Parti del mondo: logiche del confine e della frontiera nella sezione geografica della Naturalis Historia di Plinio il Vecchio

Due to an organic view of Nature, the Plinian world is perceived as a living organism with its boundaries acting as joints that simultaneously separate and unite the territories. This anatomical perspective aids in conceptualizing the space governed by Rome as a ‘de-fragmented’ entity within which a potentially homogeneous humanity unfolds. For this reason, Pliny’s geography is constructed as a non-ethnographic discourse, wherein curiosities and marvelous details are documented primarily to demarcate the frontiers of the world, beyond which lies either the unknowable or the untamed.