English

Proper noun

Pliny ‎(plural Plinys or Plinies)

1. An ancient Roman praenomen.
   • 1828, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, volume 24 no. 147

     The two Plinys, Lucan, (though again under the disadvantage of verse) Petronius Arbiter, and Quintilian, but above all, the Senecas, (for a Spanish cross appears to improve the quality of the rhetorician) have left a body of rhetorical composition such as no modern nation has rivalled.

   • 1836, Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Reminiscences of a Literary Life

     Of Q. Curtius, the Demosthenes (both), Eutropius, Horace (first with a date), Homer, Justin, Livy, the two Plinies, Quintilian, Martial, Tacitus, and Virgil, the first editions; but my friend must not be allowed to have a succession of nights of undisturbed repose till he possesses the first Horace, and the first Roman edition of Virgil.

2. Pliny the Elder, Gaius Plinius Secundus (23–79 AD): an ancient Roman nobleman, scientist and historian, author of Naturalis Historia, "Pliny's Natural History".
3. Pliny the Younger, Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus (63–ca. 113): an ancient Roman statesman, orator, and writer, a great-nephew of Pliny the Elder.

Derived terms

• Plinian
• Plinyism

Translations