Pliny the Elder’s Natural History is a go-to source for understanding what ancient Romans believed about the world and the model for every encyclopedia since. But, as classics scholar Eleni Hall Manolaraki writes, Pliny doesn’t just tell his readers facts. He invites them to use their senses to explore a natural world that, as a member of the Stoic school of philosophy, he views as a manifestation of the divine.
As with many writers from both his time and ours, the sense Pliny most often appeals to is sight, urging his readers to visualize the amazing creatures and exotic civilizations found as far away as India and Ethiopia. But Manolaraki argues that Pliny stands out from other ancient natural philosophers in honoring the four “lesser” senses as well.
And, where many other Stoic writers suggest seeking the divine through contemplation of the stars or natural landscapes, Pliny does the same with bugs and grubs. He marvels at the “power” and “perfection” of nature in giving sensory organs to tiny creatures like the mosquito and woodworm. While humans can barely see the intricate structure of mosquito’s body, he suggests, they can appreciate its “belligerent and comparatively booming voice” and feel the effects of its “sharp weapon for piercing the skin” that also functions as a tube for consuming blood.
Manolaraki writes that, by recognizing the insect’s own sensory experience, Pliny invites his readers to consider tiny creatures as subjects who, like humans, are observers of the world:
“The enlightened response to the mosquito’s touch, suggests Pliny, should not be humanocentric irritation, but nature-centric wonder at its gustatory endowment.”
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Elsewhere, he takes other creatures’ perspectives in describing how crocodiles or magpies notice and react to the dangers posed by humans in their vicinity.
Pliny even attributes some amount of “soul,” responsiveness to stimuli, or even a form of consciousness to plants. For example, he writes that the lupine “turns round every day with the sun and tells the time to the farmers even in cloudy weather. It does not like to be covered with earth.”
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He also instructs readers that the best farming soil has “a taste of perfumes,” which can be recognized as an odor found “around sunset, at the place where the ends of rainbows bend down to earth, and when the soil has been drenched with rain after a long period of drought.” Once someone has smelled this divine scent, Pliny claims, they will instantly recognize it in the future. He suggests that his readers must trust their own sensory experience and recognize it as a link to the divine.
In Pliny’s telling, divine nature is aligned with humanity’s practical needs and aesthetic desires: the “earth is kind and gentle and indulgent, ever a handmaid in the service of mortals, producing under our compulsion, or lavishing of her own accord, what scents and tastes, what juices, what surfaces for the touch, what colors!”
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