An old Encyclopaedia Britannica is a work to cherish

Two thousand years ago, a young Cilician named Oppian, wanting to rehabilitate his disgraced father, decided to write Halieutica, an account of the world of fishes, as a gift for Marcus Aurelius. It was a mixture of possible fact and definite fiction – if only there were octopuses that climb trees and fishes that fancy goats – and it was a success. His father was forgiven, and the son’s written work accepted as authoritative knowledge. In short, although Wikipedia, ‘the free encyclopaedia’, calls Halieutica ‘a didactic epic,’ it was an early encyclopaedia – a word taken from the Greek enkyklios paideia, meaning ‘knowledge in the round’, and which has come to denote a set of books that contains articles that can be cross-referenced, is in alphabetical order and is the authors’ view of what knowledge needs to be known and what unknowns need to remain unknown.

Simon Garfield does not write about Oppian (I mention him not for one-upmanship but because more people should know about a man who wrote that deer sailed the sea using their horns as sails).