The Polyhistor

Priscian indeed uses the testimony of Solinus, whom Paul the Deacon and other authors attest was a celebrated grammarian who flourished under Emperor Justinian in the year of Christ 530; but many centuries intervene between Vespasian and Justinian. That Solinus was even earlier than that aforementioned Theodosius seems to be argued by the fact that, when he mentions Byzantium, he makes no mention of a changed name, from which you might infer that he was also older than the Emperor Constantine, surnamed the Great, from whom that city took the name of Constantinople and New Rome in the year of Christ 311, as Jerome and others have handed down to memory. If in that codex a place had been assigned to Solinus according to the merit of his age, he would surely have been older even than L. Florus, or rather (as we have shown elsewhere) L. Annaeus Seneca, who wrote that epitome of Roman history from T. Livius under the Emperor Trajan, between the years of Christ 100 and 120. But Ioannes Camers, the interpreter of Solinus’s Polyhistor, claims that Solinus drew almost everything from the fountain of Pliny, but that he never mentions Pliny, whom he surpassed, because this little work was published while Pliny was still alive (he dedicated his Natural History to the Emperor Vespasian). When Hermolaus Barbarus had judged the same thing before Camers, he accused Solinus of an ungrateful spirit toward Pliny; and there are some, whose names we shall spare here, who seem to themselves to be doing something great and worthy of praise as often as they call Solinus an ape of Pliny, as if they had established from somewhere that the good man Pliny was older, from whose Natural History Solinus excerpted these things. As if, indeed, Pliny himself could not by the same logic be seen as ungrateful to Dioscorides and others, and be called an ape of many both Latin and Greek writers, whom he emulated—