As the Hellenistic period saw the methodical collection of knowledge in royal libraries,
Rome’s ascendancy was marked by the appearance of books aiming at comprehensive
syntheses of Greek scholarship and traditional Roman culture. Designed to embrace enkuk-
lios paideia, “general culture,” these books represent the beginning of the encyclopedic
tradition. What enkuklios paideia meant was not yet fixed: V’s Disciplinae covered
dialectic, rhetoric, grammar, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music, architecture, and
medicine; C’ Artes comprised agriculture, military science, medicine, oratory, juris-
prudence, and philosophy. Unlike these older encyclopedias, the goal of NH, and its prime
structural criterion, was not tuition in skills valued by Roman society, but investigation into
nature.
The index-list of NH, a novel device intended to let readers find particular facts without
lengthy browsing, represents another innovation. A universal taxonomy in miniature, the
index-list also demonstrates how to fit the world into a referential shape. This instrument of
reference, as well as Pliny’s sums of facts recorded, set a standard and issued a challenge to
later encyclopedic authors.
Pliny is sometimes attacked for excessive credulity, since NH abounds in the surprising
and the marvelous (mirabilia): fantastic animals, astonishing springs, and oddly-shaped
peoples. But from an ancient perspective, mirabilia serve not only the recognized literary end
of entertainment, they also illustrate the variety and power of Pliny’s chosen subject,
Nature. Since the normal is understood by contrast with the strange, Pliny’s mirabilia work as
limit-cases, demarcating the realm of accepted knowledge by tracing its periphery.
Pliny’s book, which often reads like an inventory of things available to his contempor-
aries, is not simply collected data given referenceable form, it is knowledge collected for
Roman use and made accessible, as Pliny himself says, by the spread of Roman authority.
As with the treasures displayed in a triumphal procession, one witnesses in NH Rome’s
power at work subduing and taxonomizing Nature.
Ed.: R. König and G. Winkler, ed. and trans., Naturkunde: Lateinisch-Deutsch/C. Plinius Secundus der Ältere
27 vv. (1973–2004); H. Rackham and W.H.S. Jones, ed. and trans., Pliny: Natural History 10 vv. (Loeb:
1938 – 1963: complete, though not always reliable, English translation with Latin text).
M. Beagon, Roman Nature: The Thought of Pliny the Elder (1992); Trevor Murphy, Pliny the Elder’s Natural
History (2004); V. Naas, Le Projet Encyclopédique de Pline l’Ancien (2002), with other bibliography; NDSB
6.116–121, A. Doody.
Trevor Murphy
Plo ̄tinos (254 – 270 CE)
The most important Platonist philosopher in late antiquity, whose life is well documented
in his pupil P’ detailed biography. Born 204 CE in Egypt, Plo ̄tinos studied
philosophy, with both the Christian and the Platonist Origen, under Ammo ̄nios Saccas at
Alexandria for 11 years (Vit. Plot. 3). In 242–3 he joined Gordian’s expedition to Persia to
learn about Persian and Indian philosophy, but without success (Vit. Plot. 3). In 244, Plo ̄tinos
moved to Rome where he opened his own school, seemingly quite popular, attracting
students from abroad – Porphurios from Athens, Roman senators (Vit. Plot. 7), and women
(ibid. 9) – and enjoying the emperor Gallienus’ favor (ibid. 12). Porphurios provides a
good impression of Plo ̄tinos’ seminars, consisting in reading the exegetical works of
D S, N, G, A, A, A, and
A A (ibid. 14), presumably to elucidate P’s and A’s
PLO ̄TINOS