A Dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology

the celebrated author of the Historia Naturalis, was born A. D. 23, having reached the age of 56 at the time of his death, which took place in A. D. 79. (Plin. Jun. Epist. 3.5.) The question as to the place of his birth has been the subject of a voluminous and rather angry discussion between the champions of Verona and those of Novum Comum (the modern Como). That he was born at one or other of these two towns sees pretty certain; Hardouin's notion, that he was born at Rome, has nothing to support it. The claim of Comum seems to be, on the whole, the better founded of the two. In the life of Pliny ascribed to Suetonius, and by Eusebius, or his translator Jerome, he is styled Novocomensis. Another anonymous life of Pliny (apparently of late origin and of no authority) calls him a native of Verona; and it has been thought that the claim of Verona to be considered as his birth-place is confirmed by the fact that Pliny himself (Praef. init.) calls Catullus, who was a native of Verona, his conterraneus. On the other hand, it has been urged with more discerning criticism, that as the two towns were both situated beyond the Padus in Gallia Cisalpina, and at no very great distance from each other, this somewhat barbarous word is much better adapted to intimate that Catullus was a fellow-countryman of Pliny, than that he was fellow-townsman. In a similar manner the younger Pliny, who was undoubtedly born at Novum Comum, speaks of Veronenses nostri (Epist. vi. ult.). Of two Veronese inscriptions which have been adduced, one appears to be spurious. The other, which is admitted to be genuine, is too mutilated for its tenour to be ascertained. It appears to have been set up by a Plinius Secundus, but whether the author of the Natural History or not, there is nothing to show. Nor would it in any case be decisive as to the birth-place of Pliny. That the family of the Plinii belonged to Novum Comum is clear from the facts that the estates of the elder Pliny were situated there, and that the younger Pliny was born there, and from several inscriptions found in the neighbourhood relating to various members of the family.

Of the particular events in the life of Pliny we know but little; but for the absence of such materials for biography we are in some degree compensated by the valuable account which his nephew has left us of his habits of life. He came to Rome while still young, and being descended from a family of wealth and distinction, he had the means at his disposal for availing himself of the instruction of the best teachers to be found in the imperial city. In one passage of his work (9.58) he speaks of the enormous quantity of jewellery which he had seen worn by Lollia Paulina. That must have been before A. D. 40, in which year Caligula married Cesonia. It does not appear necessary to suppose that at that early age Pliny had already been introduced at the court of Caligula. The strange animals exhibited by the emperors and wealthy Romans in spectacles and combats, seem early to have attracted his attention (comp. H. N. 9.5). He was for some time on the coast of Africa, though in what capacity, or at what period, we are not informed (H. N. 7.3). At the age of about 23 he went to Germany, where he served under L. Pomponius Secundus, of whom he afterwards wrote a memoir (Plin. Jun. Ep. 3.5), and was appointed to the command of a troop of cavalry (praefectus alae) (Plin. Jun. l.c.). It appears from notices of his own that he travelled over most of the frontier of Germany, having visited the Cauci, the sources of the Danube, &c. It was probably in Belgium that he became acquainted with Cornelius Tacitus (not the historian of that name, H. N. 7.16). It was in the intervals snatched from his military duties that he composed his treatise de Jaculatione equestri. (Plin. Jun. l.c.) At the same time he commenced a history of the Germanic wars, being led to do so by a dream in which he fancied himself commissioned to undertake the task by Drusus Nero. This work he afterwards completed in twenty books.

Pliny returned to Rome with Pomponius (A. D. 52), and applied himself to the study of jurisprudence. He practised for some time as a pleader, but does not seem to have distinguished himself very greatly in that capacity. The greater part of the reign of Nero he spent in retirement, chiefly, no doubt, at his native place. It may have been with a view to the education of his nephew that he composed the work entitled Studiosus, an extensive treatise in three books, occupying six volumes, in which he marked out the course that should be pursued in the training of a young orator, from the cradle to the completion of his education and his entrance into public life. (Plin. Jun. l.c. ; Quint. Inst. 3.1.21.) Towards the end of the reign of Nero he wrote a grammatical work in eight books, entitled Dubius Sermo, confutations of which were promised by various professed grammarians, Stoics, dialecticians, &c.; though ten years afterwards, when the Historia Naturalis was published, they had not appeared. (Plin. H. N. i. Praef. § 22.) It was towards the close of the reign of Nero that Pliny was appointed procurator in Spain. He was here in A. D. 71. when his brother-in-law died, leaving his son, the younger Pliny, to the guardianship of his uncle, who, on account of his absence, was obliged to entrust the care of him to Virginius Rufus. Pliny returned to Rome in the reign of Vespasian, shortly before A. D. 73, when he adopted his nephew. He had known Vespasian in the Germanic wars, and the emperor received him into the number of his most intimate friends. For the assertion that Pliny served with Titus in Judaea there is no authority. He was, however, on intimate terms with Titus, to whom he dedicated his great work. Nor is there any evidence that he was ever created senator by Vespasian. It was doubtless at this period of his life that he wrote a continuation of the history of Aufidius Bassus, in 31 books, carrying the narrative down to his own times (H. N. praef. § 19). Of his manner of life at this period an interesting account has been preserved by his nephew (Epist. 3.5). It was his practice to begin to spend a portion of the night in studying by candle-light, at the festival of the Vulcanalia (towards the end of August), at first at a late hour of the night, in winter at one or two o'clock in the morning. Before it was light he betook himself to the emperor Vespasian, and after executing such commissions as he might be charged with, returned home and

devoted the time which he still had remaining to study. After a slender meal he would, in the summer time, he in the sunshine while some one read to him, he himself making notes and extracts. He never read anything without making extracts in this way, for he used to say that there was no book so bad but that some good might be got out of it. He would then take a cold bath, and, after a slight repast, sleep a very little, and then pursue his studies till the time of the coena. During this meal some book was read to, and commented on by him. At table, as night be supposed, he spent but a short time. Such was his mode of life when in the midst of the bustle and confusion of the city. When in retirement in the country, the time spent in the bath was nearly the only interval not allotted to study, and that he reduced to the narrowest limits; for during all the process of scraping and rubbing he had some book read to him, or himself dictated. When on a journey he had a secretary by his side with a book and tablets, and in the winter season made him wear gloves that his writing might not be impeded by the cold. He once found fault with his nephew for walking, as by so doing he lost a good deal of time that might have been employed in study. By this incessant application, persevered in throughout his lifetime, he amassed an enormous amount of materials, and at his death left to his nephew 160 volumina of notes (electorum comnmentarii), written extremely small on both sides. While procurator in Spain, when the number of them was considerably less, he had been offered 400,000 sesterces for them, by one Largius Licinius. With some reason might his nephew say that, when compared with Pliny, those who had spent their whole lives in literary pursuits seemed as if they had spent them in nothing else than sleep and idleness. When we consider the multiplicity of his engagements, both public and private, the time occupied in military services, in the discharge of the duties of the offices which he held, in his forensic studies and practice, in visits to the emperor, and the performance of the miscellaneous commissions entrusted to him by the latter, the extent of his acquisitions is indeed astonishing. From the materials which he had in this way collected he compiled his celebrated Historia Naturalis, which he dedicated to Titus, and published, as appears from the titles given to Titus in the preface, about A. D. 77.

The circumstances of the death of Pliny were remarkable. The details are given in a letter of the younger Pliny to Tacitus (Ep. 6.16). Pliny had been appointed admiral by Vespasian, and in A. D. 79 was stationed with the fleet at Misenum, when the celebrated eruption of Vesuvius took place, which overwhelmed Herculaneum and Pompeii. On the 24th of August, while he was, as usual, engaged in study, his attention was called by his sister to a cloud of unusual size and shape, rising to a great height, in the form of a pinetree, from Vesuvius (as was afterwards discovered), sometimes white, sometimes blackish and spotted, according as the smoke was more or less mixed with cinders and earth. He immediately went to a spot from which he could get a better view of the phaenomenon; but, desiring to examine it still more closely, he ordered a light vessel to be got ready, in which he embarked. taking his tablets with him. The sailors of the ships at Retina, who had just escaped from the imminent danger, urged him to turn back. He resolved, however, to proceed, and in the hope of rendering assistance to those who were in peril, ordered the ships to be launched, and proceeded to the point of danger, retaining calmness and self-possession enough to observe and have noted down the various forms which the cloud assumed. Hot cinders and pumice stones now fell thickly upon the vessels, and they were in danger of being left aground by a sudden retreat of the sea. He hesitated for an instant whether to proceed or not; but quoting the maxim of Terence, fortes fortuna adjuvat, directed the steersman to conduct him to Pomponianus, who was at Stabiae, and whom he found preparing to set sail. Pliny did his best to restore his courage, and ordered a bath to be prepared for himself. He then, with a cheerful countenance, presented himself at the dinner-table, endeavouring to induce his friend to believe that the flames which burst out with increased violence were only those of some villages which the peasants had abandoned, and afterwards retired to rest, and slept soundly. But, as the court of the house was becoming fast filled with cinders, so that egress would in a short time have become impossible, he was roused, and joined Pomponianus. As the house, from the frequent and violent shocks, was in momentary danger of falling, it appeared the safer plan to betake themselves into the open fields, which they did, tying pillows upon their heads to protect them from the fallling stones and ashes. Though it was already day, the darkness was profound. They went to the shore to see if it were possible to embark, but found the sea too tempestuous to allow them to do so. Pliny then lay down on a sail which was spread for him. Alarmed by the approach of flames, preceded by a smell of sulphur, his companions took to flight. His slaves assisted him to rise, but he almost immediately dropped down again, suffocated, as his nephew conjectures, by the vapours, for he had naturally weak lungs. His body was afterwards found unhurt, even his clothes not being disordered, and his attitude that of one asleep rather than that of a corpse.

It may easily be supposed that Pliny, with his inordinate appetite for accumulating knowledge out of books, was not the man to produce a scientific work of any value. He had no genius, as indeed might have been inferred from the bent of his mind. He was not even an original observer. The materials which he worked up into his huge encyclopaedic compilation were almost all derived at second-hand, though doubtless he has incorporated the results of his own observation in a larger number of instances than those in which he indicates such to be the case. Nor did he, as a compiler, show either judgment or discrimination in the selection of his materials, so that in his accounts the true and the false are found intermixed in nearly equal proportion,--the latter, if any thing, predominating, even with regard to subjects on which more accurate information might have been obtained; for, as he wrote on a multiplicity of subjects with which he had no scientific acquaintance, he was entirely at the mercy of those from whose writings he borrowed his information, being incapable of correcting their errors, or, as may be seen even from what he has borrowed from Aristotle, of determining the relative

importance of the facts which he selects and those which he passes over. His love of the marvellous, and his contempt for human nature. lead him constantly to introduce what is strange or wonderful, or adapted to illustrate the wickedness of man, and the unsatisfactory arrangements of Providence. He was, as Cuvier remarks, (Biograph. Univ. art. Pline, vol. xxxv.), "an author without critical judgment, who, after having spent a great deal of time in making extracts, has ranged them under certain chapters, to which he has added reflections which have no relation to science properly so called, but display alternately either the most superstitious credulity, or the declamations of a discontented philosophy, which finds fault continually with mankind, with nature, and with the gods themselves." His work is of course valuable to us from the vast number of subjects treated of, with regard to many of which we have no other sources of information. But what he tells us is often unintelligible, from his retailing accounts of things with which he was himself personally unacquainted, and of which he in consequence gives no satisfactory idea to the reader. Though a writer on zoology, botany, and mineralogy, he has no pretensions to be called a naturalist. His compilations exhibit scarcely a trace of scientific arrangement; and frequently it can be shown that he does not give the true sense of the authors whom he quotes and translates, giving not uncommonly wrong Latin names to the objects spoken of by his Greek authorities. That repeated contradictions should occur in such a work is not to be wondered at. It would not, of course, be fair to try him by the standard of modern times; yet we need but place him for an instant by the side of a mans like Aristotle, whose learning was even more varied, while it was incomparably more profound, to see how great was his inferiority as a man of science and reflection. Still it is but just to him to add, that he occasionally displays a vigour of thought and expression which shows that he might have attained a much higher rank as an author, if his mental energies had not been weighed down beneath the mass of unorganized materials with which his memory and his note-tablets were overloaded. In private life his character seems to have been estimable in a high degree, and his work abounds with grave and noble sentiments, exhibiting a love of virtue and honour, and the most unmitigated contempt for the luxury, profligacy, and meanness which by his time had so deeply stained the Roman people. To philosophical speculation on religious, moral, or metaphysical subjects he does not seem to have been much addicted. All that is very distinctive of his views on such matters is that he was a decided pantheist.

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