K A T Z C O N T E S T W I N N E R New England Classical Journal 43.2 (2016) 95-106 “Foolhardy and Full of Evils” Linum, Vela, and the Warped Fabric of Empire in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History Darcy Tuttle Yale University e  f “Life is foolhardy and full of evils,”1 writes the elder Pliny early in Book XIX of his Natural History, and at the center of this constellation of wickedness lies perhaps the greatest threat of all: the flax plant (linum). For Pliny, the plant’s unassuming appearance belies a treacherous nature. “Sown without Nature’s consent,”2 with it humankind “lays out no lesser a snare for the whole animal kingdom than we do for our own selves.”3 Pliny ultimately delivers an impassioned tirade of more than a thousand words against flax and the linen sails (vela) which constitute its most reprehensible byproduct. While it is easy to pass over this passage as merely another unintentionally amusing Plinian digression (albeit an ironic one—Pliny was lying on a linteum, a linen cloth, likely a sail, when he died in the eruption of Vesuvius), such a reading ignores key features of the text.4 Not only does the linum passage constitute the opening of Book XIX; it is quite literally the centerpiece of the entire Natural History. 1 Audax vita, scelerum plena (NH 19.4). All translations are my own. 2 ut sentiamus nolente seri natura (NH 19.6). 3 …neque enim minores cunctis animalibus insidias quam nobismet ipsis lino tendimus (NH 19.11). 4 Ibi super abiectum linteum recubans semel… (Pliny the Younger, Ep. 6.16.18). — 95 — The Natural History comprises thirty-seven books — thirty-six discounting the table of contents—thus placing the juncture between Books XVIII and XIX at the exact midpoint of the work.5 Pliny locates his description of flax at this pivotal point, which in itself demands attention. But even more intriguingly, a closer examination of the diatribe also reveals that its apparent ramblings mask a hidden structure that ties into Pliny’s broader themes of celebrating imperial might and bemoaning imperial morals. Pliny’s flax is characterized by contradiction, just as these two aims of his history are themselves in tacit conflict. Consequently, Pliny’s description of flax can be read as a covert critique of empire and imperial authority itself. Pliny himself initially provides a much more mundane explanation for his placement of the flax tirade at the opening of Book XIX. Book XVIII ends with a discussion of weather forecasting, a topic which apparently most other ancient authors used as a springboard into a discussion of “the care of gardens”6 (by which Pliny seems to mean the kitchen gardens and window boxes he takes up much later in Book XIX).7 Such a transition seems logical given weather’s vital impact on the growing season. Pliny, however, snidely pronounces himself astonished “that others seeking esteem for their intelligence and renown for their wisdom” would adopt this strategy while passing over plants with more auctoritas and utility, most particularly flax.8 Flax, it seems, is an eminently more suitable topic to follow weather omens, since the growing plant is not only impacted by weather, but so is its chief byproduct, the linen sail (velum). And it seems to be for this reason that Pliny personifies the flax plant as the sail during his initial, derogatory description of the plant, before turning to how it is otherwise used and grown. However, beyond such obvious transitional utility, Pliny’s strategic use of chapter openings throughout the Natural History is an important facet of his broader structural goals. In his discussion of Pliny’s taxonomy and structure, Trevor Murphy has argued that the Natural History is organized based upon contrasting categories.9 He highlights Book VIII as an example of how this broader structure is implemented at the beginnings of chapters and then complicated, much like in Book 5 My thanks to Professor Andrew Johnston for pointing this out. 6 Proximam multi hortorum curam fecere (NH 19.1). 7 NH 19.49-59. 8 nobis non protinus transire ad ista tempestivum videtur, miramurque aliquos scientiae gratiam eruditionisve gloriam ex his petentes tam multa praeterisse nulla mentione habita tot rerum sponte curave provenientium, praesertim cum plerisque earum pretio usuque vitae maior etiam quam frugibus perhibeatur auctoritas (NH 19.2). 9 Murphy (2007, pp. 29-48). — 96 — XIX. Pliny opens Book VIII with a description of elephants, categorizing them as the largest and most “Roman” of animals.10 This choice of chapter opening serves two purposes: it gives Pliny a general scheme for the individual book (largest to smallest, most “Roman” to most “other”) and highlights and celebrates Roman greatness as central, with everything else diverging. Yet while Pliny’s structural goals may be discernable on the macro level, on the micro level they are less tangible. As Andrew Wallace-Hadrill has succinctly put it, “Pliny will not content himself with being informative. He insists on rhetoric.”11 Pliny complicates his structure within individual books and topics with his habitual digressions, diatribes, and anecdotes (in spite of his prefatory promise to forgo excessus),12 which ensure that the structure within a given book is anything but linear or clearly defined.13 Thus it is that Pliny has books where he moves in short span from the cause of echoes to instances when it “has rained with milk, blood, flesh, iron, wool, and fire-hardened bricks.”14 The same digressive structure seems to dominate the internal organization of the flax passage, which Pliny lays out in the index as containing discussion of “[1] the natural properties and marvelous qualities of flax; [2] twenty-seven of its superior varieties; [3] the manner in which it is sown and processed; and [4] when linen sails were first used in theaters.”15 While his treatment of theater awnings is clearly a digression, otherwise Pliny’s structure here seems to fulfill his broader intellectual goal of clear categorization. Yet once one plunges into the passage itself, it becomes evident that Pliny’s primary focus is on rhetorical disparagement, an aim that obfuscates his declared arrangement of topics. The section on the “Natural properties and marvelous qualities of flax,” becomes instead a meditation on the speed of linen-sail-assisted sea travel and the folly of man “for provoking death in all these ways,” which Pliny ends by proclaiming that “no execration against the inventor of navigation is sufficient,” turning flax into an allegory for human audacia: “Look at what is sown with human hands, what is reaped with the same human ingenuity: 10 Ibid. 30. 11 Wallace-Hadrill (1990, p. 81). 12 Neque [libri mei] admittunt excessus aut orationes sermonesve aut casus mirabiles vel eventus varios… (NH Pref. 12). 13 Murphy (2007, p. 30). 14 (xliv-viii) Qua ratione echo reddatur…(lvii) Lacte pluisse, sanguine, carne, ferro, lana, lateribus coctis (NH 1.2). 15 continentur (i–vi) Lini natura et miracula; genera eius excellentia XXVII; quomodo seratur et perficiatur; quando primum in theatris vela (NH 1.19). — 97 — that which seeks out the winds upon the sea, so that we may know that Fate hates us.”16 Such inflammatory statements do not seem to fall within the scope of a general description of the natural properties and qualities of flax. As the tirade progresses, the distinction between the various sections of the passage becomes confused. Pliny initially seems to be heading from section 1 (“the natural properties and marvelous qualities of flax”) to section 3 (“the manner in which it is sown and processed”), which he also handles in a moralizing manner: So that we may know that flax is sown without Nature’s consent, it burns the field and impoverishes the soil. It is mostly sown in sandy soil and in a single furrow. Nor does any plant grow more quickly: it is sown in the spring and harvested in summer, and on account of this also it causes injury to the soil.17 Yet then he backtracks to section 2 (“flax’s superior varieties”), describing the many places where flax is grown and the uses of particular types, although he does so by questioning the perversity of places removed from the sea growing flax and making linen.18 Sections 2 and 3 remain mixed, with Pliny moving back and forth between varieties of flax and the processes it undergoes. The material which may be called section 3 (“the manner in which flax is sown and processed”) is similarly derisive, concluding with the declaration that flax is “always made better through injury,”19 echoing Pliny’s earlier assertion that flax “is not woven into fabric through its own strength, but is instead broken and beaten and forced by means of injury into the softness of wool, to arrive at the greatest level of foolhardiness (audaciae).”20 After beating this point over the head (much like the processing of flax), Pliny then commits himself to excessus of excess, touching upon “living linen,” which fire cannot consume (modern asbestos);21 the dyed linen sails of Alexander the Great and Cleopatra; and finally the use of linen sails as awnings,22 all of which he characterizes negatively as examples of dangerous luxury. In the end, the flax passage reads more 16 ac tot modis provocari mortem…ac summa audacia pervehi mare! Nulla exsecratio sufficit contra inventorem… ecce seritur hominis ut sciamus favisse Poenas (NH 19.5-6). 17 ut sentiamus nolente seri natura, urit agrum deterioremque etiam terram facit. Seritur sabulosis maxime unoque sulco. Nec magis festinat aliud: vere satum aestate evellitur, et hanc quoque terrae iniuriam facit (NH 19.6-7). 18 NH 19.7-15. 19 semper iniuria melius (NH 19.18). 20 neque id viribus suis nexum, sed fractum tunsumque et in mollitiem lanae coactum iniuria ac/ad summa audaciae pervenire (NH 19.5-6). 21 NH 19.19-20. 22 NH 19.22-25. — 98 — like a philippic (and a poorly-structured one at that) than a carefully constructed critique. It fails to closely follow the outline Pliny himself provides in the index. As a result, Pliny’s rant against linum can seem a perfect example of the shoddy writing and scientific credulity of which Pliny has so often been accused.23 However, while such conclusions certainly grant the modern reader a pleasing sense of intellectual superiority, they fail to explain why Pliny hates flax so much. The most straightforward possibility may be that the plant refuses to align itself neatly with the categories Pliny uses to organize his encyclopedic inquiry. Pliny himself suggests as much when he first introduces the topic: “In order that I may begin by means [of plants] widely-acknowledged for their usefulness and those that indeed fill not only all lands but even the sea, the flax plant is sown but is not able to be named among the grains (fruges) or garden plants (hortensia), but in what part of life is it not met, or what could be more miraculous [than this plant]…?”24 Flax is an uncategorizeable plant of contradiction. It is a land plant that colonizes the sea (by means of linen sails), it is neither fruges nor hortensia, and it is commonplace yet also a miraculum. A traditional Italian plant, it is also intensely foreign, from exotic and potentially corrupting places like Ethiopia, India, Arabia,25 and even the home of the Morini, “considered the most remote of peoples.”26 It is used as simple medicine, food, and sacrifice by Italian farmers,27 the very sort of traditionalism Pliny approves of elsewhere, yet can be simultaneously the height of luxurious excess, used in mulierum deliciis (the luxuries of women), and sold at rates of four gold denarii for each twenty-fourth of an ounce,28 or at prices equal to those of the finest pearls.29 23 For examples of these critiques (and a refutation of them), see Wallace-Hadrill (1990, pp. 80-81). 24 atque, ut a confessis ordiamur utilitatibus quaeque non solum terras omnes verum etiam maria replevere, seritur ac dici neque inter fruges neque inter hortensia potest linum; sed in qua non occurret vitae parte, quodve miraculum maius (NH 19.2-3). 25 NH 19.15. 26 ultumique hominum existimati Morini (NH 19.8). 27 Inter medicamina huic vis et in quodam rustico ac praedulci Italiae transpadanae cibo, sed iam pridem sacrorum tantum, gratia (NH 19.16-17). 28 mulierum maxime deliciis circa Elim in Achaia genito; quaternis denaris scripula eius permutata quondam ut auri reperio (NH 19.20-1). 29 aequat pretia excellentium margaritarum (NH 19.20). — 99 — Yet, in this last respect, flax fits all too well into Pliny’s broader categories and aims, and this provides another explanation for his intense dislike. Throughout the Natural History Pliny laments the decline of Roman traditional morality and asserts that this decline is caused by an appetite for and over-reliance on luxury. As Wallace-Hadrill has convincingly argued, this commentary on luxury and moral decline underlies the whole work, wherein “Nature supplies, unasked and ungrudgingly, everything man needs, but that man, blinded by luxuria, abuses nature and turns it into the tool of his own destruction.”30 Flax fits easily into this reading of the Natural History—it stands in for man’s audacia and, like man, harms nature.31 So too does it line up with another of Wallace-Hadrill’s arguments: that in Pliny what is moral and natural is that which is simple, cheap, and easy to obtain.32 Italian flax, when used locally for simple, affordable goods like medicine, mattresses, and lamp wicks,33 carries no moral stigma, but the further it gets from Italy the more luxurious and dangerous it becomes, most of all when it (as vela) is also the means of transporting other foreign luxuries to the Italian market. To Pliny, such flax is indeed an unnatural part of nature. It harms the very earth that nourishes it and grows against Nature’s wishes. It can cause the very elements to behave contrary to their natures, as epitomized by Pliny’s conception of asbestos “linen,” which becomes “more splendidly clean through the action of fire than [it] would be able to with water.”34 Flax even upsets gender norms: its greatness and preeminence comes not from masculine strength (vis) but from affront and injury (iniuria) and effeminate softness (mollitia).35 While weaving is traditionally the province of women, “it is seemly that flax be woven even by men,”36 and when women do weave flax, they often do so in strange ways—for instance, underground.37 30 Wallace-Hadrill (1990, pp. 86). 31 See footnote 17 above. 32 Ibid. 88. 33 NH 19.13-17. 34 ardentesque in focis conviviorum ex eo vidimus mappas sordibus exustis splendescentes igni magis quam possent aquis (NH 19.19). 35 neque id viribus suis nexum, sed fractum tunsumque et in mollitiem lanae coactum iniuria ac/ad summa audaciae pervenire (NH 19.5-6). 36 linumque nere et viris decorum est (NH 19.18). 37 in Germania autem defossae atque sub terra id opus agunt (NH 19.9). — 100 — Pliny is not alone in his discomfort with flax, particularly in relation to how it is processed by being broken, beaten, drowned, hung upside down, roughly combed with iron, drowned again, and then beaten some more.38 In an unfinished paper memorably titled, “The Passions of the Flax,” Robert Eisler has posited that the suffering and death of flax inspired the Greek mourning cry αἴλινον and the mythic figure Linus, who died by beating and dismemberment (much like the processing of flax) and whose mother’s name meant “sandy,”39 an apparent link to Pliny’s assertion that flax grows in sandy soil.40 Eisler traces the suffering of flax in fable from the Egyptian worship of Osiris, the god who was torn apart and then reborn underground just as flax is reborn when its seeds are sown; to Germanic and Slavonic folktales and songs where the torments of flax are used to ward off evil spirits; to the somewhat disturbing 1849 Hans Christian Andersen fable “The Flax,” where the ever optimistic plant undergoes repeated torment as it is uprooted, drowned, roasted, broken, combed, woven into linen, cut up, pulped into paper, and finally used as kindling.41 Eisler finally (through some argumentative contortions) links flax folktales to the passions of Christ.42 In another paper published just a few years later, Robert Graves seems to have independently reached many of the same conclusions, linking Linus to flax cultivation (he cites Pliny the Elder as an explanation for the name of Linus’ mother, but otherwise makes no reference to him).43 He also suggests that this preoccupation with the violence done to flax is part of a broader tradition, referencing a number of shocking flax harvest rituals that apparently took place in the Austrian Alps where men who interrupted the flax harvest were beaten, threatened with castration, and generally forced to undergo the same torments as the plant. He uses this evidence to advance a disturbing and exceedingly unlikely reconstruction of Greek ritual, concluding that “it seems likely, then, that at the flax-harvest in Argolis women used to catch, sexually assault, and dismember a man who represented the flax spirit.”44 While it is dangerous to speculate too far down these sorts of Jungian rabbit holes, it seems fair to assume that there was a general cultural anxiety in the Mediterranean 38 See NH 19.16-18. 39 Eisler (1950, pp. 114-133). 40 NH 19.7. Eisler, however, does not cite Pliny when he makes this observation. 41 Andersen. 42 Eisler (1950). 43 Graves (1954, pp. 167-181). 44 Ibid. 172-173. — 101 — region about the iniuria undergone by flax, and it is not unlikely that Pliny draws upon this discomfort in his own description of the plant. But I believe Pliny also has a more subversive, specifically Roman, motivation for flax-hatred: critique of empire. Such a reading may initially seem at odds with explicitly stated aims of the Natural History. It is a book dedicated to Titus, Pliny’s iucundissime imperator,45 a work written “for the glory of the race that conquers other peoples and for the glory of the Roman name.”46 The inquiry has a clear imperial agenda: to catalogue the contents of empire and, as Murphy suggests, “to assimilate the unfamiliar to the operating system of Roman culture.”47 Elizabeth Pollard has even suggested that the botanical classification Pliny undertakes in Book XIX and elsewhere could mirror and celebrate the imperial gardens associated with Vespasian’s Templum Pacis, which may have contained specimens of unusual plants from throughout the empire.48 “Who,” Pliny asks in the History, “would not think that life has profited with the whole world in communication under the majesty of Roman rule, with the trade of goods and the fellowship of joyous peace…?” Who indeed? Pliny himself, it would seem. He immediately goes on to bemoan how greed has corrupted individual’s morals, leaving them unable to take advantage of the glorious opportunities offered by their own empire, to the point where “the breadth of the world and the extent of things have inflicted a kind of penalty on subsequent generations.”49 Pliny’s apparent endorsement of imperial aggrandizement is in conflict with his other theme of moral decline through lust for foreign luxuries, the very sorts of luxuries which are the wages of empire.50 Both these topics (and their inherent contradiction) had long been tropes of Roman writing, but articulating their contradiction was uniquely risky under the Empire. It is difficult to critique the consequences of empire without critiquing the emperor. Thus Pliny is careful to cast Roman greed and lack of interest in knowledge as existing in spite of 45 NH Pref.1. 46 profecto enim populi gentium victoris et Romani nominis gloriae, non suae, conposuisse illa decuit (NH Pref. 16). Pliny here is praising Livy, but in describing what he thinks ought to motivate a work, he surely suggests his own aims. 47 Murphy (2007, p. 15). 48 Pollard (2009, pp. 309-338). 49 quis enim non communicato orbe terrarum maiestate Romani imperii profecisse vitam putet commercio rerum ac societate festae pacis…posteris laxitas mundi et rerum amplitudo damno fuit. (NH 14.2-5). 50 See Murphy for further discussion (2007, pp. 69-70). — 102 — “an emperor who rejoices in the production of written works and arts.”51 Yet Pliny uses flax and linen sails to destabilize this distinction. In the opening of Book XIX, Pliny spends a lengthy (and somewhat tedious) amount of time marveling how linen sails can transport imperial officers to and from their duties in various parts of the empire at impressive speeds.52 In so doing, Pliny demonstrates that these vela, which allow for the importation of corrupting luxuries and lure men into unmarked graves,53 are in fact vital to the successful administration and continued conquest of the Roman empire. Vela are Roman. Yet immediately thereafter Pliny launches into his diatribe against linum and vela. As the passage progresses, Pliny describes increasingly luxurious and foreign varieties of flax, culminating in the most expensive types, including asbestos, which is used in “the funeral garments of kings.”54 Kingship is supposed to be very un-Roman, and Pliny even explicitly links “insanely” luxurious dyed flax to eastern autocrats who are even more un-Roman: “It has also been attempted to dye linen, so that it may submit to our collective insanity in so attiring ourselves. This first happened in the fleets of Alexander the Great when he navigated the Indus river…Cleopatra came with Mark Anthony to Actium and fled that same place with a purple sail. Later on this sail was the mark of the emperor’s ship.”55 Something disturbing has happened here—Cleopatra and the Roman princeps are using the same linens. Within his convoluted inquiry into flax and linen, Pliny has managed to inextricably link both the Roman empire and Rome’s morally corrupt, conquered enemies, suggesting that there might not be so much difference between pharaoh and princeps after all. Both are distinguished by the same excessive and un-Roman luxuries. 51 tam gaudente proventu literarum artiumque principe (NH 2.117-118). 52 NH 19.3-4. 53 “no execration against the inventor [of navigation] is sufficient…it was not enough for him that man should die on land unless he also perished without burial rites.” nulla exsecratio sufficit contra inventorem dictum suo loco a nobis, cui satis non fuit hominem in terra mori nisi periret et insepultus (NH 19.6). 54 regum inde funebres tunicae corporis favillam ab reliquo separant cinere (NH 19.19). 55 Temptatum est tingui linum quoque, ut vestium insaniam acciperet; in Alexandri Magni primum classibus Indo amne navigantis… velo purpureo ad Actium cum M. Antonio Cleopatra venit eodemque fugit. hoc fuit imperatoriae navis insigne postea (NH 19.22). — 103 — Pliny’s plant-based critique of empire becomes even more evident in his apparent digression immediately thereafter into the use of linen sails as theater awnings. Connecting these sails to the sails discussed at the beginning of the diatribe reveals the hidden narrative structure underlying the whole flax passage. The passage is not merely a rambling rant against flax and linen, but a well-plotted invasion of sails. Originating out at sea, a province which was never truly Roman (since the Romans only mastered it to face the Carthaginians), they progressively invade the Roman state both spatially and culturally in the closing section of the flax passage, which is much more than the advertised description of theater awnings: “Tightly stretched linen sails were used in the theaters to make shade… Soon Caesar as dictator wove sails over the whole Roman Forum and over the Via Sacra from his own house and without interruption over the hill going up to the Capitoline… Then, even without the excuse of games, Marcellus, born to Octavia, sister of Augustus, shadowed the Forum with sails so that litigants might pause there more healthily—how much changed from the morality of Cato the censor, who believed that the Forum should even be paved with pointy rocks (muricibus)! Even more recently sails colored like the sky, bespangled with stars, were rigged along lines in the amphitheaters of the emperor Nero. Sails are made red in the courtyards of houses and there they defend moss from the sun.”56 First linen sails, which Pliny earlier established as a source of wicked audacia, cover the theaters, already marginal, Hellenized spaces which were viewed as potentially corrupting, but then they cover the Forum and the Via Sacra, the heart of Roman public and civic life, and the Capitoline, the “head” of the Roman state and world, an assault “woven” by Julius Caesar even as he plots the demise of the Republic and subjugates its people through civil war. Sails then become a regular part of public life under the patronage of the Imperial family (especially its most corrupt and extravagant member, Nero), until finally they invade the final, most fundamental frontier of Roman identity and morality, the domus. Pliny emphasizes the reversal and weak- 56 in teatris [vela] tenta umbram fecere…mox Caesar dictator totum forum Romanum intexit viamque sacram ab domo sua et clivum usque in Capitolium,,. deinde et sine ludis Marcellus Octavia Augusti sorore genitus …velis forum inumbravit, ut salubrius litigantes consisterent, quantum mutati a moribus Catonis censorii qui sternendum quoque forum muricibus censuerat! vela nuper et colore caeli, stellata, per rudentes iere etiam in amphitheatris principis Neronis. rubent in cavis aedium et muscum ab sole defendunt (NH 19.23-24). — 104 — ening of Roman morality that this assault symbolizes by contrasting it with the old Republican views of Cato, an author he reveres. Instead of an austere Forum paved with stones as uncomfortable as the shells of murices (spiny shellfish from which expensive purple dye was made), the Forum and the state are luxuriously cushioned with sails that may instead even be dyed with murices. Indeed, such a purple sail is used by the emperor himself. Ultimately, Pliny leads the reader to question whether Romans and the Roman state are, like flax, made more powerful by suffering indignity and injury. Are the internecine struggles and the theft of freedoms that can come with imperial rule worth the expansive glory that attends them? Murphy has demonstrated that Pliny, like many other Roman authors, saw the Romans as conquered culturally by those they had themselves conquered,57 but I argue that Pliny may covertly be taking this trope a step further. Pliny writes that, “after the senator began to be chosen on the basis of his wealth…and nothing began to adorn the magistrate and the general more than wealth…all the arts called liberal from that greatest good [freedom], declined into the opposite, and it became possible to succeed through servitude alone.”58 These positions all had meaning beyond wealth before the emperors took away their real power. So while Pliny cannot explicitly say it, his critique of Roman avarice is closely tied to problems stemming from luxurious imperial rule, and he himself is creating art that is a work of servitude, dedicated to the imperial family. By comparing flax to the audacia of the Roman people, to the expansive power and decline of morality under empire, and finally to imperial luxury itself, Pliny seems to suggest that the Roman people have been conquered by their own emperors. 57 Murphy (2007, p. 68). 58 postquam senator censu legi coeptus, iudex fieri censu, magistratum ducemque nihil exornare quam census, postquam coepere orbitas in auctoritate summa et potentia esse, captatio in quaestu fertilissimo, ac sola gaudia in possidendo, pessum iere vitae pretia, omnesque a maximo bono liberales dictae artes in contrarium cecidere, ac servitute sola profici coeptum (NH 14.5). — 105 — Works Cited Andersen, Hans Christian “The Flax,” Jean Hersholt, trans. The Hans Christian Andersen Center, http://www.andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/TheFlax_e.html. Graves, R. “Discoveries in Greek Mythology.” The Hudson Review 7.2 (1954), pp. 167–181. http://doi.org/10.2307/3847166. Eisler, R. “The Passion of the Flax.” Folklore 61.3 (1950), pp. 114–133. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1257742. Murphy, T. Pliny the Elder’s Natural History: The Empire in the Encyclopedia. Oxford University Press Scholarship online: Oxford (2007). Pollard, E.A. “Pliny’s Natural History and the Flavian Templum Pacis: Botanical Imperialism in First-Century C. E. Rome.” Journal of World History 20.3 (2009), pp. 309–338. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40542802. Pliny. Natural History, Volume I: Books 1-2. H. Rackham, ed., trans. Loeb Classical Library 330. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA (1938). ——— Natural History, Volume IV: Books 12-16. H. Rackham, ed, trans. Loeb Classical Library 370. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA (1945). ——— Natural History, Volume V: Books 17-19. H. Rackham, ed., trans. Loeb Classical Library 371. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA (1950). Pliny the Younger. Letters, Volume I: Books 1-7. B. Radice, ed., trans. Loeb Classical Library 55. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA (1969). Wallace-Hadrill, A. “Pliny the Elder and Man’s Unnatural History.” Greece & Rome 37.1 (1990), pp. 80–96. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/643244. — 106 —