He might also have been influenced by the name of a legendary island mentioned in The Natural History by Pliny the Elder.

However, it is clear he was familiar with the works of Virgil and with Pliny the Elder's Natural History, and his monastery also owned copies of the works of Dionysius Exiguus.

According to Pliny the Elder in Achaea, the garland worn by the winners of the sacred Nemean Games was also made of celery.

Aelian's anecdotes on animals rarely depend on direct observation: they are almost entirely taken from written sources, often Pliny the Elder, but also other authors and works now lost, to whom he is thus a valuable witness.

Pliny also considers the possibility of an imperfect sphere, " shaped like a pinecone ".

Books on the subject included the Naturalis Historia of Pliny the Elder, which not only described many different minerals but also explained many of their properties, and Kitab al Jawahir ( Book of Precious Stones ) by Muslim scientist Al Biruni.

Ancient Romans such as Pliny ( N. H. 5. 10 ) thought that the river near Timbuktu was part of the Nile River, a belief also held by Ibn Battuta, while early European explorers thought that it flowed west and joined the Senegal River.

Later Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt and contemporary of Ashoka the Great, is also recorded by Pliny the Elder as having sent an ambassador named Dionysius to the Mauryan court.

Strabo also wrote that Sesostris started to build a canal, and Pliny the Elder wrote:

Stalactites are first mentioned ( though not by name ) by the Roman natural historian Pliny in a text which also mentions stalagmites and columns and refers to their creation by the dripping of water.

The term was understood in the Latin world as well, where Pliny the Elder glossed it as follows: " each is the equivalent of a kingdom, and also part of one " ( regnorum instar singulae et in regna contribuuntur ).

In Rome, writers and philosophers like Cicero, Seneca, Pliny the elder, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Cato and Collumella also expressed important ideas on this ground.

It is not improbable that it is here that a part of the cliff fell in, in the manner recorded by Pliny Two gates of the city are also still distinctly to be traced.

Pliny also came into contact with many other well-known men of the period, including the philosophers Artemidorus and Euphrates during his time in Syria.

It is also discussed by Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia.

Pliny does not name the prostitute ; however, the Restoration playwright Nathaniel Richards calls her Scylla in The Tragedy of Messalina, Empress of Rome, published in 1640, and Robert Graves in his novel Claudius the God also identified the prostitute as Scylla.

220 A. D .) Aconite was also described in Greek and Roman medicine by Theophrastus, Dioscorides, and Pliny the Elder, who most likely prescribed the Alpine species Aconitum lycoctonum.

The generic name was first used by Pliny the Elder ( 23-79 ) for a plant also known as strychnos, most likely S. nigrum.

Pliny the Elder also recorded that a Roman general who had his arm cut off had an iron one made to hold his shield up when he returned to battle.

It enjoyed great prosperity, however, due to their growing of spelt, a grain that was put into groats, wine, roses, spices, unguents etc., and also owing to its manufacture, especially of bronze objects, of which both the elder Cato and the elder Pliny speak in the highest terms.

Most of what we have from the Babylonians was inscribed in cuneiform with a metal stylus on tablets of clay, called laterculae coctiles by Pliny the Elder ; papyrus seems to have been also employed, but it has perished.

Arrian mentions many others by name, but they would seem to have been little more than mountain torrents: the most important of them were Charieis, Chobus or Cobus, Singames, Tarsuras, Hippus, Astelephus, Chrysorrhoas, several of which are also noticed by Ptolemy and Pliny.

He is also mentioned by Celsus, Caelius Aurelianus, and Pliny.

Pliny the Elder also gives us some statements about Abnoba ( Natural History, 4. 79 ).

Melampus, for example, quotes from her in his book Peri Palmon Mantike (" On Twitches ") § 17, § 18 ; and Pliny quotes from her respecting eagles and hawks, evidently from some book of augury, and perhaps from a work which is still extant in MS., entitled Orneosophium.

He was the first Roman to cross the Atlas Mountains, and Pliny the Elder quotes his description of the area in his Natural History.

Interestingly, Sicard quotes Pliny as one of the ancient Roman sources for the modern understanding of the qualities supposedly represented by the gods.

The novel takes as its motto two parallel quotes, from Tom Wolfe's " Hooking Up " and from the " Natural History " of Pliny the Elder ( who, as noted, is a central character in the book itself ), with both writers speaking in nearly identical terms of the preeminence of, respectively, the present United States and the Roman Empire, over the rest of the world.

Pliny the Elder ( Book 3 Chapter 24 of Naturalis Historia, published in 77 CE ) quotes a monument to the reign of Augustus, the tropeaum Alpium, located in the Rhaetia of his day, stating that Augustus subdued the Alpine peoples from the upper sea to the lower sea, including the Calucones.

But by the 1st century AD, Pliny the Elder was in a position to claim that everyone agrees on the spherical shape of Earth, although there continued to be disputes regarding the nature of the antipodes, and how it is possible to keep the ocean in a curved shape.

Some authors claim that the argument relating to Seleucus handing over more of what is now southern Afghanistan is an exaggeration originating in a statement by Pliny the Elder referring not specifically to the lands received by Chandragupta, but rather to the various opinions of geographers regarding the definition of the word " India ":

The phrase comes from Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia, regarding the discovery of a recipe for an antidote to a poison.

It is ancient regarding wine as Pliny the Elder mentions it in his natural history.

The oft-repeated tale of Messalina's all-night sex competition with a prostitute comes from Book X of Pliny the Elder's Natural History.

Antoninus ’ father and paternal grandfather died when he was young and he was raised by Gnaeus Arrius Antoninus, his maternal grandfather, reputed by contemporaries to be a man of integrity and culture and a friend of Pliny the Younger.

Pliny the Elder notes that several of them were richer than Crassus, the richest man of the Republican era.

Facio records that van Eyck was a learned man, and that he was versed in the classics, particularly Pliny the Elder's work on painting.

Pliny was considered an honest and moderate man, consistent in his pursuit of suspected Christian members according to Roman law, and rose through a series of Imperial civil and military offices, the cursus honorum ( see below ).

Pliny the Elder believed that it was these birds that inspired man to build homes of earth in imitation of the Western Rock Nuthatch's nests.

While other Roman writers of the time, such as Cicero, Suetonius, Lucan, Tacitus and Pliny the Elder, described human sacrifice among the Celts, only Caesar and the geographer Strabo mention the wicker man as one of many ways the Druids of Gaul performed sacrifices.

Pliny the Elder, in his " Natural History ," relates the story of a contest between Apelles and Protogenes: ' Apelles sailed Rhodes, eager to see the works of a man only known to him by reputation, and on his arrival immediately repaired to the studio.

Gallus was a man of great learning, an excellent Greek scholar, and in his later years devoted himself to the study of astronomy, on which subject he is quoted as an authority by Pliny.

Man becomes man as he refines himself ; he even becomes godlike: “ Deus est mortali iuvare mortalem ,” wrote Pliny, translating a Greek Stoic, “ To help man is man ’ s true God .” Finally, the man who practiced humanitas cultivated his aesthetic sensibilities as he listened to his reason: " Cum musis ,” wrote Cicero, “ id est, cum humanitate et doctrina habere commercium ".< ref > Peter Gay's citation of the phrase, Cum musis, etc., refers to an anecdote in the Tusculan Disputations, in which Cicero recounts how during a visit to Syracuse, in Sicily, he had chanced to discover the tomb of Archimedes, at that time unknown to the inhabitants of the city, but which he, Cicero, recognized from its description in a line of poetry he had memorized ; and he contrasted the enduring fame of Archimedes, the mathematician, to the obloquy of the notorious Sicilian tyrant Dionysius the Elder, buried nearby: “ Who is there who has had anything at all to do with the Muses, that is, with humanity and learning, who would not prefer to be this mathematician rather than that tyrant?

Pliny the Elder ( 23 AD-79 AD ) wrote “ It is beyond calculation how great is the debt owed to the Romans, who swept away the monstrous rites, in which to kill a man was the highest religious duty and for him to be eaten a passport to health .”