Pliny: Natural History, Vol. I (Loeb)

PLINY: NATURAL HISTORY

PREFACE, 27-30

They were inscribed "Made by X" (which I will mention in their proper places); this made it appear that the author had assumed supreme confidence in his art, and as a result, these works were very unpopular.

28 For my own part, I frankly confess that my works would admit of a great deal of expansion—and not only these, but all my publications. By saying this, I hope to guard against your "Homer-scourgers" (which is the more accurate term). I hear that both the Stoics and the Academy, as well as the Epicureans—and as for the philologists, I always expected it from them—are in labor, attempting to produce a reply to my publications on philology, and have been having a series of miscarriages for the last ten years. Not even elephants take so long to bring their offspring to birth!

29 As if I did not know that Theophrastus—a man whose excellence as an orator earned him the title "the divine"—actually had a book written against him by a woman, which gave rise to the proverb about "choosing your tree to hang from!"

30 I cannot refrain from quoting the actual words of Cato the Censor on this subject, to show that even the treatise on military discipline by Cato—who had learned his soldiering under Africanus, or rather under him and Hannibal as well, and who could not endure even Africanus, a commander-in-chief who had won a triumph—found critics ready to attack him, the sort of people who try to gain glory for themselves by running down another man’s knowledge. "What then?" he says in the book in question, "I myself know that if certain writings are published, there will be plenty of people who will vitilitigate original: "vitilitigent"; Pliny explains this as a combination of vitium (fault) and litigare (to quarrel/litigate), essentially "fault-quarreling" or "quibbling.", but these will mostly be people entirely devoid of true distinction. For my part, I have let these persons’ eloquence run its course."