77 C.E.

Pliny relates that Cicero once saw the 15,693-verse Iliad of Homer written “in so small a compass as to be wholly enclosed in a nutshell.” A certain Pierre-Daniel Huet, later Bishop of Avranches and long a skeptic of this anecdote, demonstrated in the 1670s that the feat was indeed entirely possible if one used both sides of a common leaf of paper, 40 verses to a line, 240 lines per page. And in the same century, when John Aubrey set out to write the epitaph for the tomb of the Tradescants, the greatest collectors of curiosities in seventeenth-century England, he chose the metaphor of theIliad in a nutshell—the macrocosm contained—to represent their encyclopedic collection:

Whilst they (as Homer’s Iliad in a nut)

A world of wonders in one closet shut