A skull, on view at the Museo Storico Nazionale Dell'Arte Sanitaria in Rome, thought to have once held the brain of Pliny the Elder
A skull, on view at the Museo Storico Nazionale Dell'Arte Sanitaria in Rome, thought to have once held the brain of Pliny the Elder. Like Mary Beard, I'm afraid I'm skeptical about pointing to a particular skeleton from the Vesuvius disaster 2000 years ago and making claims it is a famous person. Sort of like all those people across the centuries claiming to have bits of the "true cross." I, too, like Professor Dunn, also immed iately wondered why, if Pliny's body was found and said to look asleep why it would not have been removed and cremated like most other Romans of the period. Matrone, the original discoverer of the skeleton, also sold off the jewels so that portion of the find context has been lost (if the objects ever existed in the first place). It was interesting, though, that the DNA analysis points to someone born in the region where Pliny the Elder is said to have been born. But the Naples area was a hub of trading activity so that could probab...