Adagia 101–200

The story told in Homer of the exchange between Diomede and Glaucus has become a proverb, used whenever we wish to describe an unequal bartering, in which something less valuable is repaid for something worth more, χρύσεα χαλκείων, 'gold for bronze.' For in book 6 of the Iliad, the poet brings in a certain Glaucus the son of Hippolochus, who is ruler of the Lycii, but a braggart and a boaster rather than a fighter. Diomede, on the other hand, is wily and clever. These two came together in a monomachia, that is to meet each other in single combat. But Glaucus, when asked by Diomede who, among gods and men, he might be, made a long speech in which he expounded the line of his family and descent, and alluded to his native country Lycia, and his city Ephyra. Then Diomede, being a Greek, perceived the stupidity of the barbarian from the arrogance of his speech, and judged that he was a man to make fun of rather than kill. So he replied that there had been of old a friendly and familiar relationship between his forefathers and Glaucus' progenitors, and that gifts in token of alliance (which they call xenia) had been reciprocally exchanged between them. Now, sticking his spear into the ground, he began to suggest that they should leave fighting alone, and renew between themselves the old friendship of their ancestors; one would entertain the other, now in Lycia, now in Argos, as soon as they had returned, each into his own country. Meanwhile, if chance brought them together, they were to abstain from attacking each other, but they would preserve the oath of friendship between them - though with others they would abide by the rules of war. 'Now,' he said, 'to make it quite clear that we are maintaining our pact of friendship and this is not treachery, let us exchange our armour, so that the rest of the army may understand that we are linked in the same alliance as our forefathers.' On these words, each leapt from his horse; they took each other by the right hand, and swore fidelity, pledging themselves to friendship and exchanging their armour. But the value of their arms was unequal: Homer says, Then Jove robbed foolish Glaucus of his wits,
To change his arms with Tydeus' son, and give
Gold for the other's bronze, a mad exchange,
Giving a hundred oxen's worth to gain
Hardly the value of nine worthless heifers.
The adage is used throughout the most celebrated authors.
Plato in the Phaedrus makes Socrates reply to Alcibiades in his usual way, saying that he was greedy enough for gain to be willing to exchange bodily beauty for the better moral beauty, 'In truth you are intending to exchange bronze for gold.' (But the translator gives 'brass' instead of 'bronze.') Aristotle too, in the Ethics, book 5, on justice, says: 'One who gives what is his own, as Glaucus gave to Diomede, gold for bronze, as Homer says.' Plutarch writing'Against the Stoics' gives this an elegant twist, when he says that the exchange of Glaucus was not really unequal because iron arms are no less useful to fighters than gold ones; but to prefer bodily well-being to honourable living, or abandon virtue for the sake of physical health, is truly to exchange 'gold for bronze.' Cicero in his Letters to Atticus, book 6: 'Well, there is all answered, not in "gold for bronze" as you asked, but we are giving back like for like.' Cicero indicates that each expression is a proverb, 'like for like' meaning equal balance, 'gold for bronze' meaning unequal exchange. The younger Pliny writes in a letter to Flaccus: 'You will receive arid letters, barefacedly ungrateful ones, not even carrying out the ingenious plan of Diomede in exchanging gifts.' Martial in the Epigrams: `You, Glaucus, were never so stupid, I think, / When you gave gold for bronze.' Aulus Gellius in his Attic Nights, book 2, when comparing and evaluating the translation by Caecilius with Menander himself, whom he had translated, shows how much it fell short of the beauty of the Greek: 'On my word, he says, there was no greater disparity between the armour of Diomede and Glaucus.'
There is also a mention of this adage in the introduction to the Pandects of Roman law, in these words: 'In our times a change in the laws has been devised, like that which in Homer, father of all virtue, Glaucus and Diomede effect between themselves, exchanging dissimilar things.' Thus far Justinian; a man, if I may speak frankly, too full of self-love and unjustifiably conceited, who valued his own patchwork and uneven flights of fancy about the laws higher than so many complete volumes by the most learned men. As to the comment on this passage by some commentator or other, it does not surprise me, but it fills me with shame. What wonder is there, if ignorance is shown here by those who have the whole of antiquity in contempt? But what the legal profession itself ought to be ashamed of is the clownish impudence of one who claims to interpret the law, but is not afraid to adduce the most foolish story, not from the authorities but from his own fancies, in a matter completely unknown. Most of all do I find it shameful and extraordinary to meet doctors who will teach in all seriousness, and as a noble invention - and teach in our universities - a blunder so crass (I won't say merely ignorant) and never see that this figment does not at all square with the words of Justinian. For he means that the useless boring volumes have been abandoned, and better and shorter writings have been adopted, that is to say, a really unequal exchange has been effected. The commentator, whoever he may have been, interpreted this story as meaning that the gifts of the exchangers were equal, but each gave what he had in superfluity and received what he needed.
The adage may therefore be used when a good service or a gift is repaid with a much less valuable gift, or the other way round. Or when someone increases his income but with the loss of his honour; he wins his place, but at the expense of his conscience; he gains a rich fortune, but loses his peace of mind. He found his way into the friendship of his prince, but fell away from the friendship of Christ.

Ὦτα καὶ ὀφθαλμοὶ βασιλέων πολλοί, Many are the eyes and ears of kings, because they watch through their spies what each man says or does. This is referred to by Lucian in the work called On Salaried Posts, and again in Against An Ignoramus. Aristotle also recalls it in the Politics, book 3. This kind of man is called in Greek ôtakoustes, and it was Darius the Younger who first employed them, having no confidence in himself. Dionysius of Syracuse added prosagôgidae, that is 'tale-bearers,' according to Plutarch. The allegory is derived from the fact that kings have spies everywhere, and they are called the king's eyes, with a number of listeners whom he uses as ears. Nor are hands and feet lacking, plenty of them, and even bellies, maybe. See what a monstrous creature a tyrant is, and how much to be feared, since he is supplied with so many eyes (and prying ones too), so many ears (and long ones too, like an ass's), so many hands and feet and bellies, not to mention less decent items. Aristophanes in the Acharnians calls Pseudartabas 'the king's eye,' because it was through him that he knew what was happening. Andromache, in Euripides, speaks differently when she calls her son the eye of her life: 'This one son was left to me, / The eye of life,' because he was the unique delight of her Iife, for nothing is dearer than the eye. Hence we call those we love, our eyes.

What Ovid wrote, 'Do you not know that kings have long hands?' is still a saying in common speech: 'Be wary of kings, their arms are very long,' - because of course through their servants, who are like arms to them, they can do harm even to those who are at a great distance. This can also apply to length of time, because even if kings dissimulate over a long period they usually extract a penalty sometime or other from those with whom they are angry, as Homer witnesses in the Iliad, book 1. Calchas speaks as follows:
A king, angry with a lesser man, is a god,
For though for a moment he swallows his wrath
He still hates on, till vengeance clears his grudge.

Ηλῳ τὸν ἦλον ἐκκρούειν, To drive out one nail by another, and Πάτταλον παττάλῳ ἐξέκρουσας, You drove out one peg with another peg, that is, you expelled one evil by another. Lucian in Philopseudes: 'And as they say, you are driving out one nail with another.' Again in the Apologia: `I am afraid that in addition to the accusation brought against me I might further find myself accused of flattery, knocking out one nail with another, as they say, a smaller with a greater.' Aristotle writes in the last chapter but one of book 5 of his Politics, that wicked men and flatterers are friends to tyrants, for they are the ones who can be useful to them, bad people for bad ends, 'one nail with another, as the proverb says.' Synesius to Olympius: 'Wicked foreigners are attacking the church; attack them. For pegs drive out pegs.' St Jerome to Rusticus the monk: 'The philosophers of the world,' he says, 'are accustomed to drive out an old love by a new love, as one nail with another.' Cicero in book 4 of the Tusculan Questions: 'A cure may often be effected by change of scene, as is done with sick people who are slow in making recovery. Some think too, that the old love can be driven out by a new, as one nail may be driven out by another.' Julius Pollux, book 9, writes that the adage is derived from a certain game, which is called kindalismos; in this a peg stuck into clayey soil is driven out by another peg being struck against it. He quotes the proverbial line: 'one nail with another, peg with peg.'
There is then a place for this adage, not only when we check one fault with another, an evil by another evil, guile with guile, force with force, boldness with boldness or slander with slander; but also when we overcome some troublesome thing by another sort of trouble, as when we subdue the incitements of desire by hard work, or master the anxiety of love by other greater cares. Eusebius against Hierocles: 'He drives out demons, one demon by another as they say,' surely referring to this proverb. And that moral maxim of Publius is not unlike these allusions: 'Never is danger conquered without danger.'

This alludes to the same thought: 'A hard wedge must be sought for a hard knot.' So says St Jerome to Oceanus: 'Meanwhile, as the common proverb says, a hard knot in the tree requires a hard wedge.' This may be used whenever we blunt the power of something bad by malignity of the same kind. It is taken from the woodmen who split oak; when they meet a somewhat stiffer knot in the wood they are unwilling to spoil an axe on it, but insert some wedge, more hard than good. In agreement with this is what is said by Sophocles in Plutarch in his essay 'On Tranquillity of Mind': `The bitter bile they purge with bitter drugs.'

Τὸ κακὸν κακῷ θεραπεύειν, To heal one evil with another, is to use a second evil to cure the first. Sophocles in the Ajax Mastigophoros: 'Peace, peace! Seek not the ill to remedy / With further ill, and make fate's wound yet worse.' Tecmessa warns Ajax not to add to the misfortune of his madness by yet another and greater misfortune, his voluntary suicide. And Herodotus in Thalia: 'Do not cure evil by evil.'

To add sickness to sickness, that is, to double the trouble. Euripides in the Alcestis: 'Do not thrust sickness on the sick. Misfortune weighs me down heavily enough.' There is the same figure in Homer's Iliad, book 14: 'Lest anyone add wound to wound.' Sophocles again: 'You added a second ailment to the first.' Not far removed from this formula is what we find in Homer's Iliad, book 7: αἰνόθεν αἰνῶς, by which we mean, to add even more bitter things to what is already bitter. For so speaks Menelaus: 'Surely this adds dishonour to dishonour.'

Μὴ πῦρ ἐπὶ πῦρ, Do not add fire to fire. This is used by Plato. The sense is clear. Do not join one calamity to another, lest you stir up an even greater commotion. Diogenianus thinks this originated from some charcoalburner, who as the fire burnt up caught fire himself, shouting meanwhile 'Do not add fire to fire.' Plato in the Laws, book 2, forbids boys to drink wine before the age of eighteen, for fear that, if the warmth of the wine is added to the ardour of their age, they may seem to be piling fire on fire. Plutarch too in 'Advice to Bride and Groom': `Let not fire be added to fire.' He makes use of it in some other places, for instance in the 'Advice on Keeping Well': 'Therefore let not fire be added to fire, as the proverb says, nor repletion to repletion, nor neat wine to wine.'

A close relation to the foregoing is, To pour oil on the fire, meaning to supply a bad thing with nourishment and support, so that it may increase more and more. Horace in the Satires: 'Add verses now, that is, add oil to fire,' ie add food for greater madness. St Jerome uses it, to Eustochium: 'Wine and youth fan the fires of pleasure twice over. Why should we add oil to the flames?'

Ελαὶῳ πῦρ σβεννύεις, You quench fire with oil. This is said when remedies are applied which exacerbate the trouble more and more. For instance, when someone tries to overcome sadness of heart by disgusting pleasures. Or if a man wishes to placate someone he has offended, and does it with quarrelling and abuse, though if he had said these things in a peaceful way he would have no difference with his neighbour. This is what Lucian was thinking of in Timon, when he says: `As if one saw a man on fire, trying to put himself out with pitch and oil.'

Γλαῦκας εἰς ἀθήνας, Owls to Athens ('you carry' or 'send' understood). This will fit stupid traders who transport their wares to a place where they are more abundant anyway, as if a man were to take grain to Egypt or saffron to Cilicia. It will be more attractive if the metaphor is transferred to the things of the mind: so-and-so teaches a man wiser than himself, he sends poems to a poet, he gives advice to a man wise in counsel. Cicero to Torquatus: 'But again in writing thus to you I am only sending owls to Athens.' And to his brother: `I will send you the verses for which you ask - owls to Athens.' Aristophanes in the Birds: 'What do you say? Who, pray, brought an owl to Athens?' Lucian uses and explains this in his epistle to Nigrinus. The proverb derives from the fact that there is a species of owl peculiar to Attica, and abundant there. It is said that they live in a place called Laureum in Attica, where there are gold-mines, and hence they are also called Laureotic owls. In old times, this bird was specially beloved by the Athenians, and held to be sacred to Minerva, owing to the grey eyes with which it sees even in the dark, and sees what ordinary birds do not see. Hence it is believed to be a good augury in counsel, and this is what is meant by the proverb 'The owl flies.' It is also said of Minerva that she turned the rash plans of the Athenians to a favourable outcome. However Daemon, quoted by the annotator of Aristophanes, thinks that the phrase 'owls to Athens' does not only come from the fact that there are plenty of owls there, but that the owl used to be stamped on the gold and silver coins of Athens together with the head of Minerva. This coin is called a tetradrachm, four drachmas; earlier on they used to have two-drachma pieces, the distinguishing.mark of which was an ox, whence the proverb comes'An ox on the tongue.' Some relate that there was also a triobolus, which they also call a half-drachma, for the drachma is worth six obols. The coin called the triobol had on one side the effigy of Jove, on the other the owl. Hence it seemed absurd to take an owl to Athens, since the whole place was full of owls. Plutarch refers to the Athenian coinage in his life of Lysander, where he tells the story of the slave who made an enigmatic allusion to a theft of his master's, when he said there were 'many owls sleeping under the tiles,' giving away the fact that there was money hidden there, stamped with the owl.

This is to be found in identical form in the comedies of Plautus and Terence. There is a Greek phrase with the same force: `You are talking to the one who knows all about it,' and 'You are telling the one who is informed.' Plato in the Hippias Major: 'O Socrates, you will speak to one who knows.' Euripides in the Hecuba: 'You speak no news, / But cast this in the teeth of those who know.' Homer in Odyssey 17 and in some other places: 'I know, I understand, you speak to one, / Who comprehends.' Again in Iliad 23 about Nestor admonishing a son: 'He spoke with friendly heart, though knowing well, / These things himself.' Cicero in the Letters to Atticus, book g: 'For our Gnaeus is marvellously anxious for despotism on Sullan lines, I speak to one who knows.'

Aristotle in his book on Divination From Dreams quotes a proverbial line as follows: 'If you throw often enough, your luck will change.' This means that we must often make an attempt, and not be immediately discouraged, if sometimes the result is not much to our liking. It may turn out that a person scores a success after trying over and over again. Aristotle's words are these: 'as the saying goes' and then follows the line. His subject is the dreams of the melancholic type of person, in which he thinks there is no divination, and yet it sometimes happens that some events fulfil their dreams; but since they are prone by a weakness of nature to much and varied dreaming, there is no wonder if coincidences arise or cases which fall out by chance exactly according to their dream. Themistius paraphrases this passage thus (I use the translation of Barbaro because the Greek book was not to hand): 'For those who spend all day throwing sometimes aim right and take the prize. The old adage says: If you throw often, some time you'll throw a Venus.'
There are those who think (and it does not seem absurd to me) that the metaphor comes from archers, not from gamblers, for ballein can also mean to shoot; and that there is a subtle difference in meaning contained in this word, in the first part indicating 'to shoot an arrow,' in the latter 'to strike.' It does happen that those who throw often hit the target occasionally by chance. Though Cicero, in book 2 of the On Divination, talking about the coincidences which I mentioned just now, refers to both metaphors: he says, 'For who is there who spends all day shooting and never hits the target? All night long we dream, there is hardly ever a night when we do not sleep, and should we be surprised when sometimes our dreams come true? What is more uncertain than the throw of the dice? Yet there is no one who throws often who does not sometimes throw a Venus, maybe twice or thrice.' Venus was at one time the luckiest throw in this kind of game, as we see in Suetonius (in a letter of Octavius Augustus to Tiberius): 'During the meal,' he says, 'we played games gerontikos' (like old men), 'both yesterday and today. When the dice were thrown, whoever threw a dog or a six put into the pool one denarius for each die, and the one who threw Venus took the lot.' Thus far Augustus. This proverb will fit also people who are trying to gain their end through chance and not through skill. There is also today a popular joke about the blind man who shot a crow with a dart.

Malum consilium consultori pessimum, Bad advice is worst for the adviser. This is a proverbial line of verse about people who give wrong advice to others, which rebounds on their own head. Indeed, as the Greeks say, Counsel is a sacred thing. Just as it should be freely accepted when the situation demands it, so it should be conscientiously and honestly given if it is needed. Otherwise there will not be lacking a Power which will exact amends from anyone who treacherously violates a sacred and divine thing. Aulus Gellius in his Attic Nights, book 4 chapter 5, thinks that this adage grew out of a certain story which he tells out of the annals of Maximus and the anecdotes of Verrius Flaccus. According to this: `The statue of Horatius Cocles, that valiant man, placed in the comitium at Rome, was struck by lightning. This needed atonement by sacrifice, and augurs were summoned from Etruria, who decided (being themselves of an unfriendly and hostile mind to the Roman people) to take care of this matter by reversing the religious rites; and they wrongly prompted the removal of the statue into a lower site, where because it was surrounded on all sides by other buildings the sun never shone. After they had gained their point that this should be done, they were denounced before the people and betrayed; and when they had admitted their treachery, they were put to death. It was decided that the statue should be removed into a high place, as genuine computations later ascertained dictated, and erected in a loftier place in the square of Vulcan. This action proved favourable and prosperous for the state. So the accusation and punishment of the Etruscan augurs was vindicated, and this aptly-written verse was spread through the whole town and sung by the children: "Who suffers most from bad advice, is the adviser."' Thus far Gellius. Moreover Valerius Maximus, book 7, tells a similar story about Papyrius Cursor, when he was besieging Aquilonia as consul. He wished to go into battle against the enemy, unless there were some deterring factor in the auspices, and consulted the keeper of the chickens, who persuaded him to give battle, although the birds had given a bad augury. When Papyrius found this out he posted the keeper of the chickens in the front line, where he expiated his crime against religion by being transfixed by the first javelin. This is recorded by Livy in his first decade, book 10.
Much the same story is told by Socrates in the Tripartite History. Eutropius the eunuch was seeking a means to punish some men who had taken refuge in a temple, and persuaded the emperor to pass a law forbidding the temple sanctuary to be available for evil-doers. The law was passed, and then it came about that Eutropius himself offended Caesar and took refuge under the altar, from which he was dragged out and executed; his own advice had ruined him.
Virgil tacitly noted the proverb in the Aeneid, book 12, where he says 'Himself Tolumnius the augur fell, / The first to hurl a dart against the foe.' Varro in his Agriculture, book 3 chapter i, quotes it openly in these words: 'In my opinion, it is not only true, as they say, that bad advice is worst for the adviser, but also that good advice is to be regarded as of value both to the one who asks for it and the one who gives it.' Sophocles in the Electra: 'For nothing is more harmful than evil counsel.' Here he takes the harm to belong to the one who is advised. But it is clear that this Latin line (as Gellius too remarks) is a rendering of the Greek verses of Hesiod which we read in the work entitled Works and Days: 'He harms himself who seeks another's harm. / Worst is bad counsel for the counsellor.' Plutarch in his essay 'On How to Study Poetry' thinks the notion in these lines is the same as the teaching of Plato in the Gorgias, where Socrates says that it is worse to inflict an injury than to suffer one, and more grievous to do harm than to receive it. And this opinion is to be found in almost so many words in the Hebrew writer Ecclesiasticus, chapter 27: 'The man who gives evil counsel shall have it recoil on his own head.'
There is a Greek fable on these lines, not without charm, and not altogether unworthy to be included in these notes. The lion was old and ill, and keeping to his den. The other animals came, as in duty bound, to visit their king - all but the fox. The wolf, seizing the opportunity, accused the fox in the lion's presence of lese-majeste, saying 'He thinks nothing of you, all-powerful as you are, and it is out of scorn that he has not been to visit you.' Meanwhile, the fox came in during the wolf's story and heard the last words he spoke. When the lion saw the fox, he immediately flew into a rage against him. The fox, however, asked for time to clear himself. 'Which of all these animals here,' he said, 'has been as useful to you as I have? I have been running hither and thither all over the place and I have found a remedy for your illness from the doctors.' The lion eagerly ordered him to produce this remedy, and he said: 'If you flay a wolf alive and wrap yourself in the skin, you will recover.' The credulous lion at once leapt on the wolf and killed him. When he had been destroyed the cunning fox laughed to see how the evil counsel of the slanderer had recoiled on his own head. Plutarch records a line to this effect: 'Ill planned for others strikes at your own heart.'

Suum cuique pulchrum is a proverbial saying about people who prefer what is their own, whatever it may be like, and rather out of prejudice than judgment. It arises from the usual attitude of mind among the human race, with whom philautia, or self-love, is so deeply rooted that you will find no one so modest, so thoughtful, or so clear-sighted that he will not be blind or suffer from delusions, misled by some mental bias, when it comes to putting a value on something of his own. Have we ever seen anyone born in such a barbarous land that he does not think his home country the best of all? What race is so savage, or has a tongue so uncouth, as not to consider all others beneath it? What bodily form is so brutish as not to appear most beautiful to itself? Aristotle wrote truly in his Rhetoric, book 2: `And besides all men are self-lovers, and whatever is their own is of necessity sweet to each, eg their deeds and words; on this account they are as a rule fond of flatterers.' This is true in general and universally (as Horace says, 'self-love is blind'), but it particularly applies to artists, and among them specially to poets, and also to lovers. Aristotle wrote most rightly in his Ethics, book 4, that every craftsman is greatly delighted by his own work, as if these were things sprung from himself. Poets love their own poems as parents love their children. A work is to the craftsman something like the offspring of the mind, and Socrates said that the midwife was a better judge of progeny than the mother herself. It is the way of loving husbands to vie with each other in singing the praises each of his own bride. An outstanding example of this is found in the youthful Tarquins. Even today there is a shrewd and common saying, 'there's no such thing to be found as an ugly sweetheart,' because to him who loves them even homely things must seem very beautiful. Theocritus expressed this idea with elegance in his sixth Eclogue: '- for often in love, O Polyphemus, the least fair seems fair.' Plato expressed this proverb in the Lysis, but contrariwise: 'There is a danger lest, according to the old proverb, that should be dear which is beautiful,' as if we should not find a thing beautiful because it is dear, but dear because it is beautiful. To this belongs what Cicero writes in the fifth book of the De finibus: 'Everyone is most influenced by his own particular interest,' and again in book 1 of the De officiis: 'Each of whom, engrossed in his own profession, undervalued that of the other.'
However, it can be forgiven if that common self-love goes just so far as to make each of us tend a little to favour our own children, our own arts or business or discoveries, our own country, so long as it does not sweep us to that point of blindness which makes us libel the virtues of others and flatter our own vices, giving them the name of virtues - so that we see ourselves like Suffenus in Catullus or Maevius in Horace. In his Epistles Horace observes this failing: 'While my faults please me,' he says, 'or deceive me in the end.' At this place Porphyrio points out that Horace is alluding to the widespread opinion that men not only fail to be sorry for their faults but actually find them pleasing. He says there was a well-known Greek proverb on this subject, but this proverb is lacking in the texts owing to the fault of the copyists. Another remark of Horace applies to this too: 'Base vices dupe the blind, or even please: / Balbinus loves the polyp that on Agne's nose he sees.' To Balbinus, a stupid lover, even the pol.yp of his darling Agne seemed to smell sweet. (A polyp is an affection of the nostrils which smells strong, like the goaty smell of the armpits; so we talk about sufferers from the polyp and the goat.) Cicero to Atticus, book 14: 'My dear fellow, let me give you a general rule on matters in which I have a fair amount of experience. There was never a poet or orator yet who thought anyone better than himself. This applies even to the bad ones. How much more to one so gifted and erudite as Brutus! I actually made the experiment the other day in connection with the edict. I composed a draft at your request. I liked mine, he preferred his own. Indeed, when, at his own entreaty, I might almost say, I addressed to him an essay on the best style of oratory, he wrote not only to me but to you too, that he could not agree with my preference. So pray let every man write as best suits himself. "For every man his own bride, mine for me. For every man his own love, mine for me." Not a very elegant distich. Atilius wrote it, a most clumsy versifier.' Thus far Cicero. It appears from his words that the two verses, 'For every man' etc come from some play by Atilius. Again, Cicero says in the Tusculan Questions, book 5: 'He was, in fact, an enthusiastic musician, a tragic poet too - how good, matters little: for in this art, more than in others, it somehow happens that everyone finds that what is his own is beautiful. So far I have never known the poet (and I have been friends with Aquinius) who did not think himself the best; this is the way with them: You are charmed with your work, I with mine.' The same idea is expressed by Plautus in the Stichus, in different words but with great elegance: 'To every queen her king is fair, to every bridegroom his bride.' With this we can also connect that line of Theocritus: 'Nor am I so unbeautiful, if truth be told.' And Virgil imitating it:
Nor am I so ill-favoured; once of late
I saw myself reflected on the shore
When dying winds had left the water calm.
Horace alludes to the adage more openly in one of his epistles:
You are keeping them for Jove's ears.
Beautiful in your own eyes, you believe that you
And you only, drip the whole honey of poetry
'Beautiful in your own eyes' means self-admiring. This phrase is little different from what St Augustine says in several places, for instance in Letter 48, drawing it from a certain Tychonius: `What we wish is sacred.' (It is a half-line from an heroic poem.) One could wish that this saying were not so applicable to the ways of some people today, who lay claim to piety more arrogantly than ever the Pharisees did, and, while they are steeped in vices neither to be tolerated nor mentioned, show astonishing self-satisfaction in their savage criticism of the way other men live.

The well-turned phrase of Lucian in his Praise of the Homeland has the look of a proverb, and carries on the same thought: 'And the smoke of his fatherland will seem brighter to him than fire elsewhere.' Philostratus in Ariadne: 'Theseus loves, but he loves the smoke of Athens; Ariadne he has not yet seen, nor has he ever known her'. In Homer, Ulysses longs to see the smoke rising from his native place, hence the proverb. So we read in the Odyssey, book 1: 'Longing to see the smoke rising from his native land.'

Viva vox, The living word, was the term used in old times for anything not written, but taken straight from the mouth of the speaker, lifelike, as it were, and effectual. Often the term 'living' is applied to things when they are in their native condition, not artificial, as 'from the living marble,' and 'seats cut in the living rock.' Natural things, in fact, have some quality of genuine grace which no artistic imitation can hope to copy. Writing is indeed a kind of voice, but as it were an artificial one, somehow mimicking the real voice. Gesture and movement are lacking; in a word, life. Delivery, as Quintilian tells us, is the life of oratory, invention of the subject-matter is its bones; order takes the place of sinews, elocution is flesh, skin and colouring, memory stands for breath, and added to all that there is the art of speaking, pronunciatio, which is like the movement of life. For there is no more certain proof of life than movement. So they talk of 'living streams' and 'quicksilver.' On the other hand things are called dead when they are torpid and inactive. Cicero says in Tusculan Questions, book 2, `Certainly many examples for imitation can be obtained from reading, but fuller nourishment comes from the living voice, as they say, especially the voice of the teacher.' So in the Letters to Atticus, book z: 'Where are those now who talk of the living voice? How much better I see what it was all about from your letter than from his speech!' But what Cicero gives here in a mutilated and shortened form, some people extend from their own invention, as 'that greater vividness is found in the living voice.' The younger Pliny in a letter to Nepos: 'Besides, the living voice, as they say, has more power to move us. For even if the things you read are more acute, yet those which are impressed on the mind by pronunciation, expression, appearance, and gesture of the speaker penetrate more deeply.' Seneca, in Letter 5: 'The living voice and the intimacy of a common life will help you more than the written word.' St Jerome in a general preface: 'The living voice has some kind of hidden force, and sounds more strongly in the pupils' ears when it comes out of the mouth of the teacher.' So far Jerome. And hence the celebrated phrase of Aeschines, about Demosthenes: 'But what if you had heard the beast himself?' And that other one: 'In the writings of Demosthenes, a great part of Demosthenes is lacking.'

What we have just mentioned is also used by Aulus Gellius, but he adds another and opposite thought. 'Since there was a dearth of the living voice, as they say, I learnt from what they call silent teachers.' By silent teachers he meant books, which do indeed speak to us, as Socrates says in Plato, but they are no good at answering our questions when in doubt. So good books are not inelegantly called silent masters. This is apt, because dumb people speak by nods and signs, not with the voice; and so books talk with us at times by means of marks and shapes which bear a meaning. Just as spoken words, according to Aristotle, are a kind of image of the meaning in the mind, so the shapes of letters can properly be called reflections, as it were, of the sounds of speech. Nor is it to be wondered at if that direct image of the heart proves a better way of reproducing and communicating the soul's intentions than that other method, writing, which imitates the imitation rather than the thing itself. The question is often asked, and very sensibly, which is the more useful in the acquisition of knowledge, to use the living voice or silent masters. Each has its own particular advantages. What we learn from books is often more recondite, and there is more of it; for each reader learns as much as his quickness of mind will allow and the faithfulness of his memory retain. There is also the point that these teachers are never tired of sharing their efforts with us. Their store is as rich as it is ready. They are read at leisure, one can think them over in private. One can look more closely at individual parts, go back over the ground and ponder it.
On the other hand what we learn from listening to a teacher costs us less in mental effort, in eyesight, in health - particularly if the one who speaks is someone we admire and love. What we learn in this way sinks more deeply into the mind, stays with us longer, is recalled more promptly. So the best plan will be to combine one type of study with the other, and when there is ample opportunity for oral instruction prefer to listen rather than read, always given that the person to whom you are listening is of moderately sound learning. Where this is not so, you may gladly turn to books (but they must be the best books) as to something of no less value. To conclude, I may add that books are called silent teachers by the same metaphor as Cicero uses when he calls the law 'a silent judge,' the judge a 'speaking law'; and Plutarch when he calls poetry a'speaking picture' and a picture `silent poetry.'

A proverb in common use among countrymen in the old days, which circulated like a riddle: Forehead before occiput. This is the way they conveyed in Antiquity that a man's business is better looked after when he himself is present and attending to it. 'Before' here means better, more effective than; who could be ignorant anyhow that the forehead is the front part of the head and the occiput the back part? Although this riddling quality of the saying gives it a certain charm, and owing to its age it was treated like an oracle. It can be found in Cato On Agriculture, chapter 4: 'If you have built well, you will come more freely and frequently, and your farm will be all the better for it. Fewer mistakes will be made, and you will get a larger return: forehead before occiput.' Pliny too says much the same thing in his History of the World, book 18 chapter 5: 'But the man who has a good house to live in visits his property oftener, and the master's forehead does it more good than his occiput - so they say, and truly.' Again in the same book, chapter 6: 'And our forebears used to say that the master's eye is the best fertilizer for his ground.' Aristotle in his Economica, book 1, seems to trace this saying to a certain Persian, and connects with it a similar image once produced by a Libyan. But I had better quote his words, in case anyone regrets their absence: 'And what the Persian and the Libyan said to one another will be rightly kept in mind. For one of them, asked what food best keeps a horse in condition, replied The master's eye. And the Libyan, when asked what was the best manure, answered The master's footsteps.' Both of them meant that the presence of the master was the most important thing in the successful conduct of affairs.
Similarly Columella thinks it is a bad thing for a farm to be often let, and a worse thing when the tenant is a townsman who intends to leave the cultivation to his workpeople and not attend to it himself. This is rather like the story told by Gellius, about the fat sleek man with the lean stringy horse; when asked about it he said no one need be surprised if he was in better trim than his horse, since he saw to his own meals himself and the horse was looked after by a slave. Plutarch in his essay 'On the Education of Children' says: 'Here and there one finds an elegant proverb coming from the stable: that nothing fattens the horse like the King's own eye.' The same simile is used by Aeschylus in his tragedy the Persians, when he calls the master's presence the eye of the house: 'The eye of the house I take to be the presence of the master.' In the same vein Livy has a happy phrase: 'There is not often much success for the things you do through the eyes of others.' Terence in his Eunuchus has the same idea when he says 'That's what happens when the masters are away,' meaning that when the masters are absent the servants are slack in their work and lax in their morals; in a word, all these add up to the same thing; if you want a thing well done, you must do it yourself, and not trust much in the diligence of others.
The person who should most take note of this is the prince, if he really has the mind of a prince and not of a pirate, that is if he has the public good at heart. But in these days bishops and kings do everything through other people's hands, ears and eyes, and think the common good is what concerns them least, kept busy as they are with their own private possessions or entirely bent on pleasure.

Similarity is the mother of good will, and links people together by habit and way of life. So we see young people liking to come together and old men congregating with old men, scholars having a taste for meeting with other scholars, ruffians getting together with other ruffians and drinkers with drinkers, sailors taking to sailors, rich men hobnobbing with other rich men, and everywhere like being attracted to like. There are a number of proverbs expressing this idea among the Ancients, such as ἥλιξ ἥλικα τέρπει, Everyone loves his own age. Cicero uses it in the Cato major: 'Like readily comes together with like, as the old proverb has it.' For the first beginnings of intimacy come from equality in age, in Greek homelikia. Homer alludes to this in Odyssey 15: 'Since we are of the same age.' Plato was thinking of it in the Republic, book 1, where Cephalus, who admits that he has reached 'the threshold of old age,' says 'For often many of us who are more or less of the same age come together, keeping the old proverb.' Aristotle in his Rhetoric, book 2, considers what is most pleasing to whom, and writes that'in general those who are related or similar in kind naturally take pleasure in each other, such as man and man, horse and horse, adolescent and adolescent, and that this is the sense of proverbs generally quoted, Everyone loves his own age, Like will to like, Beast knows beast, Jackdaw sits by jackdaw, and others of the same kind.' Theognis says that there is close friendship between contemporaries, neighbours and old men: 'All these share mutual respect and love, neighbours, equals in strength and old men.' There is some connection between this proverb and what Empedocles says in Aristotle's On the Soul, book 1, that the soul 'is something made by combination out of all elements'; indeed that it is in itself something of them, and recognizes each of them, for the reasons that it has some affinity with each individual element. Hence Plato says in the Timaeus that the soul consists of elements. The lines of Empedocles are as follows:
For by earth we see earth, and by water water,
By ether we see divine ether, by fire destructive fire,
By love sweet love, and hate by baneful hate.
At first we despaired of finding any better translation of these lines than that of Argyropoulos (although I suspect that in the first line the copyists have changed undam into aquam). Later, at the request of friends I have added my own, such as it is. (Argyropylos gives two words for one, for the sake of the metre, and leaves out two epithets. Then he spoils the grace of repetition, by using aquam and undam, discordia and lite, to say nothing of the harshness of the collocation in Terram nam. And he added the adverb sane on his own. I have added an epithet to 'love,' but such as the poet himself would have added if the metre had permitted, as he added his own epithet to the contrasting word. I am not saying this to cast aspersions on a man whose scholarship deserves the thanks of scholars, but so that young readers may profit by the criticism - for this is mainly written for them.)
One of the philosophers, Zeno I think, relates (in Augustine) that the soul herself is a self-moving harmony, and for this reason can be caught up and carried away by harmonious things (this is its nature) just as children too are affected by the modes of music through some natural affinity, even when they have no idea what music is. Aristotle produces this definition in the very place I have just quoted, without giving the author's name.

Ομοιον ὁμοιῳ φίλον, Like rejoices in like. Aristotle in the Ethics, book 8: 'Like seeks like,' and in book 9: 'Like is a friend to like.' Hence that other phrase: 'Similarity is the mother of affection.' So where there is absolute similarity there is the most violent love, and this is the meaning of the fable of Narcissus. Agathon in the Symposium of Plato: `For the old saying is right, that like always cleaves to like.' Plutarch in the essay called 'How To Tell A Friend From A Flatterer,' quotes the following iambic lines:
The speech of age is pleasant to the old,
Boy suits with boy, woman with woman too,
A sick man with the sick, and one in grief
With one who suffers is in dear accord.
Diogenes Laertius, showing that Plato imitated some things from the writings of Epicharmus, quotes his saying that 'a bitch seems most beautiful to a dog, a cow to a bull, a she-ass to an ass, a sow to a boar,' I have said elsewhere 'To every queen her king is fair.' Plato in the eighth book of the Laws: 'We say that like is a friend to like as far as virtue is concerned, and equal to equal.' But the adage can rightly be transferred also to those who are linked by a likeness in vice. Directed against those is the line of Catullus 'Well agreed are the abominable profligates,' and Martial's 'Worst of wives and worst of husbands, I am surprised that you do not agree,' and Juvenal's 'Great is the concord among catamites.'

This adage may be derived from Homer's Odyssey, book 17, line 217, where Melanthius the goatherd sees Eumaeus the swineherd bringing Ulysses with him, tattered and torn, and makes a jest about both of them, as if the two of them were well matched: 'Now the worthless leads the worthless; / Thus always God brings like to like.' Aristotle in the Ethics, book 8, quotes as a proverb `Whence they say "like will to like."'

Αεὶ κολοιὸς πρὸς κολοιόν ἱζάνει, Jackdaw always sits by jackdaw. This proverb, an iambic line, is found in Diogenianus, and it is noted in the book of Aristotle's Rhetoric which I have just quoted, where he calls it to mind among other proverbs of the same nature, and also in book 8 of his Ethics: `And jackdaw to jackdaw.' (This is a trochaic dimeter in Greek, no doubt taken from some poet.) Gregory made use of the adage with some elegance in a letter to Eudoxius: 'That jackdaw sits by jackdaw you hear the proverb say.' Varro in book 3 of his Agriculture attests that gatherings of jackdaws have long been known, whence Plutarch says, in 'On Having Many Friends,' 'It is neither like a herd of cattle nor like a flock of daws.' The bird's name in Greek comes from the word kolao, I glue together, and Varro thinks with him, tattered and torn, and makes a jest about both of them, as if the two of them were well matched: 'Now the worthless leads the worthless; / Thus always God brings like to like.' Aristotle in the Ethics, book 8, quotes as a proverb 'Whence they say "like will to like."'

When Aristotle added (in the place I have just mentioned) 'and whatever other proverbs of this kind there are,' he was no doubt thinking of a passage in the ninth Idyll of Theocritus: 'The cricket is dear to the cricket, the ant to the ant, the hawk to the hawk.' The social behaviour of the ant is well known, and the concert of the crickets.

An exception to the foregoing must be made for those who are engaged in the same trade, because with them the similarity of their occupation brings about more competition than good will. Hesiod, in his poem entitled Works and Days, gave several metaphorical descriptions of this mutual envy, but without condemning competition between craftsmen - in fact, he approved and praised it. The poet had set forth two kinds of emulation, one useful and honourable for mankind, the other nasty and pernicious. The latter, he said, drove men to quarreling and warfare as they strove for wealth and honours, while the former encouraged them to industry and creditable skills by putting before them examples to follow. He describes honourable emulation in the words below. I translate these very exquisite lines only to make them intelligible; for hardly anyone could achieve their beauty, and certainly not I.
Neighbour envies neighbour, to see him work hard and prosper -
Richer and richer he gets; and good is this strife for mortals.
And potter vies with potter and one smith vies with another;
Beggar is jealous of beggar and singer of singer is jealous.
These lines are often made use of by different authors, and notably by Aristotle in the second book of his Ethics. Again, in book 8 of the same work he quotes them as proverbial: 'They say that all such men behave like potters to one another,' meaning that they are jealous, with an allusion of course to the adage in Hesiod. Again in the third book of the Rhetoric, `And so they say, potter vies with potter.' He quotes there a line from some poet or other: `And so close cousinship brought jealousy.' But there is a likeness which Plutarch in his 'Table-talk' calls machimos, that is, quarrelsome and bellicose, - cocks have it, and sophists, mendicants, poets, singers; and for this reason he excludes this kind of men from meeting at feasts, for fear that quarrels should break out. There is another sort of similarity, which he calls epieikes, reasonable, like that between jackdaws. To this kind belong sailors, tillers of the soil, hunters, wrestlers, who may properly recline at the same table. To these we may add lovers, unless they happen to love the same girl.

Ο Κρῆς τὸν Κρῆτα, Cretan ... Cretan; one may understand whatever verb is suitable, like Cretan incites Cretan, tries to trick him, or something of the sort, whenever it is a matter of one rogue having dealings with another rogue, or one trickster with another. The adage is taken from the ways of the Cretans, which were severely criticized in Antiquity.

Κρῆς πρὸς Ἀιγινήτην A Cretan (acts) with a man of Aegina. This has the same meaning, applied to two equally bad characters who hoax each other. For the Aeginetans also had a bad reputation in old days; some think it was against them that the oracle was delivered, 'Neither third nor fourth.'

Αλωπεκίζειν πρὸς ἑτέραν ἀλώπεκα Confronted with a fox be fox yourself. A proverbial iambic line: be cunning with the cunning. Horace says, 'May the designs that lie hidden in the fox never fool you.' Aristophanes in the Wasps: 'It is not right to play the fox.' If I have translated the Greek word by vulpinari, it is not to be despised as a coinage of my own or a neologism, because Nonius Marcellus quotes it out of Varro; and Varro was bold to say vulpinari for the Greek alopekizein, to play the fox, just as Horace used iuvenari, to behave like a young fool, for neanizein; see the proverb battarizein.

Πρὸς Κρῆτα Κρητίζειν, To play Cretan against a Cretan, ie use lying against a liar. Plutarch used it in the life of Lysander: 'Play Cretan against the Cretan, as the saying is,' and again in the life of Paulus Aemilius, 'It was not at all hidden from those who knew him well that he was playing Cretan with the Cretans.' The vanity of the Cretans, as for instance about the sepulchre of Jove which they claimed to have, with many other lies of the same sort, became a common proverb; the line of Epimenides quoted by the Apostle Paul testifies to this: 'Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, slow bellies.' St Jerome in his commentary on this Epistle indicates that this line is to be found in a work of Epimenides entitled On Oracles. Hence Paul also calls him a prophet, either in jest or because the subject warrants it. The opening of this poem, 'Cretans are always liars,' was used by the poet Callimachus of Cyrene in a hymn which he wrote against the Cretans and in honour of Jove, accusing them of absurdity because they boasted that they could show Jove's tomb, although he was immortal. Thinking of this, Ovid remarks, 'Cretans do not invent everything.' Hence the verb kretizein, to play Cretan, is used in Greek to mean 'tell lies.'
Suidas gives another origin for the adage, when he writes that the Cretan Idomeneus, who was given the job of distributing money collected from the spoils taken from the enemy, allocated far the best part of it to himself. So it seems to fit those who defraud others and always consider their own advantage more zealously. He thinks the adage is applicable to those who try in vain to use lies against a specialist in lying. As the common saying goes, it is most difficult to rob thieves, and equally difficult to get away with lying to liars.

Diogenianus list something very similar to this: πρὸς κάρα καρίζεις, You are Carizing with a Carian, that is to say, you are acting the rustic with a rustic, talking barbarous language to a barbarian, or stupidly to the stupid. The Carians are a people of Phrygia, whom we shall mention in another place; their way of life gave rise to several proverbs.

Ο κρῆς τὴν θάλασσαν, The Cretan (supply, is ignorant or frightened of ) the sea. This proverb is quoted and explained at the same time by Strabo in his Geography, book 10, where he writes that the Cretans took a foremost place through their skill in navigation and their experience in maritime matters; and hence a proverb grew up in ancient times, `a Cretan knows nothing of the sea,' applied to people who pretend to be ignorant of something they are particularly skilled in. For how could the Cretans, island-dwellers as they are, be ignorant of the sea which completely surrounds them? Aristides also made use of this in Pericles, The Cretan and the sea, and Zenodotus writes that it is to be found in Alcaeus. It is like what Horace says in his Epistle to Octavius, 'Even I who say I never wrote a line am found a bigger liar than a Parthian.' This is because the Parthians are at their fighting best when they simulate flight.

In a number of authors we find proverbs about bringing things to a close, and one of these is Ad umbilicum ducere, To bring to the scroll-end, meaning to complete and finish a book. The 'navels,' or scroll-ends, according to Porphyrion, are those ornaments made of bone, wood or horn, in the shape of the human navel, which were added to a finished scroll, and hence the proverbial metaphor 'he got to the navel,' that is, to the end. Horace in the Epodes:
For the god, the god forbids me
To bring to an end the swift measures begun,
The song promised of yore.

Martial in the fourth book of the Epigrams:
Ho there! 'tis enough, my little book.
We have now come to the very end; you still
Want to go on further and keep on going.
Again in book 5: '[a book] which, spruce with cedar oil and purple, has fully grown with its black knobs.' Again in book 3:
Now you may strut abroad, anointed with cedar-oil,
And bright with the twin garnish of your brows,
Run riot with your painted bosses.
Again in book 11: 'You return me my book unrolled to its very horns, /And as if, Septitianus, you had read it through.' I am not sure whether this proverb could be transferred to something other than a book or a poem - it might strain the metaphor.

A more general metaphor is 'to put on the coping-stone,' meaning to finish something in all its parts. You will find instances in Cicero, De officiis, book 3, and sometimes in the letters of Pliny. This comes from builders, who on finishing a building, usually place some sign of completion on the top. Just as the foundation is the very beginning of their work, so the coping-stone is the last point of the finished building. So 'to lay the foundations' comes to mean to start on something, and 'to put on the coping' means to complete something, to add the final touch, as they call it. This is close to the Greek expression, 'he set down the colophon' (full stop).

To add the final touch has the same sense, and is obviously taken from craftsmen who rough out a first attempt or mock-up of the work and call this the first touch [ prima manus], then shape it more exactly, and finally polish it with the utmost care; and this they call the suprema or summa manus, the final touch. Ovid says, `No patient reading will those works receive, / Unless it's known they lack the final touch.' Just afterwards he uses the 'file' for the same meaning: 'Taken untimely from the anvil, that; / My writings lack the last touch of the file.' Seneca to Lucilius: 'Devotees of wine are particularly : pleased by the last drink, the one which sinks them, which puts the final touch to their intoxication.' By the same metaphor we say, nothing is lacking but the'extreme' touch. Instances of this are too frequent in literature for any other references to be necessary.

This comes in the same category: to add a last act to the play means to bring to a termination, arising from the poets who write comedies and tragedies and cut up their plays into acts. So Horace says, 'Five acts, no more.' They usually take most care with the last act, as Cicero writes to his brother Quintus: 'I end my letter by imploring and urging you that - after the fashion of good poets and hard-working actors - you should take particular pains with the last phase and finale of your office and employment; so that this third year of your rule may, like the third act of a play, be recognized as having been the most highly finished and brilliantly staged of the three.' Again to Atticus, book 13: 'At this point the play was over, but I wanted to fill up the page.' In his Cato Cicero transfers the metaphor to the end of life. In the same way Apuleius in his Florida, book 3, speaking of Philemon the playwright, says 'They announced that the poet Philemon, who was waited for to finish off a fictitious plot on the stage, had already completed the true story at home. For he had already said "Farewell, and give me your applause" to human affairs.' I think the remark of Lucilius in Nonius belongs to this class: 'It is for a stitcher of patches to sew his last bit of patchwork best.'

We call the outcome of anything, in proverbial language, the catastrophe or denouement. Speaking of proverbial metaphors, I have pointed out that each discipline or type of craftmanship has its own set of terms, which are used out of superstition, I might say, as is usually done in rites and ceremonies and magical incantations; and when these are diverted to another use, they take on the look of a proverb. For instance, from military discipline we get to sound the retreat, to give ground, the first line, they fell back on the old guard [triarii]. From music, we get prelude for preface, or for the start of something; top string, lowest string, for loud or deep tone; to strike the same wrong note, for to make the same mistake often. Every plot, as Donatus shows, is divided into three parts, protasis, epitasis and catastrophe. The protasis is the first excitement, swelling as it goes on. The epitasis is a flurry of complications. The catastrophe is a sudden transformation of the whole thing. So Lucian elegantly calls the outcome or result of an affair its catastrophe in several places, and particularly in his work On Salaried Posts: 'And in the end of all what the catastrophe of the drama is' (that is, what outcome there is to their servitude). And in Alexander the False Prophet: 'This is the conclusion of the tragedy of Alexander.' And in the Life of Peregrinus: 'I see you again, good Cronius, laughing at the denouement of the play.'

When we mean the whole of something, we say From head to heel. There are three ways of using this proverbial expression. It may refer to the body, the mind, or the circumstances; the two last are the more pleasing, doubtless because they are more metaphorical. Homer applies it to the body, Iliad 23: 'From head to feet,' and so does Theocritus in the Boukoliskos: 'And she looked me over from head to toe.' Plautus in the Epidicus, 'Look, Epidicus, from the toenail to the topmost hair.' Horace: 'Beautiful from head to heel.' Cicero, in his Pro Roscio comoedo, says: 'Does not his very head, and those completely shaven eyebrows, seem to breathe out malice, and proclaim cunning? If any indication is given to men by the physical appearance, without words, does he not seem entirely made up of fraud, deceit and lies, from his very toenails to the top of his head?'
Aristophanes in the Plutus applies it to circumstances: 'Listen then, since I shall tell you the whole thing, From the feet up to the head', though here the comic poet amusingly transposes head and feet. St Jerome, in the preface to the book called in Hebrew the Book Of Days, says: 'With his help I collated it from the head, as they say, down to the last toenail.'
This can be transferred to the mind, in this way: 'I will describe his ways and his mind, in a word the very man himself, from the topmost hair, as they say, to the tip of his very heel'; though the instance from Cicero we have just quoted seems to belong to the mind more than to the body. The adage is used differently again when we speak of the 'head of the business,' meaning the chief originator, just as when we speak of the fount of something. Terence says 'You are the head of this affair,' and the Greeks το κεφάλαιον τοῦ πράγματος, 'the gist (head) of the matter.' Lucian in the Tyrannicide talks about the 'head of tyranny,' and Plato in the third book of the Laws said 'the fount of sedition.' Then we have 'to arrive at the heel, in the heel of the work, at the very heel of your letter'; 'to start from the very head,' 'to run back from heel to head,' and other forms of this way of speaking, which are to be found in all the authors. Plutarch 'Against the Stoics': 'From the opening and beginning right to the crown.'

Cursu lampada tradere, To hand on the torch in the race, is a proverbial metaphor, meaning to pass on the part you have played, as it were, to different people in succession. Lucretius: 'Like runners they hand on the torch of life.' The reference is to living creatures which propagate themselves by succession, so that life is passed on from one to another turn by turn. Varro in his Agriculture, book 3 chapter 15: 'But, my dear Merula, for fear that our friend Axius may learn some natural history while listening to this, as I have made no mention of profit, I am handing over to you the torch in the race.' By these words he indicates that he is handing over the other part of his speech to Merula, and the latter takes his turn in speaking. Lucretius seems to have imitated Plato, who writes in the Laws, book 6, that the citizens should take care in begetting and educating children, so that they may pass on, like a burning torch, that life which they themselves received from their forebears. That phrase of Persius comes in here: 'You who are before me, why beg me to hand on the torch in the race?' Aristophanes in the Frogs: 'But the torch no one can carry yet, / Because of lack of training.' He is rebuking the idleness and inertia of the citizens. The commentator adds here that the ancients used to carry torches in three sets of games, those sacred to Prometheus, to Vulcan, and to Athena (the Panathenaia). Prometheus is believed to have been the first to institute this kind of games, in which the runners carried lighted torches. Each runner when tired handed the torch to the next, and he in his turn, wearied, gave it to another, and so it was successively handed on, thus symbolically re-enacting the story of Prometheus; and how, as he flew down to earth, he kept perpetually waving the fennel-stalk in which he had taken some of the celestial fire, to prevent its going out again. Plato mentions this in the Republic, book 1, indicating that torch-processions were held in honour of Minerva too.
Pausanias, however, gives lengthier description of the ceremony of these games in his Attica. Herodotus also recalls it, but briefly, in Urania, where he says that this custom was established by the Persians; horses and men were posted at intervals and one handed on the despatches to another, like torches, so that they might be passed along more quickly. The writer of the Rhetorica ad Herennium says: 'It is not the same thing as in the palaestra, where the runner who receives the burning torch is swifter as he takes up the race than the one who hands it over; if it were the same, the general who takes over the army would be a better general than the one who gives it up. In the race it is the tired man who hands the torch to the fresh one; here it is the experienced general who gives the army to a raw successor.' Thus a man will be said to 'hand on the torch' when, tired out or at the end of his time, he gives up his office to be carried on by others. And on the other hand they also 'hand on the torch' who, in the words of Terence, 'help each other out,' and render assistance one to the other.

Αρχὴ ἥμισυ παντός, Well begun is half done. This adage signifies that it is in the tackling of a task that the greatest difficulty lies. It is a half-line from Hesiod, quoted by Lucian in Hermotimus. Aristotle also refers to it in the Politics, book 5, and Plato in the Laws, book 6: 'For in proverbs it is said that the beginning is half of a whole action, and everyone always praises a good beginning. But, as it seems to me, it is more than half, and no one has ever praised sufficiently a beginning well made.' Suidas quotes from a certain Marinus: 'That was the beginning for us, and not only the beginning, nor as the proverb has it half of the whole, but the complete thing itself.' Aristotle in the Ethics, book 1: 'The beginning is said to be more than half of the whole.' Horace in the Epistles: `Who sets about hath half performed his deed; / Dare to be wise.' Ausonius: 'Begin, for half the deed is in beginning; / Begin the other half, and you will finish.' Plutarch, in his essay 'On How to Study Poetry,' quotes these verses from Sophocles: 'For someone who begins well every deed, /'Tis likely that's the way the end will be.'

Αρχὴν ἰᾶσθαι πολὺ λώϊον ἠὲ τελευτήν, Doctoring is better first than last. Suidas quotes this as a proverb. Theognis says the same thing: 'Apply the treatment when disease begins.' Similarly, Persius, in the third Satire: 'In vain you'll see them cry for hellebore, / When the sick flesh swells up; forestall the ill.' And also Ovid: 'Doctoring comes too late, / When evils have grown strong through long delay.' The adage warns us that it takes less trouble to remove an evil at the beginning, when it is still fresh, than after it has existed for a long time; that children must be sheltered from vices when they are at a tender and tractable age, and animosities must be healed at once, lest they grow into strife. The smallest ills must be shunned, from which greater often spring up. Occasions must be avoided which are likely to bring to birth any kind of evil.

This is a country adage, but not unworthy to be included in this book: Do not hesitate to plant. It warns us not to be lazy about attempting any of those things from which a great result can come for very little outlay, if not at once, at least later on; if not for ourselves, at least for posterity. Columella in the twelfth book of his Agriculture: 'And so that common saying about planting trees is used by countrymen, "Do not hesitate to plant."' For building often exhausts an income, commerce depends on chance and many a man has lost by it; similarly most things have their disadvantages or dangers, but from the planting of trees the greatest advantage is to be obtained, and it is done at little cost. Virgil expresses this figuratively when he says in the second book of the Georgics: 'Do we still doubt to plant, and spend our care?'

There is a proverbial allegory in Cicero, 'to put on winged sandals,' meaning to get ready to flee, and to be willing, as it were, to take flight somewhere: so he writes to Atticus, book 14, 'That lot are scared of peace, every man of them. So I had best find wings for my boots.' It comes from Homer, who often puts wings on the heels of Mercury as he takes flight:
Straight then he shod his feet with lovely sandals,
Golden, ambrosial-scented and they bore him
Through limpid air and over boundless lands
Swift as the wind.
It is this passage in Homer which Virgil more or less adapts in the Aeneid, book 4:
And first he buckled on
His golden shoes, which high o'er earth and sea
Winged him along as rapid as the wind.
So we say those who prepare to run away 'put wings on their feet.' For the very terms avolare and revolare [fly off, fly back] are often used by Cicero for 'to flee' and `to return.'

Tricae and apinae, stuff and nonsense, were popular names for trifling worthless things. Martial: 'The games I played in youth and childhood once, / My nonsense-tricks,' and again "Tis stuff and nonsense - worse, if worse there be.' Hence they used tricari, which is the same metaphor, of wasting time on nonsense. Cicero has it in several places, for instance in the Letters to Atticus, book 15: 'He's full of nonsense of course, like the man he is.' And again: 'Balbus is full of nonsense.' This adage arose from an actual event. Trica and Apina were once towns in Apulia, as Pliny shows in his Natural History, book 3 chapter iz, where he is speaking of the bays on the coast of Europe: 'There Diomede wiped out tribes called Monadi and Dardi, and two towns which proverbially have become a byword, Apina and Trica.' Stephanus indicates that Trica was a town in Thessaly, the name being derived from Trica, a daughter of Peneus. Nonius Marcellus takes tricae to mean hindrances and complications, from the Greek word for hair, in which chickens are wrapped up; hence our words 'extricate' and 'intricate.' Lucilius, whom he also quotes, has a word tricones for those whose nonsense wastes people's time, and tricinus quaestus for late or meagre, and tricae Attellanae in Varro for very complicated nonsense. I would not rule out the allusion to hair, but the derivation from the town is more likely to be right. Pliny, book 8 chapter 48, points out that sheep are valued for shortness in the leg and well-clad underparts, and those with bare underparts he called apicae, as rejects to be weeded out.

Κωρυκαῶος ἠκροάζετο, A Corycaean was listening. This is used when someone has tried to conceal what he is doing but is found out by the inquisitive. How this adage arose, I will explain from the authorities. Corycus is a mountain in Pamphylia, very high and well supplied with harbours, and for this reason it offers great opportunities for lurking pirates, who were called Corycaeans after this mountain. These people had invented a new system of secret attack. They scattered out among the harbours of Mount Corycus, and mingled with the merchants on their arrival, so as to learn by eavesdropping what kind of cargo they carried, what their destination was, and at what time they had decided to weigh anchor. As soon as they knew this, they reported it to the pirates, with whom they were in partnership for robbery on the high seas. And so at the right moment they attacked together and looted the ships. When the merchants found this out they kept their arrangements quiet and under cover, for fear of ambush. But even so they did not succeed in keeping their affairs dark, as the Corycaeans smelt out everything, and hence the proverb arose: 'A Corycaean was listening to him.' It expresses something closely covered up and yet found out.
Suidas says that Corycus is a promontory in Pamphylia, and the city of Attalea is adjacent to it. The citizens of this town took steps not be harried themselves by the robbers who used the promontory as their stronghold: they spread out among the other harbours and listened to find out who had put into port and where they were going, and gave this information to the robbers. The same author quotes Ephorus as saying that the Corycaeans were a mixed gang of people who founded a little town in Lydia under the peak of Corycus, which looks out to sea; they were close to Myonessus. These used to mingle with the merchants who landed at the port, as if they were also merchants, wishing to buy some commodities; and then they reported what they had come to know to the Myonessians. These latter went in to the attack against the seamen and shared out with the Corycaeans either the booty taken or the ransom paid by merchants, the Greek for which is lytra. But according to Stephanus, Corycus is a very high mountain close to the town of Teos in Ionia, and the harbour of the same name is adjacent to it. He comments here on the stratagems of the pirates and on the proverb. Strabo too gives an opinion about the Lydian Corycus; I give his words out of book 14: 'Before coming to Erythrae you come first to Eras, a small town of the Teians and then to Corycus, a lofty mountain, and to a port below it, Casystes, and to another port called Erythras and a number of others after that. They say the coastline of the mountain was frequented by pirates, the Corycaeans, so-called, who had devised a new way to attack ships. Scattering themselves among the ports they would follow the merchants whose ships were anchored there, and overhear what they had on board and where they were going, and then they would come together and attack them after they were at sea and plunder the ships. Thus we call every busybody who is eager to hear whatever is said in secret "a Corycaean," and say proverbially "the Corycaean was listening" whenever someone seems to himself to have acted or spoken in private and yet has not kept himself hidden, owing to the people who eavesdrop and want to know things which are no business of theirs.' So far Strabo. In these words there seems to be some corruption of the text; one will be cured by reading ληστῶρ for ληστήρια the other by inserting πραττομένων καὶ before διαλεγομένων as the translator seems to have done. As there are two cities of the same name, the authorities trace the proverb to both of them. Stephanus explains that in Cilicia also there is a city called Corycus, 'surrounded by a harbour and the open sea,' as Pomponius Mela says, 'and joined to the mainland by a narrow isthmus'; close by it is that famous cave celebrated in literature. Now we have been told that the Cilicians were pirates. I think this is the same city as the one which Zenodotus and Suidas place in Pamphylia, because Pamphylia borders on Cilicia, and formerly a good part of Cilicia was attributed to Pamphylia. The same Stephanus indicates that there was also an island of the same name; and again that Corycia was a promontory of Crete, and that there was a harbour of that name in Ethiopia.
The writers of comedy introduce a certain Corycaeus, a god, who lends an ear and listens to what goes on: so Menander in his Enchiridion and Dexippus in his Thesaurus, according to Suidas. Hesychius also had a few words about it, explaining that in Greek corycus means a leather bottle, a boat, or a javelin. Cicero uses this adage in the tenth book of his Letters to Atticus, the last letter: 'So henceforward I won't write to you what I am going to do, only what I have actually done. Every spy in the country ("all the Corycaeans") seems to have an ear to catch what I say.'

Cicero, Tusculan Questions, book 2: 'For it is not only Fortune which favours the brave, as the old proverb has it, but still more, reason.' This is quoted elsewhere out of Ennius. It is used in the Aeneid of Virgil, and pretty well everywhere by everybody. Ovid in book 2 of the Fasti: 'Chance and God help those who dare.' And again he alluded to it with: 'Venus herself favours the bold.' Then Livy in the Macedonian War, book 4: 'They used to say that Fortune favours the brave.' The adage advises us to make a strong bid for Fortune; for it is for people who do this that things go well. For Fortune seems to favour that kind of man, but to be inimical to those who dare make no experiments, but for ever hide away in their shells like snails.

Τὸν τρέχοντα ὀτρύνειν, To cheer on the runner, is to encourage someone to do the very thing he is inclined to do of his own accord. By using this metaphor we lessen, or indeed remove, the danger of offending by exhortation. Cicero to Cassius: 'So as to meet Caesar in Italy (for that is what I supposed) and to cheer on the runner as the adage has it, when after sparing so many of our most distinguished men, he was actually returning to the ways of peace.' Again to his brother Quintus, book z: 'You are therefore acting indeed like a brother in urging me (though at the present moment, upon my honour, you are cheering on a willing runner).' Again to Atticus: 'When you exhort me to spend those days in the exposition of philosophy you are urging a willing runner.' Again in the De oratore: 'For it is easier to urge on the willing runner, as they say, than to stir up an inert one.' Pliny to Cannius: 'I know you have no need of the goad, but my affection for you leads me to spur on the willing runner.' The metaphor is drawn from runners who contend in a race and are usually lent speed by the cheering. Lucian, writing to Nigrinus, quotes from Homer: 'Courage, for as Homer says, you are urging on him who hastens willingly.' This is found in the Iliad, book 8: 'Why do you urge me on, great son of Atreus, / Hurrying so fast of my own accord?' There is an allusion to the same thing in the Odyssey, book 24: 'Speaking thus he urged on Athena, / Already very eager.' Thus we are 'cheering the willing runner' when we call a person to a task to which he is drawn by his own desires, for which he has a bent. Dion, for instance, recalls that Timotheus the singer often used a certain tune called'the song of Pallas' to incite the spirit of Alexander the Great to a sudden lust for war. He did indeed incite him, but he was on the way already, being by nature sanguinary and with a great thirst for battle. Had it not been so, he would never have been capable of stirring up Sardanapalus, that most effeminate of mortals, by the same music. Terence in the Andria turns this to a bad sense, leaving out the metaphor: 'If he's not mad enough of his own accord, give him a push.' That favourite phrase of Cicero's comes in here, 'to check in mid-career.' At the beginning of the Topica: 'Your own will-power checked you in mid-career.' Also 'to be in mid-career' and 'to interrupt in mid-career.'

The same thought, in a metaphor drawn from elsewhere, is expressed by the younger Pliny in a letter to Pompeius Saturninus: 'You begged me to send you something I had written, when I had determined to do that very thing myself. So you spurred on a horse already running with a will.' The metaphor is taken from riders, who sometimes apply the spur to a horse when he is already running with a will, to make him run still faster. Thus a man spurs us on who stimulates us when we are relaxed; but to spur on the running horse, applied to us, is to increase and sharpen the desire and interest we already have. Ovid has 'No need to spur the horse in full career.' These metaphors as a class are almost always proverbial: To put spurs to, to ply the goad, together with their opposites: To rein in, to keep on a tight rein, to tighten the reins. Cicero to Atticus: 'He adds his support too and, one might say, applies the spur.' Again, to the same correspondent, in book 6: 'But, as Isocrates said about Ephorus and Theopompus, one of them needs the rein, the other the spur.' Plato in the ninth book of the Laws: 'You did very well, Cleinias, to check me as I was almost carried away, and make me attentive.' And Cicero s phrase: 'He recalled him in mid-career.'

Εν τριόδῳ εἰμὶ λογισμῶν, I am at the crossroads of decision. This is applied to those who are in doubt and of uncertain mind, hesitating as to which alternative to choose, like travellers who come to a place where three roads meet, and are doubtful about which way to take. 'Way' or 'path' is often used by Greek authors to mean a choice of plan, as Euripides uses it in the Hecuba: 'The path of your deliberations.' Theognis says `I am standing at the crossroads.' Plato too has a reference to this in the Laws, book 7: he warns us that if some strange and unusual thing occurs, we should not rush at it with open arms, but stop as if we had come to a crossroad and did not know the way, nor should we push on until some investigation has been made to show where each road leads; 'like,' he says, 'a man at a crossroads.'

Δὶς καὶ τρὶς τὸ καλὸν, Twice and three times over what is beautiful (supply, should be repeated). Plato makes use of this in various places, for instance in the Philebus: 'I have mentioned this before; but the proverb seems to be apt, that it is right to repeat what is beautiful two and three times in conversation.' And again in the Gorgias: 'And they say it is a beautiful thing to speak and consider beautiful things two and three times over.' Again in the Laws, book 6: 'I say again what I said just now, for there is no harm in stating what is beautiful twice over.' Lucian in the Dipsades quoting the same Plato: 'Never too much of the beautiful.' In general, there is such a power in excellent things that the more often and the more closely they are examined the more they please, as Horace says: 'This, the nearer you stand, / Will charm the more, and please you ten times over.' On the other hand, things which are falsely coloured or commonplace sometimes have a charm to begin with, through sheer novelty, but soon grow ugly on repetition. So Pliny, book 15, chapter 14, mentions a kind of wild fruit which they call one-bite (unedo) because only one can be eaten: it is `worthless,' he says, and hence the reason for the name.

If strife arises between brothers, it is usually more bitter than between ordinary enemies. Many examples of this can be found in history: Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus and their like, Jacob and Esau. The son of the emperor Antoninus Severus had such a dire and persistent hatred of Geta that it could not be appeased by his most terrible death, but wreaked its fury on all his friends as well. This is the subject of our adage, which is recorded by Aristotle in the seventh book of the Politics: 'For they think that these people should be under a duty to oblige them, and therefore, over and above the loss they suffer, they feel defrauded of what was owed them. Hence the proverb "There's no hate like brothers' hate," and those who loved beyond measure hate beyond measure too.' Thus Aristotle. Euripides had this in mind in the Iphigeneia in Aulis: 'Wretched it is for brothers to come to words, / Wrangling in speech when they fall into strife.'

This adage was born in the brothel, as it seems, but it can be turned to a more modest usage, if we wish to say that a grown man will commit greater offences if he has been used to small vices as a boy. It can be found in the fragments of Petronius Arbiter, in these words: 'I was astounded, and declared that Gito, a most bashful boy, could never be a party to this wantonness, and that the girl was not of an age to take over the role of womanly submission. Well, said Quartilla, is she younger than I was when I submitted to a man? May I call down the rage of my guardian Juno, if I ever remember having been a virgin. As a little child I was defiled with those of the same age, and as the years went on I attached myself to older boys, until I came to the age I am at now. It is from this, I think, that the proverb arose, He can bear the bull who has already borne the calf.' There seems no absurdity in tracing the adage to the exploit of Milo of Croton, of whom we read that he used to carry a calf for some distance every day, and when it grew into a bull he carried it without difficulty. And thus it will fit those who gradually become accustomed to things, however difficult.

One should remember the living. An old adage about people who talk all the time of the deceased; it is commonly thought unlucky to have the name of the dead always on one's lips, and to call them as witnesses in conversation. Hence Varro in the third book of his On the Latin Language thinks the word lethum, death, comes from the Greek Lethe, the river of oblivion, as if it were right that one who has departed this life should go into oblivion; and at funerals it used to be the custom to announce publicly: 'That man has been given up to death.' Cicero refers to this adage in the fifth book of his De finibus bonorum et malorum. In this Piso and then Quintus Cicero said how deeply they were moved by the memory of famous men, and by the contemplation of the places where once they had dwelt when alive, and each of them recalled those whose memory particularly delighted him. Then Pomponius Atticus said, as if in jest: 'For my part, you are fond of attacking me as a follower of Epicurus, and I do spend much of my time with Phaedrus, who as you know is my dearest friend, in the gardens of Epicurus which we passed just now; but I obey the old saw "I remember the living." Still I could not forget Epicurus, even if I wanted; the members of our body not only have pictures of him, but even have his likeness on their drinkingcups and rings.' Thus far Cicero. Plautus in the Truculentus: 'While he lives, you may know a man: when he is dead, you may keep silence.' But nowadays the common people do not even remember the services rendered by their friends, though the saying of Thales is justly famous, that we should be mindful of absent friends no less than of those who are present.

Cum larvis luctari, Wrestling with ghosts, is said of those who heap blame on the dead: nothing could be more unworthy of an honourable man. Suidas quotes Aristophanes as saying: 'Stop, stop, Lord Mercury! / For his reproach was against Cleon who is dead.' Lucian in The Sects: 'They fight a shadowy fight against you when you are absent.' He means both the absent and the dead. Pliny recalls this in the preface to his History of the World in this way: 'Plancus made a witty remark when it was said that Asinius Pollio was preparing speeches against him which would be published either by himself or by his children after the death of Plancus, so that he could not reply, and he retorted "Only ghosts wrestle with the dead."' By this remark he dealt them such a blow that educated opinion found them the last word in impudence. Aristotle in his Rhetoric quotes Plato in the Republic as saying that those who bark at the dead are like puppies which bite the stones that are thrown at them, but never touch the people who have injured them.

Much the same seems to be iugulare mortuos, To cut a dead man's throat, meaning to censure the dead and fight with those who are already no more. It is adopted from war, in which it would be a cowardly and absurd thing to cut the throat of men prostrate and already dead, just as it is brave to contend with the living. Laertius quotes this in his life of Menedemus. He says that Bion, when he was at pains to attack the soothsayers, was cutting dead men's throats, those in fact who were already hissed off the stage and universally rejected by public opinion. Aristophanes in the Birds wrote 'to kill the dead.' This is a metaphor which is much pleasanter when it is farther removed from its literal meaning: for instance if one says that it is 'cutting a dead man's throat' to attack a book which all condemn, or to argue against an opinion which everyone has voted down long ago, or to find fault with something which is in itself abominated by everybody.

Κύκνειον ᾆσμα Swan-song. Found among the Greek proverbs. Aelian also mentions it in his work On the Nature of Animals, as a proverb. It is suitable to those who speak with eloquence at the very end of their lives, or write with great sweetness in extreme old age; this is something which usually happens to writers, their last works being the least bitter and the most honeyed, as if their eloquence matured with age. Swans are said to break into wonderful song at the point of death, and this is celebrated in literature by everybody but no one has either verified it or believed it. Lucian declares he never even saw any swans when he sailed along the Po. Aelian adds that swans only sing when the soft west wind blows, the zephyr for which the Latin is favonius. Martial: 'Sweet are the songs he sings with failing voice, / Makes his own funeral music like a swan.' There are even philosophers who try to produce a reason for this, and assert that it happens because of the efforts of the breath of life to escape through that long narrow neck. St Jerome speaks in praise of a certain old man's eloquence, after mentioning several writers: 'All these,' he says, 'sang a kind of swan-song at the approach of death.' And he writes in the epitaph on Nepotianus: 'Where is he, that taskmaster of ours, a sweeter voice than any singing swan.' I used it too, in an epigram, which I threw off long ago, addressed to that universal Maecenas of studies, never to be praised enough, William, archbishop of Canterbury:
Radiant singers thou shalt see arise,
With voices sweet and tuneful that have power
To fling swan's music to the distant stars,
And men shall hearken in the age to come.
Athenaeus also remembers this adage in the Doctors at Dinner, book 14, quoting Chrysippus, where he mentions a man who took such extraordinary delight in witty sayings that he said, just as he was about to be executed, 'I'm ready to die when I've sung my swan-song,' meaning, I imagine, that the remark had a point to it because as soon as he had spoken he would lose his life. Cicero writes in the preface to the third book of his De oratore, speaking of L. Crassus: `The man's voice and words were divinely beautiful, like a swan-song, and we were almost expecting to hear it when we came into the senate-house after his burial, to look upon that very spot where he last stood.'

In the same way the fluency of Nestor the leader of the Pylians became proverbial, to indicate an old man's mellifluous speech. For Homer says he lived through three generations, and credits him with more than honeyed eloquence. For thus he says in Iliad i. 'After them rose Nestor, the eloquent Pylian leader, / And from his tongue flowed speech more sweet than honey.' Theocritus copied this in the Bucolics, according to Plutarch: 'Because the Muse bedewed his lips with sweet nectar.' And that phrase of Horace's tends the same way: 'With your own beauties charmed, you surely know / Your verses with a honey'd sweetness flow.'

Among other peoples of Greece, it is to the people of Attica that a special native wit and humour is ascribed, to such an extent that 'Attic wit' and 'Attic eloquence' have become a proverbial way of saying 'the best.' Terence in the Eunuchus: 'Did I not say he had Attic eloquence?' (making fun of a bungling graceless soldier). St Jerome to Pammachius (I think he is laughing at Jovinianus): 'This is the eloquence of Plautus, this is Attic wit, comparable, as they say, to the eloquence of the Muses.' The remark about the Muses' eloquence is a reference to Varro s well-known praise of Plautus, in which he said 'the Muses themselves, if they had wished to speak Latin, would have spoken with the lips of Plautus.' And Lucian alludes to this in the essay On Salaried Posts: 'Furthermore if they have said something in a rustic way, they wish that very thing to seem a pure Atticism and drawn from Hymettus.' Hymettus is a mountain of Attica famed for its honey, and hence we have 'Attic honey' and 'the honey of Hymettus.' These were of special value, as Martial testifies in his Xenia: 'This the bee, spoiler of Thesean Hymettus, has sent you, / Noble nectar from the woods of Pallas.'

Επὶ μανδραβούλου χωρεῖ τὸ πρᾶγμα, The affair goes on in Mandraboulus' fashion - that is to say, day by day it gets worse. This comes from a certain Mandraboulus who found a treasure, and first of all dedicated a golden sheep to Juno of Samos; the following year he offered a silver one, and the next year a bronze one. Lucian in On Salaried Posts: 'But you rejoice and deceive yourself and you always think the future is going to be better. But the opposite of what you hoped for comes about, and as the proverb says, things go Mandraboulus' fashion, growing smaller and worse day by day so to speak, and stepping backward.' Alciphron in one of his letters: 'As the proverb says, things go in Mandraboulus' fashion.' This is appropriate for those who change for the worse. Just as Menedemus says in Plutarch, many people come to Athens to study; first they turn out wise men, then philosophers, then rhetoricians, and finally uneducated people. It would not be out of place here to add that fine thought of Plato's, in the Laws, book 1: 'To conquer oneself is the first and best of all victories. On the other hand to be inferior to oneself is the most shameful and slothful thing that could happen.' The man conquers himself who goes forward to better things; but to turn out inferior to oneself is to become worse.

Mature fias senex, si diu velis esse senex, Be old early, if you want to be old long, is a Latin proverb which reminds us that while we are still unimpaired we should cease from the exertions of youth, and begin to take care of our health, if we wish to enjoy a long and vigorous old age. For the lot of old age is leisure and rest. This is spoken by the elder Cato in Cicero: 'For I have never given my assent to that ancient and much-praised proverb, Be old early, if you want to be old long.' It may not win the approval of Cato, tough character that he was, allowing himself no respite from toil even in extreme old age; but we should take notice of it, especially if it is applied to the vices of youth, such as lust, drunkenness, wild behaviour, for unless a man gives these up in good time he will either never reach old age at all, or will have but a short one.

Γεροντοδιδάσκαλος, A teacher of the old. This is a title quoted often by Nonius Marcellus among the titles of Varro's plays, and there is no doubt that like most of the others it is proverbial. It is apt for the person who spends his trouble on something tardy and untimely, and spends it in vain. just as youth is teachable, and adaptable to any condition, so old age is intractable, slow and forgetful. As Theognis says: 'Teach me not, age makes me unteachable.' Euripides in the Bacchae: 'I, old as I am, shall guide you, also old.' This line is found indeed in the Philoctetes of Sophocles, and Gellius in the Nights, book 13, testifies that it was widely used and proverbial. Varro seems to have taken his title from the Euthydemus of Plato, where Socrates relates how his teacher Connus, from whom he learnt as an old man to play the lyre, was called mockingly by the boys 'the old man's schoolmaster.' An alleged remark of Diogenes comes in here: 'Doctoring a dead man and teaching an old one are the same thing.' However it is a useless saying, which deters old men from learning things which it is disgraceful not to know.

Age is slow at any kind of learning, but especially at learning a language, a faculty which is given by nature to children. It is generally well known that children can learn to speak any tongue, while older people do not achieve it or imitate it very badly. Hence the proverb 'to teach an old man a new language,' applied to those who labour at the wrong time and in vain. St Jerome says in the preface to the four Gospels: 'It is a worthy task, but one of dangerous presumption, to judge others when one is open to be judged by all, and to teach an old man a new language, and turn back a world that is growing grey to its childish beginnings,' by which he means that the adult age is less amenable in all ways than those unformed and tender years, and Ovid puts this in an elegant metaphor:
The tree spreading wide its shade to the walkers beneath it
Once was a wand, when first it was planted in earth.
Then a mere hand's turn could pull it from shallow ground simply,
Now it stands firm, by its own strength grown huge.
For this reason the character must be formed while the age is malleable; the mind accustomed to the best, while it is impressionable as wax. For later on, by the force of years, the mind becomes rigid, and we can hardly unlearn what we have learnt wrong; what we do not know can only be taught us with infinite trouble. I am not saying this to deter older people from learning, since it is never too late to learn, but in order to urge children to study. We must not leave out the saying, common though it is, 'the old parrot takes no notice of the rod.' Although the meaning of the adage is not obscure, it will become clearer from the words of Apuleius, in the Florida, book 2, about the parrot: 'When being trained to imitate our country speech, it is tapped on the head with an iron key so that it really feels who is master. This takes the place of the cane while it is learning. The young bird learns at once, up to the age of two years, while the mouth is pliable and can be moulded, and the tongue is tender and vibrates quickly. But if an old one is caught, it is both unteachable and forgetful.' Thus far Apuleius. Pliny also mentions, book 10 chapter 42, the wonderful teachableness of this bird, but only up to two years old. Close to these remarks is a common but not inelegant expression: 'it is too late to accustom old dogs to the leash.'

Very similar is what Varro records in the third book of his On the Latin Language: An old man takes an old bride, used whenever like delights in like, an old fellow in an old woman, a cripple in a cripple, a barbarian in a barbarian, a rogue in a rogue. For the ancients used the word cascus for what we call 'old'; and the authority for this is that same Varro, who says that in the Sabine tongue, which has its roots far back in the Oscan language, casnar is the term for an old man, and that Ennius, skilled in Oscan, wrote: 'Which first the ancient (casci) Latin peoples bore.' Cicero in book z of his Tusculan Questions calls the ancient Latins casci: 'That one thing was fixed in the minds of the men of old whom Ennius styled the ancients' (casci). However, Varro quotes the adage as proceeding from a certain Manilius, saying 'it was no wonder if an old woman had married an old man, since he gave her such a tuneful wedding.' This seems to be a joke at the expense of the elderly bride of an old man, alluding to the sound of the word cascus as if it came from singing (canendo). In the same place there is a reference to the epigram of a certain Papinius, which he wrote about a youth named Casca: 'Absurd it sounds, when your old woman calls you Casca.' I imagine the youth had married an old woman, and so it seemed ridiculous whenever the crone (casca) called her young husband by his own name, Casca. Perhaps the jest in the proverb recalls the early marriage custom mentioned by Plutarch in his 'Problems': those who led the bride to her bridegroom's house told her to say these words, 'Where you are Gaius, I am Gaia.'

Δὶς διὰ πασῶν., Double diapason. By this proverb was signified a great difference or very long interval; hence things which seemed most incompatible with each other, and totally different in kind, were said to differ dis dia pason. Lucian in his essay How History Should Be Written: 'And this is, as the musicians' proverb says, a case where they are a double diapason apart from each other.' Again in the Apology: 'But realize this: there is a very great difference between entering a rich man's house as a hireling, where one is a slave and endures what my essay describes, and entering public service, where one administers affairs as well as one can, and is paid by the emperor for doing it. Consider every detail and examine it for yourself. You will find the two lives a double diapason apart, to use a musical proverb, and as like each other as lead and silver, bronze and gold, anemone and rose, monkey and man. You are paid in the first case as in the second, and in both you are under a master's orders; but there is no small discrepancy between one position and the other.' So far Lucian. The adage, as he indicates, is borrowed from the art of music. Macrobius, in his Commentary On the Dream of Scipio, book 2, mentions five kinds of harmony: diatessaron, diapente, diapason, diapason and diapente, and finally double diapason. The combination of the diatessaron and the diapente constitutes the diapason, which has been given this name because it gives complete harmony, so that there seems to me to be a connection between this proverb and another which I shall mention elsewhere, A full octave. Plutarch and all the ancient writers, Greek or Latin, who have written about musical theory, similarly fix the limit of harmony at what is called the 'double diapason.' Boethius too, in the first book of his treatise On Music, records that in ancient times harmonic proportion depended entirely on the heptachord, that is to say on seven strings, the lowest being called hypate and the highest nete. Later when different people added other strings, the number of notes was increased to the point of doubling the heptachord. And this was apparently to be the end of the development, except that harmonic theory seemed to require the mese or middle string which had occupied the place in the heptachord agreeing with its name and which, in its relation to the furthest string in either direction, gave the diatessaron. This string was thus added and given its due place, and the result was fifteen strings, the furthest at one end being called proslambanomenos, and at the other end nete hyperbolaios. So it came about that the mese in its relation to the two extremes gave the harmony diapason; and each of the two extremes in relation to the mese produced the same harmony. Moreover the highest, taken with the lowest, gave the harmony called double diapason, because the ratio I have described covered twice that harmony which is called the diapason. So, since the harmonic ratio stopped at this point and could not proceed any further, the expression passed into popular speech to describe things as widely as possible different from each other, which were said to be a double diapason apart, exactly as if one were to say, so far apart that a greater separation would be impossible. An exactly similar phrase is ἐκ διαμέτρου, diametrically opposite.
But since I have rashly - and as it were forgetting myself - gone further into musical matters than the nature of the work undertaken required, I should like to add by the way some further information, which is not, I think, very widely known, and will not be uninteresting to know. For at this point, just as I was scribbling all this down in my notes, it so happened that by great good luck along came Ambrogio Leone of Nola, an outstanding philosopher of our time, and one endowed with incredible diligence and expertise in exploring the intricacies of intellectual disciplines; he has also had no little experience in reading and examining the works of writers in both Latin and Greek. As he arrived just when I was writing, I read him what I had already written, and then I said, 'I am afraid, Ambrogio, that the general mass of musicians will make trouble over my adage "double diapason," and strongly oppose it, being "at the other end of the scale" from my way of looking at it; these people do not hesitate to extend the limits of harmony to the twentieth note of the gamut. Now you are an authority on difficult cases and you are also experienced not only in the theory but in the practice of music. I should like you to explain to me in a few words, if it is not too much trouble, why the ancients were afraid of going any further, even the least little bit, past the fifteenth interval, even to the extent of the thing becoming a proverb; and why these moderns have no hesitation in pushing the boundary out to such a wide range of consonances, setting aside the limits of the ancients, and as the saying goes "jumping the bounds"; they are not afraid to go on to the twentieth interval.'
He laughed in friendly fashion. 'What a scrupulous fellow you are,' he said, 'to add to your worries the fear of what the singers will say about your adage in their drinking parties! To repel the slanders of the musicians, one shield would be enough for you: say you are repeating the old adage. It was in any case sure to agree with the theory of the old musicians from whom it came. But so as to satisfy you rather than them, here in a few words is what I have observed, and what I think, about this subject.
'To start with, the reason which has prompted modern musicians to exceed the limits of the ancients is something they must look to themselves. For myself, I see two reasons why antiquity should have preferred to stop at the "double diapason." First, that nature herself seems to have fixed this sort of limit to consonances, by arranging that the human voice should not reach beyond the fifteenth interval; if one tries to go higher the result is not a natural voice, but forced and artificial, and seems more like a squeak than a voice. If one strains on the contrary to push it lower, one gets out of the vocal register into something like a hawking noise. Thus, since art should always as far as possible agree with nature, it seems to me that the ancients were not wrong in circumscribing the realm of art within the barriers which nature had set to the human voice. This would be a sufficient reason to convince anyone, I think, but the second is more imperative.
'It is this. You know that in Boethius, On Music, book 4, the view is found that musical harmony should be considered not only in relation to reason, but also in relation to the senses. For this reason Ptolemy, in the book 1 have mentioned, rejects the opinion of certain Pythagoreans who have given greater importance to the reason than to the senses when they discriminate between harmonies; they say that the senses only supply the germ, as it were, of knowledge, while the perfect understanding depends on reason. Again, he refutes the opinion of Aristoxenus who attributed more than their due proportion of importance to the senses, and very little to the reason; musical harmony should be so ordered that neither the reason should resist the senses nor the senses contradict the reason. Aristotle does not disagree with Ptolemy (Physics, book 2) for he says that music is not solely a mathematical science but depends partly on reason and partly on the senses. This is impossible if the musical progression once goes beyond the fifteenth interval, that is, the "double diapason." Now reason does not in any way forbid a progression to the thousandth note, since the same harmonies contained in the octave would recur at regular intervals. The procedure would be no different from what it is in mathematical calculations, where the proportion of "one and a half" would be the same between twelve thousand and eight thousand as between four and six. But musical sensitivity vanishes, so to speak, beyond the fifteenth note, and it is not of much importance to consider a rational harmony unaccepted by the senses, because it is not perceptible to them. The reason why it is imperceptible is because the interval is too long. The power of reason has an immense range; but physical experience, on the contrary, is contained in very narrow limits. It is the same as what happens to the sense of sight, when vision is blurred and fails if the objects on which the power of sight is trained are far removed, and the greater the distance the more this occurs. This is much more pronounced with the sense of hearing, which is less acute than that of sight. Now what happens in the use of the senses as they perceive objects which come into their field, happens in the use of the mind as it judges by the senses. If you place one colour beside another, and as the Greeks say, "put purple to purple," does not the sense of sight immediately distinguish by this comparison how the colours differ from each other and how like they are to each other? In the same way, if you present to the ear one sound followed by another sound, it will unhesitatingly distinguish the accord or discord which exists between them; if they are separated by an undue interval, the judgment soon begins to waver. Moreover, just as auditive sensitivity is sooner dulled than ocular, so the judgment resulting from the ear is sooner blunted than that resulting from the eye; one conclusion depends on the other.

Ινα δέος, ἔνθα καὶ αἰδὼς, Where there is fear there is modesty. A proverbial saying which is still common today, and like that remark of Terence, 'We are all made worse by licence.' The greater part of mankind abstains from misdeeds 'for fear of cudgelling.' Plato in the Laws, book 5: 'But audacity breeds impudence.' The word used for audacity, adeia, means absence of fear. He quotes also in the Euthyphro from some poet or other, for it is a half-line from a heroic poem): 'Where there is fear, there modesty is too.' Suidas says it is from Epicharmus.

Θύραζε κᾶρες, οὐκ ἔτ᾽ ἀνθιστήρια, Out you go, slaves, the Anthesteria is over. This is usually said when a person always expects to have the same advantages, or considers that he is always free to do something which has been permitted for a certain limited length of time. For instance, if one who had once experienced a man's liberality should go on coming back to ask for something else; or when children spin out longer the time they are allotted for holidays and play. The origin of the proverb is said to be as follows. Among the Athenians a certain month was called anthisterion, because it gave birth to the most flowers. During this month there were festivals and banquets of a freer sort, just as the custom was at the Saturnalia among the Romans, and the slaves also were allowed to be guests at table, and take a holiday from their work. When the holiday was over and they were recalled to their usual tasks, the masters would speak in this fashion, 'Out you go, Carians, the festival's over.' They called the slaves Carians, because that race got its living by working for hire, and becoming the servants of anyone who would pay them wages. Some say that the Carians once held part of Attica. When the Athenians were conducting the ceremonies of the Anthesteria they used to allow the Carians to come into the city and into their houses and to join in the feast; but once the solemnities were over, if they found any of the Carians idling about the town, they would say jokingly, `Out you go, Carians, the festival's over.' This Greek word has the same meaning as the Latin Floralia, a festival of which the licentiousness is commented on by many authors. Something of the same sort is said by Seneca in his skit on Claudius: 'It will not always be Saturnalia.' For the Saturnalia also gave a time of liberty to slaves.

Οἱ φῶρες τὴν βοὴν, Thieves (supply, fear or, have heard) a noise: This will fit people who have a sense of guilt and are afraid of being caught, or who have committed some crime and run away in terror. The consciousness of wrongdoing, particularly of theft, has the result of making a man tremble and fear the light. So we find among the Hebrew sayings, 'The wicked flee when no man pursueth.' Virgil alluded to it: 'And when I shouted, Where is the fellow running to now? / Tityrus, round up your flocks: you were lying hidden in the rushes.'

Τὸ σχοινίον φεύγουσι τὸ μεμιλτωμένον, They dodge the rope that's raddled with red-ochre. This can be aptly applied to a man who hastens to do his job, not because he wants to, but for fear of incurring a fine. It is a line from Aristophanes, which his commentator, and Suidas too, record more or less in this form. The magistrates of Athens tried in various ways to compel the populace to make their appearance at the public assembly as often as possible; they barricaded the rest of the streets which did not lead to the market-place; they removed merchandise from the market so that there should be no idling there on that excuse; and they prepared rope smeared with a red colour, which is called miltos (Pliny translates it by minium), which some call in Latin cinnabar. With this two officials went round roping in the people and driving them to the assembly. Everyone tried to avoid the cord, because any person who clearly bore a red mark from contact with the rope was forced to pay a fine. So we may elegantly say, about anyone who is afraid of a bad mark, 'running away from the red rope.'

Εὐδαιμονέστερος Καρκίνου Στροβίλων, Luckier than the Strobili of Carcinus. An ironical saying about an unlucky and wicked man. Carcinus was a poet whose sons were called Strobili by Aristophanes; he also calls them 'glukutrachelos,' or sweet-necked. The joke comes in the meaning of the names, for in Greek, carcinus means crab, and strobili snails, both misshapen and ugly creatures. The adage is listed by Suidas and Zenodotus; in Aristophanes it is in the Peace.

Plautus in the Aulularia puts into the mouth of the aged Euclio: 'If you are wasteful at holiday time, you may be in want at ordinary times, unless you live sparingly.' A proverbial figure, which warns us not to be so lavish at festivals that we have nothing left for everyday expenses. Days of festival were celebrated by the offering of sacrifices, by feasts in daytime, games in the honour of the gods, or public holidays; non-festal days were given to the management of public and private business. This can be suitably adapted to people who waste their substance in youth and go hungry in old age, or who squander money unseasonably and will long for it later on.

Γαλῆ ταρτησσία, A Tartessian cat. This was a term for something huge and ridiculous. The Tartessians are in Spain, and it is said that their cats grow very large. Possibly it may be applied to the rapacious as well. Aristophanes in the Wasps: 'They watch me holding spits as if I were a cat who'd stolen meat.' Lucian, when he says 'as rapacious as cats,' also suggests that the greediness of cats was a general opinion.

Plautus in the Curculio: 'Does she yet bear the yoke?' Someone is enquiring about a girl, whether she is of an age to receive a man. That this is the meaning is sufficiently borne out by what follows: 'She is as pure, as far as I'm concerned, / As if she were my sister.' Horace writes in the Odes of a girl not yet ripe for a husband: 'Not yet can she bow her neck and bear the yoke,' thus showing the transference of the metaphor from the young ox who has not yet got the strength to do his share of work in pulling the plough. For to sleep together demands two people on equal terms, just as it is with a pair of oxen. That is why marriage is called coniugium, a yoking together.

Γαλῇ κροκωτὸν (understand, You supply) a party-frock for the cat. This is often said when an honour is bestowed on those who are unworthy of it, and whom it does not suit at all; or else when something is given to those who do not know how to use it, for instance if a most beautiful book were given to someone entirely foreign to the Muses. The crocoton is a kind of dress, of circular shape with fringes, which was worn by rich ladies. In Nonius, under the word richa, the crocoton is included among luxury garments. This is how I take it that the text should be read, 'a party frock, a rich-embroidered richa.' But according to Plutarch, some used to paint Hercules as 'wearing the crocoton' when he was serving Omphale. The adage comes from a fable of Stratis, which I have related in a different place. But whether the word used in Greek, gale, means a cat or a weasel, or what is vulgarly called catus, I leave to others to decide, since I see there is an argument about it among the learned.

Γαλῆν ἔχεις, You have a weasel in your house. This suits the person for whom everything goes wrong, as if the fates and the gods were angry, as they say. In old days this animal was thought to be inauspicious and unlucky to those who had it and kept it in the house, so the saying is not very different from those other proverbs, 'He must have Sejus' horse,' or 'He has gold from Toulouse.' And even now in some countries, notably among the English, it is held to be an evil omen if while they are getting ready to go out hunting someone mentions a weasel. Even to have it running across your path is now commonly accounted unlucky. The adage is mentioned by Diogenianus.

Κόμπος μάξιμος, Haughty Maximus. This was said about a person who proudly thought himself wiser than he was. It was taken from the behaviour of a certain Maximus, an insolent fellow full of his own conceit. In some texts I find a variant: kompas Maximos. In Greek kompos means arrogance and insolence, and it gives kompazein (to talk big) and kompein (to boast). Euripides says 'insolence of tongue.' This too is found in the collections of Diogenianus.

Εκ πολλῶν ἀχύρων ὀλίηον καρπὸν συνήγαγον, From a lot of chaff I got little grain. That is, from a great deal of work I gained a very small advantage; or from a wordy speech I extracted little in the way of a sound idea, or out of aa huge volume I gained only the least bit of learning. The metaphor is from winnowers of wheat.

Δεῖ κώπην ἐλαύνειν μαθόντα, It should be the man who has learnt, who wields the oar. The proper person to exercise a skill is the one who has previously learnt it. This is mentioned by Plutarch in his essay 'Can Virtue Be Taught?' and Horace also in the Art of Poetry:
The Man, who knows not how with Art to wield
The sportive weapons of the martial field,
The bounding Ball, round Quoit, or whirling Troque
Will not the laughter of the Crowd provoke
But every desperate Blockhead dares to write ...
In our own time too there is a similar proverb going round: 'Anyone who does not know the rules of the game can keep out.'

Εκ τοῦ βοὸς ἱμάντας λαμβάνειν, Making the Ieash from the bull's own hide, is what people are said to do, when for the purpose of injuring somebody they use something received from that very person. For instance, a man might write verse attacking the person who had taught him the rules of prosody; or a tyrant might extort money from the citizens for the support of an armed guard intended to suppress them; or someone might make an attack on rhetoric with the very weapons of rhetoric. The metaphor comes from husbandmen, who cut thongs of ox-hide with which they tie up their oxen. Plutarch in his essay 'A Pleasant Life Is Impossible :'What could anyone say? For the nature of the flesh has in itself the material of disease, and as is jokingly said, making its leash from the bull's own hide, takes its pains from the body.'

Εξ ἑνὸς τὰ πάνθ᾽ ὄρα, From one learn all. So Virgil: `From one crime learn them all.' The adage teaches that from the experience of one event we ought to learn to foresee such things next time. It is recorded by Suidas. He maintains, however, that it is said of those who wrongly judge everything from a single instance; for his verb is not 'learn' but 'he learns,' as if having found one Frenchman false, one should judge them all to be so.

Εκ τοῦ εἰσορᾶν γὰρ γίγνεται ἀνθρώποις ἐρᾶν, In mortals, 't is from seeing love is born. A proverbial line of verse, telling us that love comes mainly by looking. For the unknown is not loved; mutual love is born from association. And it is especially the eyes which lure one on to love, for they are particularly the seat of the soul. The poets say that in them Cupid lies in wait to send out his darts. Virgil suggested this adage when he says: 'When I saw, how I was lost, how wild delusion seized me!' And again in the Georgics, 'She fires him as he looks.' So in Terence, Chaerea falls helplessly in love with a girl he has only just seen. Juvenal cites as a marvel the case of the blind lover: 'He never saw the girl for whom his passion blazed.' We read that some philosophers, and among them Democritus, put out their own eyes because they were the instigators of evil desires. And so it is for pious men to remember that it is not safe to look upon that which it is not lawful to desire. Diogenianus records this proverb.

Αφ᾽ ὑψηλοῦ μοῦ καταγελᾷς, You are mocking me from your lofty height. Said of a person who laughs at another, with pride and contempt. The metaphor is taken from those who stand on a high place to speak; and therefore 'look down' [despicere] is used in Latin for 'despise,' because whoever is in a lofty place is safer, and can disregard the person who stands in a lower spot.

Εκ τοῦ πηλοῦ πόδας ἔχεις, You have your feet out of the mire. That is, you have escaped from the danger, or you are safely established out of danger. Taken from travellers. It is like that other proverb, Out of range. People are said to 'stick in the mud' when they are involved in troublesome business from which they cannot extricate themselves.

Ex umbra in solem educere, To bring something out of shadow into sunlight, is to bring out a thing which has been hidden and lain idle into open use by the public and for the common good. It is taken from athletes, whose habit it is to strengthen the body's forces by endurance of sun and dust. It is the weaklings who lie in the shade. This would be more attractive when applied to the things of the mind: if one said, for instance, that Socrates had brought philosophy out of the shadow into the light of the sun. There are examples to be met with everywhere in literature.

Φρουρῆσαι ἐν ναυπάκτῳ, To keep watch in Naupactus. When the Achaeans took Naupactus, they killed Pausanias, the captain of the guard and in charge of the watch; so says Theopompus. This seems to have become a joke among the people, against those who perish by their own inertia, or who hold an office which is odious and full of danger. It is mentioned by Zenodotus. Suidas gives it in this form, `you shall keep watch in Naupactus.' He provides a different origin for the adage. Since those who formed the guard for Naupactus were paid a very small wage, and bought a great deal which was necessary for the purpose, it became a soldiers' jest, it seems, at the expense of those who toiled in vain, and whose hope was not realized. Naupactus was a town in Aetolia, which Philip held at the time; the name is derived from ship-building, because it was there that the Heraclidae first constructed a ship.

Αρᾶς ἱερὸν, A temple of execration, was said about people who had a habit of frequent cursing. It is a custom much to be blamed nowadays, among the common people, many of whom never speak without introducing oaths and curses, dreadful even to hear. In ancient times there were certain kinds of execration, even publicly, as for instance among the Athenians against anyone who had refused to point out the way to a person who had gone astray. For Christians these have been replaced by what is called excommunication. There was also the curse laid on the enemy, mentioned by Macrobius, and by Horace in the Odes: 'With curses I will hound you; / No sacrifice shall purge my execration.' Hesychius states that there was a temple of execration in Athens, of which Aristophanes makes mention in the Horae, but curses were uttered only for grave calamity. Elsewhere, if I am not mistaken, I have spoken of curses represented in tragedy, which Diogenes the philosopher jokingly said had happened to him, because he lived 'houseless and stateless, without country, without money, having no fixed dwelling and living from day to day.' The proverb is given by Diogenianus.

Αφθονοι μουσῶν θύραι The doors of the Muses are free from envy. Often said about people who freely and frankly communicate their learning to others, and are ready and willing to teach. It will be applicable too to those who are ready to learn, like the saying we have mentioned elsewhere, 'the doors of the Muses are open.'

Εὐρυβατεύεσθαι, To play Eurybatus, means to have bad morals. Eurybatus was one of the Cercopes, a man of notable wickedness. Lucian mentions him in his False Prophet: 'beyond the Cercopes, beyond Eurybatus, or Phrynondas, or Aristodemus, or Sostratus.' There was more than one person of this name, notorious for cunning and wicked ways; for there was also an Ephesian Eurybatus, who was sent by Croesus to raise an army, with a large amount of money, and he defected to Cyrus, as Ephorus tells. Others think it more likely to refer to the Eurybatus who was one of the two Cercopes, as I said. Duris refers it to the Eurybatus who was a companion of Ulysses. Nicander put on record that a Eurybatus of Aegina was by far the most cunning and criminal. There are those who say that there was a thief of this name, a particularly shrewd man. When he was caught and kept a prisoner, his guards were carousing and ordered him, for their amusement, to show them the methods he had used to scale houses. He refused at first, as if he were extremely unwilling to do it, but their demands became more pressing and in the end, with great difficulty, they persuaded him. So the fellow got ready his sponges and stakes, and grappling-irons, which are called engkentrides in Greek, and began to climb the wall. But as they watched, and admired the originality of the technique, Eurybatus caught hold of the fretted ceiling and escaped across the tiles before they could run round the building. In this way he tricked his guards and got out of danger. Eustathius mentions him in his commentary on the Iliad, book 1, with a reminder that there are two ways of pronouncing the name, Eurybatus and Eurybates, and that it is derived from a word meaning to go far afield. Thus it is particularly suitable to one who is caught, but by some trick makes his escape.

Καὶ σφάκελοι ποιοῦσιν ἀτέλειαν, Aches and pains too give exemption. This is a proverb in common use in Athens, referring to people who get what they want on any pretext whatever. It originated from the following event, so they say. Peisistratus the tyrant used to exact a tithe from the Athenians on whatever they grew in the fields. One day when he was out for a walk, he saw an old man working among the rocks, that is to say on a stony soil, and asked him what profit he hoped to raise from that. 'Aches and pains,' he said, 'and Peisistratus fines us a tenth of those.' The tyrant, astonished at the man's frankness, abolished the tithes on the Athenians. The thing went into common parlance: 'even aches can gain exemption.' Sphacelus, however, is a kind of illness, which usually results from excessive fatigue. Some think it is pain in the joints, some say decay of the bone. Theophrastus in book 5 of the Causes of Plants, explains that a defect occurs also in the roots of plants which is called sphakelismos from the human disease. The adage is recorded by Suidas. Hesychius points out that any severe pain is called sphacelus.

A phrase with the strongest appearance of a proverb is that put into the mouth of Hector by Homer in Iliad 20: 'Since my weapon too has its sharp point.' We may properly use this whenever we admit that we are indeed the weaker, but nevertheless do not lack the power to hurt. Similar to this is that Virgil in phrase: '- from our wound too, blood flows.' And again in Ovid: 'I have some power too, and my darts can wound.'

Τοῦ κακοῦ τρέπεται χρὼς The coward changes colour. Plutarch in his 'On Natural Causes,' in the problem: Why does the polyp change colour? quotes as a well-known proverb 'Hence the saying that the coward's colour changes.' It happens in fear that the face goes white, especially with the timid, as if all the blood were retreating to the vitals. This has more beauty if applied to the mind: as one might say, the philosopher is not at all afraid of those things which the common people have in horror, 'it is the coward who changes colour.' The proverb was born from book 13 of Homer's Iliad. The poem goes thus:
For the coward's colour changes and varies continually,
Nor does his mind stay steady, but runs hither and thither
And losing his head he shifts from one foot to another,
His heart beats wildly as his thoughts dwell on doom,
His teeth begin to chatter. Not so the brave;
No change of colour for him, nor violent terror.

Μὴ πρότερον εὶς βουλὴν παρέλθῃς, πρὶν ἂν κληθείης, Come not to counsel before you are called. This saying, now familiar under the name of Cato, seems to have been proverbial, as Plutarch bears witness: his words in the 'Table-talk,' book 1, are these: 'Surely therefore it was out of place and proverbially wrong for Menelaus to become an adviser without being asked.' But some may prefer to connect this with another proverb: 'Uncalled the cowards go to good men's feasts,' which I shall mention in another place.

Plutarch in his 'Table-talk,' book 1, records as a popular saying: `The most delightful sailing is by the land, and walking by the sea.' This will be rightly adapted to carry the sense that everything is most delightful when tempered by some admixture of an opposite kind; as for instance if you mingle a little learning in your pastimes, and mix light relief with your studies. Similar to this is the phrase quoted by the same writer from the poet Philoxenus, in the essay which he called 'On How To Study Poetry': 'The most delicious meat is what is not meat, and the most delicious fish what is not fish.' In the same way we get more pleasure from philosophy when mingled with poetry, and poetry with an admixture of philosophy is more attractive.

Πράσου φύλλῳ τὸ τῶν ἐρώτών δέδεται βαλάντιον, With a leaf of leek the purse of the Loves is tied. This is mentioned by the same author in the book we have just quoted, but it is best to give his own words: 'And one would wonder especially at this: a man sparing and mean, once he has fallen in love, not unlike iron put into the fire, becomes soft and malleable, pliant and more agreeable, so that the old humorous saying does not seem so ridiculous, that the purse of the Loves is fastened with a leaf of leek. And this is why it is said that love is like drunkenness; it makes men hot and gay and dissolute.' Plutarch thus seems to think that the proverb alludes to the nature of the leek, which has the power to produce heat, to stimulate urine, to rouse sexual passion, activate the menses and inflate the bowels, as we learn from Dioscorides, book 2. Suidas explains that this adage is used of those who go to enormous expense because they are in love, and indulge in excess, like the usual lovers in comedy. Plutarch, in the essay he entitled `Eroticus,' notes among the other commendations of Cupid or Love, that it makes the sordid fine, the miser lavish, the churlish polite, and the timid bold. So the pockets of Cupid are said to be tied up with a leek-leaf, because they are easily untied, either owing to the fragile character of the leaf, or because of its inherent power to relax and stimulate the body.

Ον τύχη μέλανα γράφει, τοῦτον οὐ πᾶς χρόνος δύναται λευκάναι, The man whom Fortune writes black, can never in all time turn white: that is, if Fortune is opposed to a man, whatever he attempts will turn out badly. The allusion is to voting by black and white stones. This is found in the collections of Apostolius.

Athenaeus in his dinner-table talk quotes a proverb about the Sybarites: 'The man who is unwilling to die before his appointed time in Sybaris must not look upon the setting or the rising sun.' He writes that this was a common saying, due to the fact that the city of Sybaris was situated in a low place, in a sort of enclosed valley, so that in the summer, morning and evening alike, they felt a terrible cold, and at midday an intolerable heat. Cicero in the De finibus book 2 informs us that the same was said of certain Asoti, a race so named for their luxurious living; for at sunset they were drunk and in the morning they were snoring. Columella in the preface of his Agriculture applies it to debauched fellows who spend their nights on lust and drunkenness and their days on sleep and gambling: 'And presently, then, that we may come to our gluttonous feasts in proper fettle, we steam out our daily indigestion in sweat-baths, and by drying out the moisture of our bodies we seek to arouse a thirst: we spend our nights in licentiousness and drunkenness, our days in gaming or sleeping, and account ourselves blessed by fortune in that we behold neither the rising of the sun nor its setting.'

Εκ πώγωνος σοφοὶ, καὶ ἀπὸ πώγωνος σοφισταὶ, and καὶ ἀπὸ πώγωνος φιλόσοφαι, Bearded, therefore wise, and sophists and philosophers as far as the beard goes. So they were called, who apart from beard and cloak had nothing of the philosopher. Sometimes Plutarch uses this in his 'Table-talk.' Horace alludes to it when he says: 'What time he bade me nurse my reverend beard.' Lucian also often jokes about philosophers with'profound beards,' and in the Eunuch Bagoas says 'If we are to judge a philosopher by his beard, the goats would carry off first prize.' Martial likewise: 'No negligible beard hangs from your chin.' This may rightly be turned against those whose holiness of life consists entirely in their dress, not in mind or conduct.

Plutarch in the fourth decade of his'Table-talk,' problem i: 'Seeing the young servant who came with Philo taking bread, but wanting nothing else, he said How strange! This is what the proverb means: The battle was among rocks but not a rock could they lift.' This seems to be said about people who do not make use of present advantages, either from laziness or from a false idea of their condition, like those who cannot be bothered to pick up a stone off a heap to repel an enemy. The same line is quoted in Athenaeus, book zo, and he adds another as though it had a similar meaning: 'They died of thirst, while water came up to their lips.'

Ως ἐν ἄλλῳ κόσμῳ, As if in another world. This is a form of proverb which is still in common use, about people who are different, far and away, from the lives of others; or to whom everything seems new; or who are far away from their native land. Plutarch in his 'Table-talk': 'But the race of Greeks is completely alien and remote from us, as if they were born and lived in another world.' Horace said in the Odes, with a similar metaphor: 'Why change we our own land / For other lands warmed by a foreign sun?' And Macrobius in the preface to the Saturnalia: 'Except where the true ring of the Latin tongue is not allowed to us, born as we are somewhere under a different sky.' As the sky is common to all, the phrase 'to be born under a different sky' must necessarily be a metaphor. And Virgil says regarding the Elysian Fields, 'They have their sun, and their own stars they know.' He said 'their own meaning different from ours. So Claudian says '- we have other stars, / And other orbs; purer the light you'll see.' Again Virgil, in the Bucolics: 'And Britons, cut off by the width of the world.' It usually happens to the generality of mortals, that when they are new arrivals in a region fairly distant from their own corner of the world, there is nothing which does not alarm them, or amaze them, or arouse their wonder, as if they had been carried off into another sphere.

Αποκείμενος ἰχθὺς, A fish put by, seems to have become a proverb against those who reserve nothing for a future occasion. For fish used to be a great delicacy. The prudent man always has something in the way of food put by, to bring out for an unexpected guest; and it does not do to imitate Achilles in Homer, for when Priam's envoys go to him they find the house empty and starveling. The adage, it seems, should take this form: 'A fish put by should not be brought out again in front of all.' Plutarch in his'Table-talk':'But I smiling said, O friend, this is like dragging in the proverbial fish put by along with the Pythagorean peck-measure.' This can be applied to a speech, or a story, not particularly attractive in itself, which none the less is repeated not without boredom. It suits the mean man, and the one who worries about the morrow.

Χωρὶς τό τ᾽ εἰπαῖν πολλὰ καὶ τὰ καίρια, Different are these, to speak well and speak aptly. An iambic line in use as a proverb, which warns us to avoid verbosity: one is almost bound to fall into error if one tries to say a great deal. In the Hebrew proverbs we find 'In the multitude of words there wanteth not sin.'

Ψάφωνος ὅρνιθες, Psapho's birds. This is used when someone achieves fame by a new method, as when a person bribes others to praise him and as it were dictates to them speeches of praise, through which he wishes to become a public figure. They tell that in Libya there was a man called Psapho, who had a mind to be considered divine; so he caught a number of birds which could be taught human speech, and trained them to say these words, 'Great God Psapho.' When he had trained them he let them go in the hills. They sang what they had been taught, and from them the rest of the birds learnt to sing it too. The people of Libya, who did not know how this had been contrived, believed it to be a divine occurrence, and set about worshipping Psapho and including him among their gods. I have found the proverb in the collections of Apostolius.