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CHAPTER III

Pliny’s Natural History

We should have to search long before finding a better starting-point for the consideration of the union of magic with the science of the Roman Empire and of the way in which that union influenced the Middle Ages than Pliny’s Natural History. Its encyclopedic character affords a bird’s-eye view of our entire subject. Its varied contents suggest practically all the themes of our discussion in succeeding chapters. Chronologically considered, it is satisfactory as an introduction, since it appeared in the early part of the Empire (77 a. d.).

I. The character of the work

Pliny’s treatise is far more than what we understand by a “Natural History.” It is an attempt to cover the whole field of science; rerum natura is its subject.[53] This, as Pliny says, is a task which no single Greek or Roman has before attempted. He tells us that he treats of some 20,000 topics gleaned from the perusal of about 2,000 volumes, with the addition of many facts not contained in previous works and only recently brought to light.[54] At first thought, then, the Natural History, vast in its scope and constituting a summary of the views of previous authorities, would seem the best single example of the science of the classical world. The fact that it touches upon many of the varieties and illustrates most of the characteristics of magic makes it the more fitting a starting-point for us. Indeed, Pliny makes frequent mention of the Magi, and in the opening chapters of his thirtieth book gives the most important extant discussion of magic by an ancient writer.

It is true, however, that Pliny does not seem to have been a man of much scientific training and experience. He said himself that his days were taken up with the performance of public duties, and that consequently his scientific labors were largely carried on in the evening hours.[55] Probably we should regard his book as little more than a compilation, and perhaps no very judicious compilation at that, in view of his maxim that there is no book so bad but that some good may be got from it.[56] Perhaps we may not unjustly picture him to ourselves as collecting his material in a rather haphazard fashion; as not always aware of the latest theories or discoveries; as occasionally citing a fantastic writer instead of a more sober one; or as quoting incorrectly statements which his limited scientific knowledge prevented him from comprehending-. Perhaps, too, he derived some of his data directly from popular report and superstition. Certainly to us to-day his work seems a disorderly and indiscriminate conglomeration of fact and legend on all sorts of subjects — disorderly, in that its author does not seem to have made any effort to sift his material, to compare and arrange his facts, even in his own mind; indiscriminate, in that Pliny seems to lack any standard of judgment between the true and the false, and to deem almost nothing too improbable, silly or indelicate to be mentioned. Ought we to consider such a work as truly representative of the beliefs of preceding centuries, or as an example of the best educated thought and science of its author’s own age? This is a question which we must consider.

Yet as we read Pliny’s pages we feel that he possessed elements of greatness. If he was equipped with little scientific training or experience, we should remember that little training or experience was necessary to deal with the science of those days. At least he sacrificed his life in an effort to investigate natural phenomena. Moreover, his faults were probably to a great extent common to his age. The tendency to regard anything written as of at least some value did not begin with him. Material had often before been collected in a haphazard manner. Lewes, in his book on the science of Aristotle, has described with truth even the famous History of Animals as unclassified in arrangement and careless in the selection of material.[57] Many of Pliny’s marvelous assertions and absurd remedies purport to be from the works of men of note, although possibly he was sometimes deceived by spurious writings. He frequently gives us to understand that he himself intends to maintain a cautious and critical frame of mind, and he makes great pretensions to immunity from that credulousness of human nature over which he will occasionally smile or philosophize.[58] When we take up Aristotle’s History of Animals and Seneca’s Natural Questions, it will become evident that Pliny’s “science” was not very different in quality from that of the Greeks or from that of his own age. If he seldom gives us a clear-cut or complete exposition of a subject, it is probably because there was seldom one to be found. If he seems in a chronic statp of mental confusion and incoherency, it is because his task staggered him. His work was by its nature so far impersonal that we can attribute its defects only in part to his personality.

On the whole, then, we probably shall not be greatly misled if we regard the Historia Naturalis as a sort of epitome of what men had believed about nature in the past or did believe in Pliny’s own day. The author may not have portrayed past and present thought at their best but he portrayed them, and that in detail. “The greatest gull of antiquity”[59] was the Boswell of ancient science.

Pliny makes almost as good a representative of mediaeval science as of that of the Roman world, and thus well illustrates the influence which the one had upon the other. Indeed not only is the Natural History just the sort of work that delighted the Middle Ages, but Pliny seems to have exerted a considerable direct influence on writers down through the sixteenth century. Isidore of Seville practically copied his unfavorable comments on the magi and his discussion of the powers of stones.[60] Bede seems to have owed a good deal to him. Alcuin openly praised that “most devoted investigator of nature.”[61] Roger Bacon quoted him; the Natural History was a mine whence Agrippa dug much of the material for his Occult Philosophy and to which Porta seems equally indebted in his Natural Magic.

II. Pliny’s discussion of magic

Before illustrating Pliny’s combination of magical lore with true and sane statements about nature, we should consider his discussion of what he was pleased to call magic; for just as he prided himself upon his freedom from excessive credulity in the abstract, so in regard to magic in particular he seems to have flattered himself that his position was quite different from what it actually was.

Pliny did have, however, a fairly clear idea of the extensive scope of magic as well as of its great age and currency. Not only did he declare that of all known arts it had exerted the greatest influence in every land and in almost every age, but “no one,” he said, “should wonder that its authority has been very great, since it alone has embraced and combined into one the three other subjects which appeal most powerfully to man’s mind.”[62] For magic had invaded the domain of religion and had also made astrology a part of itself,[63] while “no one doubts that it originally sprang from medicine and crept in under the show of promoting health as a loftier and more holy medicine.”[64] Indeed, he thinks that the development of magic and of medicine have been parallel[65] and that the latter is now in imminent danger of being overwhelmed by the follies of magic which have made men doubt whether plants possess any medicinal properties at all.[66] Pliny, moreover, sees the connection of magic with the lore of the magi of Persia. Indeed, “magus” is his only word for a magician. But this does not lead him to admit what some persons — the philosopher Eudoxus, for instance — have asserted, that magic is the most splendid and useful branch of philosophy.[67] For Pliny, magic is always something reprehensible.