by Daisy Dunn
9 PLE 8.1.
10 PLE 8.44.
11 PLE 8.5–7.
12 Lanciani, Wanderings in the Roman Campagna, pp. 306, 311. The estates of Castelfusano, Castelporziano, and Capocotta were based here.
13 My description is based on both PLY 2.17 and the findings of the Laurentine Shore Project at Royal Holloway, University of London, on the archaeology of the Vicus, as outlined in their online resource and illustrations at https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/laurentineshore
14 PLY 4.6.2.
15 PLY 1.9.6.
16 Virgil Aeneid 7.59–63. On the ancient origins of Laurentum and the Aeneid see N. Purcell, ‘Discovering a Roman Resort-Coast: The Litus Laurentinum and the Archaeology of Otium’ via https://intranet.royalholloway.ac.uk/classics/research/laurentine-shore-project/documents/pdf/litus-laurentinum-english-version.pdf, 1998, especially p. 10.
17 T. C. A. de Haas, Fields, Farms and Colonists, Vol. 1, Barkhuis and Groningen University Library, Groningen, 2011, p. 206.
18 PLY 2.17.7.
19 At the top of one tower was a dining room with a wide view over the water. There have been many attempts to find Pliny’s house at Laurentum; some have ‘found’ it at Grotte di Piastra (S. P. Ricotti, ‘La Villa Laurentina di Plinio il Giovane: un ennesima ricostruzione’, Lunario Romano, 1983, pp. 229–51); others in the area of the so-called Villa di Plinio, ‘La Palombara’ – see Lanciani, Wanderings in the Roman Campagna, on Sachetti (1713); others at Tor Paterno in Castelporziano. Cardinal Barberini drew the ruins he found at Tor Paterno – see I. Campbell, Ancient Roman Topography and Architecture, Vol. 2 of The Paper Museum of Cassiano Del Pozzo (20 Parts in 3 Series, Royal Collection Trust, 1996–), the Royal Collection and Warburg Institute in association with Harvey Miller Publishers, London, 2004, p. 669.
20 Varro said that the solstice, solstitium, was so-named because it was the time the sun, sol, came to a halt, sistere (de Lingua 6.8).
21 PLY 8.7.1.
22 PLY 7.20.3.
23 Hoffer, Anxieties of Pliny the Younger, p. 29 n.1. Pliny was legally permitted to free a fifth of his slaves up to total of one hundred. See also Duncan-Jones, ‘The Finances of a Senator’, p. 97 n.56 with earlier bibliography on this point.
24 PLY 1.21.2; 8.16.
25 PLY 2.17.24.
26 PLY 7.21.1–2.
27 PLY 7.21; P. R. du Prey, The Villas of Pliny: From Antiquity to Posterity, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1994, p. 283.
28 Lanciani, Wanderings in the Roman Campagna, p. 318 notes the discovery of clay weights.
29 PLE 30.19.
30 PLE 11.145, and Cicero Ars Oratoria 138; PLE 11.139.
31 For a discussion of the phrase in Latin poetry see J. Glenn, ‘The Blinded Cyclops: Lumen Ademptum (Aen. 3.658)’, Classical Philology, Vol. 69, No. 1, January 1974, pp. 37–8.
32 On the lamps discovered at the site, many of which date to the first century AD, see G. G. Fernández, ‘Le Lucerne’, pp. 149–53, in P. Braconi, and J. Uroz Sáez (eds), La Villa Di Plinio il Giovane a San Giustino, Quattroemme, Perugia, 1999.
33 The seven stars of the Pleiades were imagined to be the daughters of Atlas. Their names were Halcyone, Merope, Celaeno, Electra, Sterope, Taygete, and Maia. But as the writer Aratus said, while ‘certainly no star has perished from the sky unobserved’, only six were usually visible to the human eye (Aratus Phaenomena 259).
34 PLE 2.41.
35 PLE 7.190.
36 PLE 7.188.
37 PLE 7.131.
38 PLE 2.14.
39 Lucretius De Rerum Natura 4, especially 4.30–43; 55–64; 724–67. Pliny quotes from the poem in letter 4.18.
40 PLE 2.28; 2.98.
41 PLE 2.108–9; Cicero On Divination 2.14. Garlands of pennyroyal could be hung in bedrooms to relieve headaches, according to Varro, PLE 20.152.
42 PLY 7.27.1. Pliny the Elder had also heard stories of ghosts, PLE 7.179.
43 PLY 7.27.5.
44 D. Felton also compares Pliny’s ghost story to Dickens’s description of Marley’s ghost. See Haunted Greece and Rome: Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1998, pp. 91–2.
45 A. Lang, The Works of Charles Dickens in Thirty-four Volumes (Gadshill Edition), with Introductions, General Essay, And Notes Vol. XVIII: Christmas Books, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1898, pp. vi–vii. Lang’s words are cited by Felton, Haunted Greece and Rome, p. 91.
46 W. C. Dendy, The Philosophy of Mystery, Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, & Longmans, London, 1841, listed in J. H. Stonehouse (ed.), Catalogue of the Library of Charles Dickens from Gadshill, Piccadilly Fountain Press, London, 1935, p. 27.
FIVE: The Gift of Poison
1 PLY 2.11.
2 Justinian Digest 48.11 on the Julian law on Extortion (Macer Public Prosecution Book I).
3 PLY 4.16.2.
4 Brevitas could mean as few as two water clocks – see Sherwin-White, Letters of Pliny, p. 132 and PLY 6.2.4–5. Tacitus Dialogus 38 (cited in Letters of Pliny, p. 134) refers to a limit placed on the length of speeches. Even fellow lawyers were now complaining about long speeches: ‘Who has the patience for those hefty volumes?’ – Tacitus Dialogus 20.
5 Juvenal Satires 1.49–50.
6 PLY 2.12.
7 PLY 2.11.23.
8 PLE 13.9.
9 PLE 33.148 with Livy Ab urbe condita 37.59.
10 PLE 14.2.
11 Pliny the Elder was discussing Eastern medicines and their popularity over the natural kitchen garden remedies he preferred (PLE 24.5).
12 Tacitus Annals 1.11.
13 See especially A. Goldsworthy, Pax Romana, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2016, pp. 174–84.
14 Suetonius Life of Domitian 2.
15 Dio Cassius Roman History 66.26.2–3; Philostratus Life of Apollonius of Tyana 6.32.2. There was also a Jewish legend that Titus died after a gnat entered his brain. Contrary to Dio’s account, Suetonius (Life of Domitian 2.3) says that it was when Vespasian died that Domitian hesitated over whether or not to bestow a double bounty upon the army.
16 PLE 29.10.
17 PLE 32.58–9.
18 Suetonius Life of Titus 11.
19 Suetonius Life of Domitian 3; Pliny Panegyricus 48.3–5. Hutchinson compares the Ciceronian language of the beast with the image of blood-licking from Polybius 7.13.6 on the tyrant Philip V – G. O. Hutchinson, ‘Politics and the Sublime in the Panegyricus’, p. 129 in P. Roche (ed.), Pliny’s Praise: The Panegyricus in the Roman World, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2011.
20 Pliny Panegyricus 48.3–5; 90.5.
21 Pliny Panegyricus 49.
22 Suetonius Life of Domitian 1.1. The house on the Quirinal Hill was later converted into the temple of Gens Flavia, which was struck by lightning in AD 96, the year of Domitian’s death. Domitian’s remains and those of his niece Julia were later deposited there; see Suetonius Life of Domitian 17.3.
23 Pliny Panegyricus 48.3–5.
24 Martial Epigrams 4.14; On Silius Italicus’ praise of Domitian’s poetry, see for example Punica 3.621.
25 Silius Italicus Punica 3.607; Suetonius Life of Domitian 6.1; Tacitus Agricola 39.
26 Tacitus Germania 30.
27 See Syme, ‘Pliny’s Less Successful Friends’, pp. 477–95; Tacitus Annals 12.27–8.
28 P. Southern, Domitian: Tragic Tyrant, Routledge, London and New York, 2013, pp. 80–2. As Southern notes here: ‘The reasons for the war and the course it took are not attested in any ancient source.’
29 Tacitus Agricola 39.
30 See Dio Cassius Roman History 67.6–7.
31 PLY 4.11; Suetonius Life of Domitian 8.4–5.
32 Cf. Dio Cassius Roman History 67.3; Plutarch Numa 10.4–7.
33 PLY 4.11.6.
34 Plutarch Numa 10.5.
35 PLE 10.171.
36 Hesiod Works and Days 586–8; 524–5. E. Campanile, ‘Ἀνόστεος ὅν πόδα τένδει’, in A. Etter, (ed.), O-o-pe-ro-si,
Festschrift für Ernst Risch zum 75 Geburtstag, de Gruyter, Berlin and New York, 1986, pp. 355–62.
37 Suetonius Life of Domitian 22; Juvenal Satires 2.32–33; PLY 4.11.
38 PLY 4.11.11.
39 Suetonius Life of Domitian 8 9. Cf. Dio Cassius Roman History 67.1.
40 PLY 4.11.11. Domitian was surprisingly lenient after the senator confessed his guilt. Suetonius (Life of Domitian 8.4) says that Cornelia’s ‘lovers’ were clubbed to death, while Licinianus escaped owing to uncertainty over his involvement even after witnesses were tortured.
41 PLY 4.11.5.
42 PLY 4.11.12. The quote comes from Homer Iliad 18.20, and was used by Pliny’s teacher, the orator Quintilian (Institutio Oratoria 10.1.49), as a good example of brevity, as noted by B. Radice, trans., Pliny the Younger, Letters and Panegyricus, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA and London, 1969, Vol. 1, p. 272.
43 Dio Cassius Roman History 67.13 says that Herennius Senecio stood for no office after that of quaestor.
44 Suetonius Life of Domitian 10.3.
45 On Pliny the Elder as Stoic see M. Beagon, Roman Nature: The Thought of Pliny the Elder, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992, pp. 94–5, who believes that his ‘view of life springs from a mainly Stoic outlook’. On some of the Stoic elements of his beliefs see also M. Griffin, ‘The Elder Pliny on Philosophers’, in E. Bispham and G. Rowe (eds), with E. Matthews, Vita Vigilia Est: Essays in Honour of Barbara Levick, Institute of Classical Studies, London, 2007, pp. 91–100.
46 T. Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998, pp. 33; 50–89. On the invention and development of encyclopaedias, see R. Fowler, ‘Encyclopaedias: Definitions and Theoretical Problems’, pp. 3–30 (and pp. 27–9 on first attested use of the word), in P. Binkley (ed.), Pre-modern Encyclopaedic Texts, Brill, Leiden, New York and Cologne, 1997.
47 PLE 2.4.
48 PLY 3.5.6.
49 Diogenes Laertius Lives of the Eminent Philosophers 7.1.3. On Zeno and Stoicism see especially H. A. K. Hunt, A Physical Interpretation of the Universe: The Doctrines of Zeno the Stoic, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1976.
50 PLY 7.31.2.
51 C. E. Lutz, Musonius Rufus: ‘The Roman Socrates’, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1947; Musonius Rufus was a tutor of Epictetus. On Musonius’ teachings see J. T. Dillon, Musonius Rufus and Education in the Good Life, Dallas; University Press of America, Lanham, Boulder, New York and Oxford, 2004.
52 Tacitus Histories 3.81.
53 Dio Chrysostom Orations 31.122.
54 PLY 1.10.5.
55 Philostratus Life of Apollonius of Tyana 1.13.3.
56 Philostratus Life of Apollonius of Tyana 8.7.34.
57 PLY 1.10.6; Euphrates cited in Epictetus Discourses 4.8.
58 See Dio Cassius Roman History 65.13; contrast Musonius Rufus, who said the beard should be left to grow (Discourses 21).
59 Seneca Epistles 103.5.
60 Musonius Rufus Discourses 9. He went into exile twice under Nero and once under Vespasian. Philostratus (Life of Apollonius of Tyana 7.16.2) said that Musonius Rufus had opposed Nero’s rule. He was apparently very resourceful. During one of his exiles, it was said, he was sent to Gyara, an island in the northern Cyclades, which lacked a water supply, and discovered a spring.
61 PLY 3.11.5.
62 Musonius Rufus Discourses 18b.
63 Dillon, Musonius Rufus and Education in the Good Life, pp. 20–21.
64 PLE 33.2; 2.158–9.
65 PLE 17.96.
66 PLE 33.1
67 PLE 7.1–4.
68 PLE 2.27; 2.156–7; 7.167–8. Cf. PLE 18.3. On Mithridates and antidotes (below) see A. Mayor, The Poison King, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2010.
69 Seneca the Younger Epistles 58.36.
70 PLE 14.51.
71 Tacitus Annals 15.64.
72 Dio Cassius Roman History 69.8.13.
73 PLY 1.22.2.
74 PLY 1.10.4.
75 Sherwin-White, Letters of Pliny, p. 136; PLY 1.22.1; 6.20.7.
SIX: Pliniana
1 The phrase that has fallen into popular parlance is divorced from its earlier context: Seneca Epistles 87.22–5, later discussed by Augustine.
2 PLE 2.103–4. Pliny the Elder was speaking here of the constellations restricting the reach of some elements, and encouraging the growth of others.
3 Ovid Fasti 2.151–2.
4 PLE 7.134.
5 D. Camardo, ‘Herculaneum from the AD 79 eruption to the medieval period’, p. 305, notes that vegetation returned slowly to Pompeii – around twenty years after the eruption, according to recent research.
6 PLE 21.2.
7 A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad, 2.
8 PLE 15.102.
9 PLE 15.103. J. Reynolds, ‘The Elder Pliny and His Times’, p. 10 in R. French and F. Greenaway (eds), Science in the Early Roman Empire: Pliny the Elder, his Sources and Influence, Croom Helm, London and Sydney, 1986, who suggests that someone of Pliny’s name introduced a new variety of tree.
10 PLE 15.104.
11 PLY 2.17.14–15.
12 The first figs come in August in Horace Epistles 1.7.5.
13 Hesiod Works and Days 679–87.
14 PLY 9.40.3.
15 PLE 2.122.
16 PLE 15.74–5.
17 PLE 12.4–5.
18 PLE 23.117ff and 8.209. ‘111 observations’ – J. Bostock and H. T. Riley (eds), The Natural History of Pliny, Vol. 4, Henry G. Bohn, London, 1856, pp. 502–7.
19 PLE 8.209: Pliny the Elder attributed to Marcus Apicius the method of increasing the size of goose or sow livers by cramming them with dried figs.
20 PLY 1.24.4.
21 PLY 1.7.6.
22 Martial Epigrams 3.45.
23 PLY 7.3.2–5; 7.9.7–8.
24 PLY 1.13.1.
25 Suetonius Life of Titus 8.1.
26 PLY 1.13.4–5.
27 PLY 5.12; 5.3.9.
28 PLY 5.3.5.
29 Suetonius Life of Caesar 73.
30 PLY 1.16.5; 4.14.4.
31 PLY 1.2.6.
32 PLY 4.27
33 PLY 4.25.
34 A. E. Housman, The Name and Nature of Poetry, Leslie Stephen Lecture, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1933.
35 See, for example, Housman’s letter, dated 26 June 1906, to James Duff Duff, author of C. Plini Caecili secundi epistularum liber sextus, on PLY 6.8.6 (A. E. Housman, The Letters of A.E. Housman Vol. 1, edited by A. Burnett, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2007, p. 197).
36 PLY 7.4.2.
37 PLY 4.14.2; 7.4.4; 8.
38 PLY 4.14.3–4.
39 Sherwin-White, Letters of Pliny, pp. 71, 559, argues that Pliny married three times and that Calpurnia was his third wife. Pliny speaks of two marriages in Letter 10.2 but it is uncertain whether his marriage to Calpurnia had taken place by this point. There is no evidence in his letters of a wife prior to the (unnamed) daughter of Pompeia Celerina to whom he was married before Calpurnia. I am inclined to think that Pliny married only twice.
40 Radice, Pliny: Letters and Panegyricus, Vol 1, p. xv, is among the scholars who date the death of Pliny’s previous wife to AD 97, citing letter 9.13.4. R. K. Gibson and R. Morello (Reading the Letters of Pliny the Younger: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2012, p. 32) suggest that Pliny remarried in or before AD 98. I also believe that Pliny remarried very soon after her death and that Calpurnia is the second of the two wives Pliny mentions to Trajan in Letter 10.2. This letter dates to the early part of his rule – AD 98, according to Sherwin-White (Letters of Pliny, p. 557). In this letter Pliny writes of how he longed to have children in the past and is still longing to now. I believe this letter post-dates Calpurnia’s miscarriage.
41 PLY 4.19.8.
42 PLY 1.14.8.
43 PLY 4.19.5.
44 On Pliny’s erotic vocabulary in Letter 7.5 see A. R. de Verger, ‘Erotic Language in Pliny, Ep. VII 5’,
Glotta 74, B., 1/2. H., 1997/98, pp. 114–16.
45 PLY 7.4.6.
46 PLY 7.4.
47 See W. Fitzgerald, Catullan Provocations, University of California Press, Berkeley, LA and London, 1995, pp. 44–6.
48 PLY 7.9.
49 PLY 2.17.3.
50 PLE 11.11–14.
51 PLE 2.232; Leonardo da Vinci, The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, edited by J. P. Richter, Phaidon, New York, 1970, Vol. II.1029 (also 1031).
52 PLY 4.30.4.
53 R. Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1974, pp. 328–9. The quotes are from the preface of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
54 Shelley, Rosalind and Helen, line 6. See J. Bieri, Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography, University of Delaware Press, Newark, 2005, pp. 61, 73.
55 Mary Shelley, The Last Man (1826), H. J. Luke, Jr. (ed.), University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London, 1993, p. 314. The description of the Pliniana in the novel is cited by R. G. Grylls, Mary Shelley: A Biography, Haskell House, New York, 1969, p. 95. Mary Shelley’s description of the Pliniana in The Last Man was inspired by her own visit to the Pliniana and the waterfall, which she recounts in her Journals, 11 April 1818: M. Shelley, The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814-1844, edited by P. R. Feldman and D. Scott-Kilvert, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1987, Vol 1., p. 204.
56 Holmes, Shelley, p. 30.
57 C. Clairmont, The Journals of Claire Clairmont, edited by M. K. Stocking, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1968 – Journal entry 12 April 1818, p. 91, cited by Holmes, Shelley, p. 418.
58 I draw here on Holmes, Shelley, pp. 417–18; 421; 471–2, who suggests that the Shelleys’ failure to acquire the Villa Pliniana might have been linked to a curious incident involving a pistol. Shelley is thought to have fathered a child with one of his servants while he was at Como. Holmes suggests that the pistol incident might be understood in light of Shelley’s probable impregnation of Elise, the servant.
59 Mary Shelley, Rambles in Germany and Italy, Edward Moxon, London, 1844, Vol. 1, p. 89 (15 August 1840); cited by L. Morrison and S. L. Stone, A Mary Shelley Encyclopaedia, Greenwood Press, Connecticut and London, 2003, p. 343.
