Pliny: Natural History, Vol. I (Loeb)

the winter weather, so that even the severity of the cold would not steal any time from his studies; and with this in mind, he used to go about in a litter a covered couch carried on poles, used by the wealthy in Rome even in Rome. I remember once he scolded me for going somewhere on foot, saying, “You need not have wasted those hours!” He considered all time not spent in study to be wasted. This resolute application enabled him to get through all those volumes, and he bequeathed to me 160 sets of notes on selected books, written on both sides of the paper in an extremely small hand—a method that multiplies the number of volumes! He used to tell how, during his lieutenant-governorship in Spain, he had an offer of £3,500 for these notes, and at that date, they were considerably fewer in number.

TEXT

A large number of manuscript copies of Pliny’s Natural History have been preserved; the oldest date back to the 9th or possibly the 8th century A.D. Attempts have been made by scholars to classify them in order of merit, but it cannot be said that even those that appear to be comparatively more correct carry any supreme authority, or indeed show much agreement on doubtful points. Meanwhile, the mass of scientific detail and terminology, and the quantity of curious and unfamiliar erudition that the book contains, have necessarily afforded numerous opportunities for copyists’ errors and for the conjectural emendation the act of correcting a text based on educated guesswork by scholars. Many of the textual problems raised are manifestly insoluble. Only a few variants of special interest are given in this edition.
Many editions have been printed, beginning with