Roman Poetry & Prose
Pliny, Natural History Preface 13, 17–18 — Nature Is Life
The preface to Pliny the Elder's Natural History contains three phrases that sit unusually close to the heart of Write It All Down. Pliny defines his subject as “the nature of things — that is, life,” claims to have gathered twenty thousand noteworthy items from roughly two thousand volumes, and describes work done in stolen hours at night before concluding: vita vigilia est, “life is wakefulness.”
- Author
- Pliny the Elder
- Work / Passage
- Natural History, Preface 13, 17–18
- Language
- Latin
- Context
- Pliny introduces the scope and working method of his encyclopedia
Pliny, Natural History Preface 13, 17–18
Preface 13
rerum natura, hoc est vita, narratur, et haec sordidissima sui parte ac plurimarum rerum aut rusticis vocabulis aut externis, immo barbaris etiam, cum honoris praefatione ponendis.
English Translation
Preface 13
The nature of things — that is, life — is being narrated, and in its humblest part at that, with many matters that must be expressed in rustic terms, foreign terms, even barbarian ones, though introduced with due respect.
Preface 17
XX rerum dignarum cura — quoniam, ut ait Domitius Piso, thesauros oportet esse, non libros — lectione voluminum circiter VV, quorum pauca admodum studiosi attingunt propter secretum materiae, ex exquisitis auctoribus centum inclusimus XXXVI voluminibus, adiectis rebus plurimis, quas aut ignoraverant priores aut postea invenerat vita.
English Translation
Preface 17
With care for twenty thousand noteworthy matters — because, as Domitius Piso says, books ought to be treasuries — I have gathered them from the reading of about two thousand volumes, few of which scholars approach because of the obscurity of their subjects, selecting one hundred authors and enclosing the material in thirty-six volumes, while adding many things that earlier writers did not know or that life later discovered.
Preface 18
nec dubitamus multa esse quae et nos praeterierint. homines enim sumus et occupati officiis subsicivisque temporibus ista curamus, id est nocturnis, ne quis vestrum putet his cessatum horis. dies vobis inpendimus, cum somno valetudinem computamus, vel hoc solo praemio contenti, quod, dum ista, ut ait M. Varro, musinamur, pluribus horis vivimus. profecto enim vita vigilia est.
English Translation
Preface 18
Nor do I doubt that many things have escaped me as well. We are human, after all, occupied with duties, and we attend to these studies in spare time — that is, at night — so that none of you should think those hours have been idle. I give the days to your service and reckon sleep only according to what health requires, content with this reward alone: that while, as Marcus Varro says, we muse upon these things, we live more hours. For surely life is wakefulness.
38th Scroll Translation
Translation Notes
rerum natura, hoc est vita — literally, “the nature of things, that is, life.” The compact identification of nature with life is Pliny's own formulation and directly underlies the song's opening refrain “Nature is life.”
XX … VV — ancient and early-modern typography for large Roman numerals is often flattened or inconsistently represented in digital texts. The standard sense of Pliny's claim is twenty thousand noteworthy items drawn from about two thousand volumes.
subsicivis temporibus … nocturnis — “in spare times, that is, at night.” Pliny presents the encyclopedia as work fitted into the hours left over from official obligations, which gives the nocturnal labor in the song a direct ancient anchor.
vita vigilia est — literally, “life is wakefulness.” Pliny turns reduced sleep into a philosophy of study: waking hours spent reading and recording become additional life.
Thirty-Six Volumes, Thirty-Seven Books
Modern editions conventionally count the Natural History as thirty-seven books. Pliny's Preface, however, says that he enclosed his collected material in thirty-six volumes.
The apparent mismatch is explained by Book 1, which functions as the work's table of contents and source index. The substantive survey then runs through Books 2–37. The song's idea of an enormous archive is therefore entirely appropriate, but the ancient counting practice deserves to remain visible.
From the Preface to Write It All Down
“Nature is life,” “Twenty thousand truths,” and the image of working while the midnight oil disappears are not generic inventions pasted onto Pliny. They are artistic transformations of claims Pliny makes about his own project: life as the subject, twenty thousand noteworthy items as its gathered substance, and night as the time in which much of the work was done.
The song's phrase “Write it down. Write it all down.” is not an ancient quotation. It distills the compulsion implied by the Preface: a world too large to master but still worth collecting before memory and time erase it.
Explore Write It All DownWhat This Preface Does Not Describe
The Preface tells us about Pliny's intellectual program, not his death at Vesuvius. The eruption narrative in the song belongs to a separate ancient source: Pliny the Younger's letter to Tacitus, Letters 6.16.
That letter describes the unusual cloud, Pliny the Elder's initial desire to investigate it, the appeal for rescue, the fleet's approach through falling ash and pumice, and his final collapse at Stabiae. Keeping the two sources separate lets the song connect Pliny's lifelong habit of observation with his last expedition without pretending that the encyclopedia narrates its author's death.
Text and Edition
The Latin follows the conventional text of the Naturalis Historia Preface, checked against modern digital presentations of the Teubner tradition. The numerals in section 17 are retained in the compact form commonly shown by digital Latin texts, with their numerical sense explained above.
The English is a new 38th Scroll translation intended to preserve Pliny's compressed, self-conscious style while making the scale of his compilation and the nighttime work behind it immediately clear.
Selected Sources and Further Reading
- Pliny the Elder. Natural History, Preface 13, 17–18.
- Pliny the Younger. Letters 6.16, for the elder Pliny's Vesuvius expedition and death.
- Beagon, Mary. Roman Nature: The Thought of Pliny the Elder.
- Murphy, Trevor. Pliny the Elder's Natural History: The Empire in the Encyclopedia.
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