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Hello, sometime in the middle of the first century AD, a retired Roman lawyer and soldier called Gaias Plinius Secundus, known to us today as Plini the Elder,

started a work on an ambitious work of scholarship, not quite like it had been attempted before.

Plinius' natural history is a vast and comprehensive encyclopedia. The author attempted to include information on every subject of contemporary knowledge.

His topics range from astronomy to zoology, medicine to metallurgy. There's even a section on art, the earliest detailed writing we have on that subject.

The natural history is one of the most substantial, surviving works of ancient literature.

It was also one of the most influential, is the door of Seville, the venerable bead and Plutarch, or among later scholars who read it, and it provided a model for modern day encyclopedias with its wide range of subject matter, careful index and list of sources.

With me to discuss Plini the Elder's natural history, a Seraphina Cuomo, reader in Roman history, Birkbeck University of London,

Liebertaub, reader in the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge University, and old duty lecturer in classics at University College Dublin.

Seraphina Cuomo, can you tell us a bit about Plinius' background and the context into which she was born?

Yes, he was born in Cuomo, unlike Cuomo in Northern Italy, so he had what we could call an Italian provincial background.

His family belonged to the elite, but not to the very top, so he belonged to what was called the equestrian ode, which we could characterize as a kind of lower aristocracy.

It has been said that if one only had this book, the natural history, he would imagine Plini the Elder as a kind of bookworm.

So it's a bit surprising to know from biographical sources that it was actually a very active man.

He had a number of posts in the army, so he was active on campaigns in Germany for instance, and it is during his military career that he met and became friends with the people who were going to be emperors later, like the Spatian entitled.

It was also a very active later on when after Niro's death, the Spatian came to power, and so it was part of what we could call the inner circle of the emperors.

So it was both a scholar and a politically and militarily active man.

He was sent out as governor as what we would now call a governor to various places.

Yes, yes. So he was given a lot of responsibility.

His travels were also an opportunity to gain a further knowledge about different places, different people, different trees and animals, and everything that goes into the book.

We know quite a lot about him, and it comes from basically one source, his nephew, Plini the Younger, couldn't you tell us about him and how we know so much about Plini the Elder?

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