Pliny. With ready generosity, however, Dr. Urlichs offered me at once for my own book a number of his notes, which we agreed should be printed in square brackets and marked with his initials H. L. U. Subsequently, however, Dr. Urlichs informed me, to my regret and surprise, that the present edition would block the way for his own; accordingly, since he had given us notes, whose value is undeniable, we acceded to his request that his name should be placed as a third on our title-page. In fairness to Dr. Urlichs, I should add that his contributions and his responsibility begin and end with the notes that bear his initials.

Besides those scholars who have given me constant and special help, I have to thank Mr. A. S. Murray, M. S. Reinach, and Professor Wilhelm Klein for many friendly hints, Mr. Bernhard Berenson for helping me to a better understanding of passages concerned with the technique of art, and Director G. von Laubmann for the singular privileges accorded to me as a reader in the Royal Library at Munich. Above all am I beholden to my friend Miss K. Jex-Blake, not only for undertaking the translation, but for her liberality in allowing certain readings to be printed, of whose soundness she was not fully convinced. She has also found time, amid the arduous tasks imposed by College lecturing, to compile both Indices, and to assist in the revision of the book throughout.

EUGENIE SELLERS.

SCHWABING, MUNICH.
July, 1896.

PLINY THE ELDER

Born A.D. 23, killed in the eruption of Vesuvius A.D. 79.

Preface to Nat. Hist. §§ 17–19.

My thirty-six volumes contain twenty thousand matters worthy of attention (for, as Domitius Piso says, they ought to be a storehouse, not a book), gathered from some two thousand books, but few of which are known to the learned, owing to the abstruse nature of their contents, and from one hundred chief authorities. I have included a great number of facts which had escaped earlier writers or become known only to a later age, and yet I cannot doubt that I too have omitted much, for I am but a man, and that a busy one, and can devote to these studies only my leisure time, that is, the hours of the night-for I would have none among you believe that I am idle even then. My days belong to you, I give to sleep only the time that may purchase health, and feel fully rewarded in that I add to the hours of my life while dallying, as Marcus Varro has it, with the Muses. For surely we live but in our waking hours.

Plin. Epist. III, 5 (to Baebius Macer), §§ 10-12; 14-16.

(My uncle) never read any book without making extracts, and often declared that no book was so bad as not to contain some useful passage. After enjoying the sun he usually took a cold bath, then ate a few morsels and took a short nap, after which, as if it were a new day, he devoted himself to study till dinner-time. While he dined he had a book read aloud and made notes rapidly. I remember that once the reader mispronounced something, and one of the company called him back and made him repeat the passage. 'Surely you understood?' said my uncle. His friend admitted it. Then why did you want him to go back?' said he, 'we have lost more than ten lines through your interruption.' . . . He only laid aside his studies when in the bath, and, when I say bath, I mean the actual bathing-chamber, for while he was being scraped and rubbed he used to listen to reading or dictate something. On a journey he threw himself entirely into study, as if he were snatching a holiday from everything else; at his side with book and tablets was a secretary wearing warm cuffs on his hands in winter, so that even the severity of the weather could not steal a moment from his studies; and this too was why he rode in a litter in Rome. I can remember his blaming me for walking; I need not, he said, have lost those hours, for he thought all time lost that was not given to study.

INTRODUCTION

THE Historia Naturalis of Pliny was intended not only to embrace the whole of the Natural Sciences, but to consider them in their application to the Arts and Crafts of Civilized Life. Hence it is that in a work, whose title would least suggest it, a short yet complete History of Art finds a logical place within the scheme. To Pliny the arts of chasing in silver and of casting in bronze are simply the indispensable complement of the chapters on metals, while, in the same way, the arts of sculpture, of painting, and of gem-engraving come under the head of kinds of earth and precious stones. Pliny's larger and compacted purpose might thus, on the face of it, seem to condemn this present detachment of the History of Art for separate treatment. But that general commentary on Pliny in the light of modern research, to which the texts of Sillig and L. von Jan were but to serve as preliminaries', seems likely, owing to the multifarious contents of the Historia, to remain in the region of unachieved possibilities, if not further away still-in Utopia: il faut plus d'un homme pour écrire sur le grand Pline". Meanwhile, from the nature of the subject, the Plinian account of Ancient Art and Artists forms an episode sufficiently complete in itself to be made, without further apology, the subject of a special inquiry.

In the Dedicatory Letter addressed with the Historia to the co-Emperor Titus, Pliny has himself announced that the 'twenty thousand matters worthy of attention' contained in the thirty-six volumes of his work were 'gathered from some two thousand books'; we must therefore regard his work as nothing more than a compilation from other records, in which personal observation plays no part outside the range of contemporary events.

The gigantic scheme had been conceived by Lorenz Okens (17791859); see Stark, Archäologie der

Kunst, p. 264.

"Scaligerana (ed. 1657), p. 189. 3 Praef. § 17.