Pliny Explains it All: The Historia Naturalis Abridged (Books I-II)

What is discussed, and when

1. 5:00 – 10:00: Saturn, Jupiter, Julius Caesar
2. 20:00 – 24:28: Jupiter

Notable quotes from "Pliny Explains it All: The Historia Naturalis Abridged (Books I-II)"

• Between the heavens and the Earth there are seven other bodies to talk about highest up there we got Saturn then there's Jupiter Mars the sun Venus Mercury Moon the heavens…

  about Saturn · at 5:33

• Some real anomalies things we've only rarely seen the Sun Goes dim sometimes like when Caesar got killed matter fact during the Civil War with Mark Anthony it stayed dim for…

  about Julius Caesar · at 8:03

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Pliny the Elder — Person · 5 mentions
• Gas Claudius Nero — Person · 2 mentions
• Julius Caesar — Person · 1 mention · first at 8:07
• Emperor Vespasian — Person · 1 mention
• Mark Antony — Person · 1 mention

Books & papers

• Historia Naturalis — Book · 3 mentions

Concepts & topics

• Saturn — Concept · 3 mentions · first at 5:37
• Jupiter — Concept · 3 mentions · first at 5:38
  Are seven other bodies to talk about highest up there we got Saturn then there's Jupiter Mars the sun Venus Mercury Moon the heavens spin to the right all these guys Spin To…
• Earth — Concept · 3 mentions
• Moon — Concept · 3 mentions
• Mars — Concept · 2 mentions
• Fever — Concept · 1 mention
• Oracle at Delphi — Concept · 1 mention
• Tides — Concept · 1 mention

Full transcript with timestamps

0:08 hey persons of age so long before the era of the wiki there used to be these things called encyclopedias where for a small fee of thousands of dollars they would mail you a tiny fraction of the knowledge we have access to today and you could put it on a shelf and it would sit there and make you look learned but while not reading an encyclopedia is easy not creating one is much easier and yet we do it encyclopedia Tanica is still in circulation today and it's maintained by around 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 contributors so whose idea was this who was the first person to sit down and say hm today I feel like writing down everything to answer that we must look nearly 2,000 years in the past to the mid-70s ad plyy the Elder author philosopher veteran Imperial administrator and one curious Buckaroo early in his life pinny's father took him to Rome to study law then as a young adult he spent several

0:58 years as a junior officer in the Roman military his interest in literature made him a few high-ranking friends there and when he came home he took to writing unfortunately a certain apocryphal Fiddler was in charge at the time who wasn't exactly kind to intellectuals so plenty kept it on the DL mostly writing about things like grammar and rhetoric which at the time few people found worth freaking out over fortunately in June of' 68 Nero finally took a hint and killed himself and following the chaos of the year of the four Emperors one Vespa came out on top vaspa was a general and a friend of plenty's so when he became emperor he promoted plent to procurator which was like the governor of a province suddenly with this guy on the throne and a cushy job to pay the bills plenty found himself in a position to make complete use of his own potential by day he continued his administrative duties but during nights

1:42 he wrote and over the course of a few years with nothing but his own wits and whatever authors he could get his hands on he created a work known as the Historia naturales this consisted of 37 books each broken up into many dozens of chapters covering just about every topic there is while it wasn't quite an encyclopedia in the modern sense it's still the earliest surviving attempt that an all-encompassing scholarly work and it is a trip I've been reading it it is fascinating not only as a reflection of what people did and did not know in the Roman Empire but also as a reflection of Plenty himself who is a character and who made zero attempt to hide it so today I come to you with a brief summary of the first part of a brief summary of all human knowledge according to one dude Circa 77 ad now the original thing makes for a fairly long read even removing most of the more uninteresting details I've only managed

2:27 to fit the first two books into today's video as for the other 35 we'll see I'm going to let plenty do the narration himself using my voice he gets a lot of things shockingly right and a lot shockingly wrong rather than constantly chiming in with fact checks I'm just going to throw chess.com analysis icons in the corner for every claim he makes I'll also provide relevant Snippets of the actual text I'm paraphrasing just for reference if you're one of the people who likes to pause the video just to see the funny hahas I snuck into the freeze frame rest assured there will be none today you can just let it play one last warning while there is a loose overall structure to this thing it also seems like plenty just kind of wrote whatever was in his head for a given chapter he has a habit of jumping back and forth between completely desperate topics and going on weird personal tangents in between I am

3:08 presenting this thing in the exact order it's written so if it at any point seems utterly scatterbrained it's his fault not mine anyway take it away yo right let me get right ahead of things these books are strictly about this world and the things we can see around it if you're one of those Mad Men Who think there are other worlds Beyond this one give it a rest all right that's psychotic you can't know these things and you can't grasp Infinity stop trying you'll hurt yourself so the heavens are a perfect sphere and they spin around us perfectly it takes 24 hours for them to do one spin which is actually really fast because the universe is huge in fact massive objects all whooshing around us this fast should be incredibly loud at all times why isn't this the case M the whole shebang is composed of four elements right which sort themselves by weight Earth is heaviest so it falls to the middle of everything

4:10 into a sphere and it stays still it's the only still thing on top of that is water then air and fire is the lightest which is why the sun and stars are made of it the sun kicks ass easily the best of the seven things up there basically a God not literally uh don't try to answer questions about God's nature by the way you'll just confuse yourself there's atmost one God and he's everything and he doesn't do weird human [ __ ] like getting jealous or banging other gods I swear people just make up New Gods every time they want something specific let me tell you there was a temple on Palatine Hill dedicated through my tax dollars by the way to Fever like the illness you understand that's bad [ __ ] right things like that are why we've got more Gods than people at this point folks in other countries worship animals and obscene things like stinking Meats there are gods of theft and other crimes it's all

4:56 Folly you want to be Godly just help others that's the way the old Roman not no and that's the way the noblest Noble of all Emperor viaan Augustus who may or may not be my best buddy but anyway if there is a God he doesn't care about what you do people put crazy emphasis on the religion avoiding Foods worrying themselves sick about all kinds of sacred rules look I hang around the capital there's a lot of rat bastards in politics real scumbags and they are thriving you don't need to torture yourself have a bacon nobody gives a [ __ ] back to the Stars which by the way also don't give a [ __ ] about you specifically for big history changing stuff yeah they'll act up but you reader do not need to worry anyway most of them are fixed in a sphere really high up there we'll call this the heavens between the heavens and the Earth there are seven other bodies to talk about highest up there we got Saturn then

5:38 there's Jupiter Mars the sun Venus Mercury Moon the heavens spin to the right all these guys Spin To the Left Saturn is cold Mars is hot but Jupiter Jupiter's just right the sun's orbit is made up of 360° 1° per day except not quite we have to add five and a fourth days or else our sunnd dials break down to Venus and Mercury these guys are weird because they like to hang around the Sun fun fact Venus is actually bright enough to help out the sun and moon sometimes when it's helping the sun we call it Lucifer the lightbringer and when it's helping the moon we call it vper the sleepy time guy Mercury tries to do the same thing but he's much more lame and cringe so he can't the moon's got phases as you know and she gets closer and farther away at different times and Dion figured out lots of cool info about the moon's orbit and you [ __ ] bullied him for it yeah this man unraveled the secrets of the

6:27 universe and in return everyone goes oh oh ho he's in love with the moon that's because humans are sick in the head they'd rather read stories about Bloodshed and massacres like that matters more than the fabric of reality get a clue anyway the moon as phases because of the way it borrows light from the sun which might be what these other guys do too we don't know yet all those spots on it are actually puddles because it likes to draw up moisture from the earth which is where we get the tides and every now and then it casts its shadow on Earth we call these eclipses and they are freaking Wicked eclipses can happen the other way around too and the way these happen proves that the Moon is bigger than the earth and the sun's way bigger than both of them oh and just so we're clear eclipses are a natural thing it's not the apocalypse or God's Wrath they follow rules even the Greeks could predict them settle down

7:11 back to the planets they're all kind of in the same belt up there and they all get farther and closer to us at different points because their orbits are complicated they mostly follow the same rules as each other but there's some goofiness like the ones further than the sun move the slowest when they're the farthest away from us but the closer ones move the quickest then we can chalk this up to the sun emitting vapor that must push them around in weird ways Thunderbolts come from Jupiter and we don't know why one theory is that it's because Saturn is very moist and Mars is very fiery and when they meet in the middle we get Celestial fire thrown down at us same reason a wet log crackles and throws off Embers in a fire there is a type of star that moves around and vanishes we call these comets and they come in all kinds of flavors these might actually be Omens I mean there have been some weird coincidences

7:54 some people think comets are permanent and we only see them when they swing by the right way While others say they're just flare-ups of celestial Vapor that dissipate on their own now to talk about some real anomalies things we've only rarely seen the Sun Goes dim sometimes like when Caesar got killed matter fact during the Civil War with Mark Anthony it stayed dim for like a year multiple sons have been seen at the same time on several occasions but no more than three three is the record same with moons one time a burning Shield darted across the sky throwing Sparks as it went another time someone saw a shooting star fly towards us until it was as big as the moon and then it turned around and went back to be a normal Comet side note even the translator was like I don't know what the [ __ ] he's talking about finally there are the stars caster and Pollock if you see both of them it's good luck

8:37 but be advised if one's alone he turns into a little bastard he can and will come down and set your boat on fire that's the celestial sphere taking care of now let's move down a peg to the air the air ends way before the moon and it mixes with water vapor to create the weather the sun dries up water on the earth it goes up and turns into clouds and then it's pushed back down again by the you know the star forces that keep stuff on Earth we get rain and hail and such and it keeps going round and round like some kind of water cycle the seasons go around once a year and we don't know exactly why but it definitely has to do with the motion of the Stars like some are wet or dry hot or cold and that influences the climate when they move especially Saturn he always soaks the place going by he's a freak like actually oh I almost forgot the dog star this guy's nuts it Kindles the sun's Vapors and when it rises the ocean gets

9:24 upset wine ferments and stagnant waters are set in motion and there's a creature called the oric in Egypt and when the dog star goes up they look at it and they sneeze out of Warship it also makes dogs go Rabbid hence the name but the stars in the seasons they create have profound effects on nature and it's not just the weather changes that do it some flora and fauna have weird links to the heavens pogium blooms right on the winter solstice even when hung up to dry in the house and heliotrope follows the sun even when it's cloudy the moon makes oysters bigger and ants lazier and diseases in the eyes of livestock will grow and diminish based on its phase that's just a few examples hey let's talk about the winds the ancient Greeks have published a lot of great observations about the winds those were warish disconnected times which makes their work all the more impressive nowadays in this great piece every shore

10:11 of this sea welcomes Romans and what are we doing when's the last time we sent anybody out to investigate this world with inquiry in their heart plenty of expeditions sure but that's just cuz you got some [ __ ] to sell rather than pursue science that could benefit all of mankind Your Hawk and olives in Byzantium just to watch your Abacus go up greed but anyway how many how many winds are there the Ancients recognized four but that's clearly not enough the Next Generation overcorrected brought it up to 12 and [ __ ] got messy and elegant so today us modern folk take the middle of the road with a nice even eight total two for each quarter of the heavens and they've got a bunch of fun names and yeah if we wanted to add in the old reject WIS we could and there's even a couple extra secret winds only recognized by a select few plus there's certain winds that only blow in certain regions of the world but you know broad

10:56 Strokes it'll do you fine these winds each blow at their various a lotted times of the year and the winter ones make for particularly rough seas in former times Pirates were compelled by the fear of death to rush into death and to Brave the winter ocean now we are driven to it by avarice Direction isn't the only difference between the winds though they can all be characterized by their temperature their moisture and the kind of weather they tend to bring volis is dry septentrio brings snow and hail auster is sultry ailo is the most healthy real mly crew those winds but while those guys are generally pretty calm we must also consider the sudden violent gusts we call storms storms are self-contained events that come in a few flavors themselves like efus which brings thunder and lightning or Typhon which doesn't certain storms also give rise to whirlwinds which are these giant loud pillars of wind and moisture that

11:46 destroy everything in their path they are so dense that they can actually support themselves on the ground and if they happen over the sea they suck up the water as they go thunderstorms produce lightning and lightning is crazy it has its unique property where it can damage things on the inside while leaving the outside unharmed it can empty casks of their wine without breaking the vessel itself and it can melt golden silver without burning the bag therein one time a noble woman named Marsha was struck by lightning while pregnant and while the baby got fried she herself survived without injury many people believe that when lightning strikes a man it can be used to predict his future with terms and conditions of course some historians also state that man is capable of invoking lightning the author El piso said that the Ancient King Numa did it all the time then his successor tus hostilius tried to imitate

12:32 him but he didn't do the ceremonies right so he just got electrocuted is any of this true H maybe at the very least I buy the fortune telling thing now we all know that we see lightning before we hear thunder that's nothing special it's just because light has a greater velocity than sound it's the same event Thunder is just the sound that lightning makes fun fact man is the only animal that isn't always killed by lightning any other creature instant death every time but we're special lightning can strike just about anything except for Laurels seals and Eagles that all safe it also never descends more than 5 ft into the ground so if you're someone who's scared of lightning Your Best Bets are deep caves or a tent made out of seal skin besides all this normal weather we do have records of some real weird stuff falling from the sky it has rained milk and blood on many occasions one time it rained flesh and the Fallen

13:16 meat that wasn't eaten by birds just didn't rot you know your casual Immortal meat storm one time it rained wool another time there was a shower of baked tiles why a country yeah stones have been known to fall from the sky now and then the Greeks like to brag about how the philosopher anex zagas correctly predicted such an event but I find that dubious we know aone fell it was like a wagon load big but I think anex agaras just got lucky I mean the guy said it would fall out of the Sun what do you want about the sun can't do a rock it doesn't have rocks finally Rainbows are nothing special we get them all the time they don't predict the weather or anything else they're just something that happens rays of sunlight hit a hollow cloud and they get refracted and the colors are due to a mixture of clouds air and Fire Let's down from the air onto the Earth Good Old Mother Earth the other three elements are bastards

14:03 you never know when they're going to turn on you fire burns us water pelts us as hail and floods our Villages air rages and squalls but Earth she's just hanging out and what a bounty she has for us giving us crops flowers medicinal plants in her compassion she even gave us poison so when life sucks we can kill ourselves quickly and what does man do naturally we take advantage of her kindness we torture her for all the iron Timber and stone she can bear and then we use that iron to tear out our entrails in search of gems to put on our fingers do you know how many hands have to be worked to the Bone just to decorate one joint of another honestly if hell existed all this greedy digging would get us there but of course whatever we take from her we all pay back in Blood and Bones eventually world keeps turning just wish you all weren't such ingrates about it anyway as we said the Earth is a perfect sphere except for

14:52 you know mountains and valleys but close enough there's a question we get all the time when people first learn about this particularly from the commoners they'll go right if Earth a ball why don't people on the other side fall off to that I say why doesn't the whole thing fall down where would it go if it did up into the other sky that doesn't make sense now the Earth is right where it belongs then they'll say all right fine but why is the ocean flat then H guess what it's not here take a glass of water fill it to the brim then drop a little something in there see that slight subtle curve that's the ocean you can see it when a ship goes out to sea the bottom bit will disappear over the horizon before the mass does and so it goes all the way around one time some Indians got blown off course by a stor and ended up in Germany side note this was not the first nor the last time the translator started his annotation with

15:34 this exact 11 syllable sigh of frustration the ocean they must have crossed had to be massive like half the globe real quick let's think about how much of the world is even inhabitable we got one hemisphere over here which is divided into five zones right on the top and bottom miserable nothing but cold and darkness in the middle Sun's Too Close Burns everything miserable so already we only got a fifth of the place to ourselves then take into account all the Seas and mountains and Wilderness and other crap in the way there's barely anything left and this is what every war in history has been over this tiny portion of what amounts to a speck in the universe even if you conquered the world you'd have barely started and how much of it can you bring with you to the Grave huh so the Earth is in the middle of the universe and we know this because of the equinoxes day and night perfectly balanced on these two dates we're right

16:17 in the middle it just makes sense there's plenty of other proof that we live on a globe certain Stars can only be seen from different parts of the world and that's cuz the Earth's in the way just ask a sailor they'll see new stars squink their way out of of the Horizon as they go also eclipses show that the time of day depends on your East West position a few years back the same eclipse of the sun same exact event was seen at 8 in Campania but at noon in Armenia try explaining that one plists here's another one time a corer named Fones ran from cison to Ellis which is a distance of 1200 stadia the way there took him 9 hours but then the return trip took him 15 and it's not cuz he was tired or took a break somewhere brother he ran against the sun likewise the length of Shadows on a given depends on your latitude in Egypt on the summer solstice at noon their Sund dials cast a shadow half the length of the pointy bit

17:05 whereas in Venice at the very same hour the shadows as long as the pointy bit if you keep going south eventually you'll reach a point where the sun's straight up at the solstice we dug a well in a town called Cen just to check and sure enough it's light all the way down if you go even further south you'll notice the sun do that twice a year at equal distances from the solstice there's also a place in India where there just aren't Shadows ever and as a consequence the people there don't know what ours are but because because of the way the sun moves you'll notice that the longest day of the year is longer the further north you go in Alexandria on the summer solstice they get 14 hours of daylight in Italy it's 15 and in Britain it's 17 following this pattern we believe that at the very North Pole it's 24 meaning they get 6 months of daylight at a time with 6 months of night on the other side

17:48 the difference in climate based on latitude is clearly reflected in the Nations that live there for one the Ethiopians let's talk about earthquakes the Babylonians used to blame these on the mo movements of the Stars one guy is even said to have predicted an earthquake through astrological means is that true I'll let you be the judge I for one believe that earthquakes are caused by the winds think about it before an earthquake it's always very calm the seas are tranquil there's not a single bird in the sky why no wind they can't fly where' the wind go underground it gets stuck down there and it builds up until finally hell literally Breaks Loose it starts off with a horrible noise like cows mooing or people fighting in the distance then everything shakes hard whole city walls get knocked down and sometimes the Earth opens up and swallows them entirely the shakings even noticed by people on ships who get

18:38 hit by waves without any wind earthquakes also make well water turn cloudy and smelly so the obvious question is what the hell can we do about it well places with a lot of natural Caverns or man-made sewers tend to get fewer earthquakes that's because the underground air has an easy way to escape buildings that are arched or that lean against each other also tend to farare better in the event of an earthquake barring all out at least things are usually over with quickly although some earthquakes have been known to last days months even one or two years straight As for related anomalies about a century and a half ago two mountains slammed together and collapsed and fire and smoke came from the ground where they stood more recently under Nero there was a knight named vecus marcelis who woke up to find that his fields and Olive ground swapped places with each other no maam or destruction just oh this is over here

19:22 now okay but just as Earth swallows up land in one place she spits it back out elsewhere as such Island sometimes rise up spontaneously out of Open Sea we have tons of records of these events across the Mediterranean they're often accompanied by a giant fiery explosion and loads of dead fish floating everywhere it said that one time some people ate these fish and then they too immediately died but enough of tragedies let's turn back to the wonders of the earth such as there many Caverns filled with gas that instantly kills things some kill only Birds others kill everything but people and still more kill everything and people in a few caves those who breathe the gas instead become intoxicated and start predicting the future as is the case with the famous Oracle at Deli we can ascribe these effects to the divine power of nature I mean what else could it be how the hell do you explain that rationally

20:09 but while most islands are attached to the Earth at the bottom there are a few that float the calamina islands are not only moved by the wind but the people on them can actually push them around with long poles to go wherever they want there's another group of floating islands known as the dancers so-called because they move to the beat of drums played on their surface I've got a few more miscellaneous wonders here let me just rattle off in harp Pasa there's a giant rock that can be moved by one finger but not by the force of the whole body in parasini there's a type of dirt that heals all wounds in trois there's a stone that makes dead bodies dissolve near the indis river there's two mountains one of which attracts iron and the other repels it so if you had iron Nails in your shoes you couldn't step on the one or off the other in arpa the grainy plant doesn't grow and in crinium the Hay Springs up already rotten let's

20:55 turn now to the tides we know these are caused by the moon and to a lesser degree the Sun Moon overhead they go up moon on the other side they go down a large open ocean is needed to Manifest this power of the planet which is why neither Lakes nor Rivers have tides in Britain The Tide Rises 120 ft the tides do a full cycle twice a day except in yuboa where they do it seven times Aristotle said that animals only die when the tide is ebbing but really that's only true of people watch seam water is salty and that's because the sun evaporates all the mild Sweet Water while leaving all the gross crap that ends up in the ocean behind a number of estimates have been made for the depth of the ocean ranging from 15 stadia to who the hell knows seawater is also heavier than fresh water which is why things float better on it as with everything in nature bodies of water have no shortage of weird stuff they get

21:43 down to some Rivers actually run underground before bursting out again elsewhere we know they're the same river because if you Chuck stuff in one it comes out the other side there's a lake in Judea where nothing sinks at all in denona there's a spring called The Fountain Of Jupiter and though the water there is cold ice it'll relight extinguished torches held near its surface the river MOS turns sheep black when they drink from it while the seases makes them turn white the penus turns them black again and then the zanthus makes them red the river aases makes the horses there produce Black Milk which the people use for food there's a spring in the island of Andros that tastes like wine the river lincus tastes sour but gets you drunk like wine and in Arcadia there's a river called the sticks that kills you instantly in labrosus there are three Springs all of which also kill you instantly but but in a much less

22:29 painful fashion than the six that's enough of those from here we turn at last to the fourth element fire in samosata along the Euphrates there's a big pull of this flammable mud they call Mala it sticks to everything it touches and if you set it on fire even water won't extinguish it Romans invaded these lands long ago and the people there poured the stuff on our soldiers cooked them in their armor like a crab there are certain places in the world where fire is always burning the Summits of many mountains are home to such Flames as are the occasional crater and field and of course the sun and stars are no exception what a weird thing these are like fire needs fuel to spread and sustain itself so what is it that can feed these Flames without destroying itself in the process there's a thinker for ye but besides these guys where else does fire come from you got fires lit by men for one certain stones have fire in

23:14 them innately there's the fire you get from rubbing sticks together and there's the fire in clouds that causes lightning you can also use concave mirrors to focus sunlight into fire highly potent do be careful sudden fires also manifest occasionally in the human body one time when six king of Rome service Talus was the child he was just sleeping there when suddenly Flames shot out of his freaking head I've got more fun facts like this to drop later but it's about time we wrap this book up and what better way than by sizing up the entire Globe so I ran some numbers added some distances checked some other people's answers I've got some estimates here on the width of the inhabited World from the mouth of the Ganges in India to the port city of gates in the west these all fall around 9,000 Mi give or take a th000 but like I said before the uninhabited Earth extends far beyond that aatosan was a really bright dude

23:59 and he put the circumference at 31,500 Mi what a big wild world it is just how wild you'll have to tune in next time for books 3 through six all of which are titled an account of countries Nations Seas towns Havens mountains rivers distances and peoples who now exist or formerly existed but for now I'm py the Elder at grai the pope sitting at home fuming in my pronunciation right there

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "Pliny Explains it All: The Historia Naturalis Abridged (Books I-II)"?

In order: 5:00 Saturn, Jupiter, Julius Caesar; 20:00 Jupiter.

What is mentioned in this Sam O'Nella Academy episode?

14 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Pliny the Elder, Saturn, Jupiter, Earth, Historia Naturalis, Moon. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Pliny Explains it All: The Historia Naturalis Abridged (Books I-II)"?

The episode runs 24 min; the transcript is about 5,486 words in 32 timestamped sections.

More from Sam O'Nella Academy

• All analyzed episodes
• People mentioned on Sam O'Nella Academy
• Topics mentioned on Sam O'Nella Academy