Pliny Explains it All: The Historia Naturalis Abridged (Books I-II) – Sam O'Nella Reaction



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23 thoughts on “Pliny Explains it All: The Historia Naturalis Abridged (Books I-II) – Sam O'Nella Reaction”

  1. I can't help but cringe, when people "react", pausing, then talking about what they "would wish" would be included, then 5 seconds later it shows up in the video. Personally i think that videos like this shouldn't be blind-reacted to. That's just me though.

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  2. Really makes you think about what our understanding will be in a thousand years, how foolish some of the things we consider facts today will seem to our ancestors. There's probably lots of things we're only half-right at best about at the moment, after all, our understanding of the universe will always be deeper tomorrow than it is today.

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  3. 11:07 my first impression was that Pliny the Elder was a kind of Pantheist, rather than a deist, although he could have been a deistic panentheist. Pantheism was much more common among ancient peoples back then, with the most notable ones being the Stoics (who beyond being known for their ethics also held a pantheistic conception of god) who were very ubiquitous in Roman society by the time Pliny was writing.

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  4. Originally, "planet" meant "something permanent in the sky that moves a lot compared to the "fixed" stars." In fact, the planets were considered to be a class of star at the time. That's why the ancients considered the sun and the moon to be planets.

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  5. Lightning penetrating into the ground is something they could figure out. Lightning strikes can produce a stone called fulgerite the same shape as lightning itself, as the heat causes sand and soil to fuse. Fulgerites have been found as long as 13 feet, and as deep as 50, but I'm willing to cut Pliny some slack on that.

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  6. The Ethiopian stuff I’m pretty sure was in reference to a theory they inherited from the Greeks that the further north and further south you go people’s blood got funny bc of the climate and that gave them whacky characteristics but Greece etc was in the middle so they were “normal”

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  7. The soviets copied the b-29 bolt for bolt becouse stalin ordered them to and they didn't want to get killed. Its called Tupolev Tu-4 and the soviet interceptors had to somehow tell the diference between the american and the soviet ones durring war

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  8. The meat showers probably are references to storms or hurricanes that sweep up small animals (frogs and fish etc) and fall down which has been known to happen with tornados and hurricanes

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  9. People have a misunderstanding that people are dumber or more intelligent than modern humans, but really it's just the difference of culture, pressures, and knowledge. Ask yourself, how would someone in ancient times verify information? Who would you go to to verify that information? Would the information be heavily biased? Biased towards what? If you couldn't verify it by doing it yourself you pretty much had to take people's word for it. Anything observable we pretty much got down but it was the scientific method we were still working out the kinks of. Therefore there was a lot of issues with trying to separate correlation from causation and filling in the blanks with your own theories. Obviously Pliny here was biased towards the Earth element and would not think of any theories that would come to the conclusion that the earth can cause just as much harm as the other elements.

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  10. My understanding is that there were a fair number of Roman philosophers who were moving toward a pantheistic model. This was one reason why "Pagan" was actually used as a slur similar to the way "redneck" or "hillbilly" might be today for religious people living in rural areas who still took the animistic and polytheistic Roman religion seriously. The intellectual urban centers were already moving toward pantheism or atheism, which might have also helped a monotheistic religion that unified all things under one creator deity to take hold there.

    Urban centers often tend to move toward pantheism or atheism because you see people of a lot of different religions living alongside each other there, which makes it difficult for them to believe that you have to worship a specific god in a specific way to get a good outcome.

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  11. The events that led to Pliny the Elder's death are really interesting, because what ended with them running towards boats with pillows tied to their heads as a "rescue". Started with him doing research for book #38, and investigating the " Fiery Tree that emerged from Vesuvius"

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  12. I just did a bit of research on the "stone that makes dead body dissolve" and what I found out is super interesting.

    He is talking about a kind of stone found in Troas called Lithos Sarcophagus, that was believed to hasten the decomposition process. The word sarcophagus comes from that, and it is now synonym with any stone made coffin. The origin of the word is Greek and it means meat-eating.

    The strange thing is, this limestone doesn't speed up decomposition, it actually slows it down, Sam's evaluation is what made me curious about this, and it was actually wrong. The lime in this stone (calcium hydroxide) dryes up moisture and in doing so it slows down decomposition, it acts as a preservant.
    Ancient people noticed that the remains placed in this stone would stop smelling faster, but they probably incorrectly assumed that this happened because the decomposition had run its course

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