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The desire to gather the world in a book

What would happen if we tried to gather everything a civilisation knows into a single book? Pliny the Elder’s Natural History answers with thirty-seven books: a dazzling journey through the cosmos, geography, peoples, animals, plants, minerals, art and their uses. It is one of Rome’s great intellectual adventures and a portrait of its confidence—and anxiety—in the face of an immense world.

Pliny writes in the first century CE, within the Roman Empire, when roads, armies and trade connected territories and news on an unprecedented scale. His encyclopedia tries to bring order to this abundance. It is not merely an inventory: it is the Roman imagination asking what deserves to be known and how knowledge can be passed on.

Its scale is impressive, but its real power lies in its method. Pliny gathers authorities, accounts, observations and wonders, revealing how difficult it was to separate what had been verified, inherited or imagined. This mixture is not a flaw to hide: it is the history of how authority was built before modern science. We can read the work as a historical source, a literature of wonder and a record of boundless curiosity—not as a contemporary scientific encyclopedia.

An encyclopedia is also a point of view

Every work that aims to gather “everything” must decide what to include, what to leave out and how to connect its materials. Natural History makes those decisions visible. Practical information, wonders and beliefs coexist within it; for that very reason, it teaches us that knowledge never arrives naked, but accompanied by an era, a language and an idea of what deserves our attention.

To think further: how we organise vast quantities of information today, what we leave out when we do so, and what responsibility we have when presenting a source as reliable knowledge.