Born to a Noble Family shortly after BC
Gaius Plinius Secundus was he,
Or Pliny to both his family and friends
At 23 he fought German barbarians.
Bored of the fighting he moved back to Rome
And in grammatical textbooks soon found a home,
Writing about history and collecting with tact
Over 20,000 accounts of Natural ‘fact’.
Such as how monsters roamed in the Far East
And how Illyrians were all one-eyed beasts,
He wrote of how elephants shudder at mice
With bee kings not queens; he was quite precise.
Collecting so much in 37 volumes of work
He didn’t have time to check all the quirks,
Such as children who rode dolphins to school
But his eccentricity didn’t make him a fool.
He rose every day at the stroke of midnight
And in reading and dictating took his greatest delight,
Often being carried from pillar to post
With his scribe and his reader, listening always to both.
His end came on a beach covered in dust
Brought about by erupting Mount Vesuvius,
Pliny the younger, should have been there
But thankfully wasn’t and so there was an heir.
With no full-scale critique until 1492
Pliny the Elder’s reputation just grew,
And whilst he was often wide of the mark
In the sciences he made one hell of a start!
It’s how he’d want to be remembered (Photo credit: Thomas Cizauskas).