Pliny the Elder

Pliny says to have seen Lucius Cos­si­tius turn from woman to man on his wedding day.

than Pliny’s judgment, when he is pleased to set it to work?

Now, as to the end that Pliny and Cicero propose to us, of glory;

but Pliny instances such as have lived long without sleep.

Plato recommends it for health, as also Pliny says it is good for the stomach and the joints.

Pliny says there are but three sorts of diseases, to escape which a man has good title to destroy himself;

Pliny tells us of a certain Hyperborean nation where, by reason of the sweet temperature of the air, lives rarely ended but by the voluntary surrender of the inhabitants, who, being weary of and satiated with living, had the custom, at a very old age, after having made good cheer, to precipitate themselves into the sea from the top of a certain rock, assigned for that service.

Every one, as Pliny says, is a good doctrine to himself, provided he be capable of discovering himself near at hand.

The two first, and Pliny, and their like, have nothing of this Hoc age;

and the nations that Pliny reports have no other language.

and, which is more, in certain frozen countries, as Pliny reports.

If Pliny and Herodotus are to be believed, there are in certain places kinds of men very little resembling us.

says Pliny.

Cicero and Diodorus say that in their time the Chaldees kept a register of four hundred thousand and odd years, Aristotle, Pliny, and others, that Zoroaster flourished six thousand years before Plato’s time.

Pliny says there are certain sea-hares in the Indies that are poison to us, and we to them;

“A short death,” says Pliny, “is the sovereign good hap of human life.

Whoever, also, should hereunto join the geometrical propositions that, by the certainty of their demonstrations, conclude the contained to be greater than the containing, the center to be as great as its circumference, and that find out two lines incessantly approaching each other, which yet can never meet, and the philosopher’s stone, and the quadrature of the circle, where the reason and the effect are so opposite, might, peradventure, find some argument to second this bold saying of Pliny:

Pliny reports of one who, dreaming he was blind, found himself so indeed in the morning without any preceding infirmity in his eyes.

The force of imagination might assist in this case, as I have said elsewhere, and Pliny seems to be of the same opinion;

as Pliny reports, that the Arcadians cured all manner of diseases with that of a cow;

I omit the odd number of their pills, the destination of certain days and feasts of the year, the superstition of gathering their simples at certain hours, and that so austere and very wise countenance and carriage which Pliny himself so much derides.

No Roman till Pliny’s time had ever vouchsafed to practise physic;

I think there are of these among the old Latin writers but two, Pliny and Celsus if these ever fall into your hands, you will find that they speak much more rudely of their art than I do;

Pliny, among other things, twits them with this, that when they are at the end of their rope, they have a pretty device to save themselves, by recommending their patients, whom they have teased and tormented with their drugs and diets to no purpose, some to vows and miracles, others to the hot baths.

The Essenians, of whom Pliny speaks, kept up their country for several ages without either nurse or baby-clouts, by the arrival of strangers who, following this pretty humor, came continually to them: