SOURCE: Harold L. Axtell, "Some Human Traits of the Scholar Pliny," in Classical Journal, Vol. 22, No. 2, November, 1926, pp. 104-13.

In the following essay, Axtell attempts to illuminate the passages in Pliny's writings that offer insight to his personality, calling Pliny earnest, skeptical, and conceited.

Sad is the present fate of Gaius Plinius Secundus. After all his tireless efforts to acquaint mankind with the wonders of the world, ungrateful posterity in the twentieth century, even the lovers of the veteres, has all but forgotten him. Nobody cares to contribute a volume on "Pliny and His Influence," or to annotate his work, or even to constitute a reliable text for it. No university offers a course in it and no classical reading circle includes it in its program. Except as an old worked-over mine to dig in at odd times for the extraction of curious information with which to complete...