Gaius Plinius Secundus was a first century Roman writer, known by the name Pliny the Elder to differentiate him from his nephew and adopted son Pliny the Younger. His best known work, and the only one preserved in its entirety, is
Naturalis Historiæ
or
Natural History.
Pliny belonged to the equestrian order and held various military and administrative positions throughout his life, combining them with studies and research on natural, ethnographic and geographical phenomena compiled in his work
Natural History
, which is possibly the first encyclopedia that antiquity bequeathed to us.
Pliny's
offers us a fascinating vision of the world as the Romans saw it 2000 years ago, covering a vast field ranging from cosmology, geography, zoology, botany, medicine, mineralogy to various superstitions of his time, and much more, developed in 37 books, which in Bostock and Riley's translation occupy some 3000 pages.
This edition condenses this masterpiece into a single volume, including all the 37 Books of the original work, preserving as much as possible the 19th century English wording of its original translators, with minimal changes to improve its readability.