Editing Natural History (Pliny) (section)

===Sources===

Pliny studied the original authorities on each subject and took care to make excerpts from their pages. His ''indices auctorum'' sometimes list the authorities he actually consulted, though not exhaustively; in other cases, they cover the principal writers on the subject, whose names are borrowed second-hand from his immediate authorities.<ref name=EB1911/> He acknowledges his obligations to his predecessors: "To own up to those who were the means of one's own achievements."<ref>Pliny the Elder. [https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/L/Roman/Texts/Pliny_the_Elder/praefatio*.html#21 Praefatio:21]</ref>

In the preface, the author claims to have stated 20,000 facts gathered from some 2,000 books and from 100 select authors.<ref>{{cite book | author=Anderson, Frank J.  | title=An Illustrated History of the Herbals | url=https://archive.org/details/illustratedhisto00ande  | url-access=registration  | publisher=Columbia University Press | year=1977 | isbn=0-231-04002-4 | page=[https://archive.org/details/illustratedhisto00ande/page/17 17]}}</ref> The extant lists of his authorities cover more than 400, including 146 Roman and 327 Greek and other sources of information. The lists generally follow the order of the subject matter of each book. This has been shown in [[Heinrich Brunn]]'s ''Disputatio'' ([[Bonn]], 1856).<ref name=EB1911/><ref>Cf. Heinrich Brunn's ''Kleine Schriften Gesammelt Von Hermann Brunn Und Heinrich Bulle...: Bd. Zur Griechischen Kunstgeschichte. Mit 69 Abbildungen Im Text Und Auf Einer Doppeltafel'', 1905 reproduction by Ulan Press (2012).</ref>

One of Pliny's authorities is [[Marcus Terentius Varro]]. In the geographical books, Varro is supplemented by the topographical commentaries of [[Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa|Agrippa]], which were completed by the emperor [[Augustus]]; for his [[zoology]], he relies largely on Aristotle and on [[Juba II|Juba]], the scholarly [[Mauretania]]n king, ''studiorum claritate memorabilior quam regno'' (v. 16).<ref name=EB1911/> Juba is one of his principal guides in botany;<ref name=EB1911/> [[Theophrastus]] is also named in his Indices, and Pliny had translated Theophrastus's Greek into Latin. Another work by Theophrastus, ''[[On Stones]]'' was cited as a source on [[ores]] and [[mineral]]s. Pliny strove to use all the Greek histories available to him, such as Herodotus and [[Thucydides]], as well as the ''[[Bibliotheca Historica]]'' of [[Diodorus Siculus]].<ref>Cf. Mary Beagon, ''Roman Nature: The Thought of Pliny the Elder'', Clarendon Press (1992), ''s.v.''; Trevor Murphy, ''Pliny the Elder's Natural History: The Empire in the Encyclopedia'', OUP (2004), pp.&nbsp;196–200 and ''passim''.</ref>