(whimsical orchestral music)
Hey persons of age.
So, long before the era of the wiki,
there used to be these things called encyclopedias,
where for a small fee of thousands of dollars,
they would mail you a tiny fraction
of the knowledge that we have access to today.
And you could put it on a shelf.
And it would sit there and make you look "learned."
But while not reading an encyclopedia is easy,
not creating one is much easier.
And yet we do it.
Encyclopedia Britannica is still in circulation today,
and it's maintained by around a hundred full-time editors
and more than four thousand contributors.
So whose idea was this?
Who was the first person to sit down and say,
"Hm, today I feel like writing down
EVERYTHING."
To answer that, we must look nearly two thousand years in the past
to the mid 70s AD.
Pliny the Elder.
Author.
Philosopher.
Veteran.
Imperial administrator.
And one curious buckaroo.
Early in his life, Pliny's father took him to Rome to study law.
Then as a young adult, he spent several years as a junior officer
in the Roman military.
His interest in literature made him a few high-ranking friends there,
and when he came home, he took to writing.
Unfortunately, a certain apocryphal fiddler was in charge at the time
and wasn't exactly kind to intellectuals.
So Pliny kept it on the DL,
mostly writing about things like grammar and rhetoric,
which at the time, few people found worth freaking out over.
Fortunately, in June of 68,
Nero finally took a hint and killed himself,
and following the chaos of the Year of the Four Emperors,
one Vespasian came out on top.
Vespasian was a general and a friend of Pliny's,
so when he became emperor he promoted Pliny to "Procurator,"
which was like the governor of a province.
Suddenly, with this guy on the throne
and a cushy job to pay the bills,
Pliny found himself in a position to make complete use of his own potential.
By day he continued his administrative duties,
but during nights, he wrote.
And over the course of a few years,
with nothing but his own wits
and whatever authors he could get his hands on,
He created a work known as the
"Historia Naturalis."
This consisted of thirty-seven books,
each broken up into many dozens of chapters
covering just about every topic there is.
While it wasn't quite an encyclopedia in the modern sense,
it's still the earliest surviving attempt
and an all-encompassing scholarly work,
and it is a TRIP.
I've been reading it.
It is fascinating.
Not only as a reflection of what people did and did not know in the Roman Empire,
but also as a reflection of Pliny himself,
who is a character,
and who made zero attempt to hide it.
So today, I come to you with
A Brief Summary of the First Part of a
Brief Summary of ALL HUMAN KNOWLEDGE
According to One Dude
circa 77 AD.
Now, the original thing makes for a fairly long read.
Even removing most of the more uninteresting details
I've only managed to fit the first two books into today's video.
As for the other thirty-five,
ehhh...uhhhh...
We'll see.
I'm gonna let Pliny do the narration himself,
using my voice.
He gets a lot of things shockingly right
and a lot shockingly wrong.
Rather than constantly chiming in with fact checks,
I'm just gonna throw chess.com analysis icons in the corner
for every claim he makes.
I'll also provide relevant snippets of the actual text I'm paraphrasing,
just for reference.
If you're one of the people that likes to pause the video
just to see the funny ha-ha's I snuck into the freeze frame,
rest assured, there will be none today.
You can just let it play.
One last warning,
while there is a loose overall structure to this thing,
it also seems like Pliny just kinda wrote
whatever was in his head for a given chapter.
He has a habit of jumping back and forth
between completely disparate topics
and going on weird personal tangents in between.
I am presenting this thing in the exact order it's written,
so if it at any point seems utterly scatterbrained,
it's his fault. Not mine.
Anyway, take it away.
(dramatic music with choir)
(music stops)
Yo.
(dramatic music with choir starts up again)
(music stops)
(drinks water)
Right, let me get right ahead of things.
These books are strictly about this world
and the things we can see around it.
If you're one of those mad men
who think there are other worlds beyond this one,
give it a rest, alright?
That's PSYCHOTIC.
You can't know these things
and you can't grasp infinity.
Stop trying, you'll hurt yourself.
So the heavens are a perfect sphere
and they spin around us perfectly.
It takes twenty-four hours for them to do one spin,
which is actually really fast because the universe is HUGE.
In fact, massive objects all whooshing around us this fast
should be incredibly loud at all times.
Why isn't this the case?
(mumbles) I don't know.
The whole shebang is composed of four elements, right,
which sort themselves by weight.
Earth is heaviest, so it falls to the middle of everything
into a sphere,
and it stays still.
It's the only still thing.
On top of that is water,
then air,
and fire's the lighest,
which is why the Sun and stars are made of it.
The Sun
kicks ass.
Easily the best of the seven things up there.
Basically a god.
Not literally.
Uh, don't try to answer questions about God's nature, by the way,
you'll just confuse yourself.
There is AT MOST one god and he's everything,
and he doesn't do weird human shit
like getting jealous or banging other gods.
I swear, people just make up new gods
every time they want something specific.
Let me tell ya,
there was a temple on Palatine Hill
dedicated, through my tax dollars by the way,
to "Fever."
Like, the illness.
You understand that's batshit, right?
Things like that are why
we've got more gods than people at this point.
Folks in other countries worship animals and obscene things
like "stinking meats."
There are gods of theft and other crimes,
it's all folly.
You wanna be godly?
Just help others.
That's the way of the old Roman nobles.
And that's the way of the noblest noble of all,
Emperor Vespasian Augustus,
who may or may not be my best buddy.
But anyway, if there is a god,
he doesn't care about what you do.
People put crazy emphasis on their religion,
avoiding foods,
worrying themselves sick about all kinds of sacred rules.
Look, I hang around the capital.
There's a lot of rat bastards in politics.
Real scumbags.
And they are THUH-RIVING.
You don't need to torture yourself.
Have a bacon. Nobody gives a shit.
Back to the stars, which, by the way,
also don't give a shit about you specifically.
For big history-changing stuff, yeah, they'll act up,
but you, reader, do not need to worry.
Anyway, most of them are fixed in a sphere really high up there,
we'll call this the heavens.
Between the heavens and the earth,
there are seven other bodies to talk about.
Highest up there we got Saturn,
then there's Jupiter,
Mars,
The Sun,
Venus,
Mercury,
Moon.
The heavens spin to the right,
all these guys spin to the left.
Saturn is cold, Mars is hot, but Jupiter?
Jupiter's just right.
The Sun's orbit is made up of 360 degrees,
one degree per day.
Except not quite.
We have to add 5 and a fourth days or else our sundials break.
Down to Venus and Mercury,
these guys are weird because they like to hang around the Sun.
Fun fact: Venus is actually bright enough
to help out the Sun and Moon sometimes.
When it's helping the Sun, we call it Lucifer,
THE LIGHT-BRINGER.
And when it's helping the Moon we call it Vesper,
the sleepy-time guy.
Mercury tries to do the same thing,
but he's much more lame and cringe,
so he can't.
The Moon's got phases, as you know,
and she gets closer and farther away at different times.
Endymion figured out lots of cool info about the Moon's orbit,
and you assholes bullied him for it.
Yeah.
This man unraveled the secrets of the universe,
and in return, everyone goes,
"Ho ho ho, he's in love with the moon."
That's because humans are sick in the head.
They'd rather read stories about bloodshed and massacres
and think that matters more than the fabric of reality.
Get a clue.
Anyway, the Moon has phases because of the way
it borrows light from the Sun.
Which might be what these other guys do, too,
we don't know yet.
All those spots on it are actually puddles,
because it likes to draw up moisture from the Earth,
which is where we get the tides.
And every now and then it casts its shadow on Earth.
We call these "eclipses"
and they are FREAKIN' WICKED.
Eclipses can happen the other way around, too.
And the way these happen prove
that the Moon is bigger than the Earth
and the Sun's way bigger than both of them.
Oh, and just so we're clear,
eclipses are a natural thing,
it's not the apocalypse or God's wrath.
They follow rules, even the Greeks could predict them.
Settle down.
Back to the planets,