Ancient / Classical History

Footnotes to Pliny's Letters

By N.S. Gill, About.com

Mt. Vesuvius

Flickr Creative Commons License Photo by Paul Resh

Letters of Pliny Pliny, translated by William Melmoth [revised by F. C. T. Bosanquet]

⁹² In the Bay of Naples.
⁹³ The Romans used to lie or walk naked in the sun, after anointing their bodies with oil, which was esteemed as greatly contributing to health, and therefore daily practised by them. This custom, however, of anointing themselves, is inveighed against by the Satirists as in the number of their luxurious indulgences: but since we find the elder Pliny here, and the amiable Spurinna in a former letter, practising this method, we can not suppose the thing itself was cstcemed unmanly, but only when it was attended with some particular circumstances of an over-refined delicacy. M.
⁹⁴ Now called Castelamare, in the Bay of Naples. M.
⁹⁵ The Stoic and Epicurean philosophers held that the world was to be destroyed by fire, and all things fall again into original chaos; not excepting even the national gods themselves from the destruction of this general conflagration. M.