Today, the oldest writing we may recognise as encyclopaedic is from Pliny the Elder. Begun not long before the eruption of Vesuvius in 77, and completed by his son after its author perished in its aftermath, Pliny’s Naturalis Historia runs to thirty-seven books, from astronomy to zoology, purposely monumental. Its author claimed that such a thing had never been attempted before, although he makes reference to those who had attempted less ambitious efforts, notably the medical reference work of Aulus Cornelius Celsus and the nine-volume illustrated guide to the liberal arts, Disciplinarum by Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BCE), which included meditations on grammar, rhetoric, geometry, astrology and music. Most significantly, and unlike Varro’s compilation, Pliny’s writing survived: it is known to us now as one of the most influential and earliest printed multi-volume works, first appearing in Venice in 1469.
Naturalis Historia was neither alphabetical nor cross-referenced, but it did have the sort of clearly defined contents page (the summarium) we may expect to see in efficient modern textbooks. It was consistently enthusiastic in tone: Pliny seemed to be in love with the entire world. The books encompassed geography and anthropology, botany and mineralogy, the cosmos and ‘Mother Earth’, olive and wine growing, mammals and insects, gemstones and dyes, sculpture and portraiture – ‘the world of nature,’ Pliny wrote, ‘or in other words life.’ In one sense it was the Great Library of Alexandria arrayed along a single shelf.
Pliny defined his intentions in his preface, a dedication to the future emperor Titus.
This is not a well-travelled path for most scholars, or one that minds are eager to wander. None of us has ever attempted it, and no one Greek has covered all of it. Most people look for attractive fields of research; those which are treated by others are said to be of immense subtlety, and are weighed down by the gloomy obscurity of the subject. Now all the subjects that the Greeks call
enkuklios paideia
ought to be dealt with but they are unknown or made confusing by over-complications, while others are so often discussed that they become tedious. It is a difficult thing to give novelty to the familiar, authority to the brand new, shine to the out-of-date, clarity to the obscure, charm to the dull, authority to the implausible, its nature to everything and all its own to nature. And this is why even if I have not succeeded, it is a brilliant and beautiful enterprise.
Pliny claimed to have studied around 2000 books by 100 authors, among them Catullus, Cicero, Livy and Virgil, resulting in some 20,000 digestible facts and observations (modern scholars suggest these numbers may have been greater still; he was either being modest or lost track). His nephew Pliny the Younger described him as a classical workaholic. Travelling through Rome, he would pay a companion to read to him as he walked. Having a bath – and more than one account describes him as a compulsive bather – he would dictate his latest entries, including this B-list of the healing properties of plants and fruits, nature in the service of man:
BRYA: The pounded bark is given for the spitting of blood and for excessive menstruation, also to sufferers from coeliac disease. The leaves … with honey added are applied to gangrenous sores. A decoction of them is healing to tooth-ache and ear-ache. The leaves furthermore are applied with pearl barley to spreading ulcers … it is applied with chicken fat to boils. It is an antidote also to the poison of serpents except that of the asp. They say that if it is mixed with the urine of a castrated ox and taken in either drink or food it is an aphrodisiac.
BRAMBLES: Nature did not create brambles for harmful purposes only, and so she has given them their blackberries, food even for men. They have a drying and astringent property, being very good for gums, tonsils and genitals. They counteract the venom of the most vicious serpents, such as the haemorrhois and prester; the bloom or the berry counteracts that of scorpions. They close wounds without any danger of gatherings. The same shoots, eaten by themselves like cabbage sprouts, or a decoction of them in a dry wine, strengthen loose teeth. They are dried in the shade and then burnt so that the ash may reduce a relaxed uvula.
BLACK HELLEBORE: A cure for paralysis, madness, dropsy without fever, chronic gout and diseases of the joints; it draws from the belly bile, phlegms and morbid fluids. For gently moving the bowels the maximum dose is one drachma; a moderate one is four oboli. It matures and clears up scrofulous sores, suppurations and indurations; fistulas also if it be taken off on the third day.*
Pliny hoped that all of educated Rome would benefit from his labours. He saw the path of learning as a moral expedition; similarly, we see how an encyclopaedia may reflect both the period in which it was written and the moral guidance of its compiler. With Naturalis Historia, Pliny was expressing his belief that man and nature existed in productive harmony, and he was concerned with what we might now call an ecological balance: neither half should be unregarding or unprotective of the other. He was also celebrating Rome as the learned centre of the universe (and defiantly Rome rather than Athens). He lived at a time of immense cultural and scientific confidence; knowledge, be it of the practical advances in mining or the orbital timings of the planets, was amassed and conquered in step with the conquests of the empire. Indeed, this was another encyclopaedic goaclass="underline" a sense of all being well with the world, a notion of order and stillness, perhaps even control. If you wrote it so, it would be so; nothing confirmed mastery in this eternal city as much as carved or written text. With this extended manuscript, everything seemed in one’s command, the sun moving sublimely around the earth, Vesuvius unthreatening in the distance.*
BISHOP OF SEVILLE
If Pliny ever wondered how his text would be remembered, he would have gazed with satisfaction at the work of Isidore of Seville. Some seven centuries later, Pliny’s Naturalis Historia would continue to form a cornerstone of learning in early medieval Europe, and thanks to Isidore’s Etymologiae (600–25 CE) it would remain influential throughout the Renaissance.
Matters both human and divine: Isidore of Seville considers his Origins
And we have further reason to be grateful to Bishop Isidore of Seville. In 2018, the English Historical Review called him ‘the patron saint of the Internet’. Shortly after Isidore’s death in 636, his pupil Braulio of Saragossa would remember ‘an excellent man … educated in every kind of expression, so that in the quality of his speech he was suited to both the ignorant audience and the learned.’
Isidore produced an extravagant spread of reference works – books which catalogued the saints, analysed the Scriptures, described each office of the Church and explained all current interpretations of the elements. Accordingly, Braulio claimed, we may fittingly apply Cicero’s comment,
Your books have brought us back, as if to our home, when we were roving and wandering in our own city like strangers, so that we might sometimes be able to understand who and where we are. You have laid open the lifetime of our country, the description of the ages, the laws of sacred matters and of priests, learning both domestic and public, the names, kinds, functions and causes of settlements, regions, places, and all matters both human and divine.