XIII.] PLINY. 263
which his birthplace, Tingitera, lay, he has given a more accurate
account than any previous writer. He affirms that the name of
* Pillars of Hercules' was derived from the two lofty mountains of
Abyla (Ceuta) and Calpe (Gibraltar), which here face one
another; and he remarks on the manner in which both of them,
but especially Calpe, project into the sea, and on the deep caves
which form a striking feature of the Rock of Gibraltar1. He is
also more correct than his predecessors with regard to the outline
of Spain and Gaul. He is the first writer who mentions the
Magnum Promontorium; and whereas Strabo, as we have seen,
erroneously conceived of the coast between Cape Finisterre and
the mouths of the Rhine as deviating but little from a straight
line, Mela was well aware of the deep gulf formed by the Bay of
Biscay, of the great projection of the coast of Gaul towards the
north-west, commencing from the mouth of the Garonne, and of
the sharp angle formed by the Armorican peninsula.
The other Roman writer on geography, Pliny the Elder, how-
ever great his deficiencies may have been, was a
literary man of far greater importance. He was
born in the year 23 A.D., either at Verona or at Novum Comura
(Como) in North Italy, and came to Rome at an early age. He
served in the Roman army as a young man in Germany, in which
country he made the acquaintance of Vespasian; and he after-
wards composed a history of the German wars in twenty books.
Towards the end of Nero's reign he was appointed procurator in
Spain. When Vespasian came to the throne, he was received by
him into the number of his friends, and this intimacy was con-
tinued by Titus, to whom he dedicated his Historia Naturalis.
The circumstances of his death, in connexion with the great
eruption of Vesuvius in ygA-D., by which Herculaneum and
Pompeii were destroyed, are well known from the famous letter of
his nephew, the younger Pliny, to Tacitus the historian, in which
they are described*. From the same source we hear of his extra-
ordinary assiduity in study—how, not only during every available
interval in his official duties, but even at his meals and when on
a journey, he used either to read, or be read to, all the while
1 Mela, 2. 95. a £/. 5. i&