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Updated: June 28, 2025
Among the learned Romans of this age of great learning, the elder Pliny, aetatis suae doctissimus, easily took the first place. Born in the middle of the reign of Tiberius, Gaius Plinius Secundus of Comum passed his life in high public employments, both military and civil, which took him successively over nearly all the provinces of the Empire.
The king who, a few months before, had compared him to Cicero, Plinius, and Agrippa, now said to Jordan, "The miser, Voltaire, has still an unsatisfied longing for gold, and asks still thirteen hundred dollars! Every one of the six days which he spent with me cost me five hundred and fifty dollars! I call that paying dear for a fool! Never before was a court fool so generously rewarded."
Neither had the fame of Cicero, Seneca, Plinius Secundus, borne her age so well, if it had not been joined with some vanity in themselves; like unto varnish, that makes ceilings not only shine but last.
T. G. Elger, the celebrated English selenographer, says of Plinius that, at sunrise, "it reminds one of a great fortress or redoubt erected to command the passage between the Mare Tranquilitatis and the Mare Serenitatis." But, of course, the resemblance is purely fanciful. Men, even though they dwelt in the moon, would not build a rampart 6,000 feet high!
His father, Lucius Caecilius Cilo, had been aedile of the colony, and, dying young, left a widow, who with her two sons, sought protection with her brother, Caius Plinius Secundus, the famous author of the Natural History.
Caius Plinius, the writer of the German wars, relates that she stood at the end of the bridge, as the legions returned, and accosted them with thanks and praises; a behaviour which sunk deep into the spirit of Tiberius: "For that all this officiousness of hers," he thought, "could not be upright; nor that it was against foreigners only she engaged the army.
This cleft forms the line of demarcation between the dark tone of the Mare Serenitatis and the light hue of the Mare Tranquilitatis, traceable under nearly every condition of illumination, and prominent in all good photographs. DAWES. A ring-plain 14 miles in diameter, situated N.W. of Plinius, on a nearly circular light area.
Also Plinius telleth a wonder thing, that the emperor sat by Drusilla the empress in a certain garden, and an eagle threw from a right high place a wonder white hen into the empress' lap whole and sound, and the hen held in her bill a bough of laurel tree full of bays, and Diviners took heed to the hen, and sowed the bays, and kept them wisely, and of them came a wood, that was called Silva Triumphans, as it were the wood of worship for victory and mastery.
And indeed, my pseudo Gallus, let me remark that, being myself a native of the Mediterranean, I can enter better than you can into the childish delight that our friend Caius Plinius expresses. It is a joy which is not to be found in the nature of the American to sleep in the tropic heats of a July sun. Winter is abhorrent to the nature of every Levanter.
As CORNELIUS PLINIUS writ the life of POMPONUS SECUNDUS; so young CHARLES FITZ-GEFFERY, that high towering falcon, hath most gloriously penned The honourable Life and Death of worthy Sir FRANCIS DRAKE. As ANTIPATER Sidonius was famous for extemporal verse in Greek, and OVID for his
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