by Daisy Dunn
60 Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, 1667–70.
61 PLY 6.30.
62 Dio Cassius Roman History 68.15.
63 Martial Epigrams 7.47. In this poem Martial rejoices in Licinius Sura’s narrow escape from death. In Epigram 1.49, meanwhile, Martial celebrates Licinius Sura’s coming to Spain.
64 Pliny may not have been familiar with the curious wine-pouring automata of Philon of Byzantium which were powered by similar siphon mechanisms.
65 PLY 5.6.36–7.
SEVEN: The Shadow of Verona
1 W. Pater, The Renaissance, Macmillan & Co., London, 1873, p. 153.
2 PLY 8.20.5.
3 See Livy Ab urbe condita 33.36.
4 Information retrieved at the baths and museum at Viale Lecco, Como.
5 CIL V 5279. See F. Sacchi, ‘Como romana: Gli aspetti monumentali della città e del surburbio’, in G. Luraschi (ed.), Storia di Como, Storia di Como, Como: Luglio, 2013, Vol. 1, pp. 154–5.
6 A. Sartori, Le Iscrizioni Romane, Musei Civici Como, Como, 1994, p. 37. See also T. Mommsen, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 4, Weidmann, Berlin, 1906, pp. 394–5, who suggests that this Lucius Caecilius Cilo was Pliny’s father, and that of the sons named in the inscription, Publius Caecilius Secundus was Pliny as he was known prior to his adoption. Sherwin-White (Letters of Pliny, p. 70) believes that Lucius Caecilius Cilo is rather ‘a collateral relation’ of Pliny.
7 It is possible that the baths at Viale Lecco, Como, were those Pliny bestowed upon the town; see G. Luraschi, Storia di Como, Vol. 1, p. 30.
8 PLY 5.11.2.
9 CIL V, Suppl. 747. This inscription was discovered in Como in the late nineteenth century – A. Sartori, Le Iscrizioni Romane, pp. 34–5. Lucius Caecilius Secundus dedicated the temple in the name of his daughter, Caecilia, so if he was Pliny’s father, then Pliny had a sister whom he never mentioned in his letters. She might have died young.
10 The portrait head of Augustus as Chief Priest dates to the first century BC and was acquired by Paolo Giovio. It is on display at the Museo Civico in Como. A number of suggestions have been made for the location of the forum, but the argument for Piazza San Fedele remains the most persuasive. See particularly the discussion of S. Maggi, ‘L’urbanistica di Como romana’, pp. 131–47 in Luraschi (ed.), Storia di Como, Vol. 1.
11 Remains of the building have been discovered on the corner between Viale Varese and Via Benzi in Como – information retrieved from Museo Civico, Como.
12 PLY 1.3.1; see Catullus Carmina 2.
13 PLY 2.8.2.
14 Marble relief sculpture dated to the second half of the first century AD and discovered on Piazza San Fedele, probable site of the forum. If Pliny looked up from this frieze to the panel above it, then he would have seen a more familiar panorama. Young men of his social class, the equestrians, parade in ceremonial procession on horseback, as he himself might well have had done in his youth.
15 PLY 1.3.1.
16 G. Luraschi, Aspetti Di Vita Pubblica Nella Como Dei Plini, Società Archeologica Comense, Como, 1986, p. 6 n.5; Storia di Como, Vol. 1, p. 31; ‘La villa romana di Via Zezio in Como’, Rivista Como, No. 3, 1976, pp. 24ff.
17 I. N. De Agostini, La sezione romana del museo archeologico di Como, Musei Civici, Como, 2006, pp. 49–52.
18 PLE 36.189, Museo Civico, Como.
19 De Agostini, La sezione romana del museo archeologico di Como, pp. 50–1.
20 Giovio, Historiae Patriae, Vol. 2, p. 232. See T. C. Price Zimmerman, Paolo Giovio: The Historian and the Crisis of Sixteenth-Century Italy, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1995, pp. 161, 338 n.125.
21 P. L. Rubin, Giorgio Vasari: Life and History, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1995, pp. 109–10 on Paolo Giovio’s advice to Giorgio Vasari about the publication without portraits. The second edition of the Lives, published in 1568, did include portraits.
22 Price Zimmerman, Paolo Giovio, p. 188. On the portraits see also M. W. Gahtan (ed.), Giorgio Vasari and the Birth of the Museum, Routledge, London and New York, 2016, pp. 81, 94 n.4.
23 PLY 2.15.
24 On the lack of evidence for regular large-scale productions of drama in Rome in this period see G. Manuwald, Roman Republican Theatre, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011, p. 119.
25 PLY 9.7.4.
26 See Price Zimmerman, Paolo Giovio p. 161 on Giovio’s rather opportunistic description of his museum’s site as having been that of a ‘Plinian’ villa.
27 Not the famous hotel but the Rockefeller Foundation located behind it.
28 Giovio, Historiae Patriae, Vol. 2, p. 249.
29 This must be the fragment now in the Museo Civico at Como – CIL V 5221. See Sartori, Le Iscrizioni Romane, p. 56.
30 There have been several attempts to identify the Plinius of the inscription as a correspondent of Pliny. While residents of sixteenth-century Bellagio conjectured that Pliny wrote to him about the studies of his uncle, R. Syme (‘Consular Friends of the Elder Pliny’, Roman Papers Vol. 7, edited by A. R. Birley, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991, p. 510 n.104) suggests that this Plinius may have been the Sabinianus (a ‘Sa’ is visible in the fragment) addressed in PLY 9.21 and 9.24.
31 In iugo huis prom fuit villa Plinii quam Tragediam appellare solebat at Bellagio. And hic olim Villa Plinii quam Comediam appellare solebat at Lenno – Ortelius, Map of Lake Como, Theatrum orbis terrarum (cited also by P. R. du Prey, The Villas of Pliny, pp. 4–6) – and also Gibson and Morello, Reading the Letters of Pliny the Younger, p. 200, who discuss further the appeal of Bellagio and Lenno as locations of Pliny’s villas with views of one another.
32 Many tourists have glimpsed what they believe to be Roman remains beneath the bay at Lenno. See for example T. W. M. Lund, The Lake of Como, Kegan Paul, London; Trübner & Co. Ltd, Trench, 1910, p. 66.
EIGHT: Portrait of a Man
1 PLY 5.7.3.
2 PLY 3.6.2–3.
3 PLE 34.6.
4 Martial Epigrams 9.59.
5 Petronius Cena Trimalchionis 50.
6 PLE 34.34; 33.148.
7 PLE 35.151–2.
8 PLE 35.5. Cf. PLY 2.7.7.
9 In 2017 an Italian newspaper helped to launch a crowd-funding project to conclude once and for all whether this was indeed the skull of Pliny the Elder. Some of the scientists who carried out investigations on Ötzi the Iceman, the mummified corpse discovered in the Alps in 1991, have been approached to examine the isotopes in the tooth enamel. See A. Cionci, ‘Il cranio di Plinio il Vecchio perso nei meandri della burocrazia’, La Stampa: newspaper article, published online on 25 August 2017.
10 F. Russo and F. Russo, 79 d.C Rotta su Pompei (Indagione sulla Scomparse di un Ammiraglio), Edizioni Scientifiche e Artistiche, Naples, 2007, p. 21.
11 Russo and Russo, 79 d.C Rotta su Pompei, p. 23.
12 M. J. Becker and J. M. Turfa, The Etruscans and the History of Dentistry, Routledge, London and New York, 2017, p. 322 on the skull and non-matching mandible. See D. J. Waarsenburg, ‘Archeologisch Nieuws verzorgd door het Nederlands Institut te Rome: De Schedel van Plinius Maior’, Hermeneus: Tijdshrift voor Antieke Cultuur 63e, No. 1, February 1991, pp. 39–43 on the difficulties surrounding the identification of the skull and inconsistencies in Matrone’s account of the excavation. As Waarsenburg notes, groundwater hampered the extraction of objects from the site.
13 Tacitus Dialogus 29.
14 Darwin owned the 1601 edition of the Natural History – C. Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin Vol. 4: 1847–50, edited by F. Burkhardt and S. Smith, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988, pp. 457, 485. Darwin and the Plinian Society – J. Browne, Charles Darwin, Voyaging, Volume I of a Biography, Pimlico, London, 2003, pp. 72–80.
15 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, D. Appleton and Company, New York, 1876, pp. 115, 123–4.
16 PLY 4.7.7.
17 Martial Epigrams 6.38; PLY 4.2.1.
18 PLY 4.2.3.
19 PLY 6.6.3.
20 Quintilian Institutio Oratoria 1.1.1.
21 PLY 6.6.3.
22 Tacitus Dialogus 34–5.
23 Petronius Satyrica 1.1.
24 PLY 4.13.8.
25 PLY 7.18.
26 Hoffer in Anxieties of Pliny the Younger, pp. 95–6, calculated that Pliny’s gift (of 500,000 sesterces or 30,000 sesterces annual income) could have provided for the education of only about 150 children, a small proportion of Comum’s total population. Duncan-Jones, ‘The Finances of a Senator’, p. 101 suggests that it supported 175 boys and girls in total.
27 Six per cent calculation – Radice, Pliny: Letters and Panegyricus, Vol. 1, p. 522 n.2.
28 CIL V 5278.
29 PLY 1.8.9.
30 Luraschi, Storia di Como, p. 31. After Pliny died a magnificent inscription (CIL V 5262) was erected in the town to commemorate the full range of his achievements and benefactions. A sixth of it survives at Milan (there is a copy of it in the Museo Civico at Comum). Radice (Pliny: Letters and Panegyricus, Vol. 2, p. 549) suggests that the inscription ‘evidently stood over the baths at Comum’.
31 PLY 1.8.2–5; on Pliny’s library see T. K. Dix, ‘Pliny’s Library at Comum’, Libraries & Culture, Vol. 31, No. 1, Reading & Libraries I, Winter 1996, pp. 85–102.
NINE: The Death of Principle
1 From V. S. Vernon Jones’s 1912 translation.
2 PLE 10.81.
3 PLE 10.141–2.
4 PLE 9.20–3.
5 Herodotus Histories 1.24.
6 PLY 9.33.8. See PLE 9.26 for Pliny the Elder’s version of the dolphin story.
7 On Pliny’s dolphin story see C. L. Miller, ‘The Younger Pliny’s Dolphin Story (“Epistulae” IX 33): An Analysis’, Classical World, Vol. 60, No. 1, September 1966, pp. 6–8.
8 PLE 7.23; 7.16.
9 PLY 6.24.
10 PLE 26.139–47; 28.241–3; 30.113–18.
11 PLE 30.116; Hippocrates Prorrhetikon II, Kühn, 1825, I, p. 207.
12 The Arch of Titus was probably completed under Domitian; see D. E. E. Kleiner, Roman Sculpture, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1992, pp. 183–5.
13 PLY 3.16; Martial Epigrams 1.13.
14 PLY 3.16.6. Martial also observed that suicide could be used to achieve fame.
15 PLY 3.16.5.
16 PLY 8.22.3.
17 Tacitus Annals 16.22; accusations against Thrasea were brought by Cossutianus Capito, who was bitter because Thrasea had formerly assisted in having him prosecuted for extortion.
18 Plutarch later drew on Thrasea Paetus’ biography of Cato when he wrote his own Life of Cato. Thrasea Paetus’ text was based on a treatise by Munatius (Plutarch Cato the Younger 37).
19 M. Griffin (Nero: The End of a Dynasty, Routledge, London and New York, 2001, p. 173) notes that the Stoics’ moral disapproval of Nero’s behaviour was political in so far as they condemned tyranny. See especially pp. 171–7 on the relevance of Stoicism to these men’s fates.
20 Dio Cassius Roman History 65.12.2; on Helvidius’ philosophical upbringing see Tacitus Histories 4.5.
21 Tacitus says that when the young Arulenus Rusticus had hoped to try to save Thrasea Paetus from being condemned, Thrasea had told him to save himself; his career was just beginning. Suetonius (Life of Domitian 10.3) is alone in stating that Arulenus wrote both biographies.
22 PLY 9.13.2.
23 PLY 7.19.
24 PLY 7.19.7; Suetonius Life of Domitian 10.3.
25 Dio Cassius Roman History 67.16.1.
26 Tacitus Histories 1.1. On the dilemma Tacitus and Pliny faced and Pliny’s efforts to align himself with the Stoics, see C. Whitton, ‘“Let us tread our path together”: Tacitus and the Younger Pliny’, in V. E. Pagán (ed.), A Companion to Tacitus, Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, West Sussex; Malden, MA, 2012, p. 353.
27 Tacitus Agricola 45.
28 See J. A. Shelton, The Women of Pliny’s Letters, Routledge, Oxford and New York, 2013, p. 69. J. M. Carlon (Pliny’s Women: Constructing Virtue and Creating Identity in the Roman World, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2009, p. 19) notes that ‘Pliny’s silence, like that of his fellow senators, assured their condemnation . . .’, and A. R. Birley (Hadrian: The Restless Emperor, Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 1997, p. 29) observes that the senators were ‘obliged to vote for the death sentence against Helvidius, Rusticus and Senecio’.
29 Tacitus Agricola 45.
30 Tacitus Agricola 2.
31 PLY 7.19.6.
32 Suetonius Life of Domitian 10.4.
33 Suetonius Life of Domitian 3.1; Martial Epigrams 11.13.
34 Dio Cassius Roman History 67.3; Suetonius (Life of Domitian 10.1) suggested that Domitian had one of Paris’s protégés killed because he reminded him of Paris.
35 Suetonius Life of Domitian 10.3.
36 Dio Cassius Roman History 67.13.3; all the philosophers left in Rome, Dio said, were banished again – which may refer to an earlier banishment by Domitian, or perhaps rather to banishments under Nero and Vespasian.
37 See B. W. Jones, The Emperor Domitian, pp. 120–3.
38 Juvenal Satires 7.86–9.
39 Eusebius Church History 3.17.
40 ‘On a very slight suspicion’: Suetonius Life of Domitian 15.1; atheism/Judaism: Dio Cassius Roman History 67.14.
41 Dio Cassius Roman History 67.14.
42 Eusebius Church History 3.19–20, quoting Hegesippus, a second-century AD writer. Jones (The Emperor Domitian, p. 117) suggests that Domitian’s persecution of Christians was largely a myth.
43 Tertullian Apology 5.4.
44 PLY 1.5.
45 PLE 8.215.
46 PLY 1.5.3.
47 PLY 7.19.10.
48 PLY 3.11.3.
49 Dio Cassius Roman History 67.1; Pliny Panegyricus 90.5; PLY 3.11.3.
TEN: The Imitation of Nature
1 PLY 5.6.19.
2 PLY 4.1.4.
3 PLY 5.6.6–7.
4 J. Boyle, Earl of Orrery, The Letters of Pliny the Younger with Observations on Each Letter; And an Essay on Pliny’s Life, addressed to Charles Lord Boyle, James Bettenham for Paul Vaillant, London, 1752, p. 350.
5 PLY 5.6.46.
6 Cato On Agriculture 1.1. On the healthy climate see PLY 8.1.
7 PLE 8.227.
8 S. Black, J. Browning, and R. Laurence, ‘From Quarry to Road: The Supply of Basalt for Road Paving in the Tiber Valley’, in F. Coarelli and H. Patterson (eds), Mercator Placidissimus: The Tiber Valley in Antiquity, Quasar, Rome, 2008, pp. 715–17. The basalt came from volcanic regions including Mount Vulsini, on Lake Bolsena, and Lake Bracciano. The basalt repaving dates to the first/second century AD.
9 J. Uroz Sáez, ‘Fundiary property and brick production in the high Tiber valley’, in Coarelli and Patterson (eds), Mercator Placidissimus, p. 124.
10 G. F. Gamurrini, ‘Le Statue della Villa di Plinio in Tuscis’, in W. Helbig (ed.), Strena Helbigiana, B. G. Teubner, Leipzig, 1900, p. 95 and n.5; more tiles stamped with Pliny’s initials were discovered in the late twentieth century.
11 Uroz Sáez, ‘Fundiary property and brick production in the high Tiber valley’, p. 124.
12 PLY 9.6.
13 Suetonius Life of Domitian 4.
14 I. K. McEwen, ‘Housing Fame: In the Tuscan Villa of Pliny the Younger’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 27, spring 1995, p. 18. The restoration was completed under Trajan.
15 PLY 10.74.
16 On Pliny the Elder and rings see R. Hawley, ‘Lords of the Rings: Ring-Wearing, Status, and Identity in the Age of Pliny the Elder’, in Bispham and Rowe (eds), Vita Vigilia Est, pp. 103–11.
17 Tacitus Germania 31.
18 PLE 33.21.
19 PLE 33.8.
20 The room was intended servire per una guardaroba di cose rare et pretiose, et per valuta, et per arte . . . (V. Borghini, Lo Stanzino del Principe in Palazzo Vecchio: i concetti, le immagini, il desiderio, edited by M. Dezzi Bardeschi, Le Lettere, Florence, 1980. Invenzione I, p
. 31).
21 I examined Francesco de Medici’s Studiolo, including the use of Pliny the Elder’s descriptions of rings, in detail in my doctoral thesis (2013). On the recreation of Natural History in this room see also S. J. Schaefer, The Studiolo of Francesco I de’Medici in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, PhD Thesis, Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, 1976.
22 The first Italian translation of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History was by Cristoforo Landino and printed at Venice by Nicolas Jenson in 1476. There were 1025 copies printed; a rare copy, on parchment, is now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford (Arch.G b.6).
23 Christopher Columbus, as McHam notes (Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance, p. 149), owned a copy of Cristoforo Landino’s translation. This was the 1489 edition, printed at Venice and now housed in the Biblioteca Colombina in Seville; see the inventory of Columbus’s books in S. A. Bedini (ed.), The Christopher Columbus Encyclopaedia, Vol. 1, Macmillan, London, 1992, p. 421.
24 Rubin (Giorgio Vasari, p. 304) observes that Vasari uses the word effigie in the 1550 edition of his book. He may have chosen the word after reading Landino’s translation of the Natural History.
25 The British Library, Harley 2677 f.1, c.1457–8, illustrated by Andrea da Firenze. The British Library also holds a beautiful edition (Harley 2676) by Hubertus with Medici coat of arms from c.1467.
26 PLE 9.119.
27 PLE 33.8.
28 Filippo Villani, Liber de civitatis florentiae famosis civibus (1381–2), edited by G. C. Galletti, Joannes Mazzoni, Florence, 1847, p. 35.
29 PLE 35.79.
30 PLE 35.65.
31 See L. Freedman, ‘Titian and the Classical Heritage’, in P. Meilman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Titian, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, p. 193.
32 Dolce’s Aretino – L. Dolce, Dolce’s Aretino and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento, edited by M. W. Roskill, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, Buffalo, NY, London, 2000, pp. 96–7.
33 PLY 5.6.22.
34 On the painting fragments at the estate see R. E. Tébar, ‘Gli Intonaci’, in Braconi and Uroz Sáez (eds), La Villa Di Plinio il Giovane a San Giustino, p. 64.
35 J. C. M. Villora, ‘Le Terrecotte Architettoniche’, in Braconi and Sáez, La Villa Di Plinio il Giovane a San Giustino, pp. 52–3.