he treats the art of public speaking, that depictions of natura can be found that make the partnership, or cooperative interaction, between nature and art conceivable.
Cicero developed the attributes of natura in the second book of De natura deorum. Cicero’s natura is divine (and female), nurturing and rational. She is “quae contineat mundum omnem eumque tueatur, et ea quidem non sine sensu atque ratione” (that which holds the whole universe together and guards it, and indeed she is not without sense and reason.)238 Cicero equated natura with both mundus (the universe) and deus (God), as the following excerpt makes clear.
Quocira sapientem esse mundum necesse est, naturamque eam, quae res omnes complexa teneat, perfectione rationis excellere, eoque deum esse mundum, omnemque vim mundi natura divina contineri.
(So the universe must be wise, and the Nature that embraces all things must be distinguished by perfection of reason. And so God must be the universe, and all the life of the universe must be contained within Divine Nature.)239
In both of the passages quoted above, Cicero described natura as nurturing and rational. He went on to explain the wisdom of natura in terms of sollertia (skillfulness). Cicero said that no human operation, such as the navigation of fleets or the deployment of troops, “tantam naturae sollertiam significat, quantam ipse mundus” (shows the skillfulness of nature so much as the universe itself).240 Cicero’s characterization of natura as divine, nurturing, and rational was not uniquely his own. Rather, the view of nature that Cicero articulated in the second book of De natura deorum has its essential elements in common with what Mary Beagon has called a “mainstream tradition,” which was “derived from the cosmological theories of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics.”241 More than a century after Cicero, the most eloquent spokesman for that tradition was Pliny the Elder.
The salient features of Pliny the Elder’s cosmology, like Cicero’s, are the divinity of natural mundus, her providence, and her skillfulness. Pliny the Elder’s very first statement about natura in Naturalis historia is that “numen esse credi par est” (she is rightly believed to be divine).242 Like the divinity of natura, the idea of her providence toward humankind, which Pliny the Elder expressed in terms of providentia (providence), naturae benignitas (the benevolence of nature) and naturae maiestas (nature’s majesty), is a recurring theme in the treatise.243 Pliny the Elder used the phrase ars naturae (the skill of nature) to refer to what we call symbiosis.244
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