Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century AD, mentioned storms of frogs and fish.

BBC: NEWS | UK | Magazine | How can it rain fish?

According to Pliny the Elder, the Roman prisoners were used by the Parthians as guards on their eastern frontier in what is today Turkmenistan.

ECONOMIST: So it's said, anyway

The aliens are a pell-mell combination of human features rather like the mythical headless Blemmyes, whose faces, according to Pliny the Elder, were in their chests.

NEWYORKER: The Cosmic Menagerie

However, when a succession of his poems turn out to be adaptations or loose translations of Petronius, Sappho, Pliny the Elder and Boethius, you may find yourself hankering after an original voice even one as extravagant as Whitman's.

ECONOMIST: Audacity and elegy