THE

LIFE AND WRITINGS OF PLINY.

CAIUS PLINIUS SECUNDUS was born either at Verona or Novum Comum modern-day Como, now Como, in Cisalpine Gaul, in the year A.U.C. 776, and A.D. 23. It is supposed that his earlier years were spent in his native province, and that he was still a youth when he moved to Rome and attended the lectures of the grammarian Apion. It was in about his sixteenth year that he there saw Lollia Paulina; as in the following year she was divorced by Caligula, and it was probably in his twentieth that he witnessed the capture of a large fish at Ostia by Claudius and his attendants, and in his twenty-second that he visited Africa, Egypt, and Greece.

In his twenty-third year, Pliny served in Germany under the legatus Pomponius Secundus, whose friendship he soon acquired, and was in consequence promoted to the command of an ala, or troop of cavalry. During his military career, he wrote a treatise (now lost) "On the Use of the Javelin by Cavalry," and travelled over that country as far as the shores of the German Ocean, besides visiting Belgic Gaul. In his twenty-ninth year, he returned to Rome and applied himself for a time to forensic pursuits, which, however, he appears soon to have abandoned. About this time he wrote the life of his friend Pomponius and an account of the "Wars in Germany" in twenty books, neither of which are extant. Though employed in writing a...