Therefore we have given him too much space; nevertheless, we have not finished with him yet, for he was also a scientist. In those fertile years between his retirement and his death he amused himself with Quaestiones Naturales, and sought natural explanations of rain, hail, snow, wind, comets, rainbows, earthquakes, rivers, springs. In his drama Medea he had suggested the existence of another continent beyond the Atlantic.60 With similar intuition, contemplating the overwhelming multitude of stars, he wrote, “How many an orb, moving in the depths of space, has never yet reached the eyes of men!”61 And he adds, clairvoyantly, “How many things our sons will learn that we cannot now suspect!—what others await centuries when our names will be forgotten! . . . Our descendants will marvel at our ignorance.”62 We do. Seneca, though always eloquent, adds little to Aristotle and Aratus, and borrows abundantly from Poseidonius. He believes in divination despite Cicero, lapses into ludicrous teleology despite Lucretius, and interrupts his science at every turn to inculcate morality; he passes skillfully from mussels to luxury, and from comets to degeneration. The Fathers of the Church liked this mixture of meteorology and morals, and made the Quaestiones Naturales the most popular textbook of science in the Middle Ages.
There were a few men of scientific mind and interest in Rome, like Varro, Agrippa, Pomponius Mela, and Celsus; but they were scarce outside of geography, horticulture, and medicine. For the rest, science had not yet detached itself from magic, superstition, theology, and philosophy; it consisted of collected observations and traditions, seldom of fresh inquiry into facts, and rarely of experiment. Astronomy remained as Babylonia and Greece had left it. Time was still told by water clocks and sundials, and by the great obelisk that Augustus had stolen from Egypt and set up in the Field of Mars; its shadow, falling upon a pavement marked off in brass, indicated both the hour and the season.63 Day and night were variably defined by the rising and setting of the sun; each had twelve hours, so that an hour of the day was longer, and an hour of the night shorter, in summer than in winter. Astrology was almost universally accepted. Pliny noted that in his time (A.D. 70) both learned and simple believed that a man’s destiny was determined by the star under which he was born.64 They argued plausibly that vegetation, and perhaps the mating season in animals, depend upon the sun;I that the physical and moral qualities of people are affected by climatic factors themselves determined by the sun; and that individual character and fate, like these general phenomena, are the result of celestial conditions inadequately known. Astrology was rejected only by the skeptics of the later Academy, who denied its pretended knowledge, and by the Christians, who scorned it as idolatry. Geography was studied more realistically, for navigation’s sake. Pomponius Mela (A.D. 43) published maps on which the surface of the globe was divided into a central torrid zone and north and south temperate zones. Roman geographers knew Europe, southwestern and southern Asia, and northern Africa; of the remainder they had vague ideas and fantastic legends. Spanish and African skippers reached Madeira and the Canary Islands,65 but no Columbus rose to test Seneca’s dream.
The most extensive, industrious, and unscientific product of Italian science was the Historia Naturalis (77) of Caius Plinius Secundus. Though busy nearly all his life as soldier, lawyer, traveler, administrator, and head of the western Roman fleet, he wrote treatises on oratory, grammar, and the javelin, a history of Rome, another of Rome’s wars in Germany, and—sole survivor of this flood—thirty-seven “books” of natural history. How he managed all this in fifty-five years is explained in a letter of his nephew’s:
He had a quick apprehension, incredible zeal, and an unequaled capacity to go without sleep. He would rise at midnight or at one, and never later than two in the morning, and begin his literary work. . . . Before daybreak he used to wait upon Vespasian, who likewise chose that season to transact business. When he had finished the affairs which the Emperor committed to his charge, he returned home to his studies. After a short light repast at noon … he would frequently, in the summer, repose in the sun; but during that time some author was read to him, from whom he made extracts and notes … as was his method with whatever he read. . . . Thereafter he generally went into a cold bath, took a light refreshment, and rested for a while. Then, as if it were a new day, he resumed his studies till dinner, when again a book was read to him, and he made notes. . . . Such was his manner of life amid the noise and hurry of the town. But in the country his whole time was devoted to study, except when he was actually bathing; all the while he was being rubbed and wiped he was employed in hearing some book read to him, or in dictating. In his journeys a stenographer constantly attended him in his chariot or sedan chair. … He once reproved me for walking; “you need not have lost those hours,” he said, for he counted all time lost that was not given to study.66
His book, so sheared and sewn, was a one-man encyclopedia summarizing the science and errors of his age. “My purpose,” he says, “is to give a general description of everything that is known to exist throughout the earth.”67 He deals with 20,000 topics and apologizes for omitting others; he refers to 2000 volumes by 473 authors, and admits his indebtedness by name with a candor exceptional in ancient literature; he notes, in passing, that he found many authors transcribing their predecessors word for word without acknowledgment. His style is dull, though sometimes purple, but we must not expect encyclopedias to be fascinating.
Pliny begins by rejecting the gods; they are, he thinks, merely natural phenomena, or planets, or services, personified and deified. The sole god is Nature, i.e., the sum of natural forces; and this god apparently pays no special attention to mundane affairs.68 Pliny modestly refuses to measure the universe. His astronomy is a galaxy of absurdities (e.g., “In the war of Octavian against Antony the sun remained dim for almost a year”69); but he notes the aurora borealis,70 states with approximate modernity the orbital period of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn as respectively two, twelve, and thirty years, and argues for the spherical form of the earth.71 He tells of islands rising from the Mediterranean in his time, and surmises that Sicily and Italy, Boeotia and Euboea, Cyprus and Syria, were gradually sundered by the patience of the sea.72 He treats of the laborious and servile mining of precious metals and regrets that “many hands are worn down that one little joint may be adorned.”73 He wishes that iron had never been found, since it has made war more terrible; “as if to bring death upon man more swiftly, we have given wings to iron and taught it to fly”74—referring to iron missiles equipped with leather feathers to help them keep their course. Following Theophrastus, he mentions under the name of anthracitis a “stone that burns,”75 but says no more about coal. He speaks of “an incombustible linen,” called by the Greeks asbestinon, “which is used to embalm the cadavers of kings.”76 He describes or lists many animals, lauds their sagacity, and tells how to predetermine their sex: “If you wish to have females, let the dams face north while being covered.”77 He has twelve wondrous books on medicine—i.e., on the curative value of various minerals and plants. Books xx-xxv are a Roman herbal, which the Middle Ages passed down to form the initial plant lore of modern medicine. He offers cures for everything from intoxication and halitosis78 to “a pain in the neck”;79 he provides “stimulants for the sexual passion,”80 and warns women against sneezing after coitus, lest they abort there and then.81 He recommends coitus for physical weariness, hoarseness, pains in the loins, dim eyesight, melancholy, and “alienation of the mental faculties”;82 here is a panacea rivaling Bishop Berkeley’s tar water. Amid such nonsense occurs much useful information, especially about ancient industry, manners, or drugs; with interesting references to atavism, petroleum, and change of sex after birth. “Mucianus informs us that he once saw at Argos a person whose name was then Arescon, but had formerly been Arescusa; that this person had been married to a man, but that shortly afterward he developed a beard and other male characteristics, upon which he took a wife.”83 Here and there valuable hints occur; e.g., Himly (1800) was led to investigate the action of jusquiamus and belladonna on the pupil by reading in Pliny a passage84 about the use of anagallis juice before operations for cataract.85 There are precious chapters on painting and sculpture, which constitute our oldest and principal account of ancient art.
Pliny was not content with natural history; he wished also to be a philosopher; and throughout his pages he scatters comments on mankind. The life of animals, he thinks, is preferable to man’s, for “they never think about glory, money, ambition, or death”;86 they can learn without being taught and never have to dress; and they do not make war upon their own species. The invention of money was fatal to human happiness; it made interest possible, by which some could live in idleness while others worked”;87 hence the rise of great estates owned by absentee landlords, and the ruinous replacement of tillage with pasturage. Life, in Pliny’s estimate, gives us much more grief and pain than happiness, and death is our supreme boon.88 After death there is nothing.89
The Natural History is a lasting monument to Roman ignorance. Pliny gathers superstitions, portents, love charms, and magic cures as assiduously as anything else, and apparently believes in most of them. He thinks that a man, especially if fasting, can kill a snake by spitting into its mouth.90 “It is well known that in Lusitania the mares become impregnated by the west wind”91—a point missed in Shelley’s ode. Pliny condemns magic; but “on the approach of a menstruating woman,” he informs us, “must will sour and seeds touched by her will become sterile; and fruit will fall from the tree under which she sits. Her look will blunt the edge of steel and take the polish from ivory; if it falls upon a swarm of bees they will die at once.”92 Pliny rejects astrology and then fills pages with “prognostics” derived from the behavior of the sun and the moon.93 “In the consulship of M. Acilius, and frequently at other times, it rained milk and blood.”94 When we reflect that this book, and Seneca’s Quaestiones, were the chief legacy of Roman natural science to the Middle Ages, and compare them with the corresponding works and temper of Aristotle and Theophrastus four hundred years earlier, we begin to feel the slow tragedy of a dying culture. The Romans had conquered the Greek world, but they had already lost the most precious part of its heritage.