Recap - Stone

We began our term's Earth-themed meetings with a discussion of the last two books of Pliny's Natural History, on stones and on precious stones, surrounded by the wonderful Watson Building Stones Collection. Sitting in front of many examples of Italian and Greek marble, our conversation ranged from amulets to amber, sanding to Sarcophagi, to the uses (and abuses) of classical statuary.

One of the most significant, lengthy, and complete ancient works, the Natural History attempted to be an encyclopaedic rendering of contemporary knowledge about the contents, origins, usages and properties of the natural world. Indeed, we found, the books were more than a catalogue of rocky descriptions, being accounts, stories, and recipes which dealt with stones in all their manifestations:

• As part of a bigger natural whole
• As sculpture, art, and buildings
• As having intrinsic aesthetic properties
• As coming from specific places
• As useful: in processes, in remedies
• As magical or marvellous
• As mythical
• As tasty
• As fossils
• As changeable
• As similar and simile

Throughout, we considered three themes or questions on the compilation and presentation of natural knowledge, as the text exhibited differing voices, digressions, and tensions:

• Authority: whose?
• Description: how?
• Meanings: why?

We closed our conversation with a passage describing the eruption of Vesuvius in which Pliny died - and which has proven to be an outstanding early description of a pyroclastic flow.

Next time we venture underground...

Making use of geological apparatus to sieve cork and sediment from wine...