Pliny's Defense of Empire

Thomas R. Laehn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136676314
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Despite perennial interest in Pliny the Elder's Natural History, the world's first encyclopedia, as a record of the prodigious, the quotidian, and the useful in Rome in the first century AD, for centuries Pliny has been derided as little more than an inept compiler of facts and marvels intellectually incapable of formulating a cogent argument supported through the selective marshaling of his materials.

In Pliny's Defense of Empire, Laehn offers a radical reinterpretation of the architecture of Pliny's encyclopedia, exposing fundamental errors in the inherited understanding of the text traceable to its initial reception in ancient Rome. Recognition of the text's true structure reveals that Pliny's encyclopedia is in fact a first-rate work of political philosophy constituting an apology for Roman imperial expansionism grounded in a sophisticated account of human nature. Correcting the accreted errors and prejudices of nearly 2, 000 years of faulty Plinian scholarship, Laehn critically examines one of the most persuasive apologies for the Roman Empire ever written and succeeds in rehabilitating the Elder Pliny as one of the world's greatest political thinkers.

An excellent resource and a must read for scholars in political theory, philosophy, and classical studies.

1 The Structure of Pliny’s Natural History

To other nations land has been allotted with a fixed boundary: But the extent of the city of Rome is the same as that of the world.

–Ovid, Fasti 2.683–84¹

A. THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE ENCYCLOPEDIA

The annular structure of the Elder Pliny’s Natural History, no less than the universe of which the encyclopedia was intended to provide an exhaustive account, is a “whole, finite and yet resembling the infinite.”² The carefully designed plan of the Natural History, however, has long gone unnoticed, hidden from view within a generation of its publication by an error of interpretation committed by Pliny’s adopted son, repeated shortly thereafter by the historian Suetonius, and concealed from modern scholars by a longstanding prejudice concerning Pliny’s ineptitude as an author.³ In an extant letter to Baebius Macer, the Younger Pliny, the Elder’s nephew and testamentary heir, briefly describes the encyclopedia as a thirty-seven-volume work “no less diverse than nature itself.”⁴ Suetonius, in his abbreviated biography of the Elder Pliny, likewise refers to the “thirty-seven books of the Natural History,” confirming the Younger Pliny’s count of the number of volumes contained in his uncle’s mastodonic text and ensuring the failure of virtually all subsequent efforts to discern its architectonic scheme.⁵ An examination of the praefatio to the Natural History reveals the error. In his own description of the great novelty and scope of his undertaking, Pliny observes that his encyclopedia, the world’s first, contains “20,000 noteworthy facts … in thirty-six volumes” (XX rerum dignarum … XXXVI voluminibus).⁶ Whereas the Younger Pliny counted the extensive index inserted between the epistolary preface and the opening book of the Natural History as a separate volume, increasing by one the total number of books comprising the encyclopedia, the Elder Pliny explicitly notes in his preface that the index is “appended” or “subjoined” (subiunxi) to the epistle itself, and it thus does not belong to the Natural History proper.⁷ The presence of occasional references in the text of the encyclopedia to nonexistent, separate indexes preceding each book, the residue of an early stage in the Natural History’s composition, and the structure of the index itself, which remains divided according to volume, provide additional evidence that the encyclopedia was originally conceived, initially composed, and ultimately meant to be read as a thirty-six-volume work.⁸

An error in the interpretation of the structure of the Natural History nearly as old as the encyclopedia itself would be unworthy of comment if the Elder Pliny was incapable of writing such an immense text according to a conscious design, as most scholars presume, or if a failure to appreciate the structure of the encyclopedia did not also result in a failure to understand its content. Once the organization of the encyclopedia into thirty-six books is granted, however, attention to the text itself not only suggests that Pliny deliberately and self-consciously wrote the Natural History in accordance with a preconceived plan but also exposes a number of widely accepted misinterpretations of Plinian thought, especially in regard to his philosophical anthropology (or theory of human nature), his philosophy of history, and even his true purpose in publishing the encyclopedia.

When describing the structure of the Natural History, Pliny’s commentators generally present variations of the following architectonic schema:

Book 1	Index
Books 2–6	The Cosmos and the Geography of the World
Book 7	Man
Books 8–11	Animals
Books 12–19	Plants
Books 20–27	Medicines Derived from Plants
Books 28–32	Medicines Derived from Animals
Books 33–37	Metals and Minerals, with Sections on Sculpture and Painting^9

Upon presenting their readers with the foregoing schema, commentators typically ridicule Pliny for his failure to employ a sophisticated principle of composition, noting the text’s “curious lack of symmetry,” describing Books 28–32 on medicines derived from animals as an interruption of “the regular succession of subjects,” and referring to the chapters on art in the books on metals and minerals as a series of “digressions” or as a “large excursus” manifestly beyond the easily distracted author’s intended theme.¹⁰ Indeed, chapters on art in books ostensibly concerned with the subjects of “metals,” “soils,” and “stones,” in which works of art are catalogued according to the material from which they are made, seem odd, an inversion of the proper relationship between matter and form, and the overall sequence of seemingly self-contained units suggests nothing else than a lack of forethought, with the volumes on medicines derived from animals disrupting the text’s linear development and downward progression through the strata of being from the highest to the lowest realities.¹¹ These and similar observations have led one recent scholar to conclude summarily on the behalf of generations of commentators that “[i]n fact, failure to proceed according to set principles is a general characteristic of the Natural History.”¹²

Momentarily setting aside the mistake of counting the index as the first of thirty-seven books, a mistake committed by all of Pliny’s commentators hitherto, the first indication of the inadequacy of the foregoing division of the text is the resulting contradiction between the encyclopedia’s purported lack of internal structure and Pliny’s recurring metatextual references to the constraints placed upon him by the “plan of the work” (institutum operis) and by the text’s “established order” (institutus ordo)—constraints that explain, for example, why he has introduced a new subject or why he must defer a discussion until a later point in the encyclopedia.¹³ More frequently, displaying both his self-consciousness as the creator of a text and his complete control over its contents, Pliny simply informs his readers that he will discuss, or has already discussed, a topic relevant to the matter at hand “in its proper place” (suo loco).¹⁴ Pliny’s repeated willingness to postpone the treatment of a subject so that it might be discussed in its “proper” location, with “proper” or “improper” locations within a text having no possible meaning except in reference to the author’s preconceived arrangement of its contents, certainly suggests the presence of a principle of composition more sophisticated than the accidental “proximity … of [his] notecards.”¹⁵

Previous attempts to isolate the text’s architectonic structure have been only partly successful. A. Locher, for instance, in his essay on “The Structure of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History,” quickly abandons the search for a sophisticated principle of composition. Dismissing the need for such a search on the grounds that “the comprehensive composition [of the text] … is clear and has frequently been presented: the universe, earth, human beings, animals, medicines from plants and animals, [and] minerals,” Locher instead focuses his inquiry on the presence of certain subordinate “structural units” organizing the “diffuse flow of information” with which Pliny was confronted into “a meaningful sequence.”¹⁶ According to Locher, Pliny employed “editorial categories” while compiling facts prior to writing the text of the encyclopedia, as well as “key-words” in the composition of the text itself. Although such “smaller structures” do not constitute a coherent architectonic scheme, they nonetheless reveal “a working method which is thoroughly thought out from a technical point of view.”¹⁷

More fruitfully, in separate works, Sorcha Carey and Mary Beagon have each suggested that in composing his encyclopedia Pliny structured his text in accordance with the structure of the universe itself. Beagon merely hints at the possibility of such an architectonic scheme in her commentary on Book 7, referring to the Natural History as a “microcosmic reflection” of the world and noting in passing that Pliny’s decision to use “nature and her parts as the framework” for his encyclopedia gave it “an unchallengeable inclusiveness and totality.”¹⁸ In her excellent treatment of the relationship between art and Roman imperial thought in the Natural History, Carey el...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Table and Figure
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Structure of Pliny’s Natural History
• 2 Plinian Man
• 3 Pliny’s Defense of Empire
• Conclusion: Pliny’s Redemption
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index