Volume 1 / Book 1 — CHAPTER II PLINY’S NATURAL HISTORY (continued 2)

The time element.

The element of time is also important. Operations should be performed before sunrise, early in the morning, at night, and so on. The moon is especially regarded in such directions.[419] When we are informed that sufferers from quartan fever should be rubbed all over with the fat of a tortoise, we are also told that the tortoise will be fattest on the fifteenth day of the moon and that the patient should be anointed on the sixteenth.[420] But this waxing and waning of the tortoise with the moon is primarily a matter of astrology and planetary influence, under which heading we shall also later speak of Pliny’s observance of the rising of the dog-star.

Observance of number.

Observance of number is another feature in Pliny’s ceremonial, of which we have already met instances. He also alludes to the writings of Pythagoras on the subject and ascribes to Democritus a work on the number four. Pliny’s recipes frequently recommend that the operation be thrice repeated. In the case of curing scrofula by the ashes of vipers he prescribes three fingers thereof taken in drink for thrice seven days.[421] In another application of a Gallic herb with old axle-grease which has not touched iron, not only must the patient spit thrice to the right, but the remedy is more efficacious if three men representing three different nations anoint the right side with it.[422] The virtue of the number one is not, however, entirely slighted. Importance is attached to the death of a stag from a single wound.[423] Sometimes three and one are joined in the same operation, as when child-birth is aided by hurling through the house a stone or weapon by which three animals, a man, a boar, and a bear, have been killed with single blows. One of the discoveries of Pythagoras which seldom fails is that an odd number of vowels in a child’s given name portends lameness, blindness, and like incapacitation on the right side of its body, and an even number, injuries on the left side.[424] In a crown of smilax for headache there should be an odd number of leaves,[425] and in a diet of snails prescribed for stomach trouble an odd number are to be eaten.[426] For a head-wash ten green lizards are boiled in ten sextarii of oil,[427] and for an application to prevent eyelashes from growing again when they have been pulled out fifteen frogs are impaled on fifteen bulrushes.[428] The person who has tied on a certain amulet is thereafter excluded from the patient’s sight for five days.[429] And so on.

Relation between operator and patient.

This last item suggests a further intangible factor in Pliny’s procedure, the doing of things to or for the patient without his knowledge. But this and any other incorporeal relationships existing between operator and patient should perhaps be classed under the head of sympathy and antipathy.

Incantations.

Closely akin to the power of numbers is that of words. Pliny once says of an incantation employed to avert hail-storms that he would not dare in seriousness to insert its words, although Cato in his work on agriculture prescribed a similar formula of meaningless words for the cure of fractured limbs.[430] But Pliny does not object to the repetition of incantations or prayers if the words spoken have some meaning. He informs us that ocimum is sown with curses and maledictions and that when cummin seed is rammed down into the soil, the sowers pray it not to come up.[431] In another case the sower is to be naked and to pray for himself and his neighbors.[432] In a third case in which a poultice is to be applied to an inflammatory tumor, Pliny says that persons of experience regard it as very important that the poultice be put on by a naked virgin and that both she and the patient be fasting. Touching the sufferer with the back of her hand she is to say, “Apollo forbids a disease to increase which a naked virgin restrains.” Then, withdrawing her hand, she is to repeat the same words thrice and to join with the patient in spitting on the ground each time.[433] Indeed, in another passage Pliny states that it is the universal custom in medicine to spit three times with incantations.[434] Perhaps the power of the words is thought to be increased or renewed by clearing the throat. Words were also occasionally spoken in plucking herbs. Ring-worm or tetter is treated by spitting upon and rubbing together two stones covered with a dry white moss, and by repeating a Greek incantation which may be translated, “Flee, Cantharides, a wild wolf seeks your blood.”[435] Abscesses and inflammations are treated with the herb reseda and a Latin translation which seems irrelevant, if not quite senseless, and which may be translated, “Reseda, make disease recede. Don’t you know, don’t you know what chick has dug up these roots? May they have neither head nor feet.”[436] In the book following this passage Pliny raises the general question of the power of words to heal diseases.[437] He gives many instances of belief in incantations from contemporary popular superstition, from Roman religion, and from the annals of history. He does not doubt that Romans in the past have believed in the power of words, and thinks that if we accept set forms of prayer and religious formulae, we must also admit the force of incantations. But he adds that the wisest individuals believe in neither.

Attitude to love-charms and birth-control.

Pliny’s recipes and operations are mainly connected with either medicine or agriculture, but he also introduces as we have seen magical procedure employed in child-birth, safeguards against poisons and reptiles, and counter-charms against sorcery. He more than once avers that love-charms (amatoria) lie outside his province,[438] in one passage alleging as a reason that the illustrious general Lucullus was killed by one,[439] but he includes a great many of them nevertheless.[440] Some herbs are so employed because of a resemblance in shape to the sexual organs,[441] another instance of association by similarity. Pliny declared against abortive drugs as well as love-charms,[442] but cited from the Commentaries of Caecilius one recipe for birth-control for the benefit of over-fecund women, consisting of a ligature of two little worms found in the body of a certain species of spider and bound on in deer-skin before sunrise. After a year the virtue of this charm expires.[443]

Pliny and astrology.

Pliny devotes but a small fraction of his work to the stars and heavens as against terrestrial phenomena, and therefore has less occasion to speak of astrology than of magic. However, had he been a great believer in astrology he doubtless would have devoted more space to the stars and their influence on terrestrial phenomena. He recognizes none the less, as we have seen, that magic and astrology are intimately related and that “there is no one who is not eager to learn his own future and who does not think that this is shown most truly by the heavens.”[444] Parenthetically it may be remarked that the general literature of the time only confirms this assertion of the widespread prevalence of astrology; allusions of poets imply a technical knowledge of the art on their readers’ part; the very emperors who occasionally banished astrologers from Rome themselves consulted other adepts. In another passage Pliny speaks of men who “assign events each to its star according to the rules of nativities and believe that God decreed the future once for all and has never interfered with the course of events since.”[445] This way of thinking has caught learned and vulgar alike in its current and has led to such further methods of divination as those by lightning, oracles, haruspices, and even such petty auguries as from sneezes and shifting of the feet. Furthermore in Pliny’s list of men prominent in the various arts and sciences we find Berosus of whom a statue was erected by the Athenians in honor of his skill in astrological prognostication.[446] In another place where he speaks for a moment of “the science of the stars” Pliny disputes the theories of Berosus, Nechepso, and Petosiris that length of human life is ordered by the stars, and also makes the trite objection to the doctrine of nativities that masters and slaves, kings and beggars are born at the same moment.[447] He also is rather inclined to ridicule the enormous figures of 720,000 or 490,000 years set by Epigenes and Berosus and Critodemus for the duration of astronomical observations recorded by the Babylonians.[448] From such passages we get the impression that astrology is widely accepted as a science but that the art of nativities at least is not regarded by Pliny with favor. But it would not be safe to say that he denies the control of the stars over human destiny. Indeed, in one chapter he declares that the astronomer Hipparchus can never be praised enough because more than any other man he proved the relationship of man with the stars and that our souls are part of the sky.[449] When Pliny disputes the vulgar notion that each man has a star varying in brightness according to his fortune, rising when he is born, and fading or falling when he dies, he is not attacking even the doctrine of nativities; he is denying that the stars are controlled by man’s fate rather than that man’s life is ordered by the stars.[450]

Celestial portents.

If Pliny thus leaves us uncertain as to the relation of man to the stars, we also receive conflicting impressions from his discussion of various celestial phenomena regarded as portentous. In one passage he speaks of the debt of gratitude owed by mankind to those great astronomical geniuses who have freed men from their former superstitious fear of eclipses.[451] But he explains thunderbolts as celestial fire vomited forth from the planet Venus and “bearing omens of the future.”[452] He also gives instances from Roman history of comets which signaled disaster, and he expounds the theory of their signifying the future.[453] What they portend may be determined from the direction in which they move and the heavenly body whose power they receive, and more particularly from the shapes they assume and their position in relation to the signs of the zodiac. Indeed, Pliny even gives examples of ominous eclipses of the sun, although it is true that they were also of unusual length.[454] He also tells us that many of the common people still believed that women could produce eclipses “by sorceries and herbs.”[455]

The stars and the world of nature.

Aside from the question of the control of human destiny by the constellations at birth, Pliny’s general theories of the universe and of the influence of the stars upon terrestrial nature are roughly similar to those of astrology. For him the universe itself is God, “holy, eternal, vast, all in all, nay, in truth itself all;”[456] and the sun is the mind and soul of the whole world and the chief governor of nature.[457] The planets affect one another. A cold star renders another approaching it pale; a hot star causes its neighbor to redden; a windy planet gives those near it a lowering appearance.[458] At certain points in their orbits the planets are deflected from their regular course by the rays of the sun,—an unwitting concession to heliocentric theory.[459] Pliny ascribes the usual astrological qualities to the planets.[460] Saturn is cold and rigid; Mars, a flaming fire; Jupiter, located between them, is temperate and salubrious. Besides their effects upon one another, the planets especially influence the earth.[461] Venus, for instance, rules the process of generation in all terrestrial beings.[462] Following the Georgics of Vergil somewhat, Pliny asserts that the stars give indubitable signs of the weather and expounds the utility of the constellations to farmers.[463] He tells how Democritus by his knowledge of astronomy was able to corner the olive crop and put to shame business men who had been decrying philosophy;[464] and how on another occasion he gave his brother timely warning of an impending storm.[465] But Pliny does not accept all the theories of the astrologers as to control of the stars over terrestrial nature. He repeats, but without definitely accepting it, the ascription by the Babylonians of earthquakes to three of the planets in particular,[466] and the notion that the gem sandastros or garamantica, employed by Chaldeans in their ceremonies, is intimately connected with the stars.[467] He is openly incredulous about the gem glossopetra, shaped like a human tongue and supposed to fall from the sky during an eclipse of the moon and to be invaluable in selenomancy.[468]

Astrological medicine.

Pliny tells how the physician Crinas of Marseilles made a fortune by regulating diet and observing hours according to the motion of the stars.[469] But he does not show much faith in astrological medicine himself, rejecting entirely the elaborate classification of diseases and remedies which the astrologers had by his time already worked out for the revolutions of the sun and moon in the twelve signs of the zodiac.[470] In his own recipes, however, astrological considerations are sometimes observed, as we have already seen, especially the rising of the dog-star and the phases of the moon. Pliny, indeed, states that the dog-star exerts an extensive influence upon the earth.[471] As for the moon, the blood in the human body augments and decreases with its waxing and waning as shell-fish and other things in nature do.[472] Indeed, painstaking men of research had discovered that even the entrails of the field-mouse corresponded in number to the days of the moon, that the ant stopped working during the interlunar days, and that diseases of the eyes of certain beasts of burden also increased and decreased with the moon.[473] But on the whole Pliny’s medicine and science do not seem nearly so immersed in and saturated with astrology as with other forms of magic. This gap was for the middle ages amply filled by the authority of Ptolemy, of whose belief in astrology we shall treat in the next chapter.

Conclusion: magic unity of Pliny’s superstitions.

We have tried to analyze the contents of the Natural History, bringing out certain main divisions and underlying principles of magic in Pliny’s agriculture, medicine, and natural science. This is, however, an artificial and difficult task, since it is not easy to sever materials from ceremonial or the virtues of objects from the relations of sympathy or antipathy between them. Often the same passage might serve to illustrate several points. Take for example the following sentence: “Thrasyllus is authority that nothing is so hostile to serpents as crabs; swine who are stung cure themselves by this food, and when the sun is in Cancer, serpents are in pain.”[474] Here we have at once antipathy, the remedies used by animals, the reasoning, characteristic of magic, from association and similarity, and the belief in astrology. And this confusion, to illustrate which a hundred other examples might be collected from the Natural History, demonstrates how indissolubly interwoven are all the varied threads that we have been tracing. They all go naturally together, they belong to the same long period of thought, they represent the same stage in mental development, they all are parts of magic.