Pliny's Natural History

In Our Time: Science

BBC

History

4.5 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 8 July 2010

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Pliny's Natural History.Some time in the first century AD, the Roman scholar Pliny the Elder published his Naturalis Historia, or Natural History, an enormous reference work which attempted to bring together knowledge on every subject under the sun. The Natural History contains information on zoology, astronomy, geography, minerals and mining and - unusually for a work of this period - a detailed treatise on the history of classical art. It's a fascinating snapshot of the state of human knowledge almost two millennia ago.Pliny's 37-volume magnum opus is one of the most extensive works of classical scholarship to survive in its entirety, and was being consulted by scholars as late as the Renaissance. It had a significant influence on intellectual history, and has provided the template for every subsequent encyclopaedia.With:Serafina CuomoReader in Roman History at Birkbeck, University of LondonAude DoodyLecturer in Classics at University College, DublinLiba TaubReader in the History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge UniversityProducer: Thomas Morris.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks for down learning the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.uk.
0:10.0	I hope you enjoy the program.
0:12.0	Hello, sometime in the middle of the first century
0:15.0	a retired Roman lawyer and soldier called Gaius Plinyus
0:18.2	Secundus known to us today as Pliny the Elder,
0:21.3	started work on an ambitious work of scholarship, nothing quite like it had been attempted before.
0:26.0	Pliny's natural history is a vast and comprehensive encyclopedia.
0:30.0	The author attempted to include information on every subject of contemporary knowledge.
0:34.0	His topics range from astronomy to zoology, medicine to metallurgy.
0:38.0	There's even a section on art, the earliest detailed writing we have on that subject.
0:42.0	The natural history is one of the most substantial... the
0:43.3	detailed writing we have on that subject. The natural history is one of the most substantial
0:44.8	surviving works of ancient literature. It was also one of the most influential.
0:49.1	Isidor of Seville, the Venerable Bede and Plutarch were among later scholars who read it and it provided a model for modern day encyclopedias
0:56.2	with its wide range of subject matter, careful index and list of sources.
1:00.7	We've been to discuss Pliny the Elder's natural history,
1:03.2	a Sarifina Cuomo, reader in Roman history at Birkbeck University of London,
1:08.0	Leibataube, reader in the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University,
1:12.1	an old duty lecturer in Classics at University College Dublin.
1:15.4	Sarafina Cuomo, can you tell us a bit about Pliny's background and the context into which
1:19.8	she was born? Yes, he was born in Como, only in Northern Italy, so he had what we could
1:26.4	call an Italian provincial background. His family was, belonged to the elite but not
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