Tacitus, Annal. xv. 20. 1. Lucan, it appears, employed his last hours in
revising his poems; on the contrary, Virgil, we are told, when his death
was imminent, renewed his directions that the Aeneid should be committed
to the flames.

[983] The text of the concluding sentence of Lucan's life is corrupt,
and neither of the modes proposed for correcting it make the sense
intended very clear.

[984] Although this brief memoir of Pliny is inserted in all the
editions of Suetonius, it was unquestionably not written by him. The
author, whoever he was, has confounded the two Plinys, the uncle and
nephew, into which error Suetonius could not have fallen, as he lived on
intimate terms with the younger Pliny; nor can it be supposed that he
would have composed the memoir of his illustrious friend in so cursory a
manner. Scaliger and other learned men consider that the life of Pliny,
attributed to Suetonius, was composed more than four centuries after that
historian's death.

[985] See JULIUS, c. xxviii. Caius Plinius Caecilius Secundus (the
younger Pliny) was born at Como, A.U.C. 814; A.D. 62. His father's name
was Lucius Caecilius, also of Como, who married Plinia, the sister of
Caius Plinius Secundus, supposed to have been a native of Verona, the
author of the Natural History, and by this marriage the uncle of Pliny
the Younger. It was the nephew who enjoyed the confidence of the
emperors Nerva and Trajan, and was the author of the celebrated Letters.

[986] The first eruption of Mount Vesuvius occurred A.U.C. 831, A.D. 79.
See TITUS, c. viii. The younger Pliny was with his uncle at Misenum at
the time, and has left an account of his disastrous enterprise in one of