The Natural History of Pliny, Volume 1 (of 6)

Imagine walking through the mind of an ancient Roman scholar who spent his life collecting every fact, every wonder, every oddity known to the Mediterranean world. That is Pliny's Natural History: a thirty-seven-book monument to curiosity, written in the first century AD and dedicated to Emperor Titus. This is not a modern encyclopedia with its careful detachment. Pliny gossips about emperors, records miracles, lists 1,200 different medicinal uses for plants, and pauses to mourn the death of his friend the giraffe. He catalogs the world's peoples, from the sciapods who shade themselves with one enormous foot to the wise men of India. He explains earthquakes, gemstones, the habits of elephants, and why sea water makes fish blind. The result is chaotic, opinionated, sometimes wrong, and utterly irresistible. Here is the entire Roman empire's knowledge of nature compressed into one furious, fascinated intelligence. It is the ancestor of every encyclopedia ever written, and it reads like no encyclopedia you have ever encountered.