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.

Pliny the Elder describes the methods of preparing papyrus in his Naturalis Historia.

Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia describes a battering ram used in mining, where hard rock needed to be broken down to release the ore.

Nonetheless, Rasmus Christian Rask concluded that the texts must indeed be the remnants of a much larger literature, as Pliny the Elder had suggested in his Naturalis Historiae, where he describes one Hermippus of Smyrna having " interpreted two million verses of Zoroaster " in the 3rd century BC.

Pliny the Elder describes its style and designers as Greek ; this may be further evidence of time-honoured and persistent plebeian cultural connections with Magna Graecia, well into the Imperial era, when Liber is found in some of the threefold, complementary deity-groupings of Imperial cult ; a saviour figure, like Hercules and the Emperor himself.

In his book on sculpture, Pliny describes two statues of " Bonus Eventus " which were in fact renamed images of Greek gods.

Pliny the Elder, notes that although emmer was called far in his time formerly it was called adoreum ( or " glory "), providing an etymology explaining that emmer had been held in glory ( N. H. 18. 3 ), and later in the same book he describes its role in sacrifices.

Some hint of the complicated cultural web that bound Armorica and the Britanniae ( the " Britains " of Pliny ) is given by Caesar when he describes Diviciacus of the Suessiones, as " the most powerful ruler in the whole of Gaul, who had control not only over a large area of this region but also of Britain " Archaeological sites along the south coast of England, notably at Hengistbury Head, show connections with Armorica as far east as the Solent.

Pliny's Natural History and the epigram writer Martial both credit Cnaeus Matius Calvinus, in the circle of Julius Caesar, with introducing the first topiary to Roman gardens, and Pliny the Younger describes in a letter the elaborate figures of animals, inscriptions, cyphers and obelisks in clipped greens at his Tuscan villa ( Epistle vi, to Apollinaris ).

In his Natural History Pliny the Elder describes a race of silvestres ( wild ) creatures in India who had humanoid bodies but a coat of fur, fangs, and no capacity to speak-a description that fits gibbons indigenous to the area.

Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century AD, describes a religious ceremony in Gaul in which white-clad druids climbed a sacred oak, cut down the mistletoe growing on it, sacrificed two white bulls and used the mistletoe to cure infertility:

Pliny the Younger ( 1st century AD ) describes in a letter the long periods he spent in his Bellagio villa, during which he practised not only study and writing but also hunting and fishing.

Pliny portrays Zenodorus as a well-reputed ancient artist of bronze statues, and describes Lysistratos of Sikyon, who takes plaster casts from living faces to create wax casts using the indirect process.

Pliny, writing in Latin in the 1st century CE, describes a region of Syria that was " formerly called Palaestina " among the areas of the Eastern Mediterranean.

According to classical rabbinical literature, the specific agate was of a sky-blue colour, and though Jacinth now refers to a red-tinted clear gem-the Jacinth-this wasn't the case at the time the Book of Revelation was written, and at that time Jacinth appears to have referred to a bluish gem ; Pliny describes Jacinth as a dull and blueish amethyst, while Solinus describes it as a clear blue tinted gem-the modern Sapphire.

An anecdote related by Pliny describes how Zeuxis reviewed the young women of Agrigentum naked before selecting five whose features he would combine in order to paint an ideal image.

The Germanic list, whom Pliny describes as

In his Epistles, Pliny the Younger describes the scene as he pleaded for a woman whose 80-year-old husband had disinherited her within days of taking a new wife.

The Periplus describes it as 3000 stadia south of the Moskhophagoi, and 4000 stadia north of Adulis, inside the regions ruled by Zôskalês, the king of Aksum ; Pliny the Elder ( N. H. 6. 168 ) notes that Ptolemais was close to Lake Monoleus.

Pliny describes four types of aetites in his Natural History and outlines their magico-medical use:

Horace and other Roman writers mention " mera tarantina " from Taranto, and Pliny the Elder describes Manduria as ' viticulosa ' ( full of vineyards ).

Pliny never saw this tomb, so his description was based on a report from Varro and perhaps a conflated comparison to the Minoan labyrinths he describes before this tomb.

In the Roman era, the term Syria is used to comprise the entire northern Levant and has an uncertain border to the northeast that Pliny the Elder describes as including, from west to east, Commagene, Sophene, and Adiabene, " formerly known as Assyria ".

Libraries were amenities suited to a villa, such as Cicero's at Tusculum, Maecenas's several villas, or Pliny the Younger's, all described in surviving letters.

According to Pliny the Elder, there were two kinds of villas: the villa urbana, which was a country seat that could easily be reached from Rome ( or another city ) for a night or two, and the Villa rustica, the farm-house estate permanently occupied by the servants who had charge generally of the estate.

Evidence of a lessening on luxury restrictions can also be found ; one of the Letters of Pliny is addressed to the woman Pompeia Celerina praising the luxuries she keeps in her villa.

Within the atrium of a Roman house or villa, a place that had formerly been quite plain, the art of the topiarius produced a miniature landscape ( topos ) which might employ the art of stunting trees, also mentioned, disapprovingly, by Pliny ( Historia Naturalis xii. 6 ).

According to Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century CE, there were several kinds of villas: the villa urbana, which was a country seat that could easily be reached from Rome or another city for a night or two, and the Villa rustica, the farm-house estate that was permanently occupied by the servants who had charge generally of the estate, which would centre on the villa itself, perhaps only seasonally occupied.

Just nearby, Pliny the Younger built his villa in Tuscis, which is identified with walls, mosaic floors and marble fragments surviving at a place now called Colle Plinio, the " Hill of Pliny ".

Pliny immediately sets out in a warship, and gets in sight of the villa, but the eruption prevents him from landing and taking off Rectina and her library — which is thus left for modern archaeologists to find.

The villa at Settefinestre was not the peristyle villa described by Pliny or to be seen at Herculaneum, filled with sculpture, mosaic floors and fine paintings.

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.

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.