Pliny the Credulist

Ken Parejko. Pliny the Elder: Rampant Credulist, Rational Skeptic, or Both? // Skeptical Inquirer, January / February 2003, Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 39-42:

Pliny the Elder’s Natural History was the premier source of information about the natural world for fifteen hundred years. Yet it contains blatant absurdities. What does that tell us about Pliny, and, perhaps, ourselves?

The author is a professor of biology at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. E-mail: parejkok@uwstout. edu

New biological adaptations such as hemoglobin, feathers, placenta, or eyes are not produced by natural selection de novo. It is likely that good evolutionary reasons, which increased the biological fitness of our ancestors, resulted in the human brain’s ability to consider, weigh, and decide. It seems too that the easy acceptance of superstition may have served the species in some way, or magical thinking would not have arisen and survived. The battle between magical and more scientific thinking did not begin yesterday. Imagine yourself eavesdropping by a Paleolithic campfire:

Lagen, torch in hand, rises: “Well, time to get back in the cave and paint another bison. ”

Murd, shaking his head: “I don’t know why you bother…”

Lagen: “You want to eat, don’t you? It’s by capturing the spirit-power of the buffalo that they allow us to kill them. ”

Murd: “What a silly idea. You’d be better off spending your time down by the river, studying the herd. ”

That conversation continued ten millennia ago, when of the five million or so of us on earth only a few were just beginning to farm and keep animals. Without the rational thinking and the empirical method it is likely no crops or cattle would have been domesticated, no advances made in metallurgy or pottery; yet cave-paintings, grave-sites, and other artifacts are evidence of a world-view saturated with magical thinking.

Until 495 B. C. the city of Miletus was the greatest of the Greek cities when, after an unsuccessful revolt against the Persian tyrants who controlled it, the city was destroyed. In the Western philosophical tradition, it was in Miletus that the first clearly recognizable steps toward rational empiricism took place. There Thales provided carefully thought-out natural rather than supernatural explanations for phenomena such as eclipses. From our perspective his conclusions might seem quaint (e. g., that the fundamental element of the universe is water, and that Earth is floating in a great cosmic sea). But it was the methodology of rational inquiry which set Thales, Anaximander, Empedocles, Leucippos, and Anaximenes apart from their colleagues.

Alongside the Milesians there remained a strong school or mysticism and other-worldliness, derivative of Orphism and represented in the philosophical tradition by the great mathematician Pythagoras (whose religion, Bertrand Russell says in his History of Western Philosophy, was based on two principles: first the transmigration of souls and secondly the sinfulness of eating beans). The contrast between the rational and mystical aspects of life is often epitomized as the conflict between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Like a vestigial organ which once served a purpose, the Dionysian remains and is likely to remain so long as the species exists. Intuition and magical thinking have long been used to explain or control those phenomena beyond the ken of the empirical method. As science has come to explain more and more of the natural world, the utility of magical thinking, though perhaps not its ubiquity, has declined.

Some would say there are aspects of the Dionysian we may need to be healthy humans. But whether superstition and the primitive will-to-power can be destructive or not is no longer open to debate, given our history of religious fanaticism, Inquisitions, tribal nationalisms and more recently, New Age credulity.

In their study of the natural world Aristotle and his student Theophrastus provided the fundament of Roman natural philosophy. In 22 A. D. Gaius Plinius Secundus, usually referred to as Pliny the Elder to differentiate him from his nephew Pliny the Younger, was born into a Roman culture with one foot still deeply implanted in the cult of magic and supernaturalism and the other resting more timidly in the landscape of Thales and Aristode’s rational empiricism. Pliny was a dyed-in-the-wool Stoic. The early Stoic Chrysippus, who some say was a better logician than Aristotle himself, described philosophy as an orchard, with logic its walls, natural philosophy (later called science) its trees, and ethics its fruit. The primary purpose of a Stoic life is to live virtuously. This means to live according to natural law (to “follow nature”), and to understand natural law one needs to study and understand the world. Stoic ethics, in other words, is informed by and grows naturally out of science (Becker 1998).

Pliny’s Natural History, an encyclopedic compendium of Roman knowledge, was called by Cuvier “one of the most precious monuments that has come down to us from ancient times” (Cuvier 1854). Though from his work comes the modern usage of the word “encyclopedia, ” Pliny did not invent the genre. Compendia of Roman knowledge were quite popular at and around his time, when we have, Seneca’s Natural Quaestiones, Celsus’s Artes, Varro’s Disciplinae, Columella’s De Re Rustica, and Dioscorides’s medical encyclopedia. But Pliny took the genre to the extreme. In his introduction he claims to cite 100 authors of some 2, 000 books, from which he claims to discuss 20, 000 topics. He is one of the first authors to provide citations at the end of each chapter, and to organize his work with a table of contents.

Though there may be 20, 000 topics in his Natural History, the simple fact is that far too many of the “facts” Pliny provides us are not facts at all, but unverified anecdotes reported as facts. If we were to swing an imaginary “B. S. ” detector over Pliny’s book, the meter would read off-scale. What do we make of this? How does it affect our judgment of poor Gaius Plinius? Is he a rampant credulist, rational skeptic, or both?

The evidence he leaves in his Natural History suggests that Pliny was no different from most of us. His belief system and the structure by which he explained the world grew naturally out of the culture in which he was raised and lived, and though he might now and then reach beyond that culture, unlike either Thales or Aristode, Pliny was neither genius nor pioneer.

Yet Pliny stood at a significant decision point of Western history, when one pathway to the future could have followed Stoic ethics towards the close study of nature and our role in it. Instead, within a few centuries of his death the dark barbarity of the Church fell over Europe, arresting the nascent rationality of pagan philosophy. The evidence we have, as we read his Natural History, suggests Pliny was a conflicted man, with a deep belief in skepticism and rational inquiry, yet unable to rise out of the magical thinking endemic around him.

What follows is evidence first of Pliny’s gullibility, then of his skepticism, and then of that boggy ground in which Pliny wavers between the two. If space allowed, it would be possible to expand these examples many times over. Book and chapter citations to Pliny’s Natural History are provided.

Pliny the Credulist

“Около Фалерий [в южной Этрурии] вся вода такова, что пьющие ее быки становятся белыми; а овцы, пьющие из беотийской реки Мелас, — черными. Кефис, вытекающий из того же озера, что и Мелас, снова делает их белыми, Пеней— опять же черными, а Ксанф [греч. ξ α ν θ ό ς, букв. «золотистый», «рыжий»]— рыжими, откуда и название этой реки. Кобылицы, пасущиеся близ Понта на полях, орошаемых рекой Астакес, дают черное молоко, люди его пьют. ” (II, 106)

“Также известно, что мужчины тяжелее женщин, и у всех животных мертвые тела тяжелее живых, а спящие тяжелее бодрствующих. ” (VII, 18)

В Эфиопии, по его сведениям, обитают крылатые лошади, “у которых имеются рога, — их называют “пегасами””, животные, которых называют “мантихор”: “ оно имеет три ряда зубов, соединяющихся наподобие гребня, человеческие лицо и уши и серо-голубые глаза; кожа у него кровавого цвета, а тело львиное; оно наносит удары концом хвоста, подобно скорпиону” (VIII, 30). Там же, в Эфиопии, “обитает дикое животное, называемое “катоблепас”— обычно небольшого размера с малоподвижными конечностями и огромной головой, которую с трудом носит: она постоянно опущена к земле. Это животное несет смерть представителям рода людского, поскольку все, кто посмотрит ему в глаза, тут же умирают. ” (VIII, 32)

“Если нападающие на него [дикобраза] собаки находятся близко, он колет им пасть своими иглами, а когда они держатся на расстоянии, мечет в них свои иглы. ” (VIII, 53)

If a shrew runs across a wheel-rut, it dies. (VIII, 83)

Осенью “лягушки смешиваются с илом, но так, что этого никому не удается увидеть, а весной снова возрождаются в таком же виде, что и при первом рождении, а почему— не известно... ” (IX, 74)

О рыбе, названной anthiae, он сообщает: “Когда антии видят, что один из них попался на крючок, все бросаются ему на помощь, и, говорят, перерезают лесу иглами, которые идут у них по хребту, как зубцы и пилы, а тот, кто попался, натягивает лесу, чтобы ее можно было разрезать. ” (IX, 85)

Plagues of flies in Egypt are killed by sacrifices to Isis. (10. 40) (Pliny, like many Romans, appears especially gullible to Egyptian religious rituals; but that may simply represent his desire to please his patron, the emperor Titus, who was very taken with things Egyptian. )

Thunder addles eggs, the cry of a hawk spoils them. (10. 75)

After covering, the mare runs north if she’s just conceived a mare colt, south if a stallion colt. (10. 83)

In India there are three-foot locusts, which people dry the bodies of and use the legs for saws. (11. 35) (Here, Pliny hedges his bets, prefacing this report with “it is said that.... ”)

In Cyprus there lives an insect like a fly that lives in fire, which dies if it leaves the fire. (11. 42)

There are trees which have spoken and have marched across a highway. (17. 38)

To protect apples from insect attack, have a menstruating woman walk around the orchard naked. (17. 38)

When wheat gets diseased, it turns into oats. (18. 44)

Diamonds can be shattered with male goats’ blood. (20. 1)

If a pregnant woman wants a child with black eyes, she should eat a rat. (30. 46)

If you’ve hit or thrown something at someone, and regret it, merely spit in the palm of the hand which did the deed, and all resentment on the part of the other will disappear. (28. 7) (Before reporting this, Pliny says: “It is surprising, but easily tested. .. . ”)

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