Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE,) born Gaius Plīnius Secundus, was a Roman scholar, historian, and scientific encyclopaedist. A prolific author all through his career, Pliny is celebrated for his thirty-seven-part Historia Naturalis (Natural History,) his only surviving work, and his extant letters. He was the uncle of Pliny the Younger.
Born in Novum Cōmum in Gallia Cisalpina, now Como in Italy, Pliny held a variety of interests and a diverse career, as was typical of his time and social class. He worked as cavalry officer in the Germanic wars and recounted in 20 books the Roman campaigns against the Germans. He later practiced law and concentrated on literature during the reign of Emperor Nero 54–68 CE.
Pliny was the compiler of a Historia Naturalis, an encyclopedia of all contemporaneous knowledge—agriculture, medicine, metallurgy, art, and people. Even though it contained many unsupported claims, fables, and exaggerations, its authority was unopposed.
Considered one of the most influential books ever written in Latin, Historia Naturalis was widely read during the Middle Ages. It offered a cosmology for poet Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas’s La Semaine ou creation du Monde (1578,) which English poet Josuah Sylvester’s translation established for the 17th century as an English classic. The English physician Philemon Holland translated the Natural History in 1601.
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In these matters the only certainty is that nothing is certain.
—Pliny the Elder
Topics: Doubt, Uncertainty, Certainty
Simple diet is best–for many dishes bring many diseases; and rich sauces are worse than even heaping several meats upon each other.
—Pliny the Elder
Topics: Eating
Lust is an enemy to the purse, a foe to the person, a canker to the mind, a corrosive to the conscience, a weakness of the wit, a besotter of the senses, and, finally, a mortal bane to all the body.
—Pliny the Elder
As in our lives, so also in our studies, it is most becoming and most wise to temper gravity with cheerfulness, that the former may not imbue our minds with melancholy, nor the latter degenerate into licentiousness.
—Pliny the Elder
Never do anything concerning the rectitude of which you have a doubt.
—Pliny the Elder
Topics: Doubt
The happier the moment the shorter.
—Pliny the Elder
Topics: Happiness
The master’s eye is the best fertilizer.
—Pliny the Elder
Topics: Farming
Most men are afraid of a bad name, but few fear their consciences.
—Pliny the Elder
Topics: Conscience
The enjoyments of this life are not equal to its evils.
—Pliny the Elder
Topics: Life and Living
God has no power over the past except to cover it with oblivion.
—Pliny the Elder
Topics: Past
The depth of darkness to which you can descend and still live is an exact measure of the height to which you can aspire to reach.
—Pliny the Elder
Topics: Adversity
Let honor be to us as strong an obligation as necessity is to others.
—Pliny the Elder
Topics: Honor
Our youth and manhood are due to our country, but our declining years are due to ourselves.
—Pliny the Elder
Topics: Age
Envy always implies conscious inferiority wherever it resides.
—Pliny the Elder
Topics: Envy
Wine maketh the hand quivering, the eye watery, the night unquiet, lewd dreams, a stinking breath in the morning, and an utter forgetfulness of all things.
—Pliny the Elder
Indeed, what is there that does not appear marvelous when it comes to our knowledge for the first time? How many things, too, are looked up on as quite impossible until they have been actually effected?
—Pliny the Elder
Topics: Possibilities
It is generally much more shameful to lose a good reputation than never to have acquired it.
—Pliny the Elder
Topics: Reputation
Hope is the pillar that holds up the world. Hope is the dream of a waking man.
—Pliny the Elder
Topics: Hope, Dreams
He picked something valuable out of everything he read.
—Pliny the Elder
Topics: Reading
When a man is laboring under the pain of any distemper, it is then that he recollects there is a God, and that he himself is but a man. No mortal is then the object of his envy, his admiration, or his contempt; and, having no malice to gratify, the tales of slander excite him not.
—Pliny the Elder
Topics: Sickness
No man’s abilities are so remarkably shining as not to stand in need of a proper opportunity.
—Pliny the Elder
Topics: Opportunities
As in a man’s life, so in his studies, it is the most beautiful and humane thing in the world so to mingle gravity with pleasure, that the one may not sink into melancholy, nor the other rise up into wantonness.
—Pliny the Elder