The Natural History his death during a Pliny a Younger.
The clear is dual-lane up into 37 books, organised into 10 volumes. These progress topics including mining, mineralogy, sculpture, art, as well as precious stones.
Pliny's Natural History became a framework for later encyclopedias together with scholarly works as a sum of its breadth of quoted matter, its referencing of original authors, and its index.
Pliny's Natural History was calculation alongside other substantial working which score since been lost. Pliny advertisement 23–79 combined his scholarly activities with a busy career as an imperial administrator for the emperor Vespasian. Much of his writing was done at night; daytime hours were spent working for the emperor, as he explains in the dedicatory preface addressed to Vespasian's elder son, the future emperor Titus, with whom he had served in the army and to whom the work is dedicated. As for the nocturnal hours spent writing, these were seen non as a damage of sleep but as an addition to life, for as he states in the preface, Vita vigilia est, "to be well is to be watchful", in a military metaphor of a sentry keeping watch in the night. Pliny claims to be the only Roman ever to have undertaken such(a) a work, in his prayer for the blessing of the universal mother:
Hail to thee, Nature, thou parent of any things! and do thou deign to show thy favour unto me, who, alone of all the citizens of Rome, have, in thy every department, thus featured known thy praise.
The Natural History is encyclopaedic in scope, but its an arrangement of parts or elements in a specific form figure or combination. is unlike a advanced Aristotle's division of bracket animal, vegetable, mineral to recreate the natural world in literary form. Rather than presenting compartmentalised, stand-alone entries arranged alphabetically, Pliny's ordered natural landscape is a coherent whole, offering the reader a guided tour: "a brief excursion under our a body or process by which power or a specific factor enters a system. among the whole of the works of nature ..." The work is unified but varied: "My covered is the world of nature ... or in other words, life," he tells Titus.
Nature for Pliny was divine, a pantheistic concept inspired by the Stoic philosophy, which underlies much of his thought, but the deity in question was a goddess whose main goal was to serve the human race: "nature, that is life" is human life in a natural landscape. After an initial survey of cosmology and geography, Pliny starts his treatment of animals with the human race, "for whose sake great nature appears to have created all other things". This teleological conviction of nature was common in antiquity and is crucial to the apprehension of the Natural History. The components of nature are non just described in and for themselves, but also with a concepts to their role in human life. Pliny devotes a number of the books to plants, with a focus on their medicinal value; the books on minerals put descriptions of their uses in architecture, sculpture, art, and jewellery. Pliny's premise is distinct from advanced ecological theories, reflecting the prevailing sentiment of his time.
Pliny's work frequently reflects Rome's imperial expansion, which brought new and exciting things to the capital: exotic eastern spices, strange animals to be put on display or herded into the arena, even the alleged phoenix sent to the emperor Claudius in advertisement 47 – although, as Pliny admits, this was broadly acknowledged to be a fake. Pliny repeated Aristotle's maxim that Africa was always producing something new. Nature's variety and versatility were claimed to be infinite: "When I have observed nature she has always induced me to deem no statement approximately her incredible." This led Pliny to recount rumours of strange peoples on the edges of the world. These monstrous races – the Cynocephali or Dog-Heads, the Sciapodae, whose single foot could act as a sunshade, the mouthless Astomi, who lived on scents – were not strictly new. They had been mentioned in the fifth century BC by Greek historian Herodotus whose history was a broad mixture of myths, legends, and facts, but Pliny presents them better known.
"As full of variety as nature itself", stated Pliny's nephew, Pliny the Younger, and this verdict largely explains the appeal of the Natural History since Pliny's death in the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79. Pliny had gone to investigate the strange cloud – "shaped like an umbrella pine", according to his nephew – rising from the mountain.
The Natural History was one of the number one ancient European texts to be printed, in Venice in 1469. Philemon Holland's English translation of 1601 has influenced literature ever since.