" Pliny the Elder connects the story of Hercules and Pyrene to Lusitania, but rejects it as fabulosa, highly fictional.

Pliny uses it a number of times in his Natural History with the same meaning that it has today.

Pliny states that Apelles made a number of useful innovations to the art of painting, but his recipe for a black varnish, called by Pliny atramentum — which served both to preserve his paintings and to soften their colour, and created an effect that Pliny praises to no end — Apelles kept secret and was lost with his death.

Pliny the Elder wrote that cranes would appoint one of their number to stand guard while they slept.

Richard Pankhurst and others have argued that the name should be understood as " River of the Boras people ", where asta can be related to Proto-Nubian asti " water "., while-boras can be linked to a number of Roman allusions to a tribe named the Bora, who lived near Meroe, and another tribe named the Megabares ( in Eratosthenes and Strabo, in Pliny the Elder ).

According to Pliny the Elder, Portofino was founded by the Romans and named Portus Delphini, or Port of the Dolphin, because of the large number of dolphins that inhabited the Tigullian Gulf.

Boas's obituary for him ( one of a number he had to write for younger colleagues including Pliny Earle Goddard and Edward Sapir ) recalls him as a genuinely good person.

Pliny described the Ligurios as having certain electrical properties, which a number of scholars have taken to imply that it referred to amber, which was one of the first items to have been discovered to have electrical properties ; the English stem electric-derives from the Greek word for amber ( elektron ).

Pliny also described a similar bird with an odd number of toes in his Naturalis Historia.

The surviving work, De medicina praecepta, in 1115 hexameters, contains a number of popular remedies, borrowed from Pliny and Dioscorides, and various magic formulae, amongst others the famous Abracadabra, as a cure for fever and ague.

It was mentioned as the royal city of the Parthians by a number of classical writers including Strabo, Pliny, Ptolemy, although the Parthians seemed to have used a number of cities as their " capital " at different periods.

Strabo and Pliny both notice it among the inland towns of Campania ; and though we learn from the Liber de Coloniis, that Vespasian settled a number of his freedmen and dependants there, yet it appears, both from that treatise and from Pliny, that it had not then attained the rank of a colony, a dignity which we find it enjoying in the time of Trajan.

This image of a fully mature " Venus rising from the sea " ( Venus Anadyomene ) was one of the iconic representations of Aphrodite, made famous in a much-admired painting by Apelles, now lost, but described in the Natural History of Pliny the Elder.

The painter and the humanist scholars who probably advised him would have recalled that Pliny the Elder had mentioned a lost masterpiece of the celebrated artist, Apelles, representing Venus Anadyomene ( Venus Rising from the Sea ).

According to Pliny, Alexander the Great offered his mistress, Pankaspe, as the model for the nude Venus and later, realizing that Apelles had fallen in love with the girl, gave her to the artist in a gesture of extreme magnanimity.

Pliny went on to note that Apelles ' painting of Pankaspe as Venus was later " dedicated by Augustus in the shrine of his father Caesar.

Pliny also noted a second painting by Apelles of Venus " superior even to his earlier one ," that had been begun by artist but left unfinished.

Much of what we know of Apelles is derived from Pliny the Elder ( Natural History, XXXV ).

Pliny also recorded an anecdote that was making the rounds among Hellenistic connoisseurs of the first century CE: Apelles travelled to Protogenes ' home in Rhodes to make the acquaintance of this painter he had heard so much about.

Apelles allowed the superiority of some of his contemporaries in particular matters: according to Pliny he admired the dispositio of Melanthius, i. e. the way in which he spaced his figures, and the mensurae of Asclepiodorus, who must have been a great master of symmetry and proportion.

" The last saying Pliny attributes to Apelles refers to the painter's diligence at practising his art every day: Nulla dies sine linea —" Not a day without a line drawn.

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.

The name is derived from the type genus Apium, which was originally used by Pliny the Elder circa 50 AD for a celery-like plant.

As the Eudoses are the Jutes, these names probably refer to localities in Jutland or on the Baltic coast, in which case their inhabitants would be Cimbri or Teutones for Pliny.

In the 4th century BC Plato knew oreichalkos as rare and nearly as valuable as gold and Pliny describes how aurichalcum had come from Cypriot ore deposits which had been exhausted by the 1st century AD.

The earliest bestiary in the form in which it was later popularized was an anonymous 2nd century Greek volume called the Physiologus, which itself summarized ancient knowledge and wisdom about animals in the writings of classical authors such as Aristotle's Historia Animalium and various works by Herodotus, Pliny the Elder, Solinus, Aelian and other naturalists.

He began the aqueducts Aqua Claudia and Anio Novus, which Pliny the Elder considered engineering marvels.

Pliny claims that division was the work of Caligula, but Dio states that in 42 CE an uprising took place, which was subdued by Gaius Suetonius Paulinus and Gnaeus Hosidius Geta, only after which the division took place.

Although his work has been criticized for the lack of candor in checking the " facts ", some of his text has been confirmed by recent research, like the spectacular remains of Roman gold mines in Spain, especially at Las Medulas, which Pliny probably saw in operation while a Procurator there a few years before he compiled the encyclopedia.

For instance, they interpret the exhortation to defend one ’ s faith “ with gentleness and reverence ” in 3: 15-16 as a response to Pliny executing Christians for the obstinate manner in which they professed to be Christians.

In another example, believing the black rock of the Schlossberg at Stolpen to be the same as Pliny the Elder's basalt, Agricola applied this name to it, and thus originated a petrological term which has been permanently incorporated in the vocabulary of science.

77 AD ), Pliny provides a foundation myth for the Celtic settlement of Cisalpine Gaul in which a Helvetian named Helico plays the role of culture hero.

The earliest written references that have survived relating to the islands were made by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, where he states that there are 30 " Hebudes ", and makes a separate reference to " Dumna ", which Watson ( 1926 ) concludes is unequivocally the Outer Hebrides.

After mentioning that this fish was sacred to Hecate, Alan Davidson writes, " Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, Martial, Pliny, Seneca and Suetonius have left abundant and interesting testimony to the red mullet fever which began to affect wealthy Romans during the last years of the Republic and really gripped them in the early Empire.

Later Pliny the Elder wrote that Sostratus was the architect, which is disputed.

Pliny the Elder's Natural History ( 36. 90 ) lists the legendary Smilis, reputed to be a contemporary of Daedalus, together with the historical mid-sixth-century BC architects and sculptors Rhoikos and Theodoros as two of the makers of the Lemnian labyrinth, which Andrew Stewart regards as " evidently a misunderstanding of the Samian temple's location en limnais the marsh '.

Philosophers such as Aristotle and Pliny the Elder argued that the full Moon induced insanity in susceptible individuals, believing that the brain, which is mostly water, must be affected by the Moon and its power over the tides, but the Moon's gravity is too slight to affect any single person.

The death of Laocoön was famously depicted in a much-admired marble Laocoön and his Sons, attributed by Pliny the Elder to the Rhodian sculptors Agesander, Athenodoros, and Polydorus, which stands in the Vatican Museums, Rome.

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.

The method of comparing hardness by seeing which minerals can scratch others, however, is of great antiquity, having first been mentioned by Theophrastus in his treatise On Stones, c. 300 BC, followed by Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia, c. 77 AD.

In book 8, chapter 16 of Pliny the Elder's Natural History from 77 AD the elk and an animal called achlis, which is presumably the same animal, are described thus:

Pliny connected these two rivers as one long watercourse which flowed ( via lakes and underground sections ) into the Nile, a notion which persisted in the Arab and European worlds – and further added the Senegal River as the " Ger " – until the 19th century.

The connection is made as follows: Pliny reports that " Timaeus says there is an island named Mictis ... where tin is found, and to which the Britains cross.

A manuscript variant of a name in Pliny has abetted the Iceland theory: Nerigon instead of Berrice, which sounds like Norway.