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Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #60230.
The Natural History of Pliny, Volume 2, is a pre‑Linnaean geographic and ethnographic survey that begins with a sweeping description of the Euxine Sea and its surrounding lands. The opening passage catalogues coastlines, rivers, towns and mountain ranges from the Bosporus to the Caspian, interweaving measurements from ancient writers such as Eratosthenes and Agrippa with Pliny’s own observations. It proceeds in a relentless inventory of places, Paphlagonia, Cappadocia, Pontus, the Cimmerian Bosporus, naming each settlement, river and tribe while noting distances, local customs and occasional historical anecdotes. The text reads like a massive travel ledger, offering a snapshot of Roman‑era knowledge about the far‑eastern reaches of the known world.
Pliny’s voice is that of a Roman scholar‑naturalist, dense with factual detail and a tone of earnest curiosity. The style is formal, heavily compounded, and rooted in the rhetorical conventions of the first century CE, with frequent asides to earlier authorities. Readers who relish exhaustive reference works, ancient geography, or the meticulous world‑building of classical encyclopaedias will find this volume rewarding, while those preferring narrative-driven histories may find its relentless cataloguing demanding.
Euxine 1 Sea, which in former times had the name of Axenus, 2 from the savage and inhospitable character of the nations living on its borders, by a peculiar whim of nature, which is continually giving way before the greedy inroads of the sea, lies between Europe and Asia. It was not enough for the ocean to have surrounded the earth, and then deprived us of a considerable portion of it, thus rendering still greater its uninhabitable proportion; it was not enough for it to have forced a passage through the mountains, to have torn away Calpe from Africa, and to have swallowed up a much larger space than it left untouched; it was not enough for it to have poured its tide into the Propontis through the Hellespont, after swallowing up still more of the dry land—for beyond the Bosporus, as well, it opens with its insatiate appetite upon another space of immense extent, until the Mæotian lakes …
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