Hylke de Boer, BA

Pliny the Elder concludes a chapter on mining with the following judgement: “How innocent, how happy, in fact how luxurious even would life be, if it desired nothing from somewhere other than the surface of the earth” (33.3). Thus, there is a moral gap between consuming riches from the surface of the earth and taking them from its interior. In this research, I aim to explain this gap by studying human nature relations in the Natural History.