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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Dickens probably drew inspiration from Pliny’s description.
By then, he had spoken for almost five hours. This was not the longest speech Pliny had ever given. He once spoke in court for seven hours straight. ‘Rejoice! Rejoice!’
Juvenal
Perfume
Alexander the Great
Pliny the Elder dated the birth of luxury in Italy precisely to 189 BC, when a Roman general returned in triumph from Asia carrying gold crowns, ivory tusks, and 137,420 pounds of silver with him.9 Pliny the Elder could not deny that ‘communication, established throughout the world through the greatness of the Roman empire’ had led to advances in people’s lives by facilitating commerce.
The arrival of chests of foreign treasures, however, seemed destined only to precipitate a moral decline and loss of identity in Rome.
Zeno,
Musonius Rufus’ sanctimonious attitudes towards luxury and concern for protecting the environment from human greed might well have made Pliny think of his uncle:
Stoicism taught them that Nature was a god to be revered, not dominated, assisted, not ignored, and as proof of this, Pliny the Elder had pointed to the lowly bramble bush.
From this we should accept that Nature does not exist for the pleasure of man, but rather, ‘man can seem to be born for the sake of the earth’.
Laurentum,
The elements may always be in battle, but in spring one begins to realise that what they really seek is balance.
The elder Pliny had observed in his Natural History that flowers wither as quickly as they bloom for the sake of warning men of the evanescence of life.
Zama,
Callimachus,
Calvus,
Pliny therefore resolved to justify his poetic ambitions by drawing up a list of the most respectable men in history who had expressed themselves in the kind of literature that proclaimed ‘I’m human’:
Julius Caesar had been furious when, in the fifties BC, Catullus had branded him ‘a shameless, grasping gambler’, an ‘adulterer’, and lover of ‘little girls’ in his poems, but forgave him.
Satyricon,
he arranged for all the parents of Comum to pool their funds with his, ‘for those who are, perhaps, forgetful with other people’s money are certainly careful with their own’.
