Pliny: Natural History, Vol. I (Loeb)

PLINY: NATURAL HISTORY

PREFACE, 24-27

But when you get inside these books, good heavens, what a void you will find! Our authors, being more serious, use titles like Antiquities, Instances and Systems, and the wittiest use Talks by Lamplight—I suppose because the author was a toper; indeed, "Tippler" was his name.

25 Varro makes a rather smaller claim in his Satires, A Ulysses-and-a-half and Folding-tablet. Diodorus among the Greeks stopped playing with words and gave his history the title Library. Indeed, the philologist Apion (whom Tiberius Caesar used to call "the world's cymbal," though he might better have been thought a drum, advertising his own renown) wrote that those to whom he dedicated his compositions received the gift of immortality from him.

26 For myself, I am not ashamed of not having invented any livelier title. To avoid seeming a downright adversary of the Greeks, I should like to be accepted on the same terms as those founders of painting and sculpture who, as you will find in these volumes, used to inscribe their finished masterpieces with a provisional title, such as "Worked on by Apelles" or "by Polyclitus." This was done as though art were always a thing in progress and never fully completed, so that if faced by the vagaries of criticism, the artist might have a line of retreat, implying that he intended to correct any defect noted if he were not interrupted.

27 Hence, it is exceedingly modest of them to have inscribed all their works in a manner suggesting they were their latest, as though they were snatched away from their creators by fate.