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PLINY THE ELDER (CAIUS PLINIUS SECUNDUS) was born of a wealthy provincial family, either at Verona or at Comum (Como), in 23 A.D. He had an excellent education, came early to Rome, and was soon introduced to civil and military office. He commanded a troop of cavalry in Germany, saw service in Africa and in Gaul, was for some time governor in Spain, and at the time of his death was in command of a fleet at Misenum. He perished of suffocation in the eruption of Vesuvius, 79 A.D., drawn, by insatiable curiosity, to the scene of the great convulsion. He was an intimate friend of the Emperor Vespasian and his son Titus, to whom the Natural History is dedicated. It was published 77 A.D., when its author was 54.
Although we know only a few facts of the life of Pliny, we know the man intimately from the beautiful letters of his nephew, Caius Plinius Cæcilius. They paint him as a man of estimable character, of generous, wise, and tranquil spirit, of fabulous industry, and of indomitable energy. He is one of the highest types of the supremely busy, cultivated, self-reliant, and many-sided natures who showed such splendid material and intellectul civilization in the early ages of the Roman Empire. By its moral corruption and social rottenness Pliny was not more disturbed than were the other leading men of his age.
Pliny's great work, Naturalis Historia, or Survey of Nature, was a general view of all that was known of the physical constitution of the world, with all its contents, mineral, vegetable, animal, and human. He himself calls it an Encyclopedia; a term he first made familiar and, as he justly boasts, he was the first in Greece or Rome to undertake the task. It was the result of almost superhuman energy; for, notwithstanding his active service on civil and military duty, and incessant labours, forensic and official, he published, at the age of 54, what has been justly called an astounding monument of industry. He laboured, as his nephew tells us, night and day, rose habitually at midnight, and whether at the bath, at meals, or on a journey, he was incessantly listening to books read to him, or dictating extracts and notes. He said the Emperor claimed his days, but he could dispose of his nights. We are asssured that he collected 20,000 extracts from 2000 works. And thus his Encyclopedia, says Humboldt, surpasses in the richness of its contents, any other production of antiquity; it is, as his nephew says, nec minus varium quam ipsa Natura: "as manifold as Nature herself."
It would be in vain to ask for success in an undertaking so manifestly premature. Without any science but Mathematics and Astronomy, and those far from complete, it was utterly impossible to construct even a provisional synthesis of the physical world. Pliny was neither philosopher, nor acute thinker, nor even accurate observer. He was not even a careful compiler, and he was entirely without critical judgment. But he aimed at results less profound than those achieved by Aristotle or Hipparchus. He attempted only a vast encyclopedia of literary information on the physical phenomena of the world. It was confined to concrete knowledge, and it did not purport to be original research. And such was his industry, and such his enthusiasm to reach some co-ordination of man's practical knowledge of this world, that his work, though not one of philosophy or discovery, was the most valuable contribution to science between the great age of the Alexandrian Museum and the dawn of modern science with Roger Bacon and Copernicus. It served as a provisional scheme of the correlations of physical Nature.
It is needless to dilate on the shortcomings of Pliny as observer and thinker. He has been severely criticized by Cuvier and Humboldt. His work has been compared to that of Buffon and also to that of Humboldt. But both of these were original observers, and one at least was a great thinker. Pliny was essentially a compiler. Still, there are two qualities in his work which give it a very high place. The first is the vast mass of recorded observation and reflection which he has preserved from oblivion; so that there are whole fields of ancient science, both abstract and concrete, the results of which are only known to us through Pliny. The second great quality of his work is the definite conception of the unity of Nature and the interdependence of the sciences. This conception of his--vastly inferior as it is to the truly philosophic synthesis of Aristotle, and though Pliny in his passion for miscellaneous information seems often to stray from it himself--breaks out again and again in striking thoughts, which seem to anticipate the spirit of positive science. Buffon, in his first discourse, has given us a fine estimate of Pliny, who, he says, "not only knew all that could be known in his age, but had that gift of looking at things on a grand scale which doubles the power of science. He inspires the reader with a breadth of view and a boldness of thought which is the root of philosophy."
In religious philosophy, Pliny was a scientific Pantheist; indeed he would now be called an Agnostic materialist. His work opens (bk. ii. § 1) with a passage of singular eloquence. "It is reasonable to hold this World, and the environment around it, whereon all things exist, to be the Deity: eternal, boundless, without beginning, and without end. To speculate on what is beyond this World of ours is no business of man, and is beyond the powers of the human mind. It is sacred, eternal, immeasurable, complete in its totality, or rather is itself totality" -- and so forth, in a vein almost similar to Hegel. He then discusses, or rather declines to speculate on, the nature of the Supreme Being, in the language of modern Pantheism.
There is a fine sentence in his opening chapter on Man (bk. vii. § 1) -- which Humboldt has taken as the motto of his Cosmos -- "We should be constantly losing sight of the power and majesty of Nature if we persist in studying it in detail without a conception of its unity." But perhaps the finest thought in Pliny -- an aphorism which may well stand for the last word of Ancient Science -- is the immortal phrase: "Deus est mortali juvare mortalem, et hœc ad œternam gloriam via. Hac proceres iere Romani" ("God means--Man giving succour to man: this is the way that leads to glory everlasting. It has been trodden by the chiefs of Rome"). The idea reminds us of Diderot and his fellow-Encyclopedists, whom Pliny, in rudimentary and empirical form, often suggests, although the encyclopedia of Pliny, unlike that of Aristotle or of Diderot, ignored the moral, social, and historical facts of humanity, and took small account of scientific precision at all. It is supremely interesting to see how near the great Romans of the early Empire came to the conception of Humanity as the dominant ideal of human life, at the very time when the appalling corruption of society around them was preparing for the ruin of the entire material and intellectual fabric in which they felt so much just pride.
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| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
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