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The Herbal Historical past of Pliny the Elder is for lots of the primary encyclopedia of historical past and a reference paintings on “the nature of all things”, as he himself stated, no less than till the Renaissance, even if the textual content owes extra to the literary custom than to statement and analysis.

Years don’t move in useless for texts like this. Pliny isn’t some of the extensively learn classics, however of the 37 books that make up this huge paintings, with greater than 20,000 references and greater than 400 cited authors, there’s person who turns out to have change into related once more in recent times. It’s guide XXIII, in large part dedicated to gold and silver. In it, the creator gave a unique worth to gold as an emblem of greed and tool, and that, in our time, it’s as soon as once more the middle of geopolitics.

A gold particle from the sedimentary fabrics of the Roman Las Medulas gold mine. Javier Fernandez Lozano

The dominance of the orbis terrarum (“the totality of the known world”) is a continuing in Roman rhetoric: it assumed the empire’s talent to “reach the limits of the world.” For Pliny, the Roman want to procure the valuable steel led them to “descend into the bowels of the earth.” The author, who in his texts puzzled how a long way human greed would penetrate, interpreted the growth of mining on account of greed and the seek for wealth.

The poet Virgil wrote that the starvation for…

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Author : bq3anews

Publish date : 2026-06-02 01:58:00

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