peoples I have seen in the North’, gentes in septentrione visae nobis, 16.2), spe8

For more instances of the ‘battle of nature’ (dimicatio naturae) in Pliny, see Beagon, Roman Nature, 159.

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cifically, as Norden demonstrates, while serving in the campaign of Domitius Corbulo, legatus pro praetore of Germania Inferior, against them in ad 47.9 This explains why Pliny caps his description by saying that despite the primitive misery of their life, ‘these tribes, if they are conquered nowadays by the Roman nation, say they are enslaved’ (16.4). Liberty is in fact their punishment; it would be far better for them to submit to Rome and become part of civilization. ‘Surely this is in fact the case: many are they whom Fortune spares as a punishment’ (16.4), Pliny sarcastically concludes. Quite unlike the historical writers who make the Chauci the ‘most noble nation among the Germans’ (so Tacitus) or at least a formidable foe of Rome, Pliny goes to great rhetorical length to demonstrate their utter wretchedness.10 His account also goes against the conclusions of the modern German archaeolo9

Norden assembles the following evidence: in the NH Pliny describes many natural phenomena and cultural institutions of Germany (e.g. 10.72, 132; 11.33, 126; 15.103; 17.26; 18.149; 19.8–9), sometimes specifying firsthand knowledge of them (e.g. 22.8). He is known (Pliny the Younger, Letters 3.5) to have been in the army in Germany and to have written a biography of his commanding officer P. Pomponius Secundus, known from epigraphic evidence (CIL xiii. 5200, 5201) as Legatus of Germania Superior, quartered in ad 51 on the Raeto-German border, of which Pliny shows topographic knowledge in NH 31.20 (Norden, Germanische Urgeschichte, 207–9). Pliny shows miscellaneous first-hand knowledge also of the North Sea coast in descriptions (37.42; 10.53; 11.126) of amber, goose-down cushions, and how the Germans use aurochs-hides and horns (Norden, Germanische Urgeschichte, 283–91). Norden’s source-criticism shows that Pliny must have displayed these bits of information in his Bella Germaniae too, from which Tacitus took them for various parts of the Annales which display verbal reminiscences of Pliny. In particular, Pliny’s story that in Germany prefects of auxiliary troops are often disciplined for sending their soldiers away from their sentry-posts in order to capture geese for goose-down bedding (10.53) is so similar to Tacitus’ account (Annales 11.18) of how Domitius Corbulo disciplined his troops in preparation for war against the Frisii and Chauci in ad 47 that Norden assigns Pliny a place in this campaign (Germanische Urgeschichte, 288–91). However, Tacitus nowhere used the NH itself as a source, and seems unaware of NH 16.2–4. 10 Norden (Germanische Urgeschichte, 297–8) attempts to account for the contradiction between the miserable Chauci of NH 16.2–4 and the warlike Chauci represented in the historians by dividing them into two groups, corresponding to the names Chauci Minores and Chauci Maiores known from Pliny (16.2), Tacitus (Annales 11.19), and Ptolemy (2.11.7.2): these would be respectively the wretched inhabitants of the coastal fringes and the


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gists (as reported by Klaus Sallmann) who have excavated Chaucian tumuli at the mouth of the Weser to find that in the first centuries ad they supported large, prosperous-looking settlements displaying ‘a relatively high standard of civilization, compared with inland excavations’.11 Pliny’s Chauci, on the contrary, own nothing. Their only drink is rainwater, and they collect it in ditches. Their only food is fish, and their only nets are what they can weave from rushes and sedge.12 For fuel they have to use soil, the mud they dig with their own hands and dry ‘not so much by the sun as by the wind’—the same north wind that has frozen their guts in the first place (16.4). They are below even their neighbours, who are nomadic pastoralists and at least have property in the form of herds and milk (16.3). They cannot be said to own even the land they live in, because what they live on is not land at all, but a paradoxical region neither earth nor sea (‘a space forever debated by Nature as to whether it belongs to the sea or to the land’, aeternam rerum naturae controversiam dubiamque terrae an partem maris).13 Twice a day the outer sea, Oceanus himself, sweeps over this debated place (Pliny carefully avoids using the word terra) and the Chauci ride out the floods in huts perched on mounds or on platforms built above the highest point of the tide, ‘like seafarers when the waters are covering their surroundings, like shipwrecked men when they have receded’, but in either case, as Pliny’s metaphor makes clear, quite landless. They are not colonists, settlers, or farmers, but castaways and exiles. The Romans would do them a favour by conquering them. more robust inland dwellers. This interpretation reconciles Pliny with the other representations of the tribe, but runs into the objection that in Tacitus and Ptolemy the Minores and Maiores clearly correspond with two tribes on opposite banks of the river Visurgis, not to any coast/inland distinction. 11

Sallmann, ‘Eternal Punishment’, 116. Norden, Germanische Urgeschichte, 295–7, found in this description of the life of the Chauci a vivid individuality that sets it off from more routine ethnographic accounts of the wretched life of savages. In an interesting personal note, he testifies from the experience of his own East Frisian childhood to the authenticity of many of Pliny’s details, such as periodic deluges, ropes braided out of sedge, rainwater collected in holes in the ground, and peat fires. 13 It is worth noting that on the subject of the ownership of land, the Digest (41.14) considers seashores in their natural condition to belong to no one. 12

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If we look at Pliny’s representation of the Chauci in this way, we can see that the point of it is not simply that it is a terrible thing to have to live without trees. The only hardship that a lack of trees per se imposes on the Chauci is the necessity of peat fires. Rather, the terrible thing about the Chauci, the source of their wretchedness as well as of Pliny’s wonder (admiratio), is the place they live in, the edge of the world, the line between the ordered world of Natura and the chaos of Ocean.14 Humans can live no farther from the centre—to go on in this direction is to enter Ocean and the uninhabitable Arctic zone (2.172), where the cold and the wet are unmitigated by any of the other elements. For Pliny, elemental extremes produce monstrosities;15 in northern Germany it is not the people who are deformed, but the place that is unformed. The region is an eternal battlefield contested between the land and Oceanus, a half-solid, halfliquid mass which rejects the shaping order of Natura just as the Chauci reject the imperium of Rome. Natura and Rome are in fact closely connected. For Pliny the centre of the world, ‘equally far from sunrise and sunset’ (inter ortus occasusque media), is of course Italy, ‘the world’s second governess and mother’ (rectrix parensque mundi altera) (second, that is, after Natura; 37.201) where land and sea are in perfect balance. In Italy, ‘life’s necessities are more easily available than in any other place’ (quidquid est quo carere vita non debeat, nusquam est praesentius, 37.202). Rome’s centrality allows a harmonious blending of the elements, which in turn guarantees a mild climate and material prosperity.16 For the Chauci, on the other hand, the extremity of the northern environment leaves only fish, mud, and sedge. To live on the margin, in a place 14

For Ocean as the limit of Natura, see the opinions expressed below by the elder Seneca, Suasoriae 1.1–16; Pliny, NH 27.2; Tacitus, Germania 45, on the northern Ocean. 15 6.187, on southern Ethiopia: ‘It is no wonder that monstrous forms of animals and humans arise in the most distant reaches of that land, because of the ingenious quickness of fire in crafting their bodies and carving their forms.’ Also on the monstrous fecundity of the sea, 9.2: ‘But a great many monstrosities are found in the sea, that lies so widely outspread and is so yielding and productive of nutriment, because the element receives generative causes from above and is always producing offspring.’ 16 Compare this conception with the Hippocratic description of Asia in Airs, Waters, Places 12, and with Vitruvius’ description of Italy (6.1).


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daily reclaimed by chaos, is to live without stable property, without land, crops, cattle, and cloth, as well as without trees. Such a life precludes possession of almost anything. The Chauci are the least enviable people on earth, to judge from Pliny’s account, their home a barren and wretched place, and certainly they seem too miserable to pose a threat to anyone—why does Pliny want to conquer them, then? What do they have that Rome wants? Should they be conquered for their own good? Or because their preference for poverty and freedom over comfortable subjugation, a choice embodied in the destruction of Varus, a preference still made manifest in Civilis’ revolt of ad 69–70, is an insult to Rome? Or is it somehow that the idea of such a people—out on the edge of things, dispossessed—is somehow linked to the anxiety of those who live at the stable centre? A life without owning the place one lives in, life without a fixed, solid territory, without cattle or crops: this is the strange prospect that Pliny’s imagination of the Chauci represents. That people can live without life’s necessities, quidquid est quo carere vita non debeat, is a thought wholly foreign to Pliny’s imagination of Rome. At Pliny’s Rome, ‘living’ means ‘having’, if not ‘getting’. From Pliny’s Rome, as we have seen in the last chapter, military expeditions continuously set out towards the world’s perimeter: Augustus’ fleet goes to the northern Ocean (2.167), Claudius’ troops to Mauretania (5.11), Domitius Corbulo to Asia (6.23 ff.), Aelius Gallus to Arabia (6.160 ff.), acquiring new territories, extending imperial rule, and bringing back reliable news about Natura.17 How can Rome make sure of its centrality without acquiring a perimeter? You cannot occupy the centre until you acquire something to surround you. Acquiring territory means visiting a new land, fixing it securely in place with an entry in map or gazetteer, and renaming it as a part of your own outskirts. Above all, what you acquire must be solid and immobile—your outskirts must not run away from you twice a day. The land of the Chauci is an inverted Rome. 17

The source of the Nile has not been located, for instance, because ‘it has only been explored by unarmed investigators, without the wars that have discovered all countries’. See Beagon, Roman Nature, 188, for ‘expeditions as the prime means of exploration in Pliny’.

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Had they remained subject to the empire the Romans would have fixed them in place by now, secured the country with a network of dikes and roads. To acquire and control this place, this reminder of primeval confusion, would be to efface all possibility that Rome, despite so many outlying territories, may once have been like this, or one day return to something similar. Pliny’s description of the Chauci is a dream of what it is like not to possess, a foreboding of the impermanence of possessing and the instability of the thing possessed. For this reason it has power to excite both contempt and wonder. Having conjured up this prospect Pliny dismisses these faroff nations, and cuts off any possibility of recognizing in them some reflection of Rome itself. Unlike Tacitus, he authorizes no channel for moral communication from his depicted Germans to his Roman readers.18 He will not make the Chauci speak to the Roman misuse of wealth, and his primitives will not assume the role, familiar to us from many ethnographies, of satiric commentators on civilized failings. the turning-posts of the world So Pliny’s representation of the Chauci has nothing in common with their traditional representation in the historians. His sarcastic treatment of what the Chauci call freedom has something to do with his own military experience, but something also to do with a sense of unease. Beyond Rome’s borders exist peoples who assert themselves to be free, peoples that, ideally, ought not to exist at all. As Vergil has Jupiter promise at Aeneid 1.278–9, the necessary starting point for any discussion about representations of Rome’s borders: ‘For them I assign neither turningposts of power nor periods: I have given them power to command without limit’ (his ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono: j 18 See Klaus Mu¨ller, Geschichte der Antiken Ethnographie, 147. The use of the primitive as satirist of civilized mores (as Anacharsis the Scythian is in Lucian) is not applicable to Pliny, who never permits his primitives to adopt a tone of moral superiority to Romans. This is a prerogative that Pliny reserves for himself. Occasionally primitives are allowed to criticize the vices of other barbarians, as a Scythian criticizes the drunkenness of the Parthians at NH 14.148. Beagon, Roman Nature, 78 adduces the Chauci to prove that Pliny, despite his criticisms of luxury, does not admire primitives.


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imperium sine fine dedi). To the power of Rome there will be limits neither in time (tempora) nor in space (metas). This is a noble vindication not only of Rome’s imperial expansion but also of her permanence and stability. Interestingly, one of the meanings of the Latin word meta is the pillar where chariots turn in a race-track. As the terminus at which one turns back, and by extension as a symbolic marker of geographical dominion, the meta was a familiar feature of the Roman imagination. Nicholas Purcell describes in detail how commonly arches, altars, gates, lighthouses, and other monuments were used by Romans to mark the termini of the great roads that bound their empire together.19 The empire’s parts were articulated by the great roads (for example, the province of Cilicia in southern Asia Minor took its existence and shape from the road from Asia through the mountain passes of the Taurus to Antioch). In legend, Hercules and Alexander were great builders of terminal monuments, each having set up pillars or altars to mark the furthest limit of his conquests. Similarly, the Roman builder, setting a monumental meta to express the completion of a journey, expressed as well the steps prior to the building of the road: that is, the unification of territories and the subjugation of landscape and people. In this sense, these terminal monuments covered the same expressive field as triumphal arches. So, to revert to Jupiter’s prophecy, the world and the Roman empire are coextensive—their interests and limits, the same. The note is one Pliny himself sounds more than once.20 In the face of earthly reality, however, the sentiment runs into some obvious difficulties. To reconcile it with the pragmatic necessity of borders is difficult, let alone with the spectres of instability raised by the ugly recurrence of civil war in 69. Vergil is himself aware of some of these difficulties: he qualifies his prophecy almost immediately with the clever equivocation we find in Jupiter’s prophecy of Augustus’ dominion at Aeneid 1.286–7: ‘A Trojan Caesar will be born . . . who will bound his power with the Ocean, his fame with the stars.’ Rome’s power is more exactly coextensive with the habitable world, the orbis 19 20

Purcell, ‘Provincial Landscape’, 22. See, for example, 27.2–3, already discussed in Ch. 4.

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terrarum, than with the world per se. Of course, not all of the world is habitable: much of it is occupied, for instance, by Ocean. So Rome will be bordered, not by walls, mountains, or rivers, but by Ocean. By means of this equivocation Vergil shifts the question from Will the empire of Rome have limits? to Will it have the right limits? If, in accordance with the second part of Jupiter’s prophecy, we find that Rome’s border is Ocean, then the answer is yes. There is nothing on the other side from which Ocean separates Rome—at least the possibility of Antipodean countries is not conceded, no more than is the existence of the Parthian empire, of the Sarmatians, the Ethiopians, or any other inconvenient facts. To Ocean, then, as an admission of the necessity of a limit, Vergil concedes the privilege of limitation. In accommodating reality as far as possible to this ideological picture, Pliny follows Vergil, but with an added degree of scientific sophistication. To Vergil’s Ocean he adds other categories of uninhabitable place, going to great length to show how much of the world Natura has stolen from man in creating mountains, seas, and the polar and torrid zones (2.172). But it is to Ocean that he assimilates the Chauci. A nation that resists incorporation into Rome, inconveniently persisting in living between Rome and Ocean, he pushes off the map and into the water. He assimilates them to a traditional picture of Earth’s outer waters, to the primitive and the chaotic state where the order of Natura is suspended. They were never really meant to be brought inside the empire, because they live beyond what are the empire’s right limits. So the rather embarrassing history of the Chauci—once subjects, now forever lost to Roman power— can be understood as both logical and inevitable. Ocean is quite properly beyond the control of Rome, for Ocean is by tradition outside the control of nature, and the Chauci are under the control of Ocean. The surviving fragment of Albinovanus Pedo’s epic about Germanicus’ expedition on the North Sea (in ad 12, described by Tacitus at Annales 2.23) is a reply to and an amplification of Vergil’s lines: They [Germanicus’ marines] think daylight and the sun had been long since left behind, and that they themselves, exiles from the earth’s


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known borders, have long since been daring to cross shades forbidden, to the turning-posts of the universe and the world’s last shores.21 (Albinovanus Pedo, fragment 1, 1–4)

Pedo took the words ‘metas rerum’, the Latin phrase that I have translated as ‘turning-posts of the universe’, directly from Vergil. As it exists, the fragment is hardly more than a rhapsody on the theme of transgression: as one of the sailors says at lines 20–3 of the fragment, ‘The gods summon us back and forbid mortal eyes to see the world’s end. Why do we defile with oars alien seas and holy waters, and trouble the peaceful homes of the gods?’22 The echo of Vergil here measures just how far Germanicus has travelled from the centre of the orbis terrarum: there are such things as boundaries designated for Rome’s power, and the expedition has advanced beyond it. As Tacitus says (Annales 2.23), describing the disastrous end of Germanicus’ fleet, Ocean is more savage than any other sea, so great and deep in fact that it is believed to be the last of all seas. The progress of Germanicus’ fleet violates divine law,23 crossing the limit ordained for Roman dominance. Pedo was not the only other writer to mark out Oceanus as a field not to be transgressed. Tacitus’ Germania also preserves the idea of ‘turning-posts’ (metae) in the north, that is to say a meta in the literal sense of a pillar marking the point on the course where the chariot turns round. In Germania 34 these turning-posts take the concrete form of the Pillars of Hercules rumoured to exist somewhere off the north coast of Germany, just out of the range of Drusus’ naval expeditions: 21 I translate the text of E. Courtney (ed.), The Fragmentary Latin Poets (Oxford, 1993), following the reading of Charles Murgia, CP 79 (1984), 325–6, in which the infinitives and participles of 1–4 depend on credunt (line 10). iam pridem post terga diem solemque relictum, j iam pridem, notis extorres finibus orbis, j per non concessas audaces ire tenebras, j ad rerum metas extremaque litora mundi . . . 22 di revocant rerumque vetant cognoscere finem j mortales oculos. aliena quid aequora remis j et sacras violamus aquas divumque quietas j turbamus sedes? 23 Not to mention imperial policy, if we can trust what Tacitus says about Augustus’ posthumous veto on expanding the frontiers: in the breviarium totius imperii which he left along with his will and the Res Gestae (Suetonius, Augustus 101.4), Augustus enjoined his successors not to enlarge the bounds of empire as he had left them, as Tacitus reports in Annales 1.11.

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In fact we have even made attempts on Oceanus itself in that direction; according to rumour there remain Pillars of Hercules to be explored, either because Hercules travelled there, or because we are in the habit of ascribing noble things everywhere to his renown. Drusus Germanicus did not lack the daring to make an investigation, but Oceanus prevented him from exploring either itself or Hercules. Soon no one made the venture, and it was seen as more in accordance with religion and piety to have faith in the exploits of the gods than to know them.

As the point at which Drusus turned back, Tacitus may have in mind the coast of the land of the Chauci where his fleet was stranded (Dio 54.32); it is also possible that Tacitus may be referring to the intervention of some divine voice warning Drusus away from the wild lands of the interior, like the inhumanly tall vision of a woman said by Suetonius to have been encountered by Drusus: ‘He did not give up chasing the enemy, whom he had often slaughtered and driven deep into the inmost wastes, until the phantom of a barbarian woman greater than human form, speaking in Latin, prohibited him from extending his conquests further’ (Suetonius, Claudius 1). This apparition may be classified as a genius of Germania, like the female spectre of Africa that accosted Curtius Rufus and prophesied his proconsulate (Pliny the Younger, Letters 7.27; Tacitus, Annales 11.21). Drusus remained the Germanicus par excellence, a hero, the man whose audacity marked out the first and farthest points of Roman penetration into the north. Since his time no one has had the daring to take up the quest, and not without reason. Hercules set up his pillars in the west to mark the limit of his progress, and indeed of the inhabitable world.24 His pillars in the north must mark a similar point, if they exist, and who would think to exceed that? So Drusus, the man who almost saw the ‘turning-posts’, is represented as something of a god, his career a story fit for saga, and remained an object of fascination for the Romans. 24 Strabo 3.5.5: ‘It is in fact the sensible thing to deny that the islands and the mountains [that some claim to be the Pillars of Hercules] resemble pillars, and to seek out the limits of the world or the expedition of Hercules at the Pillars that are properly named; for it was the ancient custom to set up such landmarks.’ Pseudo-Scymnus ll. 188–9 (GGM 196–237) speaks of a ‘Pillar of the North’.


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That Pliny himself was fascinated by Drusus, and saw him as parallel to himself, we may infer from a story of his nephew’s: Pliny, as a young soldier in Germany, was inspired to write his Bella Germaniae by a vision of Drusus, who commanded him not to allow him to be forgotten (Pliny the Younger, Letters 3.5). So Drusus the heroic soldier found his monument in Pliny the heroic author, subjugating the Germans to his history. the torpid sea Pliny’s description of the Chauci, though drawn from personal experience and ‘anschaulich und durchaus individuell’ as Norden, Germanische Urgeschichte (p. 295) says, is part of a classical tradition of depictions of Ocean, particularly northern Ocean. At 16.2–4 Pliny contradicts the historical representations of the Chauci at almost every point, but these contradictions are entirely comprehensible in terms of this tradition, and in this respect Pliny’s emphasis on the mixture or confusion of land and water is entirely typical. Such depictions, particularly of northern seas, speak as a matter of course of waters either strangely thick and sluggish,25 or of tides that travel far inland, changing or obliterating the boundaries between the dry and the wet, an idea that James Romm26 assigns a place in the ancient perception of Ocean as the home of primal chaos. In the earliest description of the northern ocean known to us, Pytheas describes a ‘congealed sea’ (thalatta pepeguia), near Thule (Pytheas, fragment 6a Mette ¼ Strabo 1.4.2). Another fragment of Pytheas reports that the sea near Thule is neither land nor water nor air but a substance intermediate and compounded from them all: He [Pytheas] adds information about Thule and those parts in which there exists neither earth in itself nor sea nor air, but a compound of them all like the ‘sea lung’, and in this he says that earth and sea and everything is suspended, and this is so to speak the binding of the 25

This tradition goes back at least as far as Plato (Timaeus 25d, Critias 108e6–109a2), and is also found in Plutarch (De Facie 941 b), both of whom describe the Ocean beyond the Pillars of Hercules as impassable because of its muddiness. Plato attributes the mud to the sinking of Atlantis, Plutarch to the silt discharged into the sea by the many rivers of a fabulous western continent. 26 James Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought, 22.

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whole, and one can neither walk nor sail upon it.27 ment 7a Mette ¼ Strabo 2.4.1)

(Pytheas, frag-

Through the geographers Timaeus and Eratosthenes, Pytheas’ book On the Ocean influenced all subsequent descriptions of northern Europe by classical authors in the four centuries after his time.28 It is not surprising that from Lucan, who describes the Black Sea in winter as a simile for the calm that immobilizes Caesar’s fleet at The Civil War 5.431 ff., the conception of the northern seas elicits a similar picture. Nature has abandoned her rule over these regions: Frost roofs the enormous sea; the wave holds tight whatever vessel it has grasped, the horseman goes crunching over levels no sail can cross, and the wheel-track of the Bessian nomad splits creaking Lake Maeotis, its billows now in hiding. The stillness of the sea is grim, the pools of the gloomy deep are motionless, the water torpid. The ocean rests, as if the rule of nature has abandoned it. The sea has forgotten its old turnings: it does not come and go with the tide, does not tremble with ripples, does not shine with the reflected sun. (Lucan, Civil War 5.438–46)

That the stillness of remotest Ocean corresponds to a paralysis of Nature, or that in Ocean Nature’s power to maintain the regularity of the tides somehow fails, is clearly a topos: we find the idea again in the declamations addressed to Alexander as he contemplates extending his conquests across the Indian Ocean in the elder Seneca29 and Curtius.30 The idea comes up again in Pliny, who alludes to it briefly at 27.2 (‘beyond the Pillars of Hercules, from the very place where Nature ceases’) and refers to it as a phenomenon specifically of the north: describing the expedition of Tiberius in ad 4–6 from the 27

Commentators are in disagreement about precisely what a ‘sea lung’ is. Whether this is some kind of mollusc (the usual Greek meaning of pleumon thalattios, which would suggest the object of Pytheas’ simile is floe-ice) or a jellyfish (the meaning of the Latin pleumon thalattios, which would suggest mud, slush-ice, or ‘frazil’) is disputed. J. O. Thomson, History of Ancient Geography (Cambridge, 1947), 149, has a good discussion of the problem. 28 J. J. Tierney, ‘The Celtic Ethnography of Posidonius’, 196. 29 For example, Suasoriae 1.1: ‘There stands a motionless sea like a sluggish mass of nature dying on its own border.’ 30 Curtius 9.4.18: If he goes further Alexander will encounter ‘darkness and shadow and unending night brooding upon the deep sea, waters full of herds of monstrous beasts, unmoving waves, where nature dying has reached an end’.


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Rhine to the promontory of the Cimbri (probably Jutland), he says that the Roman expedition saw a sea ‘stiff with excessive moisture’ (2.167).31 Tacitus adheres to the tradition in Agricola 10, where he describes Ocean in the region of Britain as ‘sluggish and heavy to the oar, and even to the wind’, and in Germania 45 he writes of the torpidity of Earth’s outermost sea near the tribe of the Swedes: ‘Beyond the Suiones they say there is another sea, sluggish and almost unmoving, and hence it is believed to encircle and close off the inhabited world.’ nat ural dominion In contrast to these accounts of the sluggishness of the outer sea, some writers ascribe to it an opposite propensity: a tendency to violent floods (or more regular but no less violent tides) that overrun coastal regions and erase all distinctions between land and water. Of these, Pliny’s description of the Chauci is the most detailed and circumstantial, but it has marked similarities with the accounts of certain Hellenistic historians attacked by Posidonius of Apamea, whose criticisms Strabo repeats at 7.2.1 ( ¼ Posidonius F272 Edelstein–Kidd). There the geographer rejects the following explanation of why the Cimbri started on the wanderings that brought them up against Rome at the end of the second century bc: ‘One might give some such explanation of their having become a migratory and piratical nation as that, inhabiting a peninsula, a great flood-tide drove them from their homeland.’ Precisely whose theory this is Strabo does not say, but it seems to have been widely held by the Romans, and survives in Florus (1.38.1)32 and Festus.33 Strabo (and presumably his authority Posidonius) goes on to impugn other tales his 31 Pliny also refers to a ‘solid sea’ (mare concretum) at 4.104 and 37.35. At 4.94–5, he reports that the northern sea is called by the Scythians ‘Amalchium’ and by the Cimbri ‘Morimarusa’, meaning respectively ‘frozen’ and ‘the Dead Sea’ (mare mortuum). 32 ‘The Cimbri, the Teutoni, and the Tigurini, made homeless when the Ocean flooded their lands, began to seek new dwelling-places across the whole world.’ 33 Paulus Festi p. 15 ed. Lindsay: ‘Ambrones: the Ambrones were a certain Gallic tribe who, when they had lost their homes because of a sudden deluge from the sea, took to raiding and plunder to support themselves and their families. Gaius Marius destroyed them and the Cimbri and the Teotoni [sic].’

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predecessors have told about the Cimbri: that they take up weapons to make war on the tides (an ethnographic detail that Aristotle also mentions in discussions of bravery in the Nicomachean Ethics 1115b25 and Eudemian Ethics 1229b28, attributing it to the Celts); that they allow the water to destroy their homes as a way of inculcating bravery,34 a tale he attributes to the fourthcentury bc historian Ephorus; and that the speed of the floodtide is such that it once almost overtook Cimbrian horsemen at full gallop, a story he takes from Cleitarchus, a historian of the third century bc. These stories, no matter how unbelievable they may have seemed to Strabo, show how old and pervasive was the conception in Greek geography of Europe’s northern edge as a watery territory subject to enormous floods. The tradition endured among the Romans, despite (or because of ?) their far more specific knowledge of northern Europe. Not long before Pliny, the chorographer Pomponius Mela (3.55) describes the islands of the northern sea near ‘Scadinavia’ (with only one n)35 as a confusion of earth and water hardly more distinct than in the compound (in Greek, syncrima) of Pytheas: Because of the alternating advances and retreats of the sea, and since the spaces between them are now covered by waves and now left bare, the regions opposite Sarmatia sometimes seem islands, sometimes a single uninterrupted land.

If land can be classified as neither continent nor island, the waters of the north also escape classification, their seas indistinguishable from rivers (Mela 3.31): Above the Elbe is the Codanus Gulf [the Kattegat?] packed with islands large and small. Therefore the sea, received into a pocket of coastlines, nowhere spreads out wide, nor does it resemble the sea; rather it wanders and divides in all directions, in appearance like a multitude of rivers, and everywhere its waters flow between and pass across the land. Where it touches the shores, it is confined by the coasts of islands that are not far from each other, and everywhere 34 This is a form of the common topos that disdain for settled comforts makes one warlike and brave, which goes back to Herodotus (9.122) and Hippocrates (Airs, Waters, Places 23). Caesar invokes this idea to explain why the Suebi migrate so often: ‘it is not permitted to stay in one place for more than a year for purpose of habitation’ (Gallic War 4.1). 35 Probably a Latinized form of the ancestor of the Swedish place-name Ska˚ne; see Thomson, History of Ancient Geography, 241.


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almost equidistant; it moves like a narrow strait, and curving repeatedly bends in a long bank.

In a passage already quoted for its depiction of the torpid Ocean, Tacitus (Agricola 10) describes how sea and land interpenetrate paradoxically in Scotland as the tide rushes far inland among the hills and mountains; the effect is a confusion of land and water similar to the descriptions of Mela. Mela creates a picture of Ocean dispersed among a maze of islands until it loses all resemblance to the sea; Tacitus describes a land so invaded by water as to become a territory of Ocean: Nowhere does the sea have wider rule. It carries much of its tidal current to and fro, and it does not rise only as far as the shore and then recede, but even streams far inland and flows circuitously, penetrating among ridges and mountains as if in its own domain.

The land receives the rushing sea into its inmost recesses, while the open Ocean takes on the immobility of land. From Pytheas to Tacitus, these writers represent the North as a place where distinguishing sea from land or river from sea with Mediterranean clarity, confining each element to its proper place, is almost impossible. Land and sea trade places or take on each other’s characteristics. Boundaries shift uneasily, are concealed or destroyed by the invasive waves. The natural order cannot be maintained here. The waters of the north either will not stay in place, but roam freely into land’s domain, or else they usurp land’s essence, being all too stable and locked in an unnatural solidity. The dominion of Nature, coextensive with that of Rome, has ceased to apply, and the boast of Aeneid 1.278–9 stands qualified. This qualification, however, gives the Chauci a place within a grander scheme. Their home as Pliny represents it fits neatly into this traditional picture of the North’s confusion and instability. The conclusion follows that they do not belong, and cannot be made to belong, in the borders of empire. conflagratio This leaves another issue unresolved. If such savages embody anxieties about what is outside the ordered city, may they not also pose the question of what the city may one day turn into?

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Like the pictures of watery instability we have just examined, the Chauci are a reminder of the primordial confusion from which we have come, and a warning of to what a primitive state the social order we have made for ourselves may someday return. The savagery of their lives bears a strong resemblance to philosophical depictions of the end of the world, in particular to Seneca’s representation of cosmic destruction at Natural Questions 3.27–30. Here Seneca concludes his survey of the qualities of terrestrial waters with an unorthodox treatment of a standard Stoic theme, the ecpyrosis or in Latin conflagratio, the recurrent conflagration that punctuates the aeons of the universe. Seneca departs from Stoic tradition by giving the starring role in this rhapsody of mayhem to water rather than to fire, quite contrary to the usual picture of the ecpyrosis in which ‘the present world order will end in a total conflagration, activated by the sun’.36 The cosmic disaster of these pages also differs substantially from Seneca’s own more orthodox depiction of conflagratio at Ad Marciam 26.6, where the real agents of destruction are the fiery stars, and floods are merely one entry in a catalogue of subsidiary terrestrial disasters that includes flattened mountains, earthquakes, dried-up seas, diverted rivers, cities swallowed by chasms, and poisonous gases. Instead, the conflagration of the Natural Questions invites comparison (quite literally: Seneca quotes the passage at length, and criticizes its occasional touches of levity, at 3.27.13–15) with the deluge of Ovid’s Metamorphoses 1.262–312. Like Ovid, and with no small force, Seneca constructs a fragile world in which houses, cities, herds, and forests are all swept away as if in a dream of disequilibrium. Unlike Ovid, who handles the subject with a lightness quite foreign to Seneca, he gives little space to either the divine rationale behind the calamity or to the world’s subsequent renewal (mentioned only in 3.28.7), and his unvarying tone will not accommodate any of the touches of pathos or incongruity allowed by Ovid. In its insistent, highstrung tone Seneca’s account resembles rather the flood depicted by his nephew Lucan at The Civil War 4.76–120, a passage that also emphasizes the elimination of boundaries, the 36 A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, i (Cambridge, 1987), 278.


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idea of shipwreck on land (l. 87), northern rivers spilling into southern countries, and also magnifies the flood to cosmic proportions.37 Like Lucan (and perhaps with more justification, considering the magnitude of his subject), Seneca’s interest is in amplifying the violence of the destruction, and in erasing the distinctions between land and sea, between north and south, high and low, and civilized men and barbarians. Even now, says Seneca, water defines the limits of human achievement. On the day of the creation of the world nature decided when all things would be submerged in a great flood, and the evidence is all around us that Earth’s waters are now in training for it (3.30.1–2). In preparation for the final deluge, nature has set water all around us, even under us.38 Water already sets a boundary in every direction to human ability to penetrate into or across the earth. With the coming of the flood, these boundaries will contract, and the distinctions of human geography will dissolve. The first boundary to be lost will be a climatic one. Constant rain and cloud will make the entire world like the distant north (3.27.4): At first rains fall unrestrained, and in the absence of the sun the sky is grim with clouds; from the moisture rise unending mist and thick fog, and there are no winds to dry them.

One has only to compare this with Pytheas’ description of the weather of the far north (F6G Mette ¼ Strabo 4.5.5)39 or with Tacitus’ accounts of the weather in Germany (Germania 2 and 4–5)40 and Britain (Agricola 12: ‘a sky disfigured by clouds and 37 See the testimonia of Gerke’s 1907 edition of the Naturales Quaestiones for a listing of the verbal parallels with Lucan. 38 ‘Where has nature not placed water in readiness so that she may attack us from every side when she wishes? I lie, if water does not come up to meet those who dig the earth and, every time greed buries us in soil or some other reason forces us to penetrate too deep, there comes at some point an end of excavation’ (Naturales Quaestiones 3.30.3). 39 A description of Thule: ‘But their grain they thresh inside big houses, since they have no pure sun, when they have brought the ears of grain indoors; for threshing-floors are useless for them because of the lack of sun and the darkness.’ Cf. Diodorus Siculus 5.21. 40 Germania 4–5: ‘The Germani do not endure thirst or heat well, but they are used to cold temperatures and hunger because of their weather and soil.

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heavy rain’) to recognize here the darkness, cloud, damp, and rain that are the stock-in-trade of all the geographers and ethnographers of transalpine Europe. More alarmingly, the Rhoˆne, Rhine, and Danube, the great rivers and frontier-lines of the north, will overflow and submerge the lands and cities of the whole continent (NQ 3.27.8), a disastrous incursion of the barbarian into civilized space. The deluge will dissolve other boundaries: what used to be high mountains become new islands or shallows (3.27.13); the demarcation of sea and land is submerged, and the waves will break ‘far from the sight of the old coastline’ (3.28.3); at last even the names of the seas and the human associations attached to them disappear as the waters close over the lands that kept them distinct: There will be no Adriatic, no strait of the Sicilian sea, no Charybdis, no Scylla. A new sea will bury all the stories, and this worldembracing Ocean that was allotted the edges of the earth will invade the middle . . . So many names will die, the Caspian and the Red seas, the gulfs of Ambracia and of Crete, the Sea of Marmora and the Black Sea. Every line of division will be erased. Whatever Nature has divided into parts will be mingled in disorder. (Natural Questions 3.29.7–8)

An even more interesting point of comparison with Pliny is the fact that, before utterly annihilating mankind, the deluge will reduce it to the most primitive level of civilization. Not only will the world’s weather become northern, but we will all come to live in the straitened circumstances of northern savages. One by one, the flood will make the most basic cultural activities impossible. The civilized forms of shelter will become untenable (3.27.6): Houses buckle and are soaked through, water accumulates at the lowest level and the foundations settle, and pools form in the soil. They try to support their tottering houses to no effect: for every prop is fixed in slippery and muddy soil, and nothing is firm.

Although the land’s appearance differs somewhat from place to place, it is as a whole either bristling with forest or disfigured by marsh, rainier where it faces Gaul, windier towards Noricum and Pannonia, fertile with respect to sown crops, not permitting fruit-bearing trees, productive for herds, but these are for the most part undersized.’


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From the final undermining of architectural stability to the destruction of whole kingdoms (what is a kingdom if not city walls, temples, and towers?) is a small step. The water will sweep away the higher forms of social organization (3.29.9): No one will find protection in either walls or towers. Temples will be no help to their suppliants, nor will the high citadels of cities; to be sure, the billows will anticipate the refugees and sweep them away from the very citadels. From west and east the floods will rush together: a single day will bury the human race. All that the indulgence of Fortune has nurtured for so very long, all that it has elevated above the rest, even the celebrated and brilliant dominions of the great nations—Fortune will bring them to destruction.

Note that Seneca refrains from stating a conclusion that follows logically from this frightening premiss, one that must be in the reader’s mind. The passing of ‘the dominions of great nations’, and of the human race itself, will necessarily include that of Rome too.41 Like shelter and political organization, agriculture will become impossible (3.27.5). Its absence will bring all humanity to the level of Pliny’s primeval forest-dwellers, who survived by shaking acorns from trees: The ground, which is soft and fluid, will not hold vines or bushes. Now it will not sustain either grasses or pasturage fertilized by water: people suffer from famine and stretch out hands to ancient foodstuffs. Wherever there is an ilex or an oak, food is shaken down from it, and wherever a tree stands held fast by a rock crevice on a hillside.

Like the Chauci, the refugees of the flood have gone through a shipwreck without leaving home (3.27.7); they are victims of shipwreck, naufragii (28.2). These refugees flee to the tops of 41 For whatever reason—perhaps it is simply too painful to contemplate— Seneca does not make this plain. The omission is served by the complete impersonality of the narrative. By describing events only on the level of the human race as a whole and concerning himself with civilizations on the most generic of terms, he avoids facing the political implications of what he has written. Seneca does not take into account what he and other Romans must all necessarily have at stake in such a future: that the conflagratio sets a temporal limit to Rome. For similar forebodings in Cicero, see De Re Publica fragment Z. 3.34b: ‘when a state, however, is destroyed, abolished, annihilated, it is so to speak as if, to compare small things with great, all this universe of ours were to perish and fail’.

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mountains, where they are cut off from all human communication or exchange (3.27.11) and, beyond fear or sorrow, lapse into a stupor (3.27.12). In the end, whoever has survived the previous stages of the cataclysm will have mentally degenerated from mere acorn-eating savagery to an animal existence. This return of nature in its most primal and chaotic state will take from us even our capacity for reason, ‘when the destruction of the human race has been completed and the wild beasts, to whose mental level humanity will have descended, are equally extinct’. The cultural level, then, of the last wretched refugees of the Senecan deluge is roughly equivalent to that now inhabited by the Chauci. If we may reverse the terms of the parallel, the Chauci live not only at the end of the world, geographically speaking, but also during it. They inhabit a space so utterly primitive as to be a dress-rehearsal for what we shall all live through in the last stage of the current aeon, a mud-flat world of interminable rain, rising rivers, and seas invading land. Ocean assigns to empire, to our power of possessing, not only geographical boundaries but a temporal limit too. the cl oaca maxima In ethnography, what the savage lacks is not significant in itself, but only in contrast with what the civilized man possesses; together, the two complete a relation that expresses an identity for the ethnographer and his audience. If the primeval confusion of NH 16.2–4 is Pliny’s dream of the impermanence of possessing and a warning of the instability of the thing possessed, its complement is his mythopoetic account of Rome’s greatest sewer, the Cloaca Maxima (36.104–8). In this description the uneasy prospect of life without fixed territory, without cattle or crops, finds its opposing term. Here Pliny expresses the fears of dissolution that we have traced in representations of the Chauci and of the ecpyrosis in order to resolve them into a mythic affirmation of Rome’s permanence. In book 36 of the Natural History, the subject of which is stones, Pliny surveys marvellous feats of architecture in foreign countries, and to surpass them all catalogues the wonderful achievements of Roman engineering. In the first of seven extended descriptions of Roman constructions and edifices,


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Pliny, setting out to correct the negligence of Livy and other historians, and in sublime defiance of the archaeological facts as we now perceive them, describes the magnificence of Rome’s present drainage system and traces it back to an episode of legendary history.42 The Cloaca comes first in this series of descriptions not only because it was built the earliest, but especially because it alone supports all the other buildings of Rome, which Pliny has just envisioned piled together into a huge mass equal to another world.43 As if retelling a creation-myth—which in one sense is just what he is doing—Pliny describes the making of a typically Roman kind of order out of a chaos represented by the flood-waters known to us from narratives of dissolution: But in those days [the late Republic] old men used to marvel at the huge expanse of the Rampart and the foundations of the Capitol, and in particular at the Cloaca, the most remarkable work of all these, for in its making hills were tunnelled through and Rome was made, as I said a little while ago,44 a hanging city, beneath which people travelled in boats when Marcus Agrippa served as aedile after his consulship. Through the Cloaca seven rivers pass, collecting in a single channel. Like mountain streams in a headlong race these rivers are compelled to seize and carry off everything in their path. Moreover, when they are spurred on by the heavy power of the rains, they shake the bottom and the sides of the sewer. Sometimes the backwash of the flooding Tiber flows up into the sewers, and the onrushing powers of opposing currents clash within the tunnels; nevertheless the resolute strength of the construction resists their onset.

This picture of the watery chaos below the city streets reminds one of the watery chaos feared by Seneca in the descriptions of 42

A fascinating survey of the place in the Roman imagination occupied by the idea of the Cloaca is provided by Emily Gowers, ‘The Anatomy of Rome from Capitol to Cloaca’, JRS 85 (1995), 23–32. 43 36.101: ‘But let us take this opportunity to pass over to the wonder of Our City and examine the docile power of eight hundred years and prove that we have mastered the world in this way too . . . If the whole number [of the buildings of Rome] were heaped up and accumulated into a single mass, its greatness would strike the eye just as if some other universe were being described, all collected into one place.’ 44 36.94: ‘We read also of the hanging garden, or more correctly, entire town, of Egyptian Thebes, under which the kings used to lead entire armies without the residents being aware of a thing. Even so, this is less wonderful than a river flowing [undetected] through the centre of a town.’ (The last clause refers to the sewers of Rome.)

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the conflagratio recently quoted. But the sewers of Rome are imperilled from above as well: Above the Cloaca huge blocks of stone are dragged along, but the hollowed channels do not yield; they are battered by the sudden collapse of buildings falling spontaneously or under the assault of fire; the ground is shaken by earthquakes, and all the same they have endured unconquerable for nearly 700 years since the time of Tarquinius Priscus.

And here comes one of Pliny’s digressions: a historical note this time, that takes him back to the very foundation of the physical fabric of the city. Although in Plautus’ time the Cloaca was apparently still an open channel,45 Pliny, like Livy (1.38.6; 1.56.2), assumes that the sewer was completed, underground tunnels and all, in the period of the kings: I must not pass over the following example, all the more so because the famous historians have neglected it. When Tarquinius Priscus was constructing the Cloaca, he used the common people to do the work, which seemed to them as interminable as it was heavy. Seeking relief from their toil, the Romans began to commit suicide en masse. The king devised a strange countermeasure for this, one imagined neither before nor since: he crucified the bodies of all his dead workers, at once putting them on display to their fellow citizens and exposing them to be torn by birds and beasts. As a result the sense of shame characteristic of the Roman nation, which has in battles so often rescued us when our cause seemed lost, came to our aid at this time too. On that occasion it deceived the Romans, who were already blushing, into the belief that, since they felt such shame while living, they would feel equally ashamed after their deaths. Tarquinius is said to have made the channels so large that he could send a wagon plentifully loaded with hay through them. (36.104–8)

As history, this story has its share of impossibilities. As we have seen, the Natural History reports that the Cloaca existed as a covered tunnel much earlier than it really did.46 Unlike Livy, who assigns the completion of the sewer to Tarquinius 45

Plautus, Curculio 475–6. The Cloaca was first enclosed in the 3rd cent.: R. M. Ogilvie, Commentary on Livy, Books I–V (Oxford, 1965), 214. For the archaeological evidence see L. Richardson, A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (Baltimore, 1992), 91–2; H. Bauer s.v. ‘Cloaca, Cloaca Maxima’, Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae, ed. Eva Margareta Steinby, i (Rome, 1993), 288–90. 46


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Superbus, Pliny gives the job to Tarquinius Priscus, who has assumed for the occasion the tyrannical cruelty for which Superbus was famous.47 The story must be treated as myth, a myth of Rome’s founding, as well as of its foundation. The story of a mass suicide prevented by a shameful display of corpses is also told about the virgins of Miletus by Aulus Gellius (15.10), so we may conclude that the plot of what Pliny has just reported comes from a traditional fund of story-structures. Gellius’ anecdote, however, lacks the political and patriotic overtones Pliny gives to this myth. It shares many elements with the story of Tarquin and Lucretia, which in Livy immediately follows the Cloaca’s construction (1.56.2). From tyranny and chaos, in both stories, the Roman sense of shame creates a new order of things, a marvel of permanence and stability. In Pliny, it is the prospect of a servile death, crucified like slaves, that shames the Romans back to their work. Livy has the people of Rome reject the job of sewer-building as servile; his Lucretia only gives in to Tarquin after he has threatened to disgrace her by shamefully exposing her body next to that of a servile ‘adulterer’.48 The myth of Lucretia uses the motifs of foreign tyranny, pride, shame, and suicide to lend the creation of the new Republic pathetic force and dramatic inevitability, and gives the overthrowers of the Tarquinii the justification of insulted freedom. In Pliny these motifs, played against anxieties associated with the destructive force of water, impart to Rome’s physical fabric the emotive associations of a civic disaster or a war. Pliny calls this legend an example (exemplum), and so it is, in the sense of a precedent or model for later action. Pliny does not report the sewer’s making; he dramatizes it as a historian might dramatize the battle of Cannae. The Roman sense of shame, the pivot on which the story’s resolution turns, is here elevated and assimilated to the Roman sense of duty, the traditional backbone of military success. As the story of Lucretia punctuates Roman history into Regnal and Republican eras, so 47

Contra Ogilvie, Commentary on Livy, 214, who unaccountably cites Pliny, NH 36.104 to support his contention that the building of the Cloaca Maxima was ‘ascribed unanimously by ancient authors to Superbus’. 48 I owe this observation to Elaine Fantham.

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the building of Priscus’ Cloaca is a national ordeal that puts ‘the sense of shame characteristic of the Roman nation’ (pudor Romani nominis) to the test, and surviving it implies initiation into a new phase of collective life. As the material token of this rite of passage, the Cloaca assumes the power of an icon, which accounts for the rapturous tone of the passage. Pliny’s rehearsal of the pressures that the Cloaca can withstand is a charm: the spell evokes the possibility of civic collapse, only to transform them into elements of pride. We should not underestimate the pride of his tone, for all that his fastidiousness strikes us as slightly ridiculous. That a description of a sewer might evoke in his audience emotions other than an exalted feeling of respect for the engineering of their ancestors Pliny will not concede, although less edifying ideas certainly did occur to other Romans,49 and a modern reader cannot help but feel that something—the function of the Cloaca in discharging Rome’s waste—is missing. What is remarkable is that Pliny can find material for admiration even in a construction of such ignoble function. More precisely, he has suppressed the ignoble function in favour of a more dignified one. The miscellaneous contents of the Cloaca do not matter when resting above it is the Forum, with all the greatness that its edifices express. The shame of what the sewer carries, as well as the fear of dissolution, are present in Pliny’s narrative, but transposed into myth, dramatized, and so resolved into a consoling patriotism. The shame of the Cloaca’s unappetizing function becomes the shame that compels the Roman labourers, transfixed by the sight of the humiliated corpses of their companions, to keep working despite the difficulty rather than be made into parts of 49

On the sordid aspects of the Cloaca, particularly its availability as a metaphorical excretory duct for the civic body, see Gowers, ‘Anatomy of Rome’, 26–30. Compare Seneca the Elder, Controversiae 3 praef. 16: ‘I remember going to Cestius’ school when he was about to recite a speech against Milo. Cestius, with his usual admiration for himself, was saying, ‘‘Were I a gladiator, I would be Fusius; were I a mime, I would be Bathyllus; were I a horse, I would be Melissio.’’ I could not hold back my scorn and cried out, ‘‘Were you a sewer, you’d be the Cloaca Maxima.’’ ’ See also Juvenal 5.103–6: ‘An eel is waiting for you, close relative of the long snake j or Tiber’s own pike, ice-spotted, himself bred by the river-banks too, j fattened on the outpourings of the sewer (cloaca) j who habitually creeps as far as the drains of midSubura.’


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such a spectacle. The fear of chaos and instability is represented, as before, as unruly, swirling water, but here it is only one leaf of a diptych of which the buildings of the Forum and the hills are the other. The frame of Pliny’s myth, the wonderful strength of the fabric created from the Roman workers’ shame, keeps the two leaves securely apart. So secure is the structure, so complete the transformation of anxiety into patriotism, that we can savour the contrast with delight as Pliny poises above the Cloaca the weight of all Rome’s architectural marvels, below it the frustrated power of the flood-waters: ‘the onrushing powers of opposing currents clash within the tunnels; nevertheless the resolute strength of the construction resists their onset’. The Cloaca is the foundation upon which the greatness of Rome is (literally) built, an expression of the qualities that make Rome the geographic centre of empire and the opposite pole of the watery chaos at the edge of the world.50 Because of the Cloaca Maxima, Rome is not just a city built on clay. It is a ‘hanging city’ (urbs pensilis) suspended above the roar and chaos of the floods, a marvel in itself of permanence, order, and beauty rescued from turbulent water by the Roman sense of shame. The conflict of permanence and instability, and the anxiety that this permanence may not after all be so enduring, are here crystallized into the single image of the stone city hanging above the flood. 50 Compare Ovid, Metamorphoses 15.431–4: ‘The tale tells that Dardanian Rome is rising j which, next to the waters of Apennine-born Tiber j lays the foundations of its power beneath an enormous burden.’ The foundations of Rome support not only the city’s architecture but also the metaphoric weight of its future.

Conclusion: Encyclopedias and Monuments

Pliny’s description of the Cloaca Maxima makes evident the pride he felt in the physical fabric of the city of Rome and the history it embodied. The Cloaca was a monument hidden from general view, built with an unheroic purpose, but it was a monument nonetheless, and Pliny conceived his task as being to draw out its meaning by locating it in Roman history. It is strange to realize, then, how carefully Pliny restrained himself from showing any pride in the monument he built himself, the Natural History. As an encyclopedic summa of human knowledge, it embodied Rome’s ambition and mastery as surely as any bronze or stone marble of its physical fabric. But as we shall see, Pliny was hesitant to claim a high status for his book, and the structure of his encyclopedia betrays the marks of that hesitancy. To understand Pliny’s modesty about his work, it is necessary to consider how inquiry into nature existed in the Roman mind as an attribute of imperial power. As with the building of any other kind of monument, publishing an encyclopedia in Flavian Rome had certain ideological implications. Like other monuments, the Natural History is an instrument for communicating the power of its creator. Assembling knowledge from all the fields of Roman dominion, the book displays its contents to be witnessed by a literate elite, as a textual embodiment of an empire known and ruled. And this is content that has been systematized and authorized in a particular way: it has been subjected to Pliny’s modes of organization, and dedicated with some ostentation to the emperor Titus. An encyclopedia endorses truth in a particular version, and by doing so excludes from legitimacy other instruments of knowledge, the traditions and other sources that it does not choose to draw on. In this connection, it must be noted again that the writing of encyclopedias was a Roman innovation, one that most likely


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came about precisely at the beginning of the imperial period. As I have said in my Introduction, though the word ‘encyclopedia’ comes from a Greek phrase, the Greeks did not write encyclopedias. Encyclios paideia is usually thought of as embracing the arts of dialectic, grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, the Seven Liberal Arts of the medieval trivium and quadrivium, but in fact this is not the only formulation of encyclios paideia, and it does not pre-date the last century of the Roman republic.1 The Greeks of the Classical era, despite their reputation for intellectual inquiry and philosophical originality, never conceived of embodying this knowledge in a single book. No scholar of Alexandria, despite the talent for collecting and organizing knowledge demonstrated in the assembling of the Library and the writing of Callimachus’ Pinakes, undertook to do so either. To gather this large and miscellaneous body of knowledge into one book and subordinate it to a central set of principles was left to the Romans. Why this should have been is not hard to see. Encyclios paideia was by origin alien to them. To the Classical and Hellenistic Greeks, it was to be taken for granted as part of the matrix of their native culture; to the Romans, it was an intellectual component of the spoils of war. The digestion and assimilation of encyclios paideia to the logic of Roman society could only be executed by a deliberate and self-conscious effort of transposition. Hence the Roman tradition of encyclopedism, which to Greek subjects like rhetoric and philosophy added the practical lore of agriculture and the art of war.2 The elder Cato may possibly have written the first of the Roman encyclopedias, a work consisting of instructions to his son on miscellaneous subjects, but this is doubtful.3 Creating the first real encyclopedia required the command of vast intellectual territories, and, as the history of the times when it was written suggests, required also the ambitions and the farreaching mental horizons attendant on administering an empire. 1 H. I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, trans. H. Lamb (Madison, 1956), 177–8, dates the formulation of the ‘seven arts’ to ‘between Dionysius Thrax and Varro’. Encyclios paideia could also be thought of as embracing law, medicine, military science, architecture, and other disciplines. 2 Marrou, Education in Antiquity, 240. 3 Beagon, Roman Nature, 12 n. 34, discusses the improbability of Cato’s encyclopedia.

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This first encyclopedia, titled Disciplinae, was written by M. Terentius Varro, the greatest Roman scholar and antiquarian of the late Republic. It is no coincidence that it was published about 34 or 33 bc, at the beginning of Augustus’ supremacy and the commencement of the Principate.4 Varro’s Disciplinae, as well as the later Artes of A. Cornelius Celsus, the second encyclopedia of which we know, written in the reign of Tiberius, were organized in terms of teachable skills. As their titles imply, both promised to teach the reader various arts or branches of knowledge, such as architecture, medicine, the art of war, and agriculture. Varro’s book covered the Seven Liberal Arts that were to become canonical in the Middle Ages (dialectic, rhetoric, grammar, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music), as well as architecture and medicine. The subjects of Celsus’ Artes were agriculture, military science, medicine, oratory, jurisprudence, and philosophy.5 Both Varro’s and Celsus’ encyclopedias were superseded by Pliny’s Natural History. The only part of Celsus that survives (meaning that only this interested later readers enough to merit copying) is the books that deal with medicine, while only small fragments of Varro’s encyclopedia have come down to us. Like the works of Varro and Celsus, the Natural History also claims to transmit encyclios paideia, as we have seen (pref. 14), but Pliny also asserts that no author before him has embraced so much in a single work. With the exception of its sections on agriculture, the Natural History cannot be read like a textbook: it does little to help the reader who wants sustained instruction on a topic. Instead, it anticipates being consulted on points of detail (pref. 33). Its subject-matter is different from Varro’s nine liberal arts. Instead of being organized around categories of teachable skills, the Natural History is broken into sections dealing with the cosmos, the earth, and the animal, vegetable, 4

The Disciplinae are usually assigned to near the end of Varro’s life (e.g. by Elizabeth Rawson, Intellectual Life in the Late Roman Republic, 117); he died in 27 bc. 5 For the contents of Varro’s Disciplinae and its extant fragments, see Friedrich Ritschl, ‘De M. Terenti Varronis Disciplinarum Libris Commentarius’, Opuscula Philologica, iii. (Leipzig, 1877), 352–402. For Celsus, see Marrou, Education in Antiquity, 240, and F. Marx, Corpus Medicorum Latinorum, vol. i (Leipzig, 1915), pp. v–cxiv.


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and mineral kingdoms. Inquiry into nature, not the betterment of individuals through instruction in general knowledge, is Pliny’s basic organizing criterion. th e arbiters of knowledge It is worth noting how important inquiry into nature is to the structure of Pliny’s book, because it is this that associates his encyclopedia most closely with imperial power. In distinct contrast to our post-Romantic myth of the scientist as a heroic but isolated and misunderstood individual whose successes serve to vindicate his own genius, scientific inquiry was thought of by the Romans as a largely collective enterprise that served to validate existing structures of power. The authoritarian function of inquiry into nature is evident from a variety of stories that weave it into the mythology of the Caesars. Of the powers of the Caesars as they are depicted in the literature of the early Principate, one of the most familiar is the power to promote knowledge by making it institutional, or to conceal it by denying it access to the public sphere. Take the example of books: the emperors often appear both as the beneficent patrons or founders of public libraries6 and as vicious censors who consigned books of history to be burnt in the Forum (Tiberius and Domitian, in Tacitus).7 Suetonius reports the emperor Gaius’ wish to have the works of Homer, Vergil, and Livy banished from the libraries (Gaius 34); in this case Gaius made himself ridiculous not because he was laying claim to a strange new power, but because he wanted to extend his power to what had long been familiar. And, to the mind of an ancient Roman, the emperors’ prerogative in this respect was not limited to books. The collection, selection, control, and publication or display of knowledge about nature was also an attribute of the emperors’ power; emperors were the most authoritative of natural historians, not in the sense of observers or writers about nature, but as arbiters of what was to be regarded as true. We have 6 Suetonius, Augustus 29 (the library attached to Augustus’ temple of Apollo on the Palatine); Julius 44 (Varro in charge of public libraries). 7 Domitian, the biographies of Thrasea Paetus and Helvidius Priscus written by Arulenus Rusticus and Hennenius Senecio, Agricola 2; Tiberius, the history of Aulus Cremutius Cordus, Annales 4.34 ff.

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already noted (see Chapter 4) how often emperors appear in literary sources as inquirers, or promoters of inquiry, into nature: that the discovery of the source of the Danube was assigned to Tiberius, and that Nero sponsored an expedition to find the source of the Nile. In this vein, it is not surprising to find Josephus reporting that Vespasian put the legendary buoyancy of the Dead Sea to the test by having people who did not know how to swim thrown into the water, their hands tied behind their backs, and watched them re-emerge ‘pushed up as if by a gust of air’ (The Jewish War 4.476–7)—an anecdote that confirms Pliny’s reference to Vespasian as ‘an emperor zealous for the advancement of knowledge’ (NH 2.118), though perhaps not in the sense Pliny intended. Though they were prospectively emperors, Tiberius and Vespasian were not enthroned at the time these anecdotes occurred. Ruling emperors, more sedentary by the nature of their jobs, were prevented from personal inquiry into nature, though they were written of as vicarious discoverers8 (as Pliny writes of Claudius’ penetration of the Atlas mountains).9 But the emperor figured again and again in the literature of nature as a central point to which discoveries in nature were relayed, and by whom they were authorized. So when dead Nereids were washed up on the beaches of Gaul, the imperial legate of the province reported the fact to the emperor Augustus (NH 9.9); the appearance of a Triton from the sea near Lisbon was reported to Tiberius by another official legation (9.9); and when a centaur was born in Egypt, it was preserved in honey and sent to Rome for inspection by the emperor Claudius, who was known to have written about the centaurs as prodigies (7.35). What was the purpose of these embassies and dispatches? Sending something remarkable to the emperor seems to have been a means of creating a permanent record for it; when the Natural History discusses remarkable yields of grain, it appeals to the records of plants sent by Roman procurators of Africa to Augustus and Nero (18.94–5). It was appropriate for an emperor to collect natural 8 See Mela’s praise of the emperor (probably Claudius) who conquered Britain: ‘Behold, the greatest of emperors is opening up that long-closed island, a conqueror of nations not only untamed but even unknown before himself’ (3.49). 9 Suetonius Paulinus on the Atlas mountains (5.14).


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curiosities. Augustus furnished his country retreats with ‘colossal limbs of huge monsters and beasts, the so-called bones of giants and weapons of heroes’ (Suetonius, Augustus 72.3); furnishings more seemly for Augustus, Suetonius notes, than the luxuries and art-objects usual in the homes of the wealthy. But the emperor was more than a registrar of remarkable natural phenomena. To judge from two anecdotes of this kind that were told about the emperor Tiberius, it is evident that the emperor was conceived of as both an interpreter of strange facts and an effective authority for digesting potentially dangerous new knowledge. In effect, the Romans thought of their emperor as a singular and central witness of prodigies, and also a safety-valve against them; they trusted him to judge what could be assimilated by the empire and annexed to the body of received knowledge. The first of these anecdotes, from Plutarch’s treatise On the Cessation of Oracles, recounts a famous prodigy much like Pliny’s story about the Nereids beached on the coast of Gaul: it also hints at the mortality of figures from mythology, whose deaths impinge on the everyday world as ominous events. On a windless evening sometime in the reign of Tiberius, the passengers of a ship drifting along the Echinades on the west coast of Greece on their way to Italy heard a mysterious voice from the island of Paxoi hailing their pilot, an Egyptian named Thamous. After being hailed three times, Thamous answered the voice, which asked him to announce that ‘Pan the Great is dead’ when the ship came past the island of Palodes. Thamous wondered for some time whether or not it was wise to carry out this request, but as the ship drifted opposite Palodes, he leaned from the stern and passed on his news. At this everyone on board heard many cries of mourning and astonishment rising from the island. And since it happened in the presence of many witnesses, the story soon spread through Rome, and Thamous found himself summoned to the presence of Tiberius Caesar. Tiberius put so much faith in his story that he had an investigation and inquiry made concerning Pan, and the professors of literature who were frequent at his court formed the conjecture that Pan was the child of Hermes and Penelope. (Plutarch, On the Cessation of Oracles, 419 d)

At first sight this anecdote looks very like Suetonius’ Tiberius whose greatest delight is tormenting the scholars of his court

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with questions from the most obscure corners of mythology, such as ‘Who was Hecuba’s mother?’ and ‘What name did Achilles take when he hid among the women?’ (Tiberius 70.3). In Plutarch’s anecdote, however, it is evident that Tiberius did not have Pan investigated to harass his pet scholars—the conjecture they formed did not call for a search through unfamiliar sources, but was ready to hand in Herodotus (2.145), who had written simply that the Greeks called Pan the son of Penelope. Instead, Plutarch shows Tiberius acting in order to disarm a potentially dangerous prodigy. It is a disturbing thought that a god should die, and by the Homeric account (Hymn to Pan 34), Pan was a god, the son of Hermes and the nymph Dryope. But this upsetting possibility was neatly defused by the scholars of Tiberius’ court: from their conjecture it follows that Pan was just a demigod, being mortal on the side of his mother Penelope, and so in the natural course of things liable to die. In this story, it was not to satisfy his whims that Tiberius gathered scholars to his court, but because it was his function to receive strange knowledge and make sense of it, stamping it with his authoritative interpretation. To fail to do so would be to leave prodigies open to alternative interpretations that might very well destabilize the accepted order of the world. That the emperor exercised authoritative control over new discoveries is the point of a second anecdote about Tiberius, which is attested in multiple authors (Petronius, Satyricon 51; Pliny 36.195; Dio 57.21.7; Isidore, Etymologies 16.16.6), but appears in its earliest form as a joke that Petronius has Trimalchio tell at his banquet at Satyricon 51: There was once a craftsman who made a glass drinking-dish that would not break. He was given an audience with Caesar and brought his gift; pretending to offer it to Caesar he threw it down on the floor. Caesar was as scared as could be. But the craftsman picked up his drinkingdish from the ground: it was dented like a bronze vessel; then he took a little hammer out of the fold of his toga and calmly made the dish as good as new. At this, he thought he had hold of Jupiter’s throne, particularly when Caesar said to him: ‘Does anyone else know this way of making glass?’ But watch: when he said ‘No,’ Caesar ordered his head cut off—because, you know, if it was public knowledge we’d be treating gold like dirt.


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Whether or not the story is true, it reflects the idea of the emperor as the final arbiter of what was permitted to be known. This story is significant because it is so explicit about the dangers that might follow if the emperor failed to control strictly the progress of new knowledge into public. The version of Pliny (36.195), though it makes clear that he did not believe the story, agrees with how Trimalchio saw the consequences: They say (a story more common than reliable) that when Tiberius was emperor there was invented a method of composing glass so that it was flexible, but the workshop of the man who devised it was entirely destroyed to prevent the devaluation of bronze, silver, and gold.

In this case, the knowledge which Tiberius restricted was even more dangerous than the story about Pan’s death: it did not threaten the consensus of opinion about the mortality of the gods, but menaced the established order of money and property. Tiberius’ means of restraining it was accordingly more direct than ordering a scholarly investigation. Take away Trimalchio’s joking tone and it is remarkably like how Tiberius, in Tacitus’ Annales (4.34 ff.), used the weight of Senate to crush the historian Cremutius Cordus. stagin g natura In both these anecdotes about Tiberius it is clear that the progress of knowledge into the public sphere was thought of as something to be controlled, and that the emperor was imagined as the one who did the controlling, judging how and even whether portents and discoveries were to be assimilated to the body of what was already known. In a similar vein, an eyewitness story which Pliny tells about Claudius furnishes evidence about the means of imperial ‘publication’, giving us an idea of how an emperor could reveal the wonders of nature to the public, if he chose. Here the idea of the emperor as a centre of knowledge combines with one of the most impressive attributes of the emperor’s power, his distribution of largesse to the Roman people in the forms of food, games, and spectacles.10 The production of 10 On the phenomenon of ‘euergetism’ (i.e. liberality and display) as a prerogative of the powerful, usurped by the emperor as the most powerful, see Paul Veyne, Bread and Circuses, 246–61.

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spectacles was for the emperor a recognized avenue for demonstrating his mastery and resources to a vast audience, and Suetonius’ biography of Claudius makes a love of playing impresario one of the most prominent traits of that emperor’s character.11 We are put in mind of the marine triumph at the mouth of the river Po, mentioned by Pliny at 3.119–20, when Claudius staged a ceremonial return to Italy in ‘what is better called a vast floating palace than a ship’ to mark his conquest of Britain (ad 43).12 It seems from Pliny’s evidence that he enjoyed staging the wonders of the natural world as astonishing displays for the Roman public, one of which Pliny saw as a young man: A killer whale was seen in the harbour of Ostia, and was attacked by the emperor Claudius: attracted by shipwrecked cargoes of leather hides imported from Gaul, it had come while he was completing the building of the harbour. Battening on the hides for many days, it ploughed a groove in the seabed, and the tidal currents piled up sand until the whale could not be turned around; when it pursued the food that the tide drove to shore its back rose high above the water like the keel of an upside-down ship. The emperor commanded numerous nets to be stretched across the harbour’s openings, and setting out himself with the Praetorian Guard he provided the Roman People with a spectacular display. The soldiers showered spears on the whale from their attacking boats, and we saw one of them sink as it filled with the spray the monster breathed out. (9.14–15)

The building of the harbour at Ostia mentioned by Pliny was one of three great public works of Claudius’ reign, along with the draining of Lacus Fucinus in central Italy and the construction of the aqueduct named the Aqua Claudia. Like the building of the harbour at Ostia, the draining of Lacus Fucinus was also an occasion for imperial spectacle. The draining of this lake necessitated the digging of a sluice by 30,000 workers that took eleven years to complete. Just before completing this remarkable proof of his mastery over the landscape—which was never successfully completed because the depth of the tunnels was miscalculated— Claudius produced a large banquet to which he invited the Roman public, as well as a sea-battle on the lake with ships manned by gladiators. A mechanical Triton was made to rise 11 12

Suetonius, Claudius 21. Purcell, ‘Provincial Landscape’, 22.


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from the lake and summoned the gladiators to arms by trumpeting on its conch (Suetonius, Claudius 20–1). At the discharge end of the tunnel, Claudius arranged a banquet so that the public could enjoy the sight of the water as it poured out from the lake into the river Liris (Tacitus, Annales 12.57). It seems that the emperor planned to present as a part of the spectacles an underground river rushing to the surface, much like the subterranean rivers described by Pliny (Chapter 4, above). Entertainment, in reading or in life, evidently included natural spectacles like these. But in the case of the whale-hunt at Ostia, Claudius’ spectacle had the additional function of revealing a prodigy of nature to the Roman public. Killer whales were largely a mystery even to Pliny himself, who admitted in describing them that ‘they can be compared to nothing so much as an enormous fleshy hulk armed with terrifying teeth’. Claudius’ exhibition of a battle with such a monster would have impressed the spectators assembled at Ostia as a marvellous demonstration of his power to reveal what nature has hidden. At Ostia, Claudius made public the nature of the killer whale to the Roman People much as Pliny, by describing their combat in amphitheatrical detail (it too is called a spectaculum), would later publish the characters of the elephant and serpent.13 The wonders of nature were one among many fields from which an emperor could assemble spectacular demonstrations of his resources: by making them serve as occasions for display and acts of public largesse, he declared that his mastery extended not just over man, but over the cosmos too. w h o s e p r o p e r t y w a s t h e natural history ? I have described above (Chapter 2) how Pliny tried to portray himself in his relation with learning as one of Cicero’s idealized literary aristocrats. By making his indebtedness to his sources transparent, he evoked the golden Ciceronian world of literary friendships in which alliances were enacted by transfers of learning. By calling attention to his indebtedness, Pliny also assimilated himself to an aristocratic ethos of liberality, largesse, and the display of wealth. Like Cicero’s Lucius Crassus 13

8.32–4. See the discussion of this passage above, Ch. 4.

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(De Oratore 1.161–2) he leads us on a tour of the mansion of his learning, wheeling out his fine collection and inviting his friends, the readers, to admire. The metaphor of the treasurehouse of knowledge, invoked by Pliny in the preface to the Natural History (pref. 17), makes the parallel even more obvious: knowledge is property, and by implication, instruction an ostentatious show of wealth. But the logical consequences of Pliny’s metaphoric stance left him in a problematic position with regard to his reader and his rulers. Pliny was not an aristocrat of the Republic, but an equestrian in the Principate, and a career civil servant dependent on the friendship of Titus and Vespasian. He was not giving a select group of aristocrats like himself a tour of the splendours of his villa, but inviting the public at large, even ‘the lowly masses and the crowds of farmers and artisans’ (humili vulgo, agricolarum, opificum turbae, pref. 6), into his collection. By collecting and publishing the world’s knowledge in a single Latin book dedicated to the emperor, he was participating in the imperial myth of the Caesars as arbiters of knowledge, but was he in fact aware of this? The same quality of the Natural History that set it apart from the earlier encyclopedias of Varro and Celsus, its dedicated focus on inquiry into nature, put it in an ambiguous position. It served the prerogative of the emperor as arbiter of knowledge, but also could have been seen as an encroachment on it. Given that, as is the trend of the evidence we have reviewed, knowledge was property, whose property was the Natural History? If the knowledge of nature was commonly viewed as an attribute of the emperor’s power, how far was a private citizen like Pliny entitled to take credit for his creation? Thesauros oportet esse, non libros, Pliny says in the preface (17), describing the kind of work it was his intention to construct, ‘there must be treasure-houses, not books’. Pliny may have built the treasure-house, but who was to have the credit of being in charge of the keys? If the display of knowledge implied mastery over what is displayed, Pliny’s mastery of the knowledge of nature left him open to a hostile construction. He might have been seen as infringing on imperial privilege. Undoubtedly, Pliny knew more about Natura than Titus or anyone else of his acquaint-


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ance, but to have used the Natural History to advertise the fact would have been offensive. So the preface of the book, in which Pliny dedicated the book to Titus, had to enact a delicate negotiation: the author had to assert the claims of his book without calling too much attention to himself. The job of the preface was to create a picture of Pliny not as an arbiter of knowledge but as a participant in the imperial myth, handing over his work for the approval of the master of Natura and so obtaining authorization for it. So it was necessary that the focus of the preface remain firmly on Titus rather than on Pliny, whose presence is in fact hard to find. The emperor’s authorization was what Pliny hoped for, but the nature of this transaction precluded him from being seen to ask for it. If the Natural History proved acceptable to its dedicatee, the simple act of putting the book into circulation, dedication intact, would be enough. To avoid the appearance of presumption, the preface could not represent the moment when Pliny gave the book to Titus, but it did not have to, because the act of dedication, if approved, enacted the authorization of its contents. The delicacy of this negotiation is enough to account for the extremely submissive tone of the preface.14 As one might expect, it contains much flattery of Titus, dwelling on his career (pref. 3), his position at the summit of human affairs (pref. 11), his eloquence, popularity, and abilities as a poet (pref. 5). It also contains much nervous self-deprecation and strained modesty. Pliny writes self-consciously on the privilege he has of addressing Titus familiarly (pref. 4), and asserts his independence of judgment, unconvincingly (pref. 20). Aware of possible charges of arrogance, he proclaims his lack of ambition (pref. 20) and effaces himself as far as he can. He sees himself as like the sculptors of ancient Greece, who gave their works only tentative signatures, modestly preferring the imperfect tense ( faciebat) to the perfect (pref. 26). The slightly frantic modesty of his repeated disavowals only sharpens my suspicions that Pliny did feel some danger in his position—that his text was possibly too central, too close to generating its own sense of authority. In 14 Citroni Marchetti, Plinio il Vecchio, 15 has noted how in the preface Pliny identifies his philanthropic urges with Titus’ own.

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fact, the only moments of self-assertion in the preface come when Pliny attacks other writers for not being as self-effacing as he is: Livy may well have entertained the possibility that he might write his histories for his own glory, but Pliny is certain that he writes not for himself but for the glory of the Roman name (pref. 16). Arrogant scholars incur his censure: Apion, who claimed to be conferring immortality on his dedicatees by writing books for them (pref. 25), acted out precisely what Pliny was most concerned to avoid with his dedicatee. He is also severe to writers (unsurprisingly, they are Greeks) who, elevating beauty over function, gave their books tantalizing but opaque titles that offered no clue to their contents: the Meadow, the Cornucopia, or the Honeycomb (pref. 24). Pliny, by contrast, prides himself on the transparency and functionality of his book, which depends on his useful table of contents (bk. 1): a sign in earnest of his zeal for crediting his authorities and speeding the reader on his way to what he wants to know. His eagerness to list his sources, which we have discussed above (pp. 60–62), may create the picture of a network of literary alliances, but it is also another means of avoiding the appearance of an arrogant mastery. Since Pliny credits authors but normally does not specify which author contributed what fact, the gesture does more to create the effect of modesty than to aid the reader. In his modesty, Pliny even goes so far as to credit the author from whom he got the idea of a table of contents, Valerius Soranus (pref. 33). Outside the preface, the consequences of Pliny’s selfeffacement are evident in other ways. His modesty makes itself felt not only in explicit self-deprecation, but also in the Natural History’s structure and texture, giving the book its particulate, local, inconsistent surface, and giving rise to many of the features that frustrate the modern reader. To present a world of facts organized around the central point of his own intelligence; to write an encyclopedia in which every fact was manifestly selected and its interpretation controlled by himself; to subordinate the natural world to a single taxonomizing principle, authorized only by his authorial persona; this would have been too self-assertive for Pliny as he negotiated his position in relation to Titus. And so there is, as we have seen, no obtrusive authorial persona supplied by the text to


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model for the reader a single authoritative way of reading. This is an absence that accounts for much of what makes the Natural History hard for us to read. We have seen, for instance, that there are many inconsistencies where Pliny has preserved the disagreements of his sources:15 where we would have had Pliny choose to authorize the one and suppress the other, he has declined to arrogate to himself the superior position of a judge. Instead, the Natural History presents itself as being on the same level as its sources, as is appropriate for a work that makes a point of displaying the network of literary friendships between its author and his tributary authorities. They are treated not as tributaries but as creditors, on the theory that it is not Pliny who has laid them under obligation, but they him. The language of credit, debt, and repayment makes this an obtrusive modesty, especially in a case of the sort where there was abundant ancient literary precedent for simply seizing material outright and leaving one’s appropriations in silence. This ostentatious modesty also explains the occasions, more often met with than we should expect in a universal encyclopedia, when the Natural History bumps up against the limits of its author’s knowledge. Pliny’s confessions of ignorance are in these instances so humble that we suspect a superstitious observance of an archaic propriety of silence. When writing, for instance, about the secret name of Rome, which it is nefas to disclose (3.65), or the source of the Nile (5.51), he is emphatic about the limits of his knowledge, declaring that certain things are just unnameable or unknowable. Regarding the Nile, we have already seen (Chapter 4) that while Pliny gives a detailed account of the river’s springs, he repeats against the evidence of his own text that its source is unknown, a profession of ignorance necessary because this particular fact was among the mythological property of the Caesars. The cause of St Elmo’s fire (2.101) is another such unknowable: ‘All these things are hidden away in the grandeur of Nature’ (omnia incerta ratione et in naturae maiestate abdita, 2.101). It is hard to reconcile this deference to the majestic unknowability of Nature with the idea of the universal accessibility of Nature implied by the picture (quoted on p. 131) of Rome’s immeasurable grandeur lighting 15

See the discussion of self-contradictions in the Introduction.

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the world up like a second sun (27.3: inmensa Romanae pacis maiestate . . . ostentante). The only thing that can account for this contradiction is the polite assumption on Pliny’s part that his own power of vision did not extend as far as Caesar’s eye. It would seem, then, that Pliny to a certain extent refrained from giving the Natural History a unified appearance in deference to the emperor’s prior claims. By maintaining the appearance of a plural world of knowledge Pliny obscured how far he was complicit in the consequences of his text’s success. The publication of the Natural History as authorized by Titus was inevitably to homogenize knowledge by delegitimizing other sources and traditions. What is more, despite the Natural History’s own heterogeneous appearance, it betrays some signs of being aware of its own potential to silence other authorities. The proof that the task of the Natural History was to take specialized or private knowledge and make it public is the resentment Pliny shows toward specialist scholars or authorities who are not part of his literary network of friends. It is clear that such figures impede the centralization and publication of knowledge. In the encyclopedia, these authorities appear only as selfish men who foster reputations for themselves by sharing their knowledge with no one. I have already quoted one passage (25.1–2, in Chapter 2) in which Pliny marks out his enemies: ‘And so to be sure those who have learned even a few things hide them away, grudging them to others, and to be nobody’s teacher serves as attestation of one’s learning.’ These are the competitors that Pliny intends to supersede by publishing his encyclopedia, along with his predecessors in encyclopedic writing, Varro and Celsus. Despite its modesty and its elaborately plural surface, the publication of the Natural History marked in fact the unification of diverse traditions under a central authority. There is a sad irony to this. Pliny voices concern over the disappearance of different traditions and sources of knowledge while effecting the homogenization of what he writes about (Chapter 2). The ostentatious parade of the book’s obligations to its sources, and the ethos of aristocratic friendship that this connotes, does not negate the fact that Pliny was no Cicero. He may have appealed to the ideology of a Republican senator, but he was an equestrian civil servant whose career and literary output had both suffered an eclipse in the reign of Nero and


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depended on the patronage of the first two Flavian emperors.16 And though he seems to have been concerned to preserve the vanishing local traditions of the Romans (see the end of Chapter 2), it was the authority of those emperors that enabled him to collect, write, and publish. While Pliny preserved some traditional knowledge, under the aegis of Vespasian and Titus, what he did not collect he extinguished by that silence, and all the while using the vocabulary of Republican literary amicitia to justify his procedure. By inscribing Titus into the Natural History as the book’s first reader, Pliny claimed imperial power and authority for his book. The dedication to Titus is a bid to confer upon Pliny’s new synthesis of knowledge the status of a standard authority, and the real effect of such a claim, despite stated regrets to the contrary, is to negate other authorities, to purify the stream of culture. competit ion an d surv ival It was by no means a fait accompli that a book as long as the Natural History would survive its author, or that it would come down intact from his day to our own. After all, none of Pliny’s other works have survived; they have disappeared, having suffered the fate common to books from antiquity. Books competed for attention not in mass markets served by systems of centralized distribution, but copy by copy, passing from friend to friend and from one social circle to another.17 To continue to exist, every ancient book had to be copied and recopied by hand at an expense of which, in an age of printing, it is hard to form a notion: the conditions in which books were disseminated in the ancient world meant that someone had to commit considerable resources, in the form of hired scribes or slave-copyists, to produce each successive copy. And for a massive work like the Natural History, the obstacles to reproduction are difficult to imagine. The exacting realities of ancient publication hastened 16

Syme, ‘Pliny the Procurator’, 209–10. On the production and circulation of texts in Rome as a social phenomenon, see E. J. Kenney, ‘Books and Readers in the Roman World’, in The Cambridge History of Classical Literature, ii: Latin Literature, ed. E. J. Kenney (Cambridge, 1982), 3–32; Raymond J. Starr, ‘The Circulation of Literary Texts in the Roman World’, CQ 37 (1987), 213–27. 17

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the demise of long books like encyclopedias that did not attract and sustain the favour of educators and institutions. We have no farther to look than Livy’s or Dio’s histories to find examples of books that became casualties of their size: both were superseded in part by more digestible epitomes. But the Natural History did survive, and what is more remarkable, not in part, but in full: in view of how often classical texts have come down to us only in lopped or mutilated form, it is remarkable that so long a book was passed on intact. It was this book, and not the encyclopedias of Varro or Celsus, that attracted readers through late antiquity, won the attention of excerptors like Solinus, and emerged into the Middle Ages as a respected authority and repository of knowledge. Before Varro, there had been no single authority to appeal to, a possibility of saying ‘you can look it up’, which meant that readers could only consult individual specialists or specialized works. Varro’s Disciplinae may be presumed to have created this space; the Natural History took it over and held it. Manuscripts of the Natural History proliferated,18 and as late as Erasmus it was treated as a reliable source of information.19 And by succeeding, it killed off its rivals, first replacing them as an object for scholarly or technical consultation, then excluding them from the scribal attention necessary to reproduce. It succeeded not only at the expense of Varro and Celsus, but also at the expense of the Meadow, the Cornucopia, and all the other Greek books with tantalizing titles that Pliny criticized in his preface; at the expense too of most of the two thousand books he says he consulted to write the Natural History (pref. 17); and of innumerable oral traditions and specialized authorities, before his time or after, never to be committed to writing. I do not doubt that the dedication to Titus played some part in this success: the Natural History carries a tacit imprimatur from Titus, proof that it was acceptable to the 18 For a detailed account of how the text of the Natural History was handed down through the Middle Ages, see L. D. Reynolds, Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics (Oxford, 1983), 307–16. Healy, Pliny the Elder on Science, 380–91, gives a thorough survey of the popularity and influence of the Natural History from antiquity to the Renaissance. Hilda Buttenwieser counts more than 200 codices of the Natural History, almost 70 of them earlier than the 14th cent.: ‘Popular Authors of the Middle Ages’, 52–3. 19 Healy, Pliny the Elder on Science, 389–90.


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arbiter of knowledge, and so equally acceptable to the institutions and educators whose tastes determined what books were transmitted from antiquity to the Middle Ages. to ins truc t or to demarcate This conclusion seems even harder to escape when we move from considering the ideological aspects of controlling knowledge in Pliny’s era to a consideration of the particular kind of knowledge that the Natural History comprises. It is crucial in this connection to recognize the essentially undidactic nature of the Natural History. Though it claims to transmit encyclios paideia, it does not teach the seven liberal arts of the later educational canon, or anything that even resembles them. Certain portions, mostly on the arts of agriculture, transmit practical lessons, but ‘how to’ is not a large part of the Natural History’s raison d’eˆtre. There is an important distinction to be observed here: its goal and methods set the Natural History apart from the great majority of other Roman technical writings, the non-literary texts with which it is usually classed. It is the favourite profession of most of these books to be able to endow their readers with mastery over a particular field or fields: the art of rhetoric promises mastery over other people, as does in a very different way the art of war; philosophy promises mastery of one’s self; the science of agriculture, a kind of mastery over nature, as well as imparting household economy, or even a quasi-philosophical mastery over the self (for the self-sufficient rural life that unfolds in Vergil’s Georgics is addressed less to a practical domination of crops and animals than to a fantasy of autonomous identity). But the Natural History promises none of these things. It makes no claims to instruct any individual in any career or course of self-improvement. It does transmit detailed and practical information about agriculture, medicine, architecture, painting, and sculpture, but no one could set about the business of becoming either a farmer, physician, or artist solely from reading its pages: agriculture, medicine, and art figure in the Natural History only as social extensions of vegetable or mineral phenomena. But it is very much concerned to put the natural world at the reader’s disposal.

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What the Natural History professes is to put before the reader the world of the elements as it impinges on our senses—much the same province that modern science has taken for itself. Most characteristic of the book is its interest in what things cost. The most cursory survey of the encyclopedia will turn up lists of the prices of natural objects such as incense, wool, marble, flax, and fish; or of what the best varieties of a given product of nature (turnips, fertilizer, oysters) are and where they can be obtained.20 The world is comprised of objects is the implication. The great success of the Natural History is that, confronted with the diversity of nature, it efficiently extracts the constituent objects and processes them, assigning to each a place in the symbolic and economic systems of Roman culture: this variety of marble is worth so much, that kind of dye another sum; such-and-such a commodity is indicative of luxury, another of antique virtue. As we have seen, although it is a sustaining premiss of our culture that science is beyond ideology, for the Romans it was a field charged with political significance, representing a vehicle for demonstrating an emperor’s power. This is of course a power that the Natural History cannot claim to impart to the reader. Its mission is, then, to objectify knowledge rather than teach it, to quantify nature and so stabilize it. Where Quintilian, Varro, and Celsus claimed to teach the reader ‘how to’, the Natural History’s claim was ‘this is what is’. Marking the extent of knowledge about nature, it circumscribed and claimed it. Again, the spectacles staged by Claudius provide an illuminating parallel: they did not pretend to transmit to their audiences the art of hunting a whale or of draining a lake, but demanded that they witness the power of their empire being exercised over mysterious and intractable nature. If we turn back to the ethnographies that we have previously considered, the descriptions of the Chauci, the Essenes, or the Hyperboreans, we find that they bear out the conclusion that the function of the Natural History is to demonstrate and demarcate, not to instruct. The ethnographic content of the Natural History is neither didactic nor intended as a guide for 20 Best turnips: 18.130; price of fine ‘byssos’ flax: 19.20; best fertilizer (marl): 17.45; (dung): 17.50–3.


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concrete action (military, diplomatic, or administrative) toward any foreign people. No ethnography here can be read as a recipe for conquering or ruling any tribe or nation. We can draw a useful distinction in this respect between Pliny as an ethnographer, on the one hand, and Caesar and Tacitus, on the other: for the most part Pliny’s ethnographies are not topical. They do not deal with the conditions of the daily life of peoples with whom the Romans of Flavian times had direct contact. The encyclopedia contains no detailed descriptions of the real foreign subjects of Roman dominion. No military tribune or provincial governor bound for Pannonia or North Africa would have profitably consulted the Natural History for practical advice on how to manage the natives he was going to encounter. Instead of describing how to deal with any of these tribes, what the Natural History does is to fix them in the reader’s mind as the farthest margin of human existence. This demarcates and stabilizes the boundaries of the known, and so of Roman power. Establishing tribes and nations in the reader’s mind that are already so bizarre as to preclude the existence of anyone more exotic in effect rules out the possibility of new discoveries beyond these tribes. The wonderful beast-men of Ethiopia and India, or the Chauci, the ne plus ultra of notowning, are thus tacitly marked as the farthest margins of the known. Since the Natural History does not constitute the study of man as a field separate from nature’s other visible manifestations, the human race too is displayed as an object of the text’s authority. As I described in the introductory survey of the ethnographies in the Natural History (Chapter 3), all the ethnographies of the Natural History can be assigned to one of three different functions: describing the limits of geographical knowledge; describing the extreme permutations of the human body; and illustrating, in the interaction of man with the products of nature, non-Roman economic behaviours that define Roman culture by contrast. In all three cases, the nations that do appear in Pliny’s ethnographies are chosen for their value as curiosities. That is, all are capable of interesting the reader as vehicles for speculation, which takes the form of either wonder about the extreme terms of what nature permits to human life (as with the Hyperboreans, whose autonomy is unimpeded by

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disease or social compulsion, the Essenes, who live without economic or sexual exchange, or the wonderful beast-men of India and Ethiopia), or the limits of what the Romans permit themselves as consumers and users of Nature’s products (as with the woodless and landless Chauci, the inhabitants of opulent Taprobane, and the Arabs of frankincense country). The anthropological and geographical portions of the encyclopedia also participate in its demarcating function. The nations described in Pliny’s ethnographies are all peripheral, in either a straightforward geographical sense, or insofar as they occupy positions on the margins of what Nature has assigned to human life (as the Hyperboreans do not experience disease, or the Essenes sex). It is their peripheral quality that marks them for what they are: they signify the margins that circumscribe the realm of knowledge. If the importance of the Natural History in Flavian Rome was as an instrument of demarcation rather than instruction, then the most revolutionary aspect of its construction must have been Pliny’s creation of the index. Book 1 of the Natural History, with its dedicatory epistle to Titus followed by the massive index, must have struck the reading public as a display of power comparable to any spectacle staged by Claudius. Not only does the index announce the encyclopedia’s universal scope and the laborious assembly of its sources, it is most impressive for showing how totally knowledge can be made into an object. It is a concrete demonstration of how referential shape can be imposed on the whole of nature, and a successful demarcation of the world into class and subclass: here, everything is made indexible. The index is a textual analogy to the Natural History’s use of the Roman triumphal procession as heuristic and analytical metaphor: both triumph and index make a thing known while at the same time signifying both the total availability and the total objectification of what is known. So it is clear that, beyond the three functions outlined above, the different ethnographies all serve another function: in their marginality, they are signifiers of the exhaustive framework of the text. Their presence implies that the encyclopedic project, to render nature in all its multiplicity into a single object, an indexed system, has been taken to the farthest shores of knowledge. Despite its professions of total scope, the Natural History


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omits some facts: the varieties of bread (18.105), the sculptural decorations of the temple of Artemis (36.97),21 certain placenames omitted because they are ‘barbaric’ or difficult to pronounce (e.g. 3.28, in Hispania Citerior; 5.1 (African placenames that are ‘altogether unpronounceable except in their own mouths’); 5.52 (parts of Syria); 6.27 (120 administrative districts of Lesser Armenia)). But these omissions do not impair the illusion of the Natural History’s total scope. This illusion, of a framework that embraces the universe, is sustained by the nations on the periphery of the world and of the text, the ethnographies that imply that no possible declension of human morphology has been left unrecognized. systems of knowledge Here we can see the most powerful consequence of the writing of the Natural History on later European civilization. To the Renaissance and subsequent eras, the Natural History was a precedent for how the diversity of multiple intellectual traditions and discourses could be reassembled into a universe, under imperial authority, in a single all-receiving text. More than any other aspect of Pliny’s encyclopedia, it was this that set the example for scientific texts of early modern Europe. The systems of knowledge that Renaissance naturalists constructed to impose on nature were conscious attempts to rival or supplant Pliny, and through them the naturalists of the Enlightenment inherited Pliny’s project of reassembling nature as order. Paula Findlen’s important book Possessing Nature has documented how Ulysse Aldrovandi (1522–1605) and other Italian Humanists were inspired by the Natural History to collect, catalogue, and display nature in all-embracing museums and encyclopedic texts, regarding Pliny as their model.22 Aldrovandi quite literally took Pliny’s estimate of the 20,000 facts contained 21 Though the Natural History has previously devoted about half of book 34 and much of 36 to describing sculpture in bronze and marble, it will not address this temple’s architectural sculptures since ‘they are irrelevant to the pattern of Nature’ (cetera eius operis ornamenta plurium librorum instar optinent, nihil ad specimen naturae pertinentia). 22 Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994), 62–70.

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in the Natural History as a challenge, and kept a careful running total of his own observations until he could show that he had beaten his ancient rival.23 The conceptual framework of his and other Renaissance collectors’ descriptive enterprises rested directly on the Natural History’s vision of the entirety and unity of nature,24 and foreshadowed the global taxonomies of eighteenth-century naturalists such as Buffon and Linnaeus. The extension of the Plinian encyclopedic project by these eighteenth-century natural historians to Africa, Asia, and the Americas was, in the words of Mary Louise Pratt, ‘a European project of a new kind, a new form of what one might call planetary consciousness among Europeans’.25 Like the Natural History, the classificatory systems of Buffon and Linnaeus were the result of a mutually beneficial relationship between encyclopedic description and imperial power. In Pliny’s as in Linnaeus’ time, advancing zones of imperial domination and trade supplied natural objects to be refined into knowledge by the researches of the intellectual, who in turn converted the diversity of the world into an ordered text, an object, incorporating what had once belonged to others into the symbolic and economic systems of their conquerors. 23

Ibid. 62–3. Ibid. 70. 25 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York, 1992), 29. 24

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INDEX

Abioi 81, 83 Achilles 200 Acoreus 143 acorns 187 Actium 159 Adriatic Sea 133, 186 Aegean 135 Aelian 38–9, 62 De Natura Animalium 38–9, 62 Aelius Gallus 130, 163, 173 Aeneas 138, 159, 184–5, 187 Aeschylus 53 Africa 78–80, 158 agriculture 31, 61, 80, 187 Agrippa, see Vipsanius Alani 154 Alasit 161 Albinovanus Pedo 176–7 Alexander the Great 88, 100, 141, 180 Alexandria 103, 158, 175, 195 Alps 133, 146–8, 152 see also mountains ambassadors 110 amber 78, 96, 98, 163 Ampsivarii 167 androgynes 84 Angrivarii 154 Annaeus Seneca, Lucius 46, 59, 63, 122–5, 141, 184–5, 187 Ad Marciam 184 Naturales Quaestiones 184–5 Annius Plocamus 111–12 anthropology 84 Antigonus of Carystus 21, 30, 100 Antilibanus 136 Antioch 140

Antisthenes 84 Antonius Castor 61 apes 91–2 Apion 206 Apollo 31 Appenines 146 Aqua Claudia 202 Aquilo 119 Aquitanica 142 Arabia 97–110, 163, 173 Arabia Petraea 136 Arcadia 35 Arch of Titus 114, 155 Aremorica 142 Argos 78 Arimaspi 58, 90 Arimphaei 80–2 Ariovistus 78 Aristeas of Proconnesus 78, 147 Aristotle 18, 22, 39, 182 On Marvellous Things Heard 22 Armenia, Armenians 80, 163 Greater Armenia 144 Arminius 167 Arrhene 145 art history 6, 10 asceticism 112, 117–18 Asia Minor 175 Asphaltites 115–18 Atlantis 84 Atramitaeans 101–2 Attica 94 Augustus, emperor 23, 97, 157, 196–9 Res Gestae 146, 157 Aurelius Cotta, Gaius 67 avarice 68–71

226

Index

baboons 91–3 Baebius Macer 54 Balla 161 Balbus, L. Cornelius 161 balsam 162–3 Baltic Sea 78, 163 Baracum 161 Bariba 130 Bay of Naples 3, 7, 8 Beagon, Mary 8, 121, 149 Black Sea 87, 133, 149, 182 Boin 161 Bosporus 46–7 Britain, Britons 78, 131, 185, 202 Brutus, Marcus Junius 59 Bubeium 161 Buluba 161 Caesar, Gaius Julius Bellum Gallicum 78–9, 86–7, 142 Caesarea 115 Callimachus 22, 195 Pinakes 22, 195 Calvino, Italo 36, 38, 62, 88 Calystrii 85 Cambades 149 Cambyses 141, 143 cameleopards 158 Caminacus 130 Campus Martius 14, 23, 52 Caninius Rufus 60 Cannae 191 cannibals 89 Canopus 74 Capitoline 155 Cappadocia 150 Carians 159 Caripeta 130 Caspian Sea 136–7, 149, 153–4 Catabathmos 80 Cato, Marcus Porcius 13, 64, 123–5, 128, 195

Caucasus 154 Cauchius 167 Celsus, A. Cornelius 13, 61, 196, 204, 208, 210 Artes 13 Celts 82 Centaurs 198 cephi (animal) 162 Chatti 154 Chauci 165–74, 187–8, 212 cheese 19 Cherusci 159, 167 China 82, 97 Choatras 144 Choromandae 89 Cicero, Marcus Tullius passim Brutus 59 De Oratore 67 De Re Publica 63 Cidamus 161 Cilicia 152–3 Cimbri 153, 157, 165, 181 cinnamolgus (bird) 9 Circius 149 Circus Maximus 52 Cizania 161 Clarke, Katherine 59, 148 Claudiopolis 150 Claudius, emperor 145, 163, 201–3 Cleitarchus 182 Clement of Alexandria 39 climate 43–4 Cloaca Maxima 25, 188–90, 192 Codanus Gulf 182 Colosseum 155 Columella, Lucius Iunius Moderatus 61, 65 Comum (Como) 2 conXagratio 183–4, 190 Conte, Gian Biagio 36–7, 88 Cornelius Valerianus 61 Cornucopia 206, 210

Index corpses 36 counterlands 106, 109, 112 Crassus, Lucius Licinius 65, 67, 203 Cremutius Cordus, Aulus 201 Ctesias 85, 90 cults 138–9 Cumania 154 Curtius Rufus 178–80 Cyclopes 90 Cynocephali 85, 165 Cyprus 57 Cyrene 78 Dacia 136, 140 Dahae 154 Dariel Pass 154 Darius 79, 93 Dead Sea 116–20, 198 death 37, 95, 99–101, 118–22 Decapolis of Syria 136, 152 Decri 161 Democritus 35, 148 Diodorus 84, 115 Diogenes 84 Dionysius of Charax 163 Domitian 10, 60, 155 Domitius Corbulo 154, 163, 167, 170, 173 Drobetae 140 Drusus Libo 123, 159, 163, 166–79 Dryope 200 duty 191 ebony 162 Echinades 199 Egypt 163 Egyptians 74 Elegea 150 elephants 30, 150, 158, 162 elks 86 empire 111–17

227

encyclios paideia 13, 33, 195–204 Engada 115, 118–19 engineering 51–2 Enipi 161 Ennius Quintus 55, 138–9 equestrians 5, 54, 61, 208 Erasmus 210 Eratosthenes 134, 180 Essenes 113, 116–27, 202 Ethiopia 83, 88, 157, 163 ethnography 77–96, 105–7, 110–24, 165 Etruscan 96 etymologies 200 Eudemian Ethics 182 Euhemerus 84 Eusebes 84 Euxine 135 Faliscan 31 Fasti Triumphales 23, 161–3 fercula 157–60 Findlen, Paula 215 Wsh 36, 140 Xax 97 Xoods 185–9 Florus 181 Forum Vibii 146 Foucault, Michel 14 frankincense 96, 99, 102–3, 110 Fraser, P. M. 22 friendship 59–60 Frisii 166–7 frontiers 144–8, 152 Gaetulians 80 Gaius (Caligula), emperor 97, 100, 163, 197 Galba, emperor 57, 72 Gallia Belgica 7, 142 Gallia Narbonensis 7, 136 Galsa 161

228

Index

Garama 161 Garamantes 161 Garland, Robert 90 Gaul (Gallia) 74, 103, 134, 142, 146, 147, 136, 212, 275, 301 Gaza 102–4 Gebbanitaeans 102–3 Gellius, Aulus 39, 55–8, 191 Noctes Atticae 55–8 Geloni 159 geography 129–37, 158, 160, 163, 176–7 Germanicus 158, 160, 163, 176–7 Germans 80, 152, 158, 160, 163, 165, 170, 172 Gibralter 46 giraVe 162 Greeks 102, 195 Gymnosophistae 89, 117 Hannibal 132, 153 Hecataeus of Abdera 121–2 Hecataeus of Miletus 162 Hecuba 200 Hector 80 Hellespont 46–7 Heracleides 21 Herculaneum 4 Hercules 175–8 Hercynian Forest 86, 146 Hermes 199–200 Herodotus 21, 43, 77–9, 85, 87 Hesiod 121 Hindus 91 Hippocrates 43, 79, 182 On Airs, Waters, Places 43 Hippomolgoi 80 hippopotamus 162 Hirpi 31 Hispania Tarraconensis 34, 55, 77, 61, 136

historiography 21, 78 Holford-Strevens, Leofranc 39, 58 Homer: Iliad 82–3 Odyssey 83, 92 honour 31, 35, 60, 97, 114 Hostilius, Tullus 96 Hyperboreans 81–2, 108, 113–26, 212 Hyrcanian Sea 149 Iambulus 84, 87 Idistaviso 167 Illyricum 159 imperial power 24, 49, 73, 141, 155, 164, 175 India 21, 78–9, 85–92, 136–8 Indian Ocean 84 Ireland 158 Isager, Jacob 97 Isidore 214 Isthmus of Corinth 46 Jerusalem 119–27 Temple of 155 Jewish War 119–20, 127, 162, 198 Jews 119–20, 125–7, 158 Josephus 114, 154, 155, 156, 158, 162 Jowett, Benjamin 36 King Juba 100, 111, 143, 163 Judaea 119, 127, 137, 156–8, 198 Julius Graecinus, C. 61 Jupiter 39, 174–5 Jutland 181 knowledge passim authorization of 13, 25, 164, 197, 201–4 decay of 68–9, 72 deWnition of 18, 49, 80

Index organization of 20, 50 synthesis of 17, 49 systems of 145 Labaetia 130 Lactucinus 35 Lacus Fucinus 202 Laestrygones 90 Lake Aretissa 144 Lake Maeotis 46, 149, 180 Lake Nilides 143 Larcius Licinus 54–7 Ciceromastix 55 Latin 34, 74, 86, 146, 158 Lelegae 154 Libya, Libyans 21, 78, 80 Licinius Mucianus, Gaius 57, 60–1 Licinius Sura, Lucius 57 Ligurian Bagienni 146 Lisbon 198 Lloyd, G. E. R. 52–3 Lucan (M. Annaeus Lucanus) 38, 46, 124, 163–7, 184 Bellum Civile 38, 140, 147, 180, 184 Lucretia 124, 191 luxury 95–8, 107–12, 114–21, 163, 199 Lyceum 22 Lycurgus 20 lynx 162 Machimos 84 Magusus 130 manticores 85 maps 23, 131–5, 158 Marchetti, Sandra Citroni 8, 10, 162 Masada 117–18 Mater Matuta 156

229

Mauretania 61, 136, 143, 163 Maxalla 161 Meadow 30, 206, 210 Medes 80 medicine 95, 132–3 Mela, Pomponius 61, 120–1, 135, 182 Chorographia 135, 182 meta (turning-post) 175 metal 6, 38, 60 metaphors 25, 36, 40, 45, 63, 66, 162 Middle Ages 41, 91, 211 Miglis Gemella 161 military 31, 134, 162–3, 167 Minaeans 101–3 minerals 6, 38, 80 Misenum 3 misers 65 Mithridates 162 Monocoli 165 monsters 58, 85, 90–1 moon 74 mountain passes 153–4 mountains 137, 148 Aetna 63 Alps 133, 146–8, 152 Atlas 131, 163 Emodus 149 Gyri 161 Haemus 133 Imaus 149 Libanus 152 Niphates 149 Pelion 21 Pyrenaeus 142 Soracte 31 Ripaean 81, 119, 149 Taurus 116, 145, 149–51, 153 Vesulus 146 Vesuvius 53 Mysians 83

230

Index

Nabata 157 Natural History (Pliny the Elder) passim aYnity as a structuring device in 31, 47–53, 136, 140, 158, 191 authorial voice in 9, 10 citation of sources 53–60 completeness of 35, 60, 84, 130, 141, 161, 167, 202 compilation of 21, 34, 190–3 contrast as a structuring device in 14, 18, 42, 83, 127, 151, 206 credibility of 9, 21 digressions 21, 30–1, 37, 44, 131 division in 29, 31, 37, 45, 84, 136, index or table of contents of 39, 161, 206 moralizing in 4, 31, 80 multi-vocality of 4, 18 order in 34, 61, 131, 136, 161, 165 structure of 24, 29–30, 35, 37, 63, 69, 197 style of 34–5 unity of 49, 162 Nereids 198 Nero, emperor 97, 141–2, 163, 198 Nicolet, Claude 14, 23, 156 Nietzsche, Friedrich 40–1 Nile, see rivers Norden, Eduard 168, 170, 179 Numa 20 obelisks 51 oceans 136, 144, 159 Oceanus 80, 171, 176, 178 oikoumene 81–2, 84 see also orbis terrarum

Olympus 84 oratory, orators 67, 161, 185 orbis terrarum 129–36, 142, 157, 164 Oreges 149 Oroandes 149 Ostia 202–4 otherness 78, 131, 134 Otho, M. Salvius 57 Ovid 34, 38, 154, 160 Ex Ponto 154, 161 Metamorphoses 38, 184 Tristia 154 palaces 94, 199 Palodes 199 Pan 199–200 Panchaia 84 Pannonia 78, 213 Paphos, temple of Venus at 57 paradoxography 21–2, 57, 80, 85, 91, 114 Pariades 149 Parthian Empire 176 Paxoi 199 Pege 161 pegmata 156 Penelope 199 periphery (of the world) 18, 20, 63, 172–3, 213–14 Persians 21, 43, 80 Petronius 125, 163, 200 Satyricon 200 Phaethon 146 Philae 144 Philip V of Macedon 132 philology 80 Phoenicia 79–80, 152 Phoenix 61 Pillars of Heracles 78, 131, 177–8, 180 see also meta Piso, Domitius 34

Index Plato 21, 83 Critias 83 Laws 83 Republic 21, 61, 83, 141 Timaeus 83, 151 Pliny the Elder passim works other than Natural History: A Wne AuWdi Bassi 9, 125 Bella Germaniae 9 De dubio sermone 9 De iaculatione equestri 9 Studiosi 9 see also Natural History Pliny the Younger 9, 34, 76, 60, 86, 122–3, 126, 146 Plutarch 20, 65–6, 128, 199 Life of Caesar 65–6 Life of Crassus 65–6 Life of Sertorius 128 Life of Theseus 20 On the Cessation of Oracles 199 Po, see under rivers poikilia 38 Polybius 74, 85, 132, 148, 156 Polyphemus 92 Pompeii 4 Pompeius Magnus, Gnaeus 157, 162 Pomponius Secundus 3, 17 Portae Caucasiae 153 Porticus Vipsania 23, 157 Poseidon 83 Posidonius 43, 78, 181 Praetorian Guard 163, 202 primitivism 25, 88, 165, 170–4, 186–7 Propontis 46 Pterophoros 119 Ptolemy 51, 134, 166 Purcell, Nicholas 130–1, 147, 175 purple 96–101

231

Puteoli 52 pygmies 90 Pythagoreans 92 Pytheas of Massalia 78, 179–80, 182–3 Quinctilius Varus 167 Quintilian (M. Fabius Quintilianus) 56, 140 Rachias 108–11 Rapsa 161 research 31, 53, 84, 180 rhinoceros 162 river-gods 110–16, 138–40, 155, 159–60 rivers 115–17, 131, 137–48, 155, 159–60 Addua 146 Albis 166 Amisia 166 Araxes 141, 159 Clitumnus 138–40, 146 Danube 137, 140–6, 186 Dasibari 161 Duria 145–6 Eridanus 146 Euphrates 116, 146–50 Garunna 142 Iactus 146 Jordan 115–20, 145, 147, 155 Lambrus 146 Minicius 146 Nathabur 161 Nile 141–4, 147, 198 Nilides 141 Ollius 146 Orgus 146 Orontes 141 Oxus 85 Po (Padus) 132, 145–7, 202 Scaldis 142 Sequana 142

232

Index

rivers (cont.): Sesites 146 Stura 146 Tamaris 56 Tanarus 145 Ticinus 146 Tigris 138, 144–5, 163 Trebia 146 Vistula 78 Visurgis 166, 171 roads 101–2 Rome 15, 20, 31, 52, 71, 78, 131, 161, 165, 167, 173–6, 188, 193 Romm, James 179 Romulus 20 rulers 53, 61, 94, 145, 147, 163 rulership 131, 161 Sabaeans 101 Sabota 101–4, 110 St Augustine 90 St Elmo’s Wre 207 Salamis 64 Sallust (Gaius Sallustius Crispus) 46, 80 Bellum Jugurthinum 80 Saltus Teutoburgiensis 166–7 Samaria 136 Sardinia 156 Sariba 101, 106 Sarmatians 176, 182 satire 97, 113, 165 Scandinavia 182 scepticism 9 Sciapodae 89, 91 science 38, 53, 160, 212 Scotland 183 sculpture 38 Scythia 79, 82, 90, 94 sea-monsters 61, 186 see also whales Sempronius Gracchus, Ti. 156

senators 96, 114, 131, 155, 161 Seneca, see Annaeus Seneca, Lucius Seres 108–11 serpents 30, 150, 203 Servius 55 shame 190–4 Shaw, Brent 87 Sicarii 118 silk 110 slaves 112 snow 91, 114, 145 Solinus, Gaius Iulius 39, 210 Spain 50, 61, 136 Sparta 84 springs 53–60, 85, 114, 161, 206 Stoicism 184 Strabo 59, 87, 90, 115, 141, 181 Geographica 59 Struthopodes 165 Suebi 78, 182 Suetonius (Gaius Sueotonius Tranquillus) 178, 197 De Grammaticis 55 Suetonius Paulinus 54, 111, 144, 202 suicide 95, 120–5, 128, 191 sun 52, 84, 94, 114, 150 sundials 52–3 Syme, Ronald 4, 60 synecdoche 154 Tabudium 161 Tacitus 72, 79, 125, 158, 168, 183, 201 Agricola 183 Annales 154, 167, 176, 201 Germania 79, 136, 145, 154, 154, 163, 167, 176, 201 Tamiagi 161 Taprobane 15, 105–13, 214 Tarquinius Priscus, Lucius 191

Index

233

Tarquinius Superbus, Lucius 191 taxes 91, 147 terebinth 100 Thamous 199 Thapsagum 161 Theophrastus 53 Theopompus 84 Thoas 35 Tiber 133, 138, 140, 189 see also rivers Tiberius, emperor 159, 166, 180, 196, 198–201 tituli 160–1 Titus, emperor 59–60, 114, 155, 162, 194, 204 toga praetexta 139 Tomis 133 trade 4, 77–8, 91, 146 Trajan, emperor 140, 163 transgression 177 trees 31, 80, 86, 99–102, 163, 168 tributaries 74, 145 Trimalchio 200–1 Triton 198, 202 triumphs 139, 154–8, 160–4 Trogodytes 136 Trojans 80 Troy 83 Turranius Gracilis 61

Varro, Marcus, Terentius 13, 43, 196, 204, 208 Disciplinae 13, 196, 210 Vatican Circus 52 Velleius Paterculus 159, 167 Vergil (Publius Vergilius Maro) 35, 43, 46, 159, 177 Aeneid 139, 144, 159, 174–5, 183 Georgics 43, 140, 211 Vespasian 97, 114, 157, 162, 198, 204 Vesuvius 4, 53 Vipsanius Agrippa, Marcus 23, 157, 189 virgins of Miletus 191 virtue 165 Viscera 161 Vitellius Aulus 57, 134 Vitruvius 43, 60, 104, 109 Vulcan 159

Umbria 139 unicorns 85 usury 60, 64, 67 Utica 124 Utopias 77, 83–4, 120

Xerxes 141

Valerii 35 Valerius Soranus, Quintus 206

Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew 14, 98 wealth 31, 47–8, 91, 135, 138, 162 West Africa 158 whales 202–3 Wilde, Oscar 41 women 81, 84, 140, 144

Yoga 91 Zeno 83 Zeus 83 Zoaranda 145 zoology 31, 96, 144, 150, 160 Zoroaster 10, 19

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