Pliny the Uncertain

About snake charming… “insomuch as experience has not decided whether it is true or false…” (8. 19)

Он утверждает, что air must be soluble in water, for fish respire as we do. “Сверх того не следует сомневаться в том, что рыбы обладают слухом и обонянием, которые оба имеют начало в воздухе: невозможно представить себе запах иначе, как пропитанный чем-то воздух. ” But then he adds: “Вот почему по этому поводу каждый может думать, как ему больше нравится. ” (IX, 6)

Рассказывают, морская звезда — горячая как огонь, и потому, к чему она в море ни прикоснется, все обжигает, а что проглотит, сразу же переваривает. Правда, я едва ли смогу утверждать, что кто-то убедился в этом на собственном опыте; меня, конечно, намного более устраивает рассказывать о таких вещах, которые можно самому, если надо, в любое время увидеть. (IX, 86)

Regarding the phoenix he says “though perhaps it is fabulous. . . . ” (X, 2)

Regarding dreams: “Here an important topic invites us and one fully supplied with arguments on both side—whether there are certain cases of foreknowledge present in the mind during repose, and what causes them, or whether it is a matter of chance like most things. ” (10. 98) (Here he seems to recognize the human need to assign meaning to random events. )

That eating rabbit makes you beautiful is just a play on words, “lepos” meaning graceful and “lepus” meaning a hare; “but [this is] so strong a belief that it must have some justification. ” (28. 79)

Reading Pliny’s work one can’t help but remark his blatant inconsistency, on the one hand accepting patent absurdities while skeptically questioning others. To Stoics like Pliny nature was God, and one view is that though he might deny God omnipotence—God cannot kill himself, make mortals immortal, change the past, or make two times ten equal anything but twenty (NH 2. 5)—Pliny was using these mirabilia as evidence of God’s ability to overstep natural law, which the divinity was sometimes required to do in order to punish human hubris.

Beagon (1992) suggests that Roman explorers who were traveling beyond the boundaries of the empire toadied to the need of their readers by reporting as fact the most sensational anecdotes they heard in their travels. There is, she shows, a strong culture of paradoxography in the first and second centuries, an obsession with the strange and unusual, which would have tainted Pliny’s primary sources.

Pliny dedicates his work to his friend Titus, son of the emperor Vespasian, to whom he was also a close confidante. Vespasian rose out of the middle class to become emperor, and may have needed all the auctoritas he could garner to convince the Roman public of his right to rule (Scott 1975. ) There were said to be omens predicting Vespasian’s emperorship; and though Pliny denigrates the ubiquitous belief in Fortune, skepticism of all omens and mirabilia may not have been politically wise. But perhaps Pliny is in being both credulist and skeptic merely covering his bases, appealing to as many readers as possible in order to increase subscription to his book.

Nearly two thousand years later, like Pliny we retain a neuroanatomy that is surprisingly adept at accepting both the latest science and oldest superstition. Newspapers commonly feature articles about the cloning of humans or photos made by the Hubble Space Telescope alongside daily horoscopes or a description of an apparition of the Virgin Mary or Christ. Not long ago a local paper featured an article on Jasmuheen, a “Breatharian” who claimed never to have to eat, reported as fact. Perhaps we ought to give Pliny the last word here: “Among all things, this alone is certain—that nothing is certain, and that there is nothing more proud or more wretched than man. ”

References

Becker, Lawrence C. 1998. A New Stoicism. N. J.: Princeton University Press.

Beagon, Mary. 1992. Roman Nature: The Thought of Pliny the Elder. New York, N. Y.: Clarendon Press.

Cuvier, Baron G. L. C. F. D., quoted in Michaud. 1854. Biographic Universelle. Vol. 35, article Pline.

Pliny, the Elder. 1997. Natural History. Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Scott, Kenneth. 1975. The Imperial Cult under the Flavians. New York: Arno Press.

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