IV
PLINY THE PLAGIARIST

AD 20—AD 80

FOR THEOPHRASTUS, HERBALISM - the medical uses to which plants could be put - was just one strand in a wide-ranging investigation of plants. That kind of practical, applied knowledge had developed over thousands of years in civilisations much more ancient than the Greeks’. In his own enquiry, Theophrastus had added something new, a philosophical overview. This embraced all plants known at that time, not just the ones from which drugs could be distilled. He started the debate about the correct names for plants. He was interested in the similarities and differences between them, and this led on to suggestions about ways in which they could be grouped. Though hampered by the lack of any precise terms, any specialised vocabulary, he managed nevertheless to describe plants in a concise, succinct fashion. He was interested in their distribution and ecology. He was the first to dealt with fundamental questions, such as the difference between root and shoot, leaf and petal. He asked the first important questions. And was answered by a deafening silence. Almost 2,000 years passed before writers in the Renaissance, with similarly enquiring minds, rediscovered Theophrastus and realised that most of what had happened in between had been a waste of time. Islamic scholars always understood his importance and stayed faithful to his original text. Soon after Alexander’s time, Greek schools had been founded in Syria where scholars translated the work of Aristotle and Theophrastus into the Syrian language. Gradually, the teachings of the Peripatetics spread into Persia and Arabia. The Syrian versions of the texts were translated into Arabic. Arab physicians and philosophers kept Theophrastus alive while Europe was groping through its long Dark Age. It was a long time before these Arab translations were turned back into Latin and Greek and European scholars were in a position to rediscover Theophrastus’s complex, quizzical take on the natural world.

In Europe, the Roman lawyer Pliny (AD 23-79) and the Greek doctor Dioscorides (AD 40-?) became the models, the dubious founts of plant knowledge. Both of them produced compendiums of plants around the same time (AD 77). But neither Pliny nor Dioscorides asked questions. Neither pushed on in any way the complex process of naming plant names. They were copiers, compilers, not thinkers. Dioscorides was a medicine man first, a plantsman second; the medical properties of plants were his chief interest. The lawyer Pliny, whose Natural History was one of the prime source-books on plants from AD 50 to the early sixteenth century, was a Roman Gradgrind. Facts, facts, facts were what he consumed and regurgitated in vast quantities, but without making much of them. He didn’t join them up to come to any conclusions. He showed little discrimination between things that were likely to be true and those that could only be fable.¹ Between them, Dioscorides and Pliny could have expanded the two disciplines, the philosophical and the practical, that Theophrastus so cleverly combined in his work. Instead they reduced the study of plants to its lowest form, of interest only when servicing the needs of man. The two strands, instead of multiplying, were reduced again to one - the herbal.

Writing after Pliny’s death, his nephew, Pliny the Younger, describes his uncle’s voracious appetite for information:

In the winter, he was accustomed to work until between one or two o’clock in the morning or at the shortest until midnight. He could fall asleep at once, no matter at what hour; sometimes even at work he would fall asleep for a few moments and awake again. Before the break of day he would go to the Emperor Vespasian - for he too used to work at night - to receive his orders or to fulfil some commission. Returning home he would study until breakfast time. After a light breakfast, if it was summer, and he had a little leisure, he would lie down in the sun and have a book read to him, taking notes and extracts; for he read nothing without making some excerpts, being accustomed to say that no book was so bad as not to contain something useful. After that, as if another day had dawned, he studied again until dinner time. Even at this principal meal a book was read, and comments written, and this without interrupting the reading. I remember that once upon a time one of his friends present checked the reader, who had given a wrong inflection, and had him read the line over again. ‘But you understood the meaning at the first reading, did you not?’ my uncle asked. The other nodded assent. ‘Why then did you call for the repetition?’ He was so greedy for time. He rose from the dinner table, whether while it was yet daylight in summer, or when in winter it was after dark, always with the same promptness, as if compelled by law. This was his manner of life amid the business and turmoil of the city. In the country the only respite he allowed himself was a daily bath; and when I say that I mean the actual time of the bath; for while the drying and dressing was going on he was either listening or dictating. On his journeyings, as if putting out of mind all business cares, he did nothing else but that; keeping always close beside him a rapid penman, a book, and a writing tablet … For the same purpose even in Rome he had himself carried from place to place in a sedan. I remember well how once in meeting me when I was walking he said: ‘You ought not to lose these hours,’ for he reckoned all time lost that was not given to study. It was by such exertions as these that he brought all those volumes to completion.²

Those volumes included a book on the correct way for a cavalryman to hurl a lance, written while he himself was in command of a cavalry company. His leadership, notes his nephew, ‘was marked equally by courage and prudence’. He managed to contain the life of his friend, Pomponius Secundus, in two books but filled twenty with an epic history of the Roman wars against the Germans, which he compiled while on military service in Germany. He said the subject suggested itself to him in a dream. Even his sleeping time could not be wasted. Three books were devoted to ‘The Student’, a comprehensive guide to oratory from cradle to Senate. While lying low on his estate during the dangerous years of Nero’s reign, he produced eight books on ‘Hesitancies in Public Address’. Imagine, given his own relentless agenda, how wildly irritating he must have found any such vacillation. The waste of it. The squandering of time. Then in AD 77, he completed the Natural History, a vast encyclopaedia of the natural world: cosmology, astronomy, geography, zoology, minerals, metallurgy. And plants.

Uncritical to a fault, Pliny packed in facts in dizzying variety, but at the same time added little new to the existing debate. In his Preface to the Natural History he names a hundred writers whose work he has plundered for his own. That’s a lot of talking books, hours of reading aloud for his poor lector, days of scribbling for his ‘rapid penman’. In fact, he quotes 473 sources, 146 of them Roman, 327 Greek. He borrows more from Aristotle (on animals) and Theophrastus (on plants) than from any other writer. ‘It is impossible,’ he says, ‘sufficiently to admire the pains and care of the ancients, who explored everything and left nothing untried.’³ In the Preface too, he says he has assembled 20,000 facts. Whose ghastly job was it to come up with that figure? It’s a suspiciously round one, but no one since AD 77 has had the will to check it. In all, he describes about 800 plants, dividing them by use: plants for wines and cordials, plants for food, for medicine, for garlands, for bees.

Plate 15: A Roman fountain niche from Baiae in Italy, made of mosaic in the first century AD

Three books (Books IV-VI) are concerned with plants for gardens. There is almost nothing of that in Theophrastus, writing more than 300 years earlier. Just once, in Book VI of his Enquiry into Plants, Theophrastus mentions the roses growing on Mount Pangaeus near Philippi which the local people dig up to plant in their gardens. But Pliny was very fond of his garden at Laurentum, the villa he describes as

planted round with ivy-clad plane trees, green with their own leaves above, and below with the ivy which climbs over trunk and branch and links tree to tree as it spreads across them. Box shrubs grow between the plane trees and outside there is a ring of laurel bushes which add their shade to that of the planes … Between the grass lawns here and there are box shrubs clipped into innumerable shapes, some being letters which spell the gardener’s name or his master’s; small obelisks of box alternate with fruit trees, and then suddenly in the midst of this ornamental scene is what looks like a piece of rural country planted there. The open space in the middle is set off by low plane trees planted on each side; farther off are acanthuses with their flexible glossy leaves, then more box figures and names.⁴

The villa has a circular driveway sweeping round in front of it. In the middle is an island bed, planted with mulberry and fig trees and bordered by a hedge of rosemary and box. In the centre is a vine-covered pergola. This was the beginning of a garden style re-created over and over again through the centuries that followed. On the Italian Riviera, the Edwardian garden designer Harold Peto planted gardens for rich American clients that in style and content could have been lifted straight from Laurentum. The vine-covered pergola has become the hallmark of the kind of property most likely to find its way on to the glossy pages of House and Garden magazine. In Pliny’s garden, an olitor looked after the vegetables; an arborator looked after the trees; a vinitor cared for the vines; an aquarius watered the plants (that was considered a low-grade job, but Ovid in exile said that he wouldn’t mind being one if it meant he could return home). A topiarius clipped the topiary that became wildly fashionable in Roman gardens during the reign of Augustus. Pliny talks of cypress being cut ‘to provide representations of… hunting scenes or fleets of ships’.⁵ The concept of a garden as a place of fancy and of plants grown purely for pleasure does not emerge in Theophrastus. The typical Greek garden of his time is described in an inscription made at Thasos early in the third century BC, on a building used to display official notices in public. It lays down the conditions of a lease for a garden under the general supervision of a priest of the cult of Asclepius. The lease sets out the rent due, but stipulates other conditions too. Periodically, the tenant must provide a bull for sacrifice, keep the walls and latrine in good repair, and cultivate only specified plants: fig trees, myrtle and hazelnuts. In return he can help himself to the wild plants of the field and, at certain hours of the day, have access to public water for irrigation.⁶

The plane tree, still a novelty in Theophrastus’s time, was as highly regarded as a shade tree by the Romans as it had been by the Greeks. Like the Greeks, the Romans brought in plants chiefly from the East, rather than the West. Among the plants that Pliny describes (and which were unknown to Theophrastus) is the cherry, first discovered growing round about Pontus on the southern shores of the Black Sea. It was taken to Rome by Lucullus around 60 BC and quickly spread with the Roman invaders to Germany and Belgium. It was in Britain by AD 46, only three years after the first Roman landings. Romans imported apricots from Armenia, damsons from Damascus in Syria, peaches from Persia. He describes the garlands and swags of foliage and flowers - narcissus, roses, lilies, larkspur - strung on feast days between the pillars of the villa porticos. Garlands and chaplets were put on altars to honour the gods, the lares public and private, the tombs and spirits of the dead.⁷ Theophrastus favoured the roses from Philippi. By Pliny’s time, the most popular roses were said to come from Praeneste and the most sweetly scented from Cyrene in Libya.

Yet though Pliny introduces a new concept - plants to grow for pleasure rather than for food or medicine - and although indefatigable in gathering information, he remains a credulous compiler, not an original thinker. He’s not even a serious researcher; little of what he writes has been gained from first-hand experience (though he does include information about plants he has seen in Germany, an area almost unknown to Theophrastus). He complains about a general ignorance of plants: ‘The reason why more herbs are not familiar is because they are only known to illiterate country people who live among them … The most disgraceful reason for this lack of knowledge is that even those who know refuse to pass on their knowledge, as if they would lose what they impart to others.’⁸ But at the same time, he himself is content to regurgitate information at second-hand. Over the next thousand years, that tendency got worse. Scholars stopped looking at plants, and saw them only through others’ eyes. Personal knowledge of plants faded as derivative knowledge multiplied.

But that second-hand knowledge could at least have been derived from a good primary source. Why were Pliny and Dioscorides, rather than Theophrastus, the models for a later age? In short, because they were there. The direct link that scholars in Western Europe had with Theophrastus came to an end with the burning of the books in Alexandria. He lived on with the Arabs and was finally reintroduced to European scholars of the fifteenth century in a translation made back into Latin from an Arab manuscript discovered in the Vatican Library in Rome. Pliny never got lost and he wrote in a language, Latin, that was ubiquitous in the Middle Ages. Anyone that could read, could read Latin as easily as their own native language. In monasteries and chapterhouses in France, Italy, Germany, England, Pliny’s Natural History was copied, copied and copied again. At least 200 transcripts were made during the Middle Ages and each new copy made the survival of Pliny’s work more secure. Copying was such an immense and expensive labour (there were thirty-seven books of it after all) that the manuscript copies were looked after extremely well. The advent of printing made his survival even more certain. By the fifteenth century, only shortly after the famous bible emerged from the Gutenberg press, Joanes Spira had issued the first printed edition of Pliny’s book in Venice (1469). Long before Christopher Columbus ever sailed to America, twenty-three separate editions of Pliny had been printed. Italian printers quickly followed Spira’s lead and brought out their own editions in Brescia, Milan, Parma, Rome, Treviso and Verona. Over the next fifty years, printers in Paris, Basel, Lyons, Frankfurt, Cologne, London, Heidelberg, Strasbourg, Frankfurt, Geneva, Leiden and Vienna followed suit. These were all Latin editions, but Pliny was translated into Italian by 1476. Versions in French, Dutch and German quickly followed. For a thousand benighted years, all that European scholars knew of Theophrastus were those passages of his Enquiry bowdlerised by Pliny.

Pliny began his professional career in Germany, where, at the age of twenty-three, he joined the Roman army of occupation. He ended it in the Bay of Naples where, as commander of a naval fleet, he had been sent to suppress piracy. In the summer of AD 79 the fleet was at anchor in the Tyrrhene sea, sheltering behind what is now known as the Punta di Miseno, close to Vesuvius. On 22 August, at about noon, a cloud in the shape of a huge Italian pine, with a straight trunk and horizontal branches, is seen to rise from the crater of the volcano. Pliny commandeers a small, light sailing boat and sets out to get a closer view of the strange phenomenon. Then comes the earthquake and the volcano’s frightful eruption. Molten lava and red-hot ashes pour from the volcano’s mouth. Pliny sees immediately that the eruption has put in danger the lives of everyone living under the mountain. As they have no way of escaping except by sea, he orders the fleet to sail to the rescue. Showers of burning stones and ash fall on his ship. His sailors are terrified, but their commander quietly continues to dictate to his amanuensis his own observations on the volcano and its effects. Pliny goes ashore at a point where a friend of his has a country estate. He finds the local villagers already provided with boats, but a strong, onshore wind prevents them getting away. Meanwhile, the dangers of remaining on land increase with every hour. When night falls, Pliny, as if to inspire courage in others, takes his customary bath. He eats dinner and goes to bed as usual. Towards morning the falls of stone and ash increase violently. The earthquake shocks become much more frequent. Pliny’s servants wake him up, fearing that the porch on which he has made his bed will get buried under the falling ash. It seems inevitable that all the buildings around will be demolished as the stones spewed out from the volcano fall thickly around. For protection, people bind cushions and pillows about their heads and rush down to the beach. Unfortunately the waves are still high and the winds unfavourable. It is not possible for anyone to get on board the ships waiting offshore. Although it is now daytime, everything at land and sea is still as dark as night, the sun obscured by the ash of the volcano. The blackness is pierced only by vivid flashes of lightning and flames that burst out with sudden ferocity from the great cracks opening up in the earth. The inhabitants rush backwards and forwards in a frenzy of despair. Pliny, helped by two slaves, rises from his couch and, overcome by sulphur fumes, falls dead. The great cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii are completely buried by ash and lava.⁹ Almost 2,000 years later, researchers analysing pollen grains trapped in the ash find that while Vesuvius was venting its terrible load, southernwood, myrtle, asters, pinks, mallow, campanula, lychnis, cerastium and plantain were blooming in the garden of the House of the Chaste Lovers at Pompeii.

Plate 16: A rose, economically shown with three different kinds of flower springing from the same bush, in a manuscript made in northern Islam AD 1083