My mother and I, meanwhile, were at Misenum – but that is of no historical consequence and you didn’t want to know about anything other than my uncle’s death. And so I end here. I add only that I have included everything that I witnessed for myself and heard straight after the event, when the truth is most remembered. You can excerpt the highlights; for a letter one writes to a friend is one thing, but the history one writes for everyone, quite another. All best.

ON LAMPSTANDS, THE DISCOVERY OF GLASS, ON THE DOLPHIN

Natural History

Pliny the Elder

Translated by Daisy Dunn, 2018

On Lampstands

Pliny the Elder (AD 23/4–79), who died in the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, was the author of a remarkable thirty-seven-volume encyclopaedia. The earliest encyclopaedia to survive from the Graeco-Roman world, the Natural History contains observations on animals and plants, accounts of art and monuments, and cures and remedies for a huge range of ailments. In this passage, taken from the thirty-fourth book, Pliny the Elder offers a delightfully esoteric tale of the origins of lampstands.

Aegina specialised in finely crafting the tops of candelabra and Tarentum their stems. Recognition for their manufacture is therefore shared between them. People are unashamed of paying a military tribune’s salary for these candelabra, even though, as the name suggests, they merely hold lights. At the sale of one such candelabrum Clesippus, a clothes-washer with a hunched back and ugly countenance besides, was added to the lot at the instruction of the public crier Theon. The two were bought by a certain Gegania for 50,000 sesterces. She showed off what she had purchased at a party, with Clesippus displayed nude to make everyone laugh. After taking him into her bed in an outpouring of shameless lust, however, she added him to her will, and in his newfound wealth he took to cultivating the candelabrum as if it were a god. This story became associated with Corinthian lampstands. Morality was only recovered when a proper tomb was erected for Gegania with the result that the memory of her misconduct lived on forever and became only more notorious across the world.

The Discovery of Glass

Pliny the Elder believed that ‘no book is so bad that there is nothing to be taken from it’. He drew on a vast range of sources when compiling his encyclopaedia and cited a great many of them. But not everything he recorded was strictly accurate. His Natural History is all the more colourful for the errors and eccentricities it contains. This story may not tell of the very earliest creation of glass, but it does capture in some detail a discovery of glass. The fact that it is described as a chance discovery on sand gives the story a ring of truth.