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Authors: Italo Calvino
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sneeze during intercourse can cause a miscarriage. Whoever considers how precarious is the birth of the proudest living being can only feel pity and shame: often even the smell of a lamp that has just been put out can cause a miscarriage. And to think that such fragile origins can produce a powerful tyrant or murderer. You who rely on your physical strength, who enjoy the benefits of Fortune, and consider yourself not her temporary ward but her son, who think you are a god the minute some success makes you puff out your chest, just think how little it would have taken to destroy you! (7.42-44)
It is easy to understand why Pliny was popular in the Christian Middle Ages, when he produced maxims like this: ‘in order to weigh up life properly, one must always remind oneself of human fragility.’
Human beings form an area of the living world which must be defined by carefully drawing its boundaries: that is why Pliny records the extreme limits reached by man in every field, and Book 7 becomes something like today’s
Guinness Book of Records
. Quantitative records above all, records of strength in lifting weights, of speed in running, of keen hearing, of memory, and even of the area of lands conquered. But there are also purely moral records, records of virtue, generosity and goodness. There are alsoextremely bizarre records: Antonina, Drusus’ wife, who never spat; the poet Pomponius who never belched (7.80); or the highest price paid for a slave (the grammar tutor Daphnis cost 700,000 sesterces, 7.128).
Only in one aspect of human life does Pliny not feel like quoting records or attempting measurements or comparisons: in happiness. It is impossible to decide who is happy and who is not, since it depends on subjective and debatable criteria (‘Felicitas cui praecipua fuerit homini, non est humani iudicii, cum prosperitatem ipsam alius alio modo et suopte ingenio quisque determinet, 7.130). If one wants to face the truth without illusions, no man can be said to be happy: and here Pliny’s anthropological survey lists examples of illustrious destinies (mostly taken from Roman history), to prove that the men most favoured by fortune had to tolerate considerable unhappiness and misfortune.
It is impossible to force that variable which is destiny into the natural history of man: this is the sense of the pages that Pliny devotes to the vicissitudes of fortune, to the unpredictability of the length of any life, to the pointlessness of astrology, to disease and death. The separation between the two forms of knowledge which astrology held together — the objective nature of calculable and predictable phenomena and the feeling of the individual existence with its uncertain future — this separation which acts as a premiss for modern science could be said to be already present in these pages, but in the form of a question that has still not been definitively resolved, and for which one must collect exhaustive documentation. In adducing his examples in this area, Pliny seems to falter: every event that happens, every biography, every anecdote, can serve to prove that life, if considered from the point of view of the person living it, cannot be evaluated either in quantity or quality, cannot be measured or compared to other lives. Its value is intrinsic to itself; so much so that hopes and fears about an afterlife are illusory: Pliny shares the view that death is followed by another non-existence which is equivalent and symmetrical to the nonexistence before birth.
That is why Pliny’s attention concentrates on the things of this world, the heavenly bodies and the territories of the globe, as well as animals, plants and stones. The soul, which cannot survive death, if it turns in upon itself, can only enjoy being alive in the present. ‘Etenim si dulce vivere est, cui potest esse vixisse? At quanto facilius certiusque sibi quemque credere, specimen securitas antegenitali sumere experimento!’ (If it is sweet to live, who can
It is easy to understand why Pliny was popular in the Christian Middle Ages, when he produced maxims like this: ‘in order to weigh up life properly, one must always remind oneself of human fragility.’
Human beings form an area of the living world which must be defined by carefully drawing its boundaries: that is why Pliny records the extreme limits reached by man in every field, and Book 7 becomes something like today’s
Guinness Book of Records
. Quantitative records above all, records of strength in lifting weights, of speed in running, of keen hearing, of memory, and even of the area of lands conquered. But there are also purely moral records, records of virtue, generosity and goodness. There are alsoextremely bizarre records: Antonina, Drusus’ wife, who never spat; the poet Pomponius who never belched (7.80); or the highest price paid for a slave (the grammar tutor Daphnis cost 700,000 sesterces, 7.128).
Only in one aspect of human life does Pliny not feel like quoting records or attempting measurements or comparisons: in happiness. It is impossible to decide who is happy and who is not, since it depends on subjective and debatable criteria (‘Felicitas cui praecipua fuerit homini, non est humani iudicii, cum prosperitatem ipsam alius alio modo et suopte ingenio quisque determinet, 7.130). If one wants to face the truth without illusions, no man can be said to be happy: and here Pliny’s anthropological survey lists examples of illustrious destinies (mostly taken from Roman history), to prove that the men most favoured by fortune had to tolerate considerable unhappiness and misfortune.
It is impossible to force that variable which is destiny into the natural history of man: this is the sense of the pages that Pliny devotes to the vicissitudes of fortune, to the unpredictability of the length of any life, to the pointlessness of astrology, to disease and death. The separation between the two forms of knowledge which astrology held together — the objective nature of calculable and predictable phenomena and the feeling of the individual existence with its uncertain future — this separation which acts as a premiss for modern science could be said to be already present in these pages, but in the form of a question that has still not been definitively resolved, and for which one must collect exhaustive documentation. In adducing his examples in this area, Pliny seems to falter: every event that happens, every biography, every anecdote, can serve to prove that life, if considered from the point of view of the person living it, cannot be evaluated either in quantity or quality, cannot be measured or compared to other lives. Its value is intrinsic to itself; so much so that hopes and fears about an afterlife are illusory: Pliny shares the view that death is followed by another non-existence which is equivalent and symmetrical to the nonexistence before birth.
That is why Pliny’s attention concentrates on the things of this world, the heavenly bodies and the territories of the globe, as well as animals, plants and stones. The soul, which cannot survive death, if it turns in upon itself, can only enjoy being alive in the present. ‘Etenim si dulce vivere est, cui potest esse vixisse? At quanto facilius certiusque sibi quemque credere, specimen securitas antegenitali sumere experimento!’ (If it is sweet to live, who can
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