I haven't read Pliny (though I've read that he had much lower epistemic standards than e.g. Aristotle), but here's a perhaps similar case: I have a volume from

I haven't read Pliny (though I've read that he had much lower epistemic standards than e.g. Aristotle), but here's a perhaps similar case: I have a volume from a "great classics" series with the surviving works of Archimedes, Apollonius, and Nicomachus -- three ancient "mathematicians". I put that word in quotes because though the first two fully merit it, the latter work is embarrassing stuff, hardly more than numerology. Nicomachus lived around Pliny's time, several centuries after the heyday of Greek/Hellenistic science. This tangent's in response to all the downvotes for peterwwillis's opinion -- it seems reasonable to me, except maybe he should've said the standards of pre-Roman Greece.