SOURCE: Mary Beagon, "Divina Natura: The Roots of Pliny's Thoughts," in Roman Nature: The Thought of Pliny the Elder, Clarendon Press, 1992, pp. 26-54.

In the following excerpt, Beagon offers a study of Pliny's religious skepticism, examining his belief in the importance of the human relationship with nature and his conclusion that "Nature is what we mean by God."

1. Natura as Divinity

The world … is fitly believed to be a deity, eternal and immeasurable, a being that was never born and will never perish. What lies outside it does not concern men to explore and is beyond the capability of the human mind to guess. It is sacred, eternal, immeasurable, wholly within the whole, or rather itself the whole, finite and resembling the infinite, certain of all things and resembling the uncertain, holding in its embrace all things that are within and without, at once the work of nature...