Naturalis Historia

Gaius Plinius Secundus (‘Pliny the Elder’) was a Roman naturalist and military commander who lived in the first century CE. While traveling the world, he acquired and collected knowledge from many different sources, and compiled what he had learned into a collection that would become the western world’s oldest scientific encyclopedia.

This project offers an observation into some of the oddest values expressed in Pliny’s work, while examining the tension left between knowledge that has survived the ages, and that which has been lost. In retrospect, Pliny’s writings have been revealed as somewhat dubious, but have nonetheless helped shape how mankind perceives and studies the world around us, to this very day.