| View Larger Image | Natural History: A Selection (Penguin Classics) | Paperbackby Gaius Plinius Secundus (Pliny the Elder) (Author), John F. Healey (Introduction)
| List Price: | $16.00 | | Price: | $10.88 | | You Save: | $5.12 (32%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | Penguin Classics | | Page Count: | 448 Pages | | Publication Date: | December 03, 1991 | | Sales Rank: | 174,538th |
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FEATURES | - ISBN13: 9780140444131
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Pliny's "Natural History" is an astonishingly ambitious work that ranges from astronomy to art and from geography to zoology. Mingling acute observation with often wild speculation, it offers a fascinating view of the world as it was understood in the first century AD, whether describing the danger of diving for sponges, the first water-clock, or the use of asses' milk to remove wrinkles. Pliny himself died while investigating the volcanic eruption that destroyed Pompeii in AD 79, and the natural curiosity that brought about his death is also very much evident in the "Natural History" - a book that proved highly influential right up until the Renaissance and that his nephew, Pliny the younger, described 'as full of variety as nature itself'. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 8 reviews)
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Absolutely fascinating read! by P. Chickowski (San Diego)  4 Stars
February 19, 2008
Even if you have only a passing interest in Ancient Rome, this work is completely entertaining and informative. It's eye-opening to learn how much the Romans actually knew of the world; knowledge that would be lost for a thousand or more years before being re-discovered. It's also remarkable to see how much they were wrong about. So much of it is genuinely funny, too. A story comes to mind about a dolphin in the port of Ostia that was friendly with the sailors and locals. They became so enamored of it, they "honored" it by anointing it with a full cask of perfume! Pliny expresses the confusion felt by those who then watched the poor animal swim off unevenly and not return for several days! Some gratitude!
Aside from the fact that this abridgment is just plain fun to read, it provides an insight into the soul of the Roman people that you just can't get from reading Tacitus, Josephus, or Caesar.
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Amusing, informative, and delightful by Jon Shemitz (Santa Cruz, California, United States)  5 Stars
May 28, 2006
You can discount this review by the way that I bought this seeking to read the famous account of Vesuvius' eruption. I couldn't remember which Pliny wrote it - and since I have free shipping through Amazon Prime, I just went ahead and impulse-bought the Natural History, without even Googling the Plinys.
Anyhow.
These selections from the Natural History are fascinating. Pliny was an energetic man, hugely desirous of literary immortality, who wrote his books in the interstices of a full career as a soldier and an administrator. Pliny worked when others were asleep; Pliny read and dictated in a sedan chair as he moved about urban areas.
The book is rambling and discursive, full of vignettes, asides, and diatribes. Parts are straightforward precises of other authors (for example, I recently read Vitrivius, and Pliny's section on water and pipes reads almost like a New Yorker review of Vitrivius' coverage of water detection and pipe construction) while other parts are based on Pliny's personal observations. The whole is laced with Pliny's rants about the evils of luxury and greed and the decline of the desire for fame; anyone who wonders about the sustainability of contemporary society will find his complaints about the frivolity and vanity of "modern" men to be nearly as appropriate today as they were almost 2000 years ago.
Healy's translation is clear and easy to read. However, Healy's selections are occasionally jarring, and some of the section titles are annoying and condescending. The footnotes can be repetitive, and are often rather ill-chosen; Healy footnotes Latin terms that are pretty obvious from cognates, while leaving some more mysterious terms completely unexplained. (It's almost as if he were aiming at a particularly incurious high-school audience.) The index is rather poor, but the Key To Place Names struck me as quite good; it's interesting to see how some names have survived (with modification) while others have been swept away by conquering tides, and it's nice to be able to put a location to places that I've seen in other works and just sort of filed under "exotic locations".
Overall, Pliny is not for everyone. I certainly wouldn't recommend it as a first exposure to Roman literature! However, I think any omnivorous reader with even a passing interest in the classics will think their time with Pliny was time well spent. Pliny ranges; Pliny amuses; Pliny will be nice to have on your shelf if industrial civilization does collapse.
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An ancestor of Borges, Kafka and Calvino by Martin Monreal (New York) 5 Stars
March 04, 2006
It is ridiculous to dismiss Pliny on account of his many mistakes and factual errors and so on.
The way to read this book is the way in which you read that kind of fantastic literature that gives the "illusion" of fact; Borges and Italo Calvino come to mind - the first one had plans for making an edition of Pliny in Spanish, with his prologue, but died before finishing the project (you can check the notes of Borges' Selected Non-Fictions for that); Calvino in fact wrote a wonderful essay on Pliny, included in "Why Read the Classics?", a book everyone giving "Natural History" less than four stars should read urgently.
Let's say it: if Pliny had got everything "right", he would still be used to teach natural science in high-school... and, for that reason, nobody would care about him.
There are people who think that the only documents that tell us something about the past are those written with a clinical, cold eye: the look of an outsider. This book is fun PRECISELY because Pliny wrote down everything that reached his ears without checking the facts -Zeus bless his heart-, and because of his welcoming disposition, a geography of the common imagination of that time has been preserved; something that otherwise would be lost.
Not long ago some people around this parts believed the Russians ate their own children. A good number among us are certain that paying someone to listen to your problems for fifty minutes every week, allows you to confront your unearthed traumas and clean up your life. Maybe in a thousand years all this will be just the mythology of our time. A few days ago scientists started to suspect Pluto is not a planet after all, so all those books written about it in the past century... they are mutating already into vintage science fiction.
In the meantime, how can anyone not be interested to know that "there is a record of 120 (mice) being born from a single mother, and in Persia of mice already pregnant being found in the parent's womb; and it is believed that they are made pregnant by tasting salt"(X, LXXXIV)? Or that "the day on which King Pyrrhus died, the heads of his victims, when cut off, crawled about licking up their own blood"(XI, LXXVII)? Or that "some people are born with a hairy heart, and that they are exceptionally brave and resolute. An example being a Messenian named Aristomenes who killed three thousand Spartans. He himself, when severely wounded, was taken prisoner and for the first time escaped through a cave from confinement in the quarries by following the routes by which foxes got in. He was again taken prisoner, but when his guards were fast asleep he role to the fire and burnt off his thongs, burning his body in the process. He was taken a third time, and the Spartans cut him open alive and his heart was found to be shaggy"(XI, LXIX)?
How can anyone not enjoy fragments like this one: "The most learned authorities state that the eyes are connected with the brain by a vein; for my own part I am inclined to believe that they are also thus connected with the stomach: it is unquestionable that a man never has an eye knocked out without vomiting."(XI, LIV)? Or his unique way of defining the eyes, "the most precious part of the body and the one that distinguishes life from death by the use it makes of daylight"(XI, LII)?
How can this miniature ancestor of Kafka be forgotten: "It is surprising that elephants can even climb up ropes, but especially that they can come down them again, at all events when they are stretched at a slope. Mucianus, who was three times consul, states that one elephant actually learnt the shapes of the Greek letters, and used to write out in words of that language: 'I myself wrote this and dedicated these spoils won from the Celts'"(VIII, III)? (Note: all quotations are from the Loeb's edition).
Other reviewer compared the Natural History with the Guinness Book of Records. He probably took a minute off to write the review and then jumped right back to reading his number of People magazine. The Guinness is a compilation of isolated (and insipid) facts. Pliny's is an organic work, as Shakespeare's crowded plays or Montaigne's essays are organic.
Like any great work in human history -from Plato to Galileo, from Dante to Stephen Hawkings- Pliny's Natural History is, first of all, a work of imagination.
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Rome's Own Guiness Book by jrmspnc (Maryland, USA)  2 Stars
February 08, 2004
Yes, yes, I know. It is the mark of great hubris to give 2 stars to a book that has survived over 2000 years and been a favorite work of many of history's top thinkers and achievers. Pliny's good enough for Petrarch, but not good enough for jrmspnc, eh?That's not what the star rating is about at all. Rather, 2 stars reflects my own, entirely subjective impression of the work. Is this a book that I want to pick up and read for fun? No. Is this a book that scholars of the ancient world should read? I don't know, I'll leave that to the scholars.What we have here is, to a modern reader, more of a Guiness Book of Records than an encyclopedia, although it is clear why Pliny may justly be called the first encyclopedist. There are some "tall tales" here, reports of creatures with no heads, or backward feet, of people who never laugh, and of people who live to be hundreds of years old. And there's lessons in mineralogy, botany, zoology, and so on.In short, the book is exactly as advertised. It is also, to one who looks for skilled prose and historical narrative, fairly tedious. The nuggest that fire the imagination are few and far between. Again, exactly as advertised so I have noone to blame but myself. I just don't see the average lay reader, with a passing interest in things Roman, getting a whole lot out of this one. Better to read an actual history of Rome, and let the historian cull the good bits out of Pliny.Healy's introduction does not help matters. Healy spends most of his introduction reciting how completely inaccurate Pliny is, sometimes even by contemporary standards, which does not bode well! So, the reader finds himself constantly thinking, "well, this is wrong anyway, so what's the point?"The point, of course, is up to each reader to judge. For this reader, there was very little point at all.
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How get he get so much wrong? 5 Stars
April 26, 2003
This book was pretty good although I had to constantly check most of Pliny's 'facts' with a natural science textbook nearby. I was shocked to find how wrong he was and on so many things. Its like he was just guessing and not performing the necessary experiments. I don't know where this guy got his degree, but that place probably wants to rethink their ciriculum. Quite frankly, with Scientists has ill-informed as Pliny was, its amazing that the Roman Empire lasted so long. What else can you really say?
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