The writers of those times, including Vitruvius, Frontinus and Pliny the Elder, treat these engines as commonplace, so their invention may be more ancient.

Pliny may refer to:

Cape Verde may be referred to in the works " De choreographia " by Pomponius Mela ( died 45 CE / AD ) and " Historia naturalis " by Pliny the Elder ( died 79 CE / AD ).

Possibly in certain places the iron sulfate may have been nearly wanting, and then the salt would be white, and would answer, as Pliny says it did, for dyeing bright colors.

Pliny the Elder " notes that the most auspicious wood for wedding torches came from the spina alba, the may tree, which bore many fruits and hence symbolised fertility ".

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.

He was mentioned by his pupil, Pliny, and by Juvenal, who may have been another student, “ as an example of sobriety and of worldly success unusual in the teaching profession ” ( Gwynn, 139 ).

Pliny states that Chalcedon was first named Procerastis, a name which may be derived from a point of land near it: then it was named Colpusa, from the form of the harbour probably ; and finally Caecorum Oppidum, or the town of the blind.

Common as it is now on some of the lower slopes of the Alps of Piedmont and Savoy, it is uncertain whether the Romans were acquainted with the gooseberry, though it may possibly be alluded to in a vague passage of Pliny the Elder's Natural History ; the hot summers of Italy, in ancient times as at present, would be unfavourable to its cultivation.

Pliny connects a number of sayings to Apelles, which may come from Apelles ' lost treatise on the art of painting.

This statue may have represented Nero as the sun god Sol, as Pliny saw some resemblance.

The Mount may be the Mictis of Timaeus, mentioned by Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia ( IV: XVI. 104 ), and the Ictis of Diodorus Siculus.

While Pliny may have been the primary source, scholars have identified others ; among them are Caesar's Gallic Wars, Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, Posidonius, Aufidius Bassus, and numerous non-literary sources: presumably based on interviews with traders and soldiers who had ventured beyond the Rhine and Danube borders, and Germanic mercenaries in Rome.

The skirret is of Chinese origin, but may have arrived in Europe in early times: it is presumed to be the siser mentioned by Pliny the Elder as a favourite of the Emperor Tiberius ( Natural History, 19. 27. 90 ), and was also grown by the Picts.

The myth of the one-horned unicorn may have originated from sightings of injured scimitar oryx ; Aristotle and Pliny the Elder held that the oryx was the unicorn's " prototype ".

It is possible that he may be identified with the Lucius Lucullus who was proconsul of Hispania Baetica, and a student of marine life, at the time Pliny the Elder wrote his Natural History ( c. 77 ).

The belief that the fore part of the name in Norse is from the word lamb makes perfect sense, but may be a later rationalisation for a name based on whatever the name of the island was at the time of Pliny and Ptolemy and the word ey.

Of the hyena, Pliny writes that it " is popularly believed to be bisexual and to become male and female in alternate years, the female bearing offspring without any male ," and that " among the shepherds ’ s homesteads it simulates human speech, and picks up the name of one of them so as to call him to come out of doors and tear him to pieces, and also that it imitates a person being sick, to attract the dogs so that it may attack them ; that this animal alone digs up corpses ; that a female is seldom caught ; that its eyes have a thousand variations of color ; moreover that when its shadow falls on dogs they are struck dumb ; and that it has certain magic arts by which it causes every animal at which it gazes three times to stand rooted to the spot.

Delastelle may have been unaware of Playfair, but he had read of the fractionating cipher described by Pliny Chase in 1859.

Pliny also reports a curious description of the Seres made by an embassy from Taprobane to Emperor Claudius, suggesting they may be referring to the ancient Caucasian populations of the Tarim Basin, such as the Tocharians:

The fruit is edible, though many people find it bland and meally ; the name ' unedo ' is explained by Pliny the Elder as being derived from unum edo " I eat one ", which may seem an apt response to the flavour.

Although Turkic languages may have been spoken as early as 600 BC, the first mention of the ethnonym " Turk " may date from Herodotus ' ( c. 484-425 BCE ) reference to " Targitas "; furthermore, during the first century CE, Pomponius Mela refers to the " Turcae " in the forecasts north of the Sea of Azov, and Pliny the Elder lists the " Tyrcae " among the people of the same area.

In Arrian's Periplus Ponti Euxini, it is called the Άκαμψις Acampsis ; Pliny may have confused it with the Bathys.

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

One of the earliest encyclopedic works to have survived to modern times is the Naturalis Historia of Pliny the Elder, a Roman statesman living in the 1st century AD.

Some modern scholars and archaeologists have argued that Essenes inhabited the settlement at Qumran, a plateau in the Judean Desert along the Dead Sea, citing Pliny the Elder in support, and giving credence that the Dead Sea Scrolls are the product of the Essenes.

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.

Metal-coated glass mirrors are said to have been invented in Sidon ( modern-day Lebanon ) in the first century AD, and glass mirrors backed with gold leaf are mentioned by the Roman author Pliny in his Natural History, written in about 77 AD.

Until recently the grape was rumoured to have ancient origins, perhaps even being the Biturica grape used to make ancient Roman wine and referenced by Pliny the Elder.

It seems to have received a colony in the time of Augustus, whence we find mention in inscriptions of the Ordo et Populus splendidissimae Coloniae Augustae Himeraeorum Thermitanorum: and there can be very little doubt that the Thermae colonia of Pliny in reality refers to this town, though he evidently understood it to be Thermae Selinuntiae ( modern Sciacca ), as he places it on the south coast between Agrigentum ( modern Agrigento ) and Selinus There are little subsequent account of Thermae ; but, as its name is found in Ptolemy and the Itineraries, it appears to have continued in existence throughout the period of the Roman Empire, and probably never ceased to be inhabited, as the modern town of Termini Imerese retains the ancient site as well as name.

It was said by Pliny the Elder to have been founded by the Laevi and Marici, two Ligurian tribes, while Ptolemy attributes it to the Insubres.

Pliny indeed mentions a great calamity which the city had sustained, when ( he tells us ) half of it was swallowed up by the sea, probably from an earthquake having caused the fall of part of the hill on which it stands, but we have no clue to the date of this event ; The Itineraries attest the existence of Tyndaris, apparently still as a considerable place, in the fourth century.

Pliny is thought to have died suddenly during his appointment in Bithynia-Pontus, around 112 AD, since no events referred to in his letters date later than that.

Plant resins have a very long history that was documented in ancient Greece by Theophrastus, in ancient Rome by Pliny the Elder, and especially in the resins known as frankincense and myrrh, prized in ancient Egypt.

The earliest report of this story comes from Pliny the Elder and dates to about 100 years after the banquet described would have happened.

Modern engineers have put forward a plausible hypothesis for the statue construction, based on the technology of those days ( which was not based on the modern principles of earthquake engineering ), and the accounts of Philo and Pliny who both saw and described the remains.

Much of the information we have gathered about the Mausoleum and its structure has come from a Roman historian Pliny.

It is one of the largest single works to have survived from the Roman Empire to the modern day and purports to cover the entire field of ancient knowledge, based on the best authorities available to Pliny.

It is the only work by Pliny to have survived and the last that he published, lacking a final revision at his sudden and unexpected death in the AD 79 eruption of Vesuvius.

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.

While no indubitably attributable sculpture by Praxiteles is extant, numerous copies of his works have survived ; several authors, including Pliny the Elder, wrote of his works ; and coins engraved with silhouettes of his various famous statuary types from the period still exist.

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.

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 ).