NATVRALIS HISTORIA
The First Encyclopædia — illustrated!
XXXVII books · 1,065 bilingual chapters · 1,065 original AI-generated illustrations
Read the illustrated edition at naturalishistoria.org.
Pliny tried to gather the world into a book: stars, seas, elephants, pigments, medicines, monsters, memory, gossip. We have given every chapter a window.
This is a complete open reader for Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia, with Mayhoff's Latin and the historical Bostock–Riley English translation. The Latin arrives first. English diffuses through it like fresh ink. Search the whole work, follow the index, move by history, or let Fortuna open a page when reason has had enough.
And yes—we made 1,065 illustrations with AI, one independently generated 1536×1024 scene for every reading unit. No recycled atlas. No shuffled crops. No arithmetic tricks. Each image was prompted for its chapter, reviewed, hashed, receipted, and assigned exactly once.
The result is part edition, part instrument, part impossible recovered codex: rough as vellum, precise as type, alive as ink.
What lives here
- all thirty-seven books in 1,065 complete Latin–English reading units;
- 1,065 one-to-one AI-generated chapter plates, plus a small documented set of non-chapter art;
- full-work positional search, index, previous/next history, and Fortuna;
- selectable text, responsive layouts, focus mode, fullscreen plates, and reduced-motion support;
- Pliny the Younger's accounts of Vesuvius, Epistulae VI.16 and VI.20, kept beyond the Elder's corpus as a clearly marked afterword.
The pictures carry no textual authority. The Latin and English remain real, selectable text. Wonder is welcome here; confusion about the evidence is not.
Receipts, because marvels require witnesses
Every chapter plate has a source hash, generation record, rights record, and one-to-one manifest assignment. Responsive AVIF, WebP, and JPEG files are delivery forms, not extra artworks. The public repository retains code, manifests, receipts, and deployable derivatives; heavy preservation masters and rejected generations can be preserved in separately checksummed source archives. No source-asset archive is published in this repository today.
Texts and license
- Latin: Mayhoff, 1906, via the Perseus Digital Library; derived data is CC BY-SA 4.0.
- English: John Bostock and H. T. Riley, 1855–57, from Project Gutenberg volumes identified as public domain in the United States; status may differ elsewhere.
- Project code and project-authored material: AGPL-3.0-only, except where a source notice says otherwise.
See NOTICE.md and the public provenance ledger for the long memory.
Contributing
Corrections are welcome. Bring evidence, preserve the source, and do not sand away the strangeness. Start with CONTRIBUTING.md.