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Geography without People: Mapping in Pliny Historia Naturalis Books 3-6

For well over a decade Pliny's Historia Naturalis has been recognised as a work which deals with moral questions and imperial culture as much as (perhaps more than) science and nature. These reassessments of the Elder Pliny move away from the disdainful and anachronistic judgments of his writings as ill-judged, naïve and unscientific, and towards a more productive analysis of the Historia Naturalis' symbolic significance and coherence within its first century Roman context. Mary Beagon finds that Pliny is representative of a particular first century ‘emphasis on humanity and its needs and aspirations’, while commenting that it is at this period that mundus and kosmos (Latin and Greek respectively for ‘world’ or ‘universe’) take on the specific meaning of ‘the inhabited world’. The coherence that Beagon finds in Pliny's work is therefore concentrated around the relationship between nature and humankind. It is this relationship, and the symbolic value given to natural phenomena, which allows so much of the Historia Naturalis to act as a cultural commentary on contemporary society. For example, Beagon, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill and Trevor Murphy identify luxuria (‘luxury’) as a key term in Pliny, and insist not only upon his aversion to this concept, but also on his transcendence of the traditional Roman diatribe against decadence and extravagance. For Beagon, Pliny's objection to luxury is partly determined by contemporary political and economic factors, as she claims that Pliny's stance mirrors that of Vespasian, who was attempting to rebuild the state's finances after Nero had squandered them. More particularly, luxuria is the antithesis of uita (‘life’), to the extent that it corrupts and distorts life, leading to passivity and desidia (‘lethargy’)—the exact opposite of the programmatic statement found in the Historia Naturalis Preface 19: uita uigilia est (‘life is being awake’).