by Daisy Dunn
15 PLY 7.1.3.
16 PLE 29.11.
17 PLE 29.28.
18 PLE 29.25; 33.116.
19 PLE 29.27.
20 PLE 29.26.
21 PLE 26.12.
22 PLE 20.42–3; 26.14.
23 A handful of bricks survive from the complex with the letters CAESAR. See Braconi and Uroz Sáez, ‘La Villa Di Plinio il Giovane a San Giustino’, in Coarelli and Patterson (eds), Mercator Placidissimus, p. 114. A piece of mosaic floor found at Pliny’s Tuscan villa consisted of black and white tiles arranged in triangular patterns with a chequered border; it has been dated to the end of the first century AD/first half of the second century AD, which coincides precisely with Pliny’s dates; see A. G. Catalá, ‘Mosaici’, in Braconi and Uroz Sáez (eds), La Villa Di Plinio il Giovane a San Giustino, pp. 121–5.
24 PLY 7.1.6.
25 PLY 10.5; 10.6; 6.3.
26 PLY 7.26.1.
27 PLY 2.8.2.
28 1 Peter 1:7.
29 PLY 7.26.4.
30 PLE 7.41.
31 A male foetus, on the other hand, was said to move on the fortieth day after conception.
32 See, for example, PLE 28.70, and R. Flemming, ‘Women, Writing and Medicine in the Classical World’, Classical Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 1, May 2007, particularly pp. 273–4, on Pliny the Elder’s lack of distinction between the two professions. On matters of gynaecological health in the Natural History see A. Richlin, ‘Pliny’s Brassiere: Roman Medicine and the Female Body’, in L. K. McClure (ed.), Sexuality and Gender in the Classical World, Blackwell, Oxford, 2002, pp. 225–52.
33 PLE 7.64.
34 PLY 8.11.3.
35 Tacitus Annals 16.8.
36 PLY 8.10.
37 It is impossible to know whether the illness that led Calpurnia to travel to Campania was the result of her miscarriage, or another illness entirely, but I believe it is likely that she went there to recover after her loss.
38 Statius Silvae 4.4.81–2. To the historian Dio Cassius (Roman History 66.21), writing in the third century AD, the mountain now resembled an amphitheatre, its centre burned out but its slopes once again covered in vineyards. Even then the crater continued to belch forth smoke, fire, and ash.
39 Camardo, ‘Herculaneum from the AD 79 eruption to the medieval period’, p. 305.
40 PLY 6.30.
41 PLY 6.28.
42 PLY 6.4.1–2.
43 PLY 6.4.4.
44 PLY 6.4.5; 6.7.
45 R. Steele and J. Addison, The Tatler, Vol. 3, John Sharpe, London, 1804, pp. 180–6. The original article was published in 1709–10 and is cited by C. Whitton and R. Gibson, ‘Readers and Readings of Pliny’s Epistles’, in Gibson and Whitton (eds), The Epistles of Pliny, p. 9.
46 PLY 7.5.2.
47 PLE 26.100.
48 Several of these remedies for gout were included in the Medicina Plinii that was compiled from the medical passages of the Natural History in the fourth century AD.
49 PLY 1.12.
50 PLY 1.12.8; see Hoffer, Anxieties of Pliny the Younger, pp. 141–8.
51 PLY 1.12.12.
THIRTEEN: After the Solstice
1 Cicada: PLE 11.107; Vines: PLE 16.104.
2 PLE 10.80.
3 PLE 21.56; 18.265.
4 PLE 18.295.
5 PLE 18.267.
6 PLE 8.133.
7 PLE 18.72.
8 PLE 18.295.
9 PLE 18.97; 18.296–8.
10 Outbuildings and square: Braconi and Uroz Sáez, ‘La Villa Di Plinio il Giovane a San Giustino’, p. 115, and Braconi, ‘La Villa di Plinio a San Giustino’, pp. 35–6.
11 PLY 4.6.2.
12 PLY 7.30.3; 9.37.2.
13 PLE 18.36.
14 PLE 18.11.
15 Hesiod Works and Days 303–9.
16 PLY 10.8.5.
17 PLY 2.4.3.
18 PLY 3.19.8.
19 PLY 5.6.10; PLE 18.181. Sherwin-White (Letters of Pliny, p. 322) used the similarities of their descriptions of the soil as further evidence that Pliny inherited the Tuscan estate from his uncle.
20 Horace Satires 2.6.4–5.
21 PLE 18.9.
22 Hesiod Works and Days 43–4.
23 PLY 3.19.
24 Carlon, Pliny’s Women, p. 120, suggests that Pliny had tutelary control over Pompeia Celerina’s funds.
25 Carlon, Pliny’s Women, p. 122, notes that Letter 1.4, in which Pliny describes visiting Pompeia Celerina’s properties, almost definitely post-dates the death of his first wife. Even under Trajan, Pliny was still assisting Pompeia by requesting that her relative, Caelius Clemens, be transferred to Bithynia; when Trajan granted the favour, Pliny thanked him for being so generous to his ‘whole household’ (PLY 10.51.2).
26 PLY 5.6.4.
27 PLE 15.3.
28 PLE 15.8.
29 See J. M. Vidal, ‘Mercantile trade in the Upper Tiber Valley: the villa of Pliny the Younger “in Tuscis”’, in Coarelli and Patterson (eds), Mercator Placidissimus, pp. 231–3.
30 Vidal (‘Mercantile trade in the Upper Tiber Valley’, p. 232) describes the abundance of amphorae for preserved fish products imported from Cadiz and surrounding areas and found at Pliny’s estate.
31 PLY 5.6.29.
32 PLE 14.13.
33 PLE 14.10.
34 Columella On Agriculture 3.3.8.
35 Propertius Elegies 4.2.
36 PLY 9.20.
37 Braconi and Uroz Sáez, ‘La Villa Di Plinio il Giovane a San Giustino’, p. 115: Pliny either extended the existing equipment or created it new.
38 Seneca Epistles 83.
39 PLE 14.137.
40 PLE 14.141.
41 PLE 14.8.
42 Suetonius Life of Domitian 7.2.
43 PLE 14.134.
44 PLE 14.134.
45 Vidal, ‘Mercantile trade in the Upper Tiber Valley’, p. 228.
46 Vidal, ‘Mercantile trade in the Upper Tiber Valley’, pp. 227–35; Marzano, Roman Villas in Central Italy, p. 111 n.45, on so-called Spello amphorae (Altotiberina 1 and 2 amphorae).
47 PLY 2.6.
48 PLE 14.91.
49 PLY 2.6.4–5.
50 Juvenal Satires 7.119–21, also cited by Vidal, ‘Mercantile trade in the Upper Tiber Valley’, p. 228.
51 P. Braconi, ‘Territorio e Paesaggio Dell’Alta Valle Del Tevere in Età Romana’, in Coarelli and Patterson (eds), Mercator Placidissimus, p.100.
52 Marzano, Roman Villas in Central Italy, p. 111 n.45.
53 Vidal, ‘Mercantile trade in the Upper Tiber Valley’, pp. 227–8.
FOURTEEN: Life in Concrete
1 PLE 3.54.
2 PLY 5.6.12.
3 PLY 8.17.2–5.
4 PLY 9.16; 8.15.
5 PLY 4.6; 10.8.5.
6 Epitome De Caesaribus 12.10–12. This account was written hundreds of years after the event.
7 Tacitus Agricola 3.
8 PLY 10.1.
9 Pliny Panegyricus 4.
10 Epitome De Caesaribus 1.6; P. Garnsey, Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World: Responses to Risk and Crisis, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, p. 231.
11 Pliny Panegyricus 30.2.
12 Pliny Panegyricus 29.3–4.
13 PLY 4.8.5.
14 PLE 7.117.
15 AE 1972. The statue was dedicated by one Marcus Cassius Comicus. The base still survives and is on display in the Museo Civico at Como.
16 PLY 3.18.1.
17 Pliny Panegyricus 59.2.
18 Tacitus Annals 1.1; Pliny Panegyricus 2.2.
19 Pliny Panegyricus 35.1.
20 PLY 3.18.10.
21 A. N. Sherwin-White, ‘Pliny, the Man and His Letters’, Greece & Rome, Vol. 16, No. 1, April 1969, p. 77 described the speech as ‘terrible’.
22 Pliny Panegyricus 52.1.
23 Pliny Panegyricus 49.6. Suetonius (Life of Domitian 21), by contrast, remembered Domitian’s banquets as generous and not prolonged. On the juxtapositions and a close li
terary analysis of the speech, see R. Rees, ‘To Be and Not to Be: Pliny’s Paradoxical Trajan’, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Vol. 45, 2001, pp. 149–68.
24 Pliny Panegyricus 46.4.
25 See D. H. Sick, ‘Ummidia Quadratilla: Cagey Businesswoman or Lazy Pantomime Watcher?’, Classical Antiquity, Vol. 18, No. 2, October 1999, p. 334 on Pliny’s struggle in this passage on pantomimes.
26 Pliny Panegyricus 17.
27 Pliny Panegyricus 13.
28 Dio Cassius Roman History 68.13–14.
29 PLY 8.4.2.
30 Pliny Panegyricus 12.4.
31 On this obscure post, which might have involved directing some river traffic as well as managing Rome’s sewers, see B. Campbell, Rivers and the Power of Ancient Rome, University of North Carolina Press, North Carolina, 2012, pp. 318–19.
32 PLY 6.31.13.
33 PLY 6.31.17.
34 PLE 35.166.
35 M. D. Jackson, S. R. Mulcahy, H. Chen, Y. Li, Q. Li, P. Cappelletti and H. Wenk, ‘Phillipsite and Al-tobermorite mineral cements produced through low-temperature water-rock reactions in Roman marine concrete’, American Mineralogist, Vol. 102, (7), 2017, pp. 1435–50.
36 Pliny Panegyricus 75.2.
37 PLY 3.7.5.
38 PLY 3.7.13 on Herodotus Histories 7.45.
39 PLY 3.7.15. See also PLY 1.3.4.
40 PLY 5.5.4.
41 PLE Preface 12–13.
42 PLY 3.18.
43 Pliny’s Panegyricus was preserved separately from his letters, in a manuscript known as the XII Panegyrici Latini (Pan Latin X(2)). It considerably predates the other eleven speeches in that collection. The next earliest speech after Pliny’s Panegyricus dates to almost two hundred years later.
FIFTEEN: Depraved Belief
1 On Pliny’s role, and on Book 10 of his letters as a collection, see G. Woolf, ‘Pliny’s Province’, pp. 93–108, in T. Bekker-Nielsen (ed.), Rome and the Black Sea Region, Aarhus University Press, Aarhus, 2006.
2 PLY 10.15.
3 PLE 36.2.
4 PLY 10.17A.
5 Tacitus Annals 3.33–4 cited in Shelton, The Women of Pliny’s Letters, p. 24.
6 Hoffer, Anxieties of Pliny the Younger, p. 12, observes that ‘the system of political patronage seems to have acted as a disincentive to child-rearing’.
7 See Power, ‘Pliny, Letters 5.10 and the Literary Career of Suetonius’, p. 158.
8 PLY 10.2; 2.13.8.
9 PLY 10.94; 10.95.
10 PLY 10.78.
11 B. Levick (‘Pliny in Bithynia – and What Followed’, Greece & Rome, Vol. 26, No. 2, October 1979, pp. 125–30) argues that the focus placed on work here might have been in recognition of Bithynia’s growing importance to the empire.
12 See, for example, PLY 4.9; 5.20; 6.13; 7.6; 7.10.
13 PLE 11.242.
14 PLY 10.17B.
15 PLY 10.18.2.
16 On the tension that could arise from this arrangement see F. Millar, ‘Trajan: Government by Correspondence’, in Government, Society, and Culture in the Roman Empire, Vol. 2, edited by H. M. Cotton, and G. M. Rogers, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London, 2004, p. 25.
17 PLY 2.12.6.
18 Millar, ‘Trajan: Government by Correspondence’, pp. 35–40.
19 PLY 10.23.
20 PLY 10.40.3.
21 PLY 10.40.3; see also PLY 10.18, in which Trajan rejects Pliny’s request for land surveyors; on suspected instances of Trajan’s voice versus his secretary’s in the letters, and the history of scholarship thereof, see A. N. Sherwin-White, ‘Trajan’s Replies to Pliny: Authorship and Necessity’, Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 52, Pts 1 and 2, 1962, pp. 114–19.
22 PLY 10.61; 10.41–2.
23 PLY 10.33.
24 PLY 10.34.
25 See Millar, ‘Trajan: Government by Correspondence’, p. 39 on Pliny encountering Christians in the remote part of the province.
26 Tacitus Annals 15.44; Suetonius Life of Claudius 25.4 with Orosius History Against the Pagans 7.6.15–16. The crucifixion of Christ had helped to quell the ‘deadly belief’ for a time, but by the mid first century ‘It would have been difficult to shut them out of the city without causing riots among the crowd’ (Dio Cassius Roman History 60.6.6).
27 On cognitio see Sherwin-White, Letters of Pliny, p. 695.
28 PLY 10.96.1.
29 Tacitus Annals 15.44.
30 PLY 10.96.3.
31 See G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, Christian Persecution, Martyrdom, and Orthodoxy, edited by M. Whitby and J. Streeter, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2006, especially pp. 110–11.
32 PLY 10.96.7.
33 See V. A. Alikin, The Earliest History of the Christian Gathering, Brill, Boston and Leiden, 2010, p. 36.
34 Dio Cassius Roman History 60.6.6.
35 Minucius Felix Octavius 8.4, also cited by S. Benko, Pagan Rome and the Early Christians, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indianapolis, 1984, p. 10.
36 Tertullian de Resurrectione Carnis 47, also cited by J. Ker, ‘Nocturnal Writers in Imperial Rome: The Culture of Lucubratio’, Classical Philology, Vol. 99, No. 3, July 2004, p. 240, who discusses the use of the word lucubratio for nocturnal Christian prayer versus Roman night-writing.
37 Martyrdom of Polycarp 9.3. Polycarp’s refusal to blaspheme Christ is also mentioned in light of Pliny’s procedure by both Benko, Pagan Rome and the Early Christians, p. 10 and L. W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Michigan, Cambridge, 2003, p. 609.
38 See Goldsworthy, Pax Romana, on the so-called pax Romana.
39 PLY 10.96.8.
40 Justinian Digest 48.18. See also W. W. Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1970, p. 87 on the torture of slaves while extracting evidence.
41 Eusebius Church History 3.18.
42 Tacitus Annals 15.44.
43 See N. E. Pasachoff and R. J. Littman, A Concise History of the Jewish People, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., Lanham, Boulder, New York, Toronto, Oxford, 2005, pp. 86–9 on the impact of the loss of the shrine on Judaism. Hadrian later built a temple to Jupiter on the site.
44 PLY 10.96.9–10.
45 PLY 10.97.
46 Benko, Pagan Rome and the Early Christians, p. 10.
47 Tertullian Apology 1.4–5.
48 Tertullian Apology 2.8.
49 Eusebius Church History 3.33.2. See Sherwin-White, Letters of Pliny, p. 692.
50 PLY 10.120.
51 PLY 10.121.
52 See Millar, ‘Trajan: Government by Correspondence’, pp. 25–41 on the precedent set by Trajan’s absence from Rome, his ‘government by correspondence’ with Pliny, and the challenges of sending messages over such a wide empire.
EPILOGUE: Resurrection
1 C. F. Ciceri, Selva di Notizie Autentiche Risguardanti La Fabbrica della Cattedrale di Como con altre memorie patrie, Eredi Caprani, Como, 1811, pp. 110–14.
2 On the representation of Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger as Christian saints on Como Cathedral see McHam, ‘Renaissance Monuments to Favourite Sons’, pp. 480–1.
3 It is uncertain whether the sculptures of the two Plinys, which date to around 1480, were completed by Giovanni Rodari or his two sons. The sons seem to have completed the sculpture niches. Their names are still visible on the plaque beneath the sculpture of Pliny the Elder.
4 CIL V 5263.
5 When Benedetto died, his tomb was placed inside the cathedral. The Historiae Patriae, speeches, and poems, the plaque proclaims, ‘do not allow Benedetto Giovio to die’.
6 PLE 2.49.
7 See F. Wallis, Bede: The Reckoning of Time, translated, with introduction, notes and commentary, Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 1999, pp. 78–9.
8 E. Barbaro, Castigationes Plinianae, Hermolaus Barbarus, Venice, 1493, p. 1. On Leoniceno and Barbaro and the Natural History, see B. W. Ogilvie, The Science of Describ
ing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2008, pp. 121–33 and G. Williams, Pietro Bembo on Etna: The Ascent of a Venetian Humanist, Oxford University Press, New York, 2017, pp. 139–44.
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