Pliny Explains it All: The Historia Naturalis Abridged (Books I-II) -- Sam O'Nella

Happy Halloween everybody

Original text:https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D2%3Achapter%3D1

Orchestral music from book titles:
"Bright Blue Blow" by Makai Symphony
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3g3-XS5QroY

____

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Intro and outro song:
"Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 in G, Movement I (Allegro), BWV 1049" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

(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,