L’inventaire du monde de Pline l’Ancien. Des colonnes d’Hercule aux confins de l’Afrique et de l’Asie

To define Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, the Italian Latinist Gian Biagio Conte coined a fitting expression: “L’inventario del mondo” (the Inventory of the World), subsequently taken up by the French historian Claude Nicolet in his book L’inventaire du monde. Pliny’s work may actually be considered as taking stock of the ancient world and of its cultural heritage around 70 CE. This holds not only for the geographical gazetteer forming books 3-6, but also for Pliny’s whole work, which can be studied from a geographical and an ethnographical perspective. 

In writing his learned and thoughtful compilation, Pliny followed an iron discipline, as we know from a letter by his nephew and adoptive son Pliny the Younger: “He combined a penetrating intellect with amazing powers of concentration and the capacity to manage with the minimum of sleep. From the feast of Vulcan onwards he began to work by lamplight, not with any idea of making a propitious start but to give himself more time for study, and would rise half-way through the night; in winter it would often be at midnight or an hour later, and two at the latest” (Letters, III, 5, 8). 

But Pliny did not limit himself to gathering a huge amount of information from Roman and “foreign” (mostly Greek) authors. He also processed these materials to present a Roman world that surpassed the Hellenistic tradition.

The papers of this collection were presented at a seminar held in Paris in 2016. They encompass a large geographical scale from North Africa to the Caucasus and Iran, via Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt (without neglecting the city of Rome and Italy), proposing new contributions to the understanding of Pliny’s Natural History and, of course, of the Roman world in the first century of our era.