Free Why Read the Classics? by Italo Calvino

find it sweet to have done living? Yet how much easier and saferit is just to rely on yourself, and to model your own peace of mind on your experience before birth) (7.190). ‘Model your own peace of mind on your experience before birth’: in other words, project yourself into contemplating your own absence, the only secure reality both before we came into the world and after we die. For the same reason we should also rejoice at recognising that infinite variety of what is different from us that Pliny’s
Natural History
parades before our eyes.
    But if man is defined by his limits, can he not also be defined by the peaks of his excellence? Pliny feels duty-bound to include in Book 7 the glorification of man’s virtues, the celebration of his triumphs: he turns to Roman history as if it were the register of every virtue, and he is tempted to find a pompous conclusion by indulging in an imperial encomium which would allow him to signal the peak of human perfection in the figure of Caesar Augustus. But I would say that this tone is not typical of Pliny’s treatment of his material: rather it is the tentative, limiting, almost bitter note that best suits his temperament.
    We could recognise here some questions which accompanied the setting up of anthropology as a science. Must an anthropological science try to avoid a ‘humanist’ perspective in order to attain the objectivity of a natural science? Do the men in Book 7 count all the more, the more different, the more ‘other’ they are from us, the more they are no longer or not yet men? But is it possible for man to escape his own subjectivity to such an extent that he can make himself the object of a science? The moral which Pliny repeats invites caution and wariness: no science can enlighten us on
felicitas, fortuna
, on the mixture of good and evil in a life, on the values of existence; every individual dies and takes his secret with him to the grave.
    Pliny could end this section on this disconsolate note, but he prefers to add a list of discoveries and inventions, both real and legendary. Anticipating those modern anthropologists who maintain that there is a continuity between biological evolution and technological development, from palaeolithic tools to electronics, Pliny implicitly admits that the additions made by man to nature become an integral part themselves of nature. This is but a step away from claiming that the true nature of man is culture. But Pliny does not know how to generalise, and seeks the specifics of human achievement in inventions and customs which can be considered universal. There are three cultural facts, according to Pliny (or his sources), upon which a tacit accord has been reached between peoples (‘gentium consensus tacitus’, 7.210): the adoption of the (Greek and Roman)alphabet; the shaving of men’s faces by a barber; and the marking of the hours of the day on a sundial.
    This triad could not be more bizarre nor debatable in its incongruous grouping of the three terms: alphabet, barber, sundial. In fact it is not true that all peoples have similar systems for writing, nor that they shave their beard, and as for the hours of the day, Pliny himself devotes some pages to a brief history of the various systems of dividing time. I am not trying here to underline a ‘Eurocentric’ perspective, which in fact is not typical of Pliny or his age, but rather the direction in which he moves: the intent to establish the elements which are constantly repeated in the most diverse cultures, in order to define what is specifically human, will become a principle of method in modern ethnology. And once he has established this point about the ‘gentium consensus tacitus’, Pliny can close his treatment of humanity and move on ‘ad reliqua animalia’, to the other animate beings.
    Book 8, which reviews the living creatures of the earth, begins with the elephant, to which the longest chapter is devoted. Why is the elephant accorded this priority?