X-Nico

unusual facts about Pliny


Giovanni Mansionario

By his careful reading of the Roman historian Suetonius, Giovanni detected that there were two authors named Pliny, not one, as had been believed previously.


1601 in literature

Philemon Holland – The Historie of the World, a translation of Pliny's Natural History

Acephali

Their mouths and eyes being in their breasts, these creatures are generally identified with the work Pliny's Blemmyae.

Antiochia in Sittacene

Pliny in his Natural History, Book 6, § 206, describes it as an important town in the western part of the ancient region of Sittacene, between the Tigris and Tornadotus rivers.

Apelles

Apelles allowed the superiority of some of his contemporaries in particular matters: according to Pliny he admired the dispositio of Melanthius, i.e. the way in which he spaced his figures, and the mensurae of Asclepiodorus, who must have been a great master of symmetry and proportion.

Aristophon

Pliny, who places him among the painters of the second rank, mentions two works by him: one showing Ancaeus wounded by the boar and mourned over by his mother Astypalaea, and another containing figures of Priam, Helen, Ulysses, Deiphobus, Dolon, and Credulitas.

Armazi

The name first appears in the early medieval Georgian annals though it is clearly much older and reflected in the Classical name Armastica or Harmozica of Strabo, Pliny, Ptolemy and Dio Cassius.

Baudolino

These creatures and many others were all described and named by Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historiæ from 77 AD: A monopod and a satyr (top); a blemmyae and a panotti (above).

Caso peruto

It produced from January to July in the town of Sessa Aurunca (Caserta) and is dated to the time of Pliny (1st century AD).

Ceto

Pliny mentions worship of "storied Keto" at Joppa (now Jaffa), in a single reference, immediately after his mention of Andromeda, whom Perseus rescued from a sea-monster.

Ceva

In the first century CE Columella referred to a particular breed of cattle raised here, and Pliny the Elder praised its sheep’s milk cheese in his Natural History.

Church music

Later, there is a reference in Pliny who writes to the emperor Trajan (61–113) asking for advice about how to prosecute the Christians in Bithynia, and describing their practice of gathering before sunrise and repeating antiphonally 'a hymn to Christ, as to God'.

Corioli

The site is apparently to be sought in the North-Western portion of the district between the sea, the river Astura and the Alban Hills; but it cannot be more accurately fixed (the identification with Monte Giove, South of the Valle Aricciana, rests on no sufficient evidence), and even in the time of Pliny it ranked among the lost cities of Latium.

Elne

In the first century CE, however, it was no more than "a modest vestige of a hitherto great city" (Pliny).

Essenes

Pliny, also a geographer and explorer, located them in the desert near the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the year 1947 by Muhammed edh-Dhib and Ahmed Mohammed, two Bedouin shepherds of the Ta'amireh tribe.

Frentani

Pliny's account is, however, more near the truth than that of Strabo and Ptolemy; for it is certain that Ortona and Anxanum (modern Lanciano), both of which are situated considerably to the north of the Sagrus, were Frentanian cities.

Geoponica

The ultimate sources of the Geoponica include Pliny, various lost Hellenistic and Roman-period Greek agriculture and veterinary authors, the Carthaginian agronomist Mago, and even works passing under the name of the Persian prophet Zoroaster.

Harvey Edward Fisk

In addition to his brother Pliny, Harvey E. Fisk's other brothers were Charles J. Fisk, banker and former Mayor of Plainfield, New Jersey; Wilbur C. Fisk, former president of the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad Company; and Alexander G. Fisk, also a banker.

History of sundials

The Romans adopted the Greek sundials, and the first record of a sun-dial in Rome is 293 BC according to Pliny.

HMS G11

The body of Telegraphist George Philip Back was recovered and buried in the churchyard of St Peter & St Paul, Longhoughton; the body of Stoker Pliny Foster was never found.

Ietas

The Ietini are only noticed in passing by Cicero among the towns whose lands had been utterly ruined by the exactions of Verres; and the Ietenses are enumerated by Pliny among the populi stipendiarii of the interior of Sicily.

Isaac Casaubon

This was followed by the text of Polyaenus, an editio princeps, 1589; a text of Aristotle, 1590; and a few notes contributed to Estienne's editions of Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Pliny's Epistolae.

Matthaeus Platearius

Ernst Meyer considered it equal to the herbals of Pliny and Dioscorides, while George Sarton thought it an improvement on "De Materia Medica".

Men, Microscopes, and Living Things

Shippen traces the history of biological thought beginning with Aristotle and followed by Pliny, Linnaeus, Cuvier, Lamarck, Darwin, and several others.

Mosylon

According to classical writers such as Pliny, the Mosylonians imported flint glass and glass vessels from Ancient Egypt, unripe grapes from Diospolis, unmilled cloths for the Berberi markets, including tunics and cloths manufactured at Arsinoe, as well as wine and tin.

Mount Chimaera

Strabo and Pliny are the only surviving ancient sources who would be expected to discuss a Lycian toponym, but the placename is also attested by Isidore of Seville and Servius, the commentator on the Aeneid.

Nair

Christopher Fuller, an anthropologist, has said that it is likely that the first reference to the Nair community was made by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, dating from 77 AD.

Naturalis historia

For Naturalis historia, the natural history by Pliny the Elder see Natural History (Pliny).

Panegyrici Latini

Pliny presents Trajan as the ideal ruler, or optimus princeps, to the reader, and contrasts him with his predecessor Domitian.

Phellus

Spratt (Lycia, vol. i. p. 66) places the Pyrrha of Pliny (N.H. v. 27) at Saaret, and this position agrees better with Pliny's words: Antiphellos quae quondam Habessus; atque in recessu Phellus; deinde Pyrrha itemque Xanthus.... It is more consistent with this passage to look for Phellus north of Antiphellus, than in any other direction; and the ruins at Tchookoorbye, north of Antiphellus, on the spur of a mountain called Fellerdagh, seem to be those of Phellus.

Physical law

The formula "law of nature" first appears as "a live metaphor" favored by Latin poets Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid, Manilius, in time gaining a firm theoretical presence in the prose treatises of Seneca and Pliny.

Pliny Fisk III

Pliny Fisk currently co-directs CMPBS with his wife, Gail Vittori.

Red mullet

Pliny cites a case in which a large sum was paid for a single fish, and an extraordinary expenditure of time was lavished upon these slow-learning pets.

Ritual of oak and mistletoe

Pliny makes allusions to the moon on its sixth day, a waxing crescent moon, as an instrument of healing: here again there is corroborative evidence in that Celtic goddesses associated with healing and regeneration are sometimes depicted wearing lunar amulets; and the great temple of the healer-goddess Sulis Minerva at Bath, Somerset bears a carving of the Roman moon-goddess Luna.

Robiola

The cheese has a long history that is sometimes traced back to the Celto-Ligurian farmers of the Alta Langa: the virtues of a cheese from Ceba (today Ceva) were extolled by the first-century Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, but any identification of that cheese with the Robiola of today must be speculative.

Sosus of Pergamon

It was discovered in 1737 during excavations at Hadrian's Villa led by Cardinal Giuseppe Alessandro Furietti, who thought it was the mosaic that Pliny had described, although other scholars think it is a copy of the original that was made for Hadrian.

Toll road

Aristotle and Pliny refer to tolls in Arabia and other parts of Asia.

Venus Anadyomene

Through the desire of Renaissance artists reading Pliny to emulate Apelles, and, if possible, to outdo him, Venus Anadyomene was taken up again in the 15th century: besides Botticelli's famous Birth of Venus (Uffizi Gallery, Florence), another early Venus Anadyomene is the bas-relief by Antonio Lombardo from Wilton House (Victoria and Albert Museum, London).

Viscum album

Pliny recorded an ancient druidic belief that mistletoe collected from oaks had special qualities; the same theme is reprised in the popular Asterix comic books.

Workman-Temple family

Pliny Fisk Temple-F.P.T was named for a Congregationalist missionary in Palestine, was born to Jonathan Temple and Lucinda Parker in Reading, Massachusetts, near Boston.


see also