Page:Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1870) - Volume 3.djvu/429

Rh PLINIUS. plaints against the arrangements of Providence, are of frequent occurrence with Pliny. His own appetite for the marvellous however frequently leads hini into an excess of credulity scarcely dis- tinguishable from the superstition which he con- demns ; though we must at the same time remem- ber that with Pliny Nature is an active and omnipotent deity ; and that his love for the mar- vellous is not mere gaping wonder, but admiration of the astonishing operations of that deity. It is a distinctly recognised maxim with him : Mild cofituenti se persuasit rerum natiira nihil incredihile eadslimare de ea. {H. N. xi. 3.) The mundus is in his view divine in its nature, eternal, infinite, though resembling the finite, globular in form, the sun being the animus or meyis of the whole, and itself a deit}-^ (ii. 4). He of course supposed this mundus to revolve round an axis in 24 hours. The earth he looked upon as globular, being fashioned into that shape by the perpetual revo- lution of the mundus round it, and inhabited on all sides. The fact that such is its shape he de- monstrates by a variety of pertinent arguments (ii. 64 — 71). His ideas with regard to the universe, the nature of the stars, &c., their important rela- tion to us as the origin of human souls (ii. 26), are in the main very much the same as those which through the influence of the Stoic school became generally prevalent among the Roman philosophers, though on various subordinate points Pliny had some singular notions, whether his own, or copied from authors with whom we are un- acquainted, many of them ingenious, still more puerile. The notion which he adopted from the earlier propounders of it, that the germs of the innumerable forms of animals, &c., with which the stars and the universe abound, find their way to the earth, and there frequently become inter- mingled, producing all kinds of monstrous forms (c. 2), accounts for the readiness with which he admits the most fabulous and impossible monsters into his zoology. The historical and chronological notices with respect to the progress of astronomy which he intersperses are very valuable. Of the beneficial effects of the spread of such knowledge he speaks with generous enthusiasm (ii. 12). With re- spect to the changes in the surface of the earth, produced by the depositions of rivers, and the ap- pearance of volcanic islands, he has some valuable and interesting statements (ii. 83, &c.). These changes, and the other startling natural pliae- nomena which present themselves in considerable number and variety in the volcanic region of Italy and Sicily, are to Pliny so many proofs of the manifold divine activity of nature (c. 93). Some of the wonders he adduces are however more than apocryphal. On the tides (of the influence of the sun and moon upon which he was well aware), currents and marine springs, he has some remarks which show that his official duties in Spain did not keep him from a careful observation of natural phaenomena (c. 97). The wonderful qualities and phaenomena of various waters and fountains {nam nee aquarum natura a miraculis cessat, c. 103), supply him with details, many of them curious and probably true, others requiring the credulity of Piiny for their belief. From the wonders of water he passes to those of fire (c. 104, &c.), and then, by a rather curious arrange- ment, closes the book with some statements re- VOL. HI. PLINIUS. ^17 garding the size of the earth and the distance between various points of it. The four following books (iii. — vi.) are de- voted to geography, and this somewhat small space Pliny has still further narrowed by digressions and declamations, so that his notices are confined chiefly to the divisions of the countries and the mere names of the places in them. Of these he has preserved a very large number which would otherwise have been utterly lost, though the lists are considerably swelled by the unconscious repe- tition of the same names, sometimes several times over, in slightly varied forms. Pliny was himself but a poor geographer, and his erroneous conception of the forms of different countries often materially affected the way in which he made use of the information which he obtained. This part of his work contains a curious medley of the geographical knowledge of different ages, not distinguished and corrected, but pieced together into one whole in the best way that the discordant statements allowed. This discrepancy Pliny sometimes points out, but frequently he omits to do this, and strives to blend the ancient and modern accounts together, so that he often makes the earlier writers speak as though they had used and been familiar with names not in vogue till some time later. (Comp. iv. 27, xxxvii. 11.) He does not altogether discredit the stories of early times, and speaks of the Rhipaean mountains and the Hyperboreans with at least as much confidence as of some other better authenticated races. His geography of Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor is that of the times of Strabo. For the N. E. portion of Asia we have that of the time of Eratosthenes. For the southern Asiatic coast up to India we have ancient and recent accounts intermingled ; for the North of Europe we have the knowledge of his own times, at least as it appears through the somewhat dis- torted medium of his imperfect notions. With regard to India and Ceylon he has some very recent and trustworthy accounts. Pliny, like Posidonius, makes the habitable earth to extend much farther from east to west than from north to south. By the western coast of Europe he understands simply Spain and Gaul ; after them begins the northern ocean, the greater part of which he thought had been sailed over, a Roman fleet having reached the Cimbrian penin- sula, and ascertained that a vast sea stretches thence to Scythia. He seems to have imagined that the northern coast of Europe ran pretty evenly east and west, with the exception of the break occasioned by the Cimbrian Chersonesus (iv. 13, &c.). Beyond Germany, he says, immense islands had been discovered, Scandinavia, Eningia, &c. He also believed the northern coast of the earth to have been explored from the east as far" as the Caspian sea (which he regarded as an inlet of the northern ocean) in the time of Seleucus and Antiochus. More than one voyage had also been made between Spain and Arabia (ii. 67, 68). He evidently considered India the most eastern country of the world (vi. 17). The third and fourth books are devoted to Europe, the countries of which he takes up in a somewhat curious order. He begins with Spain, specifying its provinces and conventus, and giving lists of the towns, the position of some of which he defines, while the greater number are merely enumerated in alphabetical order ; men- tioning the principal rivers, and noting the towns