Pliny Natural History, Vol. I (Loeb Latin-English)

us who has made the same venture, nor one among the Greeks who has tackled single-handed all departments of the subject. A large part of us seek agreeable fields of study, while topics of immeasurable abstruseness treated by others are drowned in the shadowy darkness of the theme. Before all else, those subjects which the Greeks call Encyclic Culture [general education] must be touched upon. And yet they are either unknown or have been made uncertain by the ingenuity of scholars, while others have been published so widely that they have become tiresome. It is a difficult task to give novelty to what is old, authority to what is new, brilliance to the common-place, light to the obscure, attraction to the stale, credibility to the doubtful, but nature to all things and all her properties to nature. Accordingly, even if we have not succeeded, it is honorable and glorious in the fullest measure to have resolved on the attempt.

For my own part, I am of the opinion that a special place in learning belongs to those who have preferred the useful service of overcoming difficulties to the popularity of giving pleasure. I have myself already done this in other works, and I declare that I admire the famous writer Livy, who, when beginning one volume a. Now lost. of his History of Rome from the Foundation of the City, started as follows: he had already achieved enough fame and could have retired to leisure, had not his restless mind b. A variant gives "my mind in a period of rest." found its sustenance in work. For assuredly he ought to have composed his history for the glory of the world-conquering nation and of the Roman name, not for his own; it would have been a greater merit to have persevered from love of the work, not for the sake of his own—