Historia Naturalis
Pliny the Elder's thirty-seven book Historia Naturalis (Natural History), organised into ten volumes, compiles information gleaned from other ancient authors and is the largest single literary work to have survived from the Roman Empire. It is the sole surviving text from the author's extensive body of work, which included at least twenty-five books and one hundred and sixty volumes of unpublished notebooks and the last that he published. The first ten books were published in 77CE, but Pliny had not finished revising the rest when he died during the eruption of Vesuvius two years later. The rest was published posthumously by Pliny's nephew, Pliny the Younger published the remainder of the work posthumously.
Despite the work's title, it is not limited to what is today understood by natural history, with topics covered including agriculture, anthropology, art, astronomy, botany, ethnography, geography, horticulture, mathematics, mineralogy, pharmacology, physiology, sculpture, and zoology.
While it fails to distinguish fact from opinion and speculation, it is encyclopedic in scope, and its structure does not resemble a modern encyclopedia. However, the breadth of subject matter, referencing of original authors, and index made it a model for later encyclopedias and scholarly works.
