The Mind of the Ancient World

Abstract

THIS book is a good example of a process which will become more and more necessary as time goes on. There are masses of old literature, full of interest, much read and very important in their day, which it is impossible for us now to read in their entirety, but which it would be a grave loss to let die. Pliny was one of the finest characters of the ancient world, highly cultivated, very busy and useful in public service under his friend the Emperor Vespasian until A.D. 79, when he was suffocated in the eruption of Vesuvius. He gave the greater part of his too short life to incessant study and compiling his “Natural History”, or “Survey of Nature”, which was an encyclopaedia of knowledge and legend about everything in the world of which men talked or had written in his time. This great book, which Humboldt thought surpassed in the richness of its contents any other ancient work, was translated at the beginning of the seventeenth century into delightful Elizabethan English, by Philemon Holland, a few years before Sir Walter Raleigh published his “History of the World”.

The Mind of the Ancient World:

a Consideration of Pliny's Natural History. By H. N. Wethered. Pp. xv + 302. (London, New York and Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., Ltd., 1937.) 12s. 6d. net.