The preface to Pliny the Elder’s Natural History stands out among introductions to ancient books for being particularly self-deprecating. That’s partly because, as a work addressed to an emperor, it has to approach its dedicatee in a cringing way. The other half of the problem is that Pliny seems disaffected with his own subject matter. That’s “nature,” as the title of the work suggests: a “sterilis materia,” Pliny calls it, nobody’s idea of a good time to read or write about.
There’s a pun in the Latin that suggests Pliny is playing a trick on the reader. “Natura” is that which “gives birth” to everything, so how could it be sterile? Why isn’t it generative at the level of description, too? How come nature can “give birth” to everything except a lively prose style through which to represent itself?
Another way of putting the same question is to ask “what’s nature, really?” Implicit in the prologue is a sense of nature as a given object that Pliny, like other encyclopedists before him, aims to represent in a culturally legible form. The task of representing nature then imposes its own imperatives, notably and problematically the imperative to completeness. The necessary capaciousness and universality of Pliny’s imitation is what makes nature into a sterilis materia, paradoxically forcing a kind of deadness on “life” (id est, vita) by pursuing its imitation ever outward into a bad infinity. An endless scope, no room for making selections or anothologizing: Pliny’s putative approach is rather like that of Borges’ librarian of Babel, cataloguing an archive that, just because of its infinite extent, can’t mean anything to anyone.
Fortunately for those of us who work on him, the method actually on display in Pliny’s NH could hardly be further from the description of it that he offers in the prologue. In the preface, Pliny insists that the true representation of nature has no room for rhetorical figures or the kind of mirabilia that make the thaumasiographical tradition so engaging; from book 2 onward, however (book 1 is an index and list of auctores), Pliny violates both these rules more or less routinely. His talents as a rhetorician and stylist are debatable (in Antike kunstprosa Eduard Norden stigmatizes Pliny as, basically, the worst, which I think is unfair), but Pliny’s bent for reporting miracles and freaks of nature means we should probably locate him within, rather than in opposition to, the genre of thaumasiography.
The task of depicting nature turns out to be much more complicated than the preface’s rhetoric of accurate and full imitation would lead us to believe. In a sense, that’s obvious: infinite nature fits within the bounds of Pliny’s finite book, so selections must have been made. Pliny foregrounds the problem near the begining of book 2, when he insists that “nature” as far as it matters to us only includes (to put it anachronistically) our own solar system. Pliny knows and does not refute the claim, advanced by Epicureans and others, that worlds similar to ours dot an infinite universe. But he excludes these at the outset, marking off a bounded part of nature as the object of his own representation. Lato sensu, that’s what NH book 2 does in general: it defines nature, and, by defining, it selects.
The preface promises to hold a mirror up to nature. This is a metaphor that we can understand. Book 2 invites us to look for another metaphor. If the map isn’t the territory, then what is it? And also, what’s the territory?
I’m definitely not saying anything revolutionary when I answer those questions by saying that nature, in Pliny, is thoroughly acculturated. If Philippe Descola is right to tag Rome as a society that, like our own, splits nature from culture, then Pliny and his readers have no more ever been Roman than we have ever been modern. Nature exists for Pliny insofar as it interfaces with (a certain) human culture: far from standing on opposite sides of a divide, nature and culture mutually and intimately define.
The upshot of that, less frequently appreciated, is that neither nature nor culture can serve as an absolute measure for the other. In Pliny, they pass the task of measuring back and forth: sometimes culture evaluates nature, sometimes nature condemns society. Even stranger (and I’ll discuss some examples in a later post or two), nature sometimes seems to take over the task of representing from culture and actually to represent culture. In those cases, the map is a map of itself. There is no territory.