Pliny the Elder

Pliny the Elder (Caius Plinius Secundus) , c.AD 23-AD 79, Roman naturalist, b. Cisalpine Gaul. He was a friend and fellow soldier of Vespasian, and he dedicated his great work to Titus. He died of asphyxiation in the neighborhood of Vesuvius, having gone to investigate the eruption. His one surviving work is an encyclopedia of natural science ( Historia naturalis ). It is divided into 37 books and, after a preface, deals with the nature of the physical universe; geography; anthropology; zoology; botany, including the medicinal uses of plants; curatives derived from the animal world; and mineralogy, including an account of the uses of pigments and a history of the fine arts. Pliny's industry was immense and his knowledge of sources extensive, but his information is mostly secondhand and quite useless as science.

Bibliography: See Selections from the History of the World, ed. by P. Turner (1962).

His nephew and ward, Pliny the Younger (Caius Plinius Caecilius Secundus), AD 62?-c.AD 113, was an orator and a statesman. He was quaestor (AD 89), tribune (AD 91), and praetor (AD 93) and subsequently held treasury posts. He was consul (AD 100) and died in his proconsular province of Pontus-Bithynia. His fame rests on his letters, written probably for publication, which are an excellent mirror of Roman life.

Bibliography: See his Letters and Panegyricus, tr. by B. Radice (2 vol., 1969); studies by S. E. Stout (1954) and A. N. Sherwin-White (1966).

Pliny the Elder ( Gaius Plinius Secundus) (ad 23–79), Roman compiler of a Natural History, which was widely read in the Middle Ages; it provided a cosmology for Du Bartas's La Semaine, ou la création du monde (1578), which Sylvester's translation established for the 17th cent. as an English classic. But Pliny's direct influence in England was small. Sir T. Browne made use of him, and so occasionally did Milton.