The Sky, Man, the Elephant

For sheer pleasure of reading, I would advise anyone taking up Pliny the Elder’s Natural History to focus mainly on three books: the two containing the fundamentals of his philosophy, that is to say Book 2 (on cosmography) and Book 7 (on man), and – for an example of his unique blend of erudition and fantasy – Book 8 (on land animals). Of course you can discover astonishing pages everywhere: in the books on geography (3–6), on aquatic animals, entomology and comparative anatomy (9–11), on botany, agronomy and pharmacology (12–32), or those on metals, precious stones and the fine arts (33–37).

It has always been the case, I believe, that people do not read Pliny, they go to Pliny to consult him, both to find out what the ancients knew or thought they knew about a certain topic, and to winkle out bizarre facts and curiosities. On this latter point one cannot ignore Book 1, an index of the whole work, whose charm derives from unpredictable juxtapositions: ‘Fish which have a small stone in their head; Fish which hide in winter; Fish which are influenced by the stars; Fish which have fetched extraordinary prices’; or ‘Roses: 12 varieties, 32 drugs; Lilies: 3 varieties, 21 drugs; Plants which grow from an exudation; Narcissus: 3 varieties; 16 drugs; The plant whose seed can be dyed to produce coloured flowers; Saffron: 20 drugs; Where the best flowers grow; What flowers were known at the time of the Trojan war; Floral patterns in clothes.’ Or again, ‘The nature of metals; Of gold; Of the amount of gold possessed by the ancients; Of the equestrian order and the right to wear gold rings; How many times the equestrian order has changed name’. But Pliny is also an author who deserves an extended read, for the measured movement of his prose, which is enlivened by his admiration for everything that exists and his respect for the infinite diversity of all phenomena.

We could distinguish Pliny the poet and philosopher, with his awareness for the universe, his sympathy for knowledge and mystery, from Pliny the neurotic collector of data, the compulsive compiler of facts, whose sole concern appears to be not to waste any note from his gigantic collection of index cards. (In his use of written sources he was both omnivorous and eclectic, but not uncritical: there were facts he recorded as true, others to which he gave the benefit of the doubt, others he rejected as obvious nonsense. The only problem is that his method of evaluation appears to be extremely inconsistent and unpredictable.) However, once one admits the existence of these two sides to him, one has to recognise that Pliny is just one writer, just as the world he wants to describe is just one world though it contains a great variety of forms. To achieve his objective, he is not afraid of trying to embrace the infinite number of existing forms in the world, which in turn is multiplied by the countless number of reports which exist about all these forms, since forms and reports both have the same right to be part of natural history and to be examined by someone who seeks in them that sign of a higher reason which he is convinced they must contain.

For Pliny the world is the eternal sky which was not created by anyone, and whose spherical, rotating vault covers all earthly things (2.2). But the world is difficult to distinguish from God, who for Pliny and the Stoic culture which he embraced is a single deity that cannot be identified with any single portion or aspect, nor with the crowd of Olympian gods (apart perhaps from the Sun, which is the soul, mind or spirit of the heavens (2.13)). But at the same time the sky is composed of stars as eternal as God (the stars weave the sky and at the same time they are interwoven into the heavenly fabric: ‘aeterna caelestibus est natura intexentibus mundum intextuque concretis’, 2.30), and is also the air (both above and below the moon) which seems empty and diffuses down here the vital spirit, generating clouds, hail, thunder, lightning and storms (2.102).

When we talk of Pliny we never know to what extent the ideas he advances can be attributed directly to him. He is scrupulous about putting down as little as possible of his own, and sticking closely to what his sources say: this conforms to his impersonal view of knowledge which excludes individual originality. To try to understand his real view of nature, what role is played in it by the arcane majesty of principles and what by the material existence of the elements, we have to restrict ourselves to what is definitely his own, to what the substance of his prose conveys. His discussion of the moon, for instance, blends together two elements: first a note of deep-felt gratitude for this ‘ultimate star, the star most familiar to those who live on earth, their remedy against the dark’ (‘novissimum sidus, terris familiarissimum et in tenebrarum remedium’) and for everything her changing phases and eclipses teach us; and second the nimble practicality of his phrasing, both of which combine to convey the moon’s function with crystalline clarity. It is in this astronomical section of Book 2 that Pliny proves that he can be more than just the mere compiler of data with a taste for the bizarre that we usually think of. Here he shows that he possesses the main strength of great scientific writers of the future: the ability to communicate the most complex argument with limpid clarity, drawing from it a sense of harmony and beauty.

All this is done without ever veering towards abstract speculation. Pliny always sticks to the facts (to what he or his source considers facts): he does not accept an infinity of worlds because this world alone is already difficult enough to understand and an infinity would not simplify the problem (2.4). He does not believe the heavenly spheres produce sound, whether that sound be a roar too great to be heard or an ineffable harmony, because ‘for us who are inside it, the world slips round day and night in silence’ (2.6).

Having stripped God of the anthropomorphic trappings which myths attributed to the Olympian gods, Pliny is forced by this logic of his to bring God closer again to humans since this logical necessity has limited his powers (in fact in one respect God is less free than man since he could not kill himself even if he wanted to). God cannot resurrect the dead, nor make someone who has been alive never have lived; he has no power over the past, over the irreversibility of time (2.27). Like Kant’s God, he cannot enter into conflict with the autonomy of reason (he cannot prevent ten plus ten making twenty), but to delimit him in this way would distance us from Pliny’s pantheistic identification of him as immanent in nature (‘per quae declaratur haut dubie naturae potentia idque esse quod deum vocamus’ (these facts unquestionably prove the power of nature, which is what we call God), 2.27).

The lyricism, or rather the mixture of philosophy and lyricism which dominates the early chapters of Book 2 reflects a vision of universal harmony which is soon shattered: a substantial part of the book is devoted to heavenly portents. Pliny’s scientific method hovers between a desire to find an order in nature and the recording of what is extraordinary and unique, and it is the latter tendency which always prevails in the end. Nature is eternal, sacred and harmonious, but it leaves a wide margin for the occurrence of miraculous, inexplicable phenomena. What general conclusion should we draw from all this? That in fact nature’s order is a monstrous order, composed entirely of exceptions to rules? Or that her rules are so complex as to lie beyond our understanding? In either case, there must be an explanation for every occurrence, even though it may be unknown to us at present: ‘All these are things of uncertain explanation and hidden in the majesty of nature’ (2.101), or a little later on, ‘Adeo causa non deest’ (There must be some cause for this) (2.115): it is not that there is no cause, some explanation can always be found. Pliny’s rationalism upholds the logic of cause and effect, but at the same time it minimalises it: even when you find an explanation for the facts, the facts do not thereby cease to be miraculous.

This last maxim acts as the conclusion to a chapter on the mysterious origin of the winds: perhaps folds in mountains, concave valleys in which gusts of wind rebound like echoes, a grotto in Dalmatia in which throwing even the lightest object is enough to unleash a storm at sea, a rock in Cyrenaica which you just have to touch with your hand to stir up a sandstorm. Pliny gives us plenty of these catalogues of strange, unconnected facts: catalogues of the effects of thunderbolts on man, causing cold wounds (the only plant not attacked by thunderbolts is the laurel, the only bird the eagle, 2.146), lists of strange things that rain from the sky (milk, blood, meat, iron or iron spunges, wool, bricks, 2.147).

Yet Pliny dismisses a large number of fanciful ideas, such as comets presaging the future: for instance, he rejects the belief that the appearance of a comet between the pudenda of a constellation – what did the ancients NOT see in the sky! – foretells a period of loose morals (‘obscenis autem moribus in verendis partibus signorum’, 2.93). Yet every strange event is for him a problem of nature, in that it represents a variation from the norm. Pliny rejects superstitions, yet he is not always able to recognise them himself, and this is particularly so in Book 7, where he discusses human nature: he quotes the most abstruse beliefs even regarding facts which are extremely easy to check. The chapter on menstruation is typical (7.63–66), but it has to be noted that Pliny’s account is of a piece with the most ancient religious taboos regarding menstrual blood. There is a whole network of analogies and traditional values that does not clash with Pliny’s rationality, almost as if the latter was founded on the same bedrock. Consequently he is sometimes inclined to construct explanations based on poetic or psychological analogies: ‘Men’s corpses float on their back, women’s on their front, as if nature wanted to respect the modesty of women even after death’ (7.77).

It is only very rarely that Pliny quotes facts that he himself has witnessed directly: ‘I have seen at night, while the sentries were on guard in front of the trenches, lights in the shape of a star shining on the soldiers’ lances’(2.101); ‘When Claudius was Emperor, we saw a centaur which he ordered to be sent from Egypt, conserved in honey’ (7.35); ‘I myself saw when in Africa a citizen of Thysdritum change from woman into man on the day of her wedding’ (7.36).

But for a researcher like Pliny, who was in a sense the first martyr of empirical science, since he would die asphyxiated by the fumes of Vesuvius when it erupted, direct observation occupies a minimal place in his work, and counts neither more nor less than what he reads in books, which for him were all the more authoritative the older they were. At best he admits his uncertainty, saying: ‘However, I would not give my word for the majority of these facts, preferring as I do to rely on the sources, to whom I refer you in all cases of doubt: I will never tire of citing the Greek sources, since they are not only the most ancient but also the most precise in observation’ (7.8).

After this preamble Pliny feels he is now authorised to launch into the famous list of ‘miraculous and incredible’ characteristics of certain foreign races which was to be so popular in the Middle Ages and afterwards, and was to transform geography into a kind of living freak show. (Its echoes will continue even in the accounts of true journeys, such as those of Marco Polo.) That the unknown lands at the edge of the Earth harbour beings who border on the human, should not surprise us: the Arimaspians with one single eye in the middle of their forehead, who fight the griffins for possession of the gold mines; the inhabitants of the forests of Abarymon, who run at full speed with their feet turned backwards; the androgynous inhabitants of Nasamona who change sex when they couple; the Thybians who have two pupils in one eye, and the figure of a horse in the other. But this huge circus reserves its most spectacular stunts for India, where one can encounter a mountain tribe of hunters who have the head of a dog; and another of leaping dancers who have just one leg, and who when they want to rest in the shade, lie down raising their single foot up as a parasol; and another race still, this time nomads, whose legs are in the shape of serpents; while the Astomi who have no mouth, live by sniffing odours. In the midst of all this there are also accounts which we now know to be true, like the description of the Indian fakirs (Pliny calls them gymnosophist philosophers), or which continue to feed the mysterious reports which we read in our newspapers (Pliny’s mention of enormous footprints could refer to the Himalayan Yeti), or legends which will be handed down for centuries to come, like that of the healing powers of kings (King Pyrrhus cured diseases of the spleen by the laying on of his big toe).

All this produces a dramatic view of human nature, as something precarious and unstable: man’s shape and destiny hang by a very thin thread. Several pages are dedicated to the unpredictability of childbirth: its difficulties, perils and exceptional cases. This too is a frontier zone: whoever exists might also not exist, or exist in a different form, and childbirth is the moment when everything is decided:

In pregnant women everything, for example even the way they walk, influences the child’s birth: if they eat food that is too salty, the baby will be born without nails; if they do not know how to hold their breath, the birth is much more difficult; even a yawn during the birth can be fatal; similarly, a sneeze during intercourse can cause a miscarriage. Whoever considers how precarious is the birth of the proudest living being can only feel pity and shame: often even the smell of a lamp that has just been put out can cause a miscarriage. And to think that such fragile origins can produce a powerful tyrant or murderer. You who rely on your physical strength, who enjoy the benefits of Fortune, and consider yourself not her temporary ward but her son, who think you are a god the minute some success makes you puff out your chest, just think how little it would have taken to destroy you! (7.42–44)

It is easy to understand why Pliny was popular in the Christian Middle Ages, when he produced maxims like this: ‘in order to weigh up life properly, one must always remind oneself of human fragility.’

Human beings form an area of the living world which must be defined by carefully drawing its boundaries: that is why Pliny records the extreme limits reached by man in every field, and Book 7 becomes something like today’s Guinness Book of Records. Quantitative records above all, records of strength in lifting weights, of speed in running, of keen hearing, of memory, and even of the area of lands conquered. But there are also purely moral records, records of virtue, generosity and goodness. There are also extremely bizarre records: Antonina, Drusus’ wife, who never spat; the poet Pomponius who never belched (7.80); or the highest price paid for a slave (the grammar tutor Daphnis cost 700,000 sesterces, 7.128).

Only in one aspect of human life does Pliny not feel like quoting records or attempting measurements or comparisons: in happiness. It is impossible to decide who is happy and who is not, since it depends on subjective and debatable criteria (‘Felicitas cui praecipua fuerit homini, non est humani iudicii, cum prosperitatem ipsam alius alio modo et suopte ingenio quisque determinet’, 7.130). If one wants to face the truth without illusions, no man can be said to be happy: and here Pliny’s anthropological survey lists examples of illustrious destinies (mostly taken from Roman history), to prove that the men most favoured by fortune had to tolerate considerable unhappiness and misfortune.

It is impossible to force that variable which is destiny into the natural history of man: this is the sense of the pages that Pliny devotes to the vicissitudes of fortune, to the unpredictability of the length of any life, to the pointlessness of astrology, to disease and death. The separation between the two forms of knowledge which astrology held together – the objective nature of calculable and predictable phenomena and the feeling of the individual existence with its uncertain future – this separation which acts as a premiss for modern science could be said to be already present in these pages, but in the form of a question that has still not been definitively resolved, and for which one must collect exhaustive documentation. In adducing his examples in this area, Pliny seems to falter: every event that happens, every biography, every anecdote, can serve to prove that life, if considered from the point of view of the person living it, cannot be evaluated either in quantity or quality, cannot be measured or compared to other lives. Its value is intrinsic to itself; so much so that hopes and fears about an afterlife are illusory: Pliny shares the view that death is followed by another non-existence which is equivalent and symmetrical to the nonexistence before birth.

That is why Pliny’s attention concentrates on the things of this world, the heavenly bodies and the territories of the globe, as well as animals, plants and stones. The soul, which cannot survive death, if it turns in upon itself, can only enjoy being alive in the present. ‘Etenim si dulce vivere est, cui potest esse vixisse? At quanto facilius certiusque sibi quemque credere, specimen securitas antegenitali sumere experimento!’ (If it is sweet to live, who can find it sweet to have done living? Yet how much easier and safer it is just to rely on yourself, and to model your own peace of mind on your experience before birth) (7.190). ‘Model your own peace of mind on your experience before birth’: in other words, project yourself into contemplating your own absence, the only secure reality both before we came into the world and after we die. For the same reason we should also rejoice at recognising that infinite variety of what is different from us that Pliny’s Natural History parades before our eyes.

But if man is defined by his limits, can he not also be defined by the peaks of his excellence? Pliny feels duty-bound to include in Book 7 the glorification of man’s virtues, the celebration of his triumphs: he turns to Roman history as if it were the register of every virtue, and he is tempted to find a pompous conclusion by indulging in an imperial encomium which would allow him to signal the peak of human perfection in the figure of Caesar Augustus. But I would say that this tone is not typical of Pliny’s treatment of his material: rather it is the tentative, limiting, almost bitter note that best suits his temperament.

We could recognise here some questions which accompanied the setting up of anthropology as a science. Must an anthropological science try to avoid a ‘humanist’ perspective in order to attain the objectivity of a natural science? Do the men in Book 7 count all the more, the more different, the more ‘other’ they are from us, the more they are no longer or not yet men? But is it possible for man to escape his own subjectivity to such an extent that he can make himself the object of a science? The moral which Pliny repeats invites caution and wariness: no science can enlighten us on felicitas, fortuna, on the mixture of good and evil in a life, on the values of existence; every individual dies and takes his secret with him to the grave.

Pliny could end this section on this disconsolate note, but he prefers to add a list of discoveries and inventions, both real and legendary. Anticipating those modern anthropologists who maintain that there is a continuity between biological evolution and technological development, from palaeolithic tools to electronics, Pliny implicitly admits that the additions made by man to nature become an integral part themselves of nature. This is but a step away from claiming that the true nature of man is culture. But Pliny does not know how to generalise, and seeks the specifics of human achievement in inventions and customs which can be considered universal. There are three cultural facts, according to Pliny (or his sources), upon which a tacit accord has been reached between peoples (‘gentium consensus tacitus’, 7.210): the adoption of the (Greek and Roman) alphabet; the shaving of men’s faces by a barber; and the marking of the hours of the day on a sundial.

This triad could not be more bizarre nor debatable in its incongruous grouping of the three terms: alphabet, barber, sundial. In fact it is not true that all peoples have similar systems for writing, nor that they shave their beard, and as for the hours of the day, Pliny himself devotes some pages to a brief history of the various systems of dividing time. I am not trying here to underline a ‘Eurocentric’ perspective, which in fact is not typical of Pliny or his age, but rather the direction in which he moves: the intent to establish the elements which are constantly repeated in the most diverse cultures, in order to define what is specifically human, will become a principle of method in modern ethnology. And once he has established this point about the ‘gentium consensus tacitus’, Pliny can close his treatment of humanity and move on ‘ad reliqua animalia’, to the other animate beings.

Book 8, which reviews the living creatures of the earth, begins with the elephant, to which the longest chapter is devoted. Why is the elephant accorded this priority? Obviously because it is the biggest animal (and Pliny’s treatment of living creatures continues according to an order of importance which largely coincides with that of physical size); but also and particularly because spiritually this is the animal ‘closest to man’! ‘Maximum est elephas proximumque humanis sensibus’, is how Book 8 opens. In fact the elephant – as is explained immediately afterwards – recognises the language of its native land, obeys orders, memorises what he learns, can experience the passion of love and the ambition for glory, practises virtues which are ‘rare even amongst men’, such as probity, prudence, fairness, and even pays religious homage to the stars, the sun and the moon. Pliny does not waste a single word (except that superlative maximum) on describing this animal, but simply quotes the quaint legends he has found in books: the rites and customs of elephants are presented as though they were those of a people of a different culture to our own but were still worthy of respect and understanding.

In the Natural History man is lost in the middle of the multiform universe, a prisoner of his own imperfection, but on the one hand he has the solace of knowing that God too is limited in his powers (‘Inperfectae vero in homine naturae praecipua solacia, ne deum quidem posse omnia’, 2.27), and on the other he has as his immediate neighbour the elephant, which can be a spiritual model for him. Caught between these two imposing but benign eminences, man certainly appears to be diminished but not crushed.

The survey of land animals moves on – as in a child’s visit to the zoo – from the elephant to the lions, panthers, tigers, camels, giraffes, rhinoceroses and crocodiles. Following a decreasing order of size, we then come to the hyenas, chameleons, porcupines, animals with lairs, and so on down to snails and lizards; pets are grouped together at the end of the book.

The main source here is Aristotle’s Historia Animalium (History of Animate Beings), but Pliny gathers from more credulous or more imaginative authors the legends which Aristotle either rejected or cited merely to refute them. This is the case both for the account of more familiar animals and for the mention and description of fantastic creatures: the list of the latter is mixed up with that of the former. Thus while still discussing elephants, a digression informs us about their natural enemy, dragons; and talking of wolves, Pliny records the legends about werewolves, though he does criticise Greek credulity. This sort of zoology contains the amphisbaena, the basilisk, the catoblepas, the crocotas, corocottas, leucocrotas, leontophons, and mantichores which will migrate from these pages to populate medieval bestiaries.

The natural history of man continues into that of animals for the whole of Book 8, and this is not only because the ideas quoted deal largely with the rearing of pets and the hunting of wild animals, as well as the practical utility which man derives from both kinds; but because the journey Pliny takes us on is also a journey into the human imagination. Animals, real or imaginary, have a privileged place in the realm of fantasy: the minute such an animal is named it is invested with the power of a phantasm, it becomes an allegory, a symbol, an emblem.

That is why I recommend the reader to browse and not to dwell just on the most philosophical Books, 2 and 7, but also on Book 8, since it is the most representative of an idea of nature which is articulated consistently throughout all 37 books of the work: nature as something external to humanity, but which is also indistinguishable from what is innermost in man’s mind, his dictionary of dreams and catalogue of fantasies, without which we can have neither reason nor thought.

[1982]