Natural History and Pliny's Natural History

In his seminal work of environmental criticism that proposed the concept of the Anthropocene without using the term itself, Bill McKibben speculated that, though previous ages felt capable of damaging parts of nature, there was no real sense that humanity could compromise the functioning of nature as a whole until mod

Two curious anecdotes in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History describe the translation of foreign scientific works into Latin. According to Pliny, after Rome defeated Carthage in 146 BCE, the senate decreed that a 28-volume agricultural treatise by a Carthaginian writer named Mago be saved from the city’s libraries and translated into Latin (18.22–23).

In the Natural History, it is clear that, in addition to his passion for inquiry and documentation of nature, Pliny the Elder has a moralizing program. He distinguishes between the acceptable use of nature’s bounty and the excessive exploitation of her resources for luxury.

A recent turn among scholars of Classical literature has been one away from traditional ‘Humanist’ thinking and towards ‘Posthumanism’, which resists assumptions of mankind’s exceptionalism in favor of opening discourses on non-human entities (Bianchi, Brill & Holmes 2019; Chiesi & Spiegel 2020).

Inspired by Grant Parker’s work (2008) on the image of India in imperial Greek and Latin literature, this paper examines Rome’s interest in another important eastern landscape, Seres, which entails Rome’s incipient knowledge about its contemporary power, Han China. I argue that Rome’s ethnographic knowledge of Seres was driven by Rome’s trade and importation of silk from the East.