Critical Introduction

Gaius Plinius Secundus, better known as Pliny the Elder (23/24–79 CE), is one of the most well known Roman authors, and his encyclopedic Natural History is the earliest surviving compendium of its kind. It covers everything from the countries and peoples that make up his world to birds and beasts, trees and grains, medicines, metals, and stones. While books of the Natural History often begin where we might expect, Pliny's loose structure allowed him to include surprising subjects throughout. A section on different kinds of stone, for example, becomes an account of famous Egyptian, Greek, and Roman sculptures and works of architecture. The Natural History has consequently been mined for information about the classical world by scholars since its initial publication. It was highly respected throughout the Middle Ages, when it was treated as font of ancient knowledge, and it remains a standard primary source for modern scholars interested in ancient history, art, politics, ecology, and philosophy.

Pliny is particularly important in the history of monsters as his Natural History is a main conduit whereby a popular group of monstrous beings was disseminated throughout Europe and the larger Mediterranean world. Pliny borrowed this set of beings from Herodotus's Histories (Greece, 440 BCE), and he in turn cites earlier texts that no longer survive by Ctesias and Megasthenes; they claim to have received their information on these monsters from Indian and Persian sources. This may well be true, as some of the creatures appear in Indian epics.

The most interesting monstrous figures in Pliny's text appear in book VII, where he discusses humanity and its origins and diversity. Here, in addition to more bestial monsters like griffins and hippocentaurs, we find one-eyed Cyclopes (prominent in our selection from Homer's Odyssey), cannibals, backward-footed Antipodes, dog-headed Cynocephali, and swift, one-legged Sciapods, among many others. These monstrous peoples (often problematically referred to as “monstrous races,” as discussed in the introduction to Friedman's The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought) differ from their normative Roman male prototypes in body, diet, dress, and practices. Together, through their collective otherness, they assemble a composite picture, in negative, of what Pliny believes to be “normal.”

Reading Questions

What are common strategies for making monsters in this text? What does each tell us about Roman notions of normality and normativity?