Among the achievements of the ancient Roman Empire still acclaimed today, historians list things like aqueducts, roads, legal theory, exceptional architecture and the spread of Latin as the language of intellect (along with the Latin alphabet, memorialised nowadays in many popular typefaces). Rome was not known, though, for substantially advancing basic science.

But in the realm of articulating and preserving current knowledge about nature, one Roman surpassed all others. He was the polymath Gaius Plinius Secundus, aka Pliny the Elder, the original compiler of scientific knowledge by reviewing previously published works.