![]() Our study of ancient agriculture, medicine, metallurgy, and the canon of great artists in antiquity, would all be impoverished if the work had perished (see art, ancient attitudes to). The value of what he preserves of the information available to him far outweighs the fact that when he can be checked against the original, he often garbles his information through haste or insufficient thought. ![]() ![]() Characteristically he claims that there are 20,000 important facts derived from 2,000 books in his work, but this is a severe underestimate. Pliny was impressed by scale, number, comprehensiveness, and detail. The years of his procuratorships produced a 31‐book history covering the later Julio‐Claudian period and, dedicated to Titus, the Natural History. German Wars in 20 books recounted Roman campaigns against the Germans, and was used by Tacitus. His cavalry command produced a monograph on the use of the throwing‐spear by cavalrymen, piety towards his patron demanded a biography in two books. Throughout this career Pliny was a most prolific author. For his career and death two letters of his nephew are the primary source. When Vesuvius erupted in 79, duty and curiosity combined, fatally he led a detachment to the disaster‐area, landed at Stabiae, and died from inhaling fumes. He became a member of the council of Vespasian and Titus, and was given the command of the Misēnum fleet (see Navies). Active in legal practice in the reign of Nero, he was then promoted by the favour of the Flavians through a series of high procuratorships (including that of Hispania Tarraconensis), in which he won a reputation for integrity. Gaius Plīnius Secundus, prominent Roman equestrian, from Cōmum in Gallia Cisalpina (see gaul (cisalpine) ), and uncle of Pliny the Younger, best known as the author of the 37‐book Natural History, an encyclopaedia of all contemporary knowledge-animal, vegetable, and mineral-but with much that is human included too: ‘Nature, which is to say Life, is my subject’.Ĭharacteristic of his age and background in his range of interests and diverse career, Pliny obtained a cavalry command through the patronage of Pomponius Secundus (consul 41), and served in Germany, alongside the future emperor Titus. ![]()
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