ローマ帝国の百科事典

最近一行ずつガイウス・プリニウス・セクンドゥスの博物誌をラテン語から英語に翻訳しています。　全書は三十六冊ですけどまだ前書きを読んでいます。ところでウィキペディアによると三十七冊が含まっています。差の理由をまだ調べていません。
Pliny the Elder, Gaius Plinius Secundus, gained renown as a naval commander and as an author. His only surviving work is the Natural Histories (Naturalis Historiae), which seems to have been completed in 77 AD.
The dedication of the work amounts to lauding the current emperor, Titus Vespasian. He praises the emperor's erudition and skill in poetry, claiming that the writings of others, and even of himself, are unworthy of Vespasian's scrutiny.
'quid ista legis, imperator humili vulgo scripta sunt, agricolarum, opificum turbae, denique studiorum otiosis.'
"Why do you read these works, emperor, which were written for the vulgar people, for the farmers,the laborers of tumult, and those with idle time?"
Pliny also claims that the Natural Histories are a work unlike anything that had been undertaken in the world up to that time. It attempts to chronicle all knowledge of the world in existence, and no single author among the Greeks or the Romans had ever attempted a work of such scale.
目次 (from Wikipedia)
Book Number Contents
1 Preface
2 Mathematical and physical description of the world
3-6 Geography and Ethnography (this seems similar to anthropology, perhaps specializing on ethnicity/culture)
7 Anthropology and Human Physiology
8-11 Zoology
12-27 Botany, including agriculture, horticulture, and pharmacology. Note that this topic consumes the largest number of books of any. Was this a topic about which a large number of written sources were available to Pliny?
27-32 Pharmacology
33-37 Mining, mineralogy, silver chasing (detailing the surface of silver with a hammer, bronze statuary, painting, modelling, marble sculpture, precious gems.