Gaius Plinius Secundus (AD 23/2479), called Pliny the Elder (), was a Roman author, naturalist and natural philosopher, and naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire, and a friend of the emperor Vespasian. He wrote the encyclopedic Naturalis Historia (Natural History), which became an editorial model for encyclopedias. He spent most of his spare time studying, writing, and investigating natural and geographic phenomena in the field. His nephew, Pliny the Younger, wrote of him in a letter to the historian Tacitus: Among Pliny's greatest works was the twenty-volume work Bella Germaniae ("The History of the German Wars"), which is no longer extant. Bella Germaniae, which began where Aufidius Bassus' Libri Belli Germanici ("The War with the Germans") left off, was used as a source by other prominent Roman historians, including Plutarch, Tacitus and Suetonius. Tacitus may have used Bella Germaniae as the primary source for his work, De origine et situ Germanorum ("On the Origin and Situation of the Germans"). Pliny the Elder died in AD 79 in Stabiae while attempting the rescue of a friend and his family from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Life and times Background Pliny's dates are pinned to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 and a statement by his nephew that he died in his 56th year, which would put his birth Pliny was the son of an equestrian Gaius Plinius Celer and his wife, Marcella. Neither the younger nor the elder Pliny mention the names. Their ultimate source is a fragmentary inscription (CIL V 1 3442) found in a field in Verona and recorded by the 16th-century Augustinian monk Onofrio Panvinio. The form is an elegy. The most commonly accepted reconstruction is The actual words are fragmentary. The reading of the inscription depends on the reconstruction, but in all cases the names come through. Whether he was an augur and whether she was named Grania Marcella are less certain. Jean Hardouin presents a statement from an unknown source that he claims was ancient, that Pliny was from Verona and that his parents were Celer and Marcella. Hardouin also cites the conterraneity (see below) of Catullus. How the inscription got to Verona is unknown, but it could have arrived by dispersal of property from Pliny the Younger's estate at Colle Plinio, north of Città di Castello, identified with certainty by his initials in the roof tiles. He kept statues of