Citations and quotations in the Naturalis Historia: creating the canon in the Encyclopaedia

The general objective of this PhD project is to study how people are cited in Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia (NH), considered the first Encyclopaedia of the Ancient World. A monumental collection of 37 books, the Naturalis Historia is populated by multiple people who are mentioned in very different roles: sources, witnesses, protagonists of episodes or significant discoveries. Indices of current critical editions represent a useful but relatively flat tool to extrapolate information about the people mentioned: by developing a digital annotation of books 2–6, the PhD candidate will be able to provide an informed picture of the people associated to astronomical and geographical knowledge, and the textual strategies used by Pliny to present them. The specific objectives of this project are (1) to systematically gather quantitative and qualitative information on the people mentioned in NH 2–6; (2) to detect the patterns used by Pliny when selecting the people in relation to the topics treated & structure of the explanations, and thus (3) to understand the mechanisms that guided the representation of sources, witnesses and protagonists in the first attempt to systematize the broad area of “natural sciences” in western history of knowledge.