Decrying the decline in the elites since Pliny the Elder

I was reading an essay recently making the point of how we fail to recognize the extent to which we do not acknowledge the knowledge limitations of people in the past and how they frequently sought to impose their limited knowledge on to new things. The particular case-study was early Spanish explorers trying to name New World animals using Old World concepts when in fact the animals were entirely different. They knew about tigers therefore any large, four-legged feline was a tiger. I'll find the essay and post it.

This was called to mind by a dip into Natural History, A Selection by Pliny the Elder, essentially a dictionary of the state of knowledge of geography, the sciences, the arts, zoology, etc. at the time of the first century A.D. This is the same Pliny the Elder about whom I posted a number of years ago whose curiosity led him to his death as he went ashore to explore Pompeii at the time of Vesuvius's eruption.

I was taken with Pliny's description of the hippopotamus. Knowledge of distant, rare or exotic things was partial, hearsay, incomplete, erroneous and dashed with imagination. That they knew anything about the river horse was remarkable but it brings back to mind just how incomplete knowledge was. Given universal education, public libraries, books in the millions, the internet and Google, it is hard to rebuild a mindset of limited knowledge. From Pliny the Elder's description.

The Nile produces a creature even mightier than the crocodile: the hippopotamus. It has hooves like those of oxen; a horse's back, mane and neighing sound; a turned-up snout; a boar's tail and curved tusks, although less damaging; and an impenetrable hide used for shields and helmets, unless soaked in water. The hippopotamus feeds on crops, marking out an area in advance for each day, so men say, and it makes its footprints lead out of a field so that no traps are prepared for its return.

Marcus Scaurus was the first to put a hippopotamus, together with five crocodiles, on show at Rome when he staged the games during his aedileship they were kept in an artificial lake. The hippopotamus stands out as a teacher in one branch of medicine. For when it lumbers ashore after excessive eating — in which it indulges all the time - to look for recently cut rushes, and sees a very sharp stalk, it presses its body on to it and pierces a vein in its leg, and so, by losing blood, lightens its body, which would otherwise become ill. Then it covers up the wound again with mud.

Elsewhere in the same edition, Pliny comments on sources of information and veracity. He fully recognizes how difficult it is to make true statements owing to faulty sources.

There are five Roman colonies in that province. According to widespread reports it might seem to be an accessible region; but, put to the test, this view is found to be almost completely fallacious; persons of rank, although unwilling to track down the truth, are not ashamed to tell falsehoods because they cannot bear to admit their ignorance. Credibility never more readily falls flat on its face than when an authority of weight supports a false assertion.

He might be talking about the modern press in that passage.

Followed by a comment that remains equally valid today.

As for myself, I am less surprised that certain matters are unknown to persons of the equestrian order - indeed some now enter the Senate - than that anything should be unknown to Luxury, which is a very great and influential power inasmuch as men scour forests for ivory and citrus-wood and all the rocks of Gaetulia for the murex and for purple.

Decrying the decline in the elites since Pliny the Elder.