ABSTRACT
In looking at Pliny we are looking at the most obvious example of natural history in antiquity, and indeed at the greatest justification for seeing a topic of natural history in the ancient world. We must be clear then about Pliny’s historical setting. We are looking primarily at the change that had occurred in ancient thinking between Greek philosophy and Roman and at why Pliny should have wanted to undertake such an enterprise. Pliny (like Seneca) was a Roman of the Equestrian Order, a group of whom it has been said1 that they were more willing than the old aristocracy to be concerned with practical and financial matters. This may well have contributed to the attention to practical matters that Pliny gives throughout the Historia Naturalis. One of his reasons for writing was to urge his fellow Romans back to the simpler and sterner life they had led a century and more before. Pliny held that all work, literary or otherwise, should be for the public good, and greatly admired the attitude of authors like Cato and Varro. Varro’s work on farming can be seen as a sort of moral allegory on the virtues of the Romans of earlier times, and Pliny has something of the same message.2
