Introduction

Much has been written about the life and career (and perhaps no less about the death) of Gaius Plinius Secundus, known today as Pliny the Elder. ¹ According to the Roman historian Suetonius, at the acme of his career as an official within the Roman imperial administration, Pliny served as the procurator, or the chief financial officer, of several Roman provinces in immediate succession, and although Suetonius does not provide his readers with a list, Gallia Narbonensis, Gallia Belgica, Africa, Hispanica Tarraconensis, and Syria have all been proposed. ² Among these possibilities, a procuratorial post in Syria has been rejected by leading contemporary scholars, and only the procuratorship of Hispanica Tarraconensis receives definite attestation in one of the letters of his nephew and testamentary heir, Pliny the Younger. ³ In his abridged biography, Suetonius merely refers to Pliny’s procuratorships as “uninterrupted” (continuas) and “very distinguished” (splendidissimas), specifications that led the great classicist Sir Ronald Syme to infer a minimum of three posts, at least one of which would have been in Belgica, the only conjectured office meriting “the epithet splendidissima.” ⁴ Additional evidence for Pliny’s procuratorial career must be gleaned from the text of Pliny’s one extant work, the Naturalis Historia, a massive encyclopedic text in which the use of foreign terms and suggestions of autopsy provide clues regarding the scope and the timing of Pliny’s travels throughout the Empire. ⁵