Molly Schaub (University of Pennsylvania)
The Agency of Plants in Pliny’s Natural History
Throughout its history of study, scholars have sought to find a consistent viewpoint on the relationship between man and nature in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (Wallace-Hadrill 1990, Healy 1999). Mary Beagon, the author who most comprehensibly tackles the subject of nature in Pliny’s work argues that man is at the center of Pliny’s cosmology as the recipient of the beneficence of a divinized Nature (Beagon 1992). Even Beagon, however, recognizes that Pliny’s Nature often comes across as ambivalent and inconsistent – sometimes benefitting and sometimes outright thwarting human intention (Beagon 1992: 50). For example, in the case of gold mining in Hispania – a particularly morally charged example for Pliny, who criticizes human desire for luxury – the earth is characterized as actively fighting back against human ambition and technology (HN 33.70 ff.). Pliny, however, attributes agency to the earth (terra) even in the case of cultivation of plants, a human technology that is considered ancient and even essential to Roman mores. This paper will argue that the agency attributed to plants is often at odds with the technologies employed by humans in the domestication, importation, and cultivation of plants in the Natural History, and it emerges as an explanation in situations where human technology of cultivation fails.
I will start by looking at the adverb sponte as it is applied to plants throughout the Natural History. Sponte is often used to denote plants that grow wildly as opposed to domesticated varieties, a distinction that can be clearly seen at a transitional point between books as when Pliny moves from a discussion of wild trees to cultivated ones at the beginning of book 17 (HN 17.1). He says his last book dealt with “trees growing of their own accord” (arborum […] sponte sua provenientium HN 17.1) and introduces cultivated trees as “those trees which, through human skill and human talents, are made more truly than they are born” (quae arte et humanis ingeniis fiunt verius quam nascuntur. ibid.) By characterizing plant cultivation as a process by which humans make trees rather than the trees themselves being an agent of their growing, Pliny aligns cultivation with other forms of human production. Throughout the rest of the work, however, the adverb sponte emerges not just as a way to create typologies of plants but also a way to characterize their behavior in the face of human technology. Technologies like the importation of plants or grafting are described as being thwarted by the plants themselves. Further, plants often get in the way of cultivation as when wild plants prevent new growth of cultivated crops. By imagining plants as an uncontrollable and inaccessible other, Pliny explains human technological failure in terms of resistance by the plants themselves. Thus, the inconsistencies of Pliny’s Nature can be rationalized through an agency all its own that is characterized as outside of human control and even comprehension.