Adagia 401–500

In the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, book 13 chapter 17, the grammarian Sulpitius Apollinaris records two proverbs, one Greek and one Latin, both with the same meaning. The Greek is a hexameter of proverbial form, he says: 'Many things happen between the cup and the final touch of the lip.' It is a warning to us that nothing we hope for is so certain, and nothing so close, that it cannot be suddenly upset by some turn of chance. So little is it safe to trust in things to come, that we are scarcely certain of what we hold in our hands.
The origin of the proverb is traced in some quarters to the following story. Ancaeus, the son of Neptune and Astypalea, daughter of Phoenix, planted a vineyard; and he vehemently harassed and urged on his workers. One of them tired of the work and turned against his master; he swore that his master would never taste any wine from those vines. Later on, when the vines had grown well and the grapes had ripened, the master exulted in triumph and sent for that servant, and ordered him to pour his master a cup of wine. As he was just about to raise the cup to his lips, he reminded the slave of what he had said, and pointed out how vain his prophecy had been. But the slave answered his master with this saying: 'Between the cup and the lips much may befall.' The event justified the slave's saying. For as they were talking, before the master had drunk the wine, another servant came in and announced that the vineyard was being wrecked by a huge boar. Hearing this, Ancaeus put down the cup and rushed off at once after the boar, which gored and killed him during the hunt.
Lycophron takes this over in his Iambics:
Learning the truth, poor wretch, at my own expense
That Fate, directing the affairs of mortals,
Tosses many things between the lip and the drinking-cup.
The commentator gives Aristotle as the authority, who also told the story of Ancaeus, with a certain variant. Ancaeus was planting the vineyard, when a seer who had been summoned prophesied to him that he would never taste the wine from it. He poured out some wine into a cup and taunted the seer as a 'false prophet.' The rest agrees with what we have related from the collections of others. Festus Pompeius says it was an augur from the neighbourhood, passing by, who made the prophecy. Lycophron alters it in another way, bringing in the father Agapenor, and making Ancaeus the son of Actor and Eurythemistis, and the boar the Calydonian boar. Dionysius, in Zenodotus, prefers to connect the proverb with Antinous, mentioned by Homer in Odyssey 22. This Antinous was one of the suitors of Penelope, and . was holding a cup, just about to drink, when Ulysses shot an arrow which transfixed him by the throat. The cup fell from his hands and he collapsed and died. It would not be out of place to transcribe Homer's lines:
He spoke, and aimed the bitter arrow at Antinous.
He was about to lift the fair cup,
Golden, two-handled, taking it in his hands
To drink the wine; murder was not in his thoughts;
Who would think that at a crowded banquet
There was one among many, strong though he be,
To bring him evil death and dark destruction?
But Ulysses aiming at his throat struck him with his arrow
And the point pierced his tender neck straight through.
He swerved to one side, and the cup fell from his hand,
And immediately the thick stream of the man's blood
Issued from his nostrils.
I think it is not inappropriate at this point to recall the reply which Julius Caesar received when he reproached the soothsayer with talking nonsense: The Calends of March have come but not gone.'

The Latin proverb runs thus, and is taken from eating as the Greek one that precedes is taken from drinking. In old days the Romans lived on offae [morsels, bits and pieces] as Valerius Maximus bears witness. 'Between mouth and morsel' is as if you said 'between the mouth and the food.' In Gellius the proverb is quoted from some speech or other of Cato's, about improper appointment of magistrates, in these words: 'Now they say, there is good grain both in the ear and in the blade. Do not be too hopeful about that. I have often heard it said that between the mouth and the morsel much can intervene. There is certainly a wide interval between the morsel of food and the blade.' Festus records the adage as 'between the hand and the chin.'

In the Phormio of Terence there is one of the most charming proverbs: 'Run away, but not beyond the house,' which warns us not to avoid one fault in such a way that we imprudently fall into a worse one. 'It is by our own fault,' he says, 'that it is profitable to be bad, when we are trying too hard to be called good and kind. Run away, but not beyond the house, as they say.' The words are those of old Demophon, reproaching himself with having striven too eagerly to avoid the reputation of being a miser, and so incurring the blame of being a fool. Donatus explains the metaphor of the adage in the following way (always supposing this comment is by Donatus): 'Run away, but not overlooking your own house, which can be your safest place of refuge.' Or, 'Run away, but not beyond the house, where a thief can better be guarded against and caught and punished with a good flogging. Or,' he says, 'the word is that of a man shouting at a thief and taking care that he should not pass in front of the house, and in passing steal something from there too.' Who would put up with this kind of guesswork, with its variable and uncertain conjectures, if we did not see this to be the very method of commentators on the law and on the Greek adages? The first interpretation suits me best. Some people, in the urgency of their flight, run past the very place where they could comfortably stay quiet. The Greeks have one word for this, parapheresthai, meaning to rush past or be carried past by mistake, away from the thing which was to be grasped. I think Lucian had this adage in mind when he writes in Nigrinus: 'And as the saying goes in the tragedies and comedies, swiftly running past the house.'

Τὴν χάρυβδιν ἐκφυγὼν, τῇ Σκύλλῃ περιέπεσον, I escaped Charybdis but fell into Scylla. These are iambic dimeters, akephaloi [without a beginning] whether produced by chance or created by art is uncertain. The meaning is this: 'While I was avoiding a more serious evil I fell into a different one'. The adage comes from the story in Homer, which tells how Ulysses sailed too close to Scylla for fear of Charybdis, and lost six of his crew. Some say that Scylla was the daughter of Nisus king of the Megarians, who for stealing her father's golden lock of hair was changed into this sea-monster, as Pausanias tells in his book on Corinth. Virgil seems to agree with this in the Bucolics, when he says
Or what shall I say of Scylla, Nisus' child,
Whom story pictures as a lovely woman
Ringed round with howling monsters to her waist,
Her sea-dogs' fangs tearing the trembling sailors?
Servius states that Scylla was the daughter of Phorcus and the nymph Crateis. When Glaucus fell in love with her, Circe, who had a passion for him, saw that he was fonder of Scylla than of herself, and mixed magic poison in the spring where the nymph was accustomed to bathe. When she stepped down into it, she was changed from the waist downwards into a variety of shapes. For this was the special quality of Circe, to change human beings into the shape of beasts. Hating her deformity she flung herself into the sea, and became the subject of the legend.
Where the truth lies, opinion differs among writers. Sallust thinks there was a rock jutting out into the sea, which looked like the shape of a woman to anyone who saw it from a distance, and the waves dashing against it seemed to imitate the sound of wolves howling and dogs barking, so it was imagined that she was girdled from the waist down with such wild animals. In the Greek collections I find that there was a trireme, a particularly fleet one, called Scylla, from skyleuein, to despoil, because the pirates who lurked in her infested the Tyrrhenian and Sicilian seas and whenever they overtook other ships, despoiled them: hence the story arose. As to Charybdis, the fables of the poets tell that she was a ravenous woman who stole the oxen of Hercules and was struck by Jove's thunderbolt, and flung into the sea, there to become a monster which retains its previous nature to this day. For it swallows up everything, and what it has swallowed is driven towards the shore round Taormina, according to Sallust. Thus Horace gives the proverbial name Charybdis to a greedy courtesan of insatiable covetousness:
Wretched youth,
In what a great Charybdis art thou caught,
Lad worthy of a better flame.
Servius says Scylla is in Italy, Charybdis in Sicily. In the Aeneid Book 3, Virgil has a beautiful description of the narrow strait between the two perils:
Once on a time, they say, these two lands were a single
Country; then there came a convulsion of nature which tore them
Hugely asunder - the ages can bring such immense geological
Change - and the sea rushed violently in between them, dividing
Italy from Sicily, severing their coasts and washing
Cities and fields on either side with a narrow strait.
Scylla guards the right shore, insatiable Charybdis
The left.
and the same elsewhere:'- not to attempt the passage, there being on either side / So narrow a margin of safety.' In the Odyssey Book 12, Homer describes the double danger at great length, and makes Circe warn Ulysses to keep his course nearer to Scylla than to Charybdis, because it would be better to lose six of his crew than have them all perish; she assures him that Charybdis is more hazardous than Scylla:
Heaven keep you from being there when she sucks the waves in her jaws,
For not even Neptune could save you from such disaster.
No; you must hug Scylla's rock and speedily drive your ship by;
It is better you should have to mourn the loss of six
Of your company, than that of your whole crew.
The adage can be used in three ways. First, when we give a warning that if a point is reached where we are in such straits that there is no escape without cost, we must choose the lesser of the two evils, following the example of Ulysses, and tend to the side where the loss is slighter. For instance, if someone is in danger of losing his money or his safety, he chooses to have his money in danger rather than his life, because the loss of possessions can be repaired in one way or another, but life once lost can never be restored. Secondly, we may use it to point out that a transaction is double-sided and dangerous, and that it needs the utmost prudence to keep from erring on either side. In this case there will be no question of deciding which is the greater risk; but this at least is clear, that on each side there is great danger. An example of the first would be, 'Remember it is far better to incur expense through Scylla than to lose health in Charybdis/ It is preferable to have a financial loss, to run into Scylla as it were, than to fall into the Charybdis of dishonour. Of the second: Take care to please the people in such a way that you do not offend the ruler. Do your business with caution and circumspection, remembering that you are steering a course between Scylla and Charybdis.' Thirdly, you could turn it the other way, like this: 'By being afraid to seem not very learned, you have brought on yourself the reputation of arrogance; that is exactly what is meant by avoiding Scylla and falling into Charybdis.' In Latin this line is famous, whoever was the author (at present it does not come to mind): 'Into Scylla he fell, in hopes of avoiding Charybdis.'

Κάπνον γε φεύγων εἰς τὸ πῦρ περιέπεσον, From smoke I fled, into the fire I fell; an iambic line very close to the previous saying. Lucian in Necyomantia:
'It had escaped my notice, that, as they say, I was forcing myself out of the smoke into the fire.'
Plato also uses it in the Republic, book 8, when he says that a people which refuses to obey free men is avoiding the smoke and running into the fire - meaning that they will be forced to obey slaves. Horace alludes to this when he says in the Satires, Tor all in vain one fault you may avoid, / If by the other you are warped.' And in the Art of Poetry: 'Shunning a fault leads to another failing, / If without skill.' Plutarch 'On False Shame': 'But it invariably happens that foolish shame fleeing the smoke of disgrace throws itself into the fire,' that is, into something worse.

To swerve by a finger's breadth, or a nail's breadth, is a common saying in Cicero, meaning 'by the least distance.' The metaphor is pleasanter when we use these words to convey perfect imitation and full agreement, as in the Academic Questions, book 2: 'From this rule I may not swerve, as they say, by a nail's breadth.' And again, 'For where does he follow Xenocrates, whose books on method in speaking are many and much approved by many, or Aristotle himself, than whom nothing has more acuteness or polish? Never does he stir a foot from Chrysippus.' He is speaking of Antiochus, who despised all others and followed Chrysippus in everything. Again in Academic Questions book 2, 'Once these are conceded, not a finger's breadth of progress can be made.' Again Letters to Atticus: 'I am determined not to stray a finger's breadth from the path of strict honour.' Again in the same work, book 13: 'One must take care, and this in every kind of life, each one of us, not to swerve one nail's breadth from our conscience.' Again in the Letters to Friends: 'Urge him therefore to stray a nail's breadth, as they say, from his writing.' Less metaphorical, but still proverbial, are the words of Euclio in Plautus' Aulularia: 'By Hercules, if you move out of this place by a finger or the breadth of a nail... .' And Cicero in the Verrines, They did not yield a finger's breadth.' The same, Letters to Atticus, book 13, the first letter: 'We have not yet set foot outside the villa, such heavy and continuous rainstorms we have had.' The same in Academic Questions book 2: 'I am not seeking from them those first principles of mathematics, which must be conceded, or else not a finger's breadth of progress can be made.' And St Jerome in imitation of this: 'And following in the footsteps of the apostolic will, let us not depart by one point, as they say, by the breadth of a nail, from his opinions.'
The metaphor appears partly to be derived from those who measure a plank or a piece of stone, or something of the kind, by fingers' breadth, whenever a precise measurement is required, for we are used to measure other things by cubits. A fingerbreadth is the smallest possible measurement. Partly it comes from land-surveyors, who measure the ground by stadia, paces, or for the smallest measurement, feet. Even now the people say 'a straw's breadth' using the same sort of figure of speech, to mean 'not in the very least.'

This proverbial hyperbole often used by Cicero seems to come from the same source: He has no place to set his foot, meaning he does not possess the least scrap of land. Letters to Atticus, book 13: 'The son of Ariobarzanes is coming to Rome. I imagine he wants to buy a kingdom from Caesar, for as things now stand he has not a place of his own to set his foot.' Again in the second Philippic: 'What place in the world was there, where you could set foot on your own ground?' Again Letters to Atticus, book 7: 'Clearly there is not a foot of soil in Italy which is not in that man's grasp.' Again in Definibus, book 4: 'What was to become of wisdom? She had not a place to set her foot, when all her functions were taken away.' It applies to a particularly poor and needy man, who has not as much ownership of land as the sole of his foot. The same writer has a joke about a farm 'which can be shot from a sling.'

Δὶς πρὸς τὸν αὐτὸν αἰσχρὸν εἰσκρούειν λίθον, It is shameful to stumble twice on the same stone. A neat and proverbial iambic line which is quoted by Zenodotus in his collection of adages. Cicero, Letters to friends, book 10: 'The error of "twice against the same stone" is held up to reproach in a familiar proverb.' Ovid, Tristia, book 2: 'But as it is - such madness accompanying my disease - I strike my foot again on those remembered rocks.' Ausonius uses this in one of his letters: 'Truly, you made your request, so that you should twice fall over the same stone in your letter, but I, whatever fortune should befall, would only blush once.' 'To fall over the same stone twice' is to go wrong twice in the same matter. For the first mistake, as in the Greek adage, deserves forgiveness; but for one who repeats the offence there is no excuse. Among the Greek maxims this one is also famous: 'It is not for a wise man to take the same tumble twice.' There is a Greek epigram also, of uncertain authorship: 'He, married once, who takes another wife, / Seeks the wild ocean with a shipwrecked craft.' A proverbial maxim current under the name of Publius has something not unlike this expression: 'He wrongly rails at Neptune, who suffers shipwreck twice.' But Scipio does not allow the wise man to err even once, or to say 'I never expected this.'

Horace expresses the same idea in the Art of Poetry, with a different metaphor: The lute-player is mocked who is forever playing the same wrong note.' Adopted from musicians, for whom it is a terrible thing to play a wrong note more than once on the same string. It can well be said of those who frequently go wrong in the same matter, or commit the same fault over and over again. The first lapse may be ascribed to chance or rashness, but to do it again argues stupidity or inexperience.

Several adages about resemblance are found in the authors, among them 'as like as one egg to another,' of things indistinguishably alike. Cicero, Academic Questions, book 4: 'Do you see how the proverb speaks of the likeness of one egg to another? Yet we have been told that in Delos at the time of its prosperity, a number of people were in the habit of keeping hens for profit. These men, when they had inspected an egg, used to say which hen had laid it. Nor is this against us. For it is enough for us to tell the eggs apart.' Quintilian also quoted this proverb. It is made use of by Seneca as well, in the skit he wrote to make fun of the Emperor Claudius.

This has the same force, and is used by Plautus in the Amphitryo: 'Milk is not more like milk, than that "I" is like myself.' This is said by Sosia about Mercury, who had assumed his shape. Again in the Miles: 'As like as milk to milk.'

Another phrase of Plautus, in the Menaechmi, has the same force: 'Not water to water, nor milk to milk, believe me, was ever more exactly resembling than he to you, and you to him.' Like this is the phrase from the same scene, 'He's so like you that he might be your mirror.' Again in the Miles: Tor never could water be drawn from the top of a well as like water as this.'

Cicero adds to these another, in Academic Questions, 'as like as eggs to eggs, and bees to bees,' when he is joking about the worlds of Democritus, each one just like the other. They say likewise, 'as like as one sheep to another.'

Ακάνθιος τέττιξ, The grasshopper of Acanthus. Used as a proverb against people who are ignorant, inarticulate or unskilled in music. It is Stephanus Byzantius who tells us that it was near the town of Acanthus, in Aetolia, that grasshoppers are mute, though they chirp elsewhere; hence this proverb. He quotes as his authority Simonides. Pliny, in his Natural History, book 11 chapter 27, writes that in the territory of Rhegium all the cicadas are silent, while across the river in the Locrian territory they sing. Pausanias says the same in his second book on Elis. Strabo Geography, book 6, reports that the territory of Rhegium is separated from the Locrian by a river named the Alex. The cicadas which live on the Locrian side chirp loudly, while those of Rhegium are silent. He thinks the cause of this is that the district of Rhegium is shady and dark, and makes the wing-cases of the cicadas heavy with moisture, while in the Locrian country, which is sunny, they are dried by the heat of the sun and are readier to emit their noise. The very fact that there is a well-known story about the vocal powers of their neighbours increases the mystery about the cicadas of Rhegium. For the aforesaid Strabo quotes Timaeus as his authority for the story that Eunomus the Locrian and Ariston of Rhegium competed with each other in song in the Pythian games. Ariston invoked the Delphic Apollo to his aid as a singer, because the people of Rhegium formerly came from Delphi. Eunomus replied that it was not for the people of Rhegium to enter into any musical contest at all, since in their country that most vocal of creatures, the cicada, lacked a voice. As they were competing, one of the strings of Eunomus' lyre snapped, and a cicada flying overhead hopped down and supplied by its chirp the note which would otherwise have been missing. He was therefore proclaimed the victor, and he put up a statue of a lyre-player with a cicada perched on his instrument.This is more or less what Strabo relates.

To be weighed on the same scales, that is, under the same conditions. Horace in the Satires: 'This granted, he'll be placed on the same scales.' And again in the Epistles: 'On the same scales Rome's writers must be weighed.' This agrees with the well-known rule of the lawyers: 'You must suffer the law you have yourself laid down.' You must let the same treatment be given to you as you have given to others. Persius: 'In that great scale the lying tongue set straight.' A very similar saying is 'To assess by the same yardstick, ἴσῳ σταθμῷ, by equal weight, that is, with level scale or balance. Plutarch: 'But with equal weight the vice that hangs about all men drags them down, "as leaden weights pull down a fishing-net."'

A soldier's proverb meaning 'he hasn't a penny,' taken, says Acron, from some Greek fable. Porphyrion derives it from the soldiers' habit of carrying whatever they posses in their belts. Lucilius, as quoted by Nonius, has a fine description of such a man:
He has no mount, no servant, no companion,
But always with him has his money-bag;
With money-bag he eats, and sleeps, and washes,
The man's one hope is in his bag, and all
The rest of life's devoted to it.
Bulga is the word used by Lucilius for a purse or pouch, a small bag hanging from the arm. So Horace says 'With copy-book and satchel on their arm'; though Festus indicates that bulga is a Gaulish word. In Aulus Gellius, Gracchus talks in the same way: 'When I set out for Rome, those full belts of silver I took out with me, were empty when I brought them back from the province.' Horace in the Epistles: 'He will go where you will, who's lost his belt.' Plautus in the Poenulus: 'You who have no belt-bag, how did you come to this town? What are you looking for?' In these words of Plautus there is a double allusion to the garment worn in the Carthaginian fashion without a girdle, and to the money carried in the belt, indispensable for living in a costly city. Pescennius Niger, according to Spartianus, forbade the soldiers to carry their belts with them into war, but if they had any money they were to hand it over to the care of the State, and it would be returned to them after the battle. Thus at one and the same time he took away from them the means of spendthrift living, and from the enemy their booty in case of any disaster. In Lampridius, writing about Alexander, we find: 'A soldier is not afraid, except when clothed, shod, armed, and with something in his belt.'

Diomedes the grammarian, defining a proverb, adds this as an example. He gives the meaning as 'we shall know from the outcome.' In the same vein is the argument in the comedy: 'the facts will show.' For as Ovid says, 'The event justifies the deed.' And in Greek αὐτὸ δείξει, The thing itself will show.

Πολλ᾽ οἶδ᾽ ἀλώπηξ ἀλλ᾽ ἐχῖνος ἕν μέγα. Many-sided the skill of the fox: the hedgehog has one great gift. Zenodotus quotes this line from Archilochus. It is said about cunning people who are involved in various plots, or rather when we want to show how some people manage to do more with one piece of astuteness than others with their different schemes. The fox protects itself against the hunters by many and various wiles, and yet is often caught. The echinus, by which I take it he means the hedgehog (for in this place he is talking of the land-animal, not the sea-urchin) by its one skill alone is safe from the bites of dogs; it rolls itself up with its spines into a ball, and cannot be snapped up with a bite from any side. In the same Zenodotus these lines are quoted from Ion of Chios, a tragic poet; and Athenaeus quotes the same from the same in his Table-talk, from a tragedy entitled Phoenicia:
But on land a lion's way I praise,
But even more the hedgehog's wretched arts:
When he perceives another creature's smell
Rolling his spiny self into a ball
He lies impregnable to touch and bite.
Plutarch refers to the proverb and to the poem in his essay entitled 'Whether Land or Sea Animals Are Cleverer.' I will give his words: The defending and guarding of their own safety by hedgehogs has provided the proverb: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog one big thing." For when the fox approaches, they say, "Rolling his spiny self into a ball, / He lies impregnable to touch and bite."' Plutarch, or whoever was the author of this work, mingled with the lines some words of his own; I say this so that no one will suspect me of the error. But it is Pliny who described most fully the intelligence and astuteness of this animal (book 8 chapter 37): 'Hedgehogs also', he says, 'prepare their food, and by rolling over the apples lying on the ground spike them on their spines; they take just one in their mouths and carry them into hollow trees. By retreating into their holes they foretell the change of wind from north to south. But when they know the presence of a hunter, they contract snout, feet and the whole of their underpart, which is covered with sparse and harmless hair, and they roll up into the shape of a ball, so that nothing can be taken hold of that is not spikes. When driven to desperation they void urine which corrodes their hinder parts and damages their spines.' Anyone who wishes to learn more about this must consult the reference I have given. This is the part which touches most closely on the sense of the proverb.
The sea-urchin also is famous for intelligence; foreseeing the raging of the sea, it collects stones and weighs itself down with them, so that the weight will keep it from being easily shifted, and its spines will not be worn out with too much rolling. When sailors see this, they make fast their boats with several anchors. This is what Pliny says in book 9 chapter 31. The fox is crafty, and knows a great many tricks, as many fables relate, especially this one, which is told by Plutarch in his Moralia. Once, when the leopard was making a scornful comparison between himself and the fox, claiming that he had a coat of varying and many-coloured spots, the fox replied that while the leopard's ornamentation was on his skin, his own was in the mind. And truly it was much better to be endowed with cunning brains than with a party-coloured skin. The Greeks call a clever and guileful person poikilophron and poikilometis; the Latin words are vafer and versipellis.
Another story is told, not unlike this proverb: once the fox was talking to the cat, and boasting that he had so many skills at his disposal that one might say he had a bag of tricks; the cat replied that she had only one, to which she trusted in danger. While they were discussing this there was suddenly a noise of approaching hounds. The cat lept up into a high tree, while the fox was encircled and caught by the pack of hounds. The moral of this story is that it is sometimes worth more to have one plan, if it is realistic and efficacious, than several wiles and trivial schemes. For instance, a poor man might court a girl with manifold devices, but a rich man would have one only, the one described by Ovid: 'Say "take what you like," you will say well.' The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog one big thing.

Horace in the Art of Poetry: 'Perhaps you can paint a cypress tree; / But that's no use, if shipwrecks earn your fee.' Acron points out that this is a proverb, derived from an inexperienced painter who could not paint anything but a cypress. A man who had been in a shipwreck asked him to paint his portrait and show the shipwreck, whereupon the painter asked if he wanted anything added in the way of a cypress? The thing first became a joke and then an adage. It can aptly be used to describe people who are always obtruding what they have learnt at inopportune moments, and when it has no bearing on anything.

This is found in the Curculio of Plautus. The adage warns us to make an early retreat from danger; whoever wishes to avoid a calamity should avoid what gives rise to it. Thus whoever wishes not to be corrupted should avoid bad company; if one does not wish to lie with a girl one should not kiss her. The poet adds at once, 'Smoke can burn nothing, but fire can.' Smoke is the sign of fire about to break out.

Terence in the Phormio: 'By your doing my situation is obviously getting back to the rope.' This proverb expresses an utterly desperate situation; for at this point some frantic people are apt to turn to the noose. Juvenal: 'Can you bear a mistress when ropes are to be had?' That other phrase belongs here:'Choose your tree and hang yourself.'

Πενία δὲ τὴν σοφίαν, Poverty has drawn wisdom as her lot. Zenodotus quotes this from Euripides; others attribute it to Ariston. Wealth is idle, but Need is the discoverer of many arts. Aristophanes in the Plutus makes her boast of this, claiming the invention of all the arts for herself. Virgil: Toil conquers all, / Persistent toil, and need in hardships dire.' Ovid: Tils often cause the mind to stir.' Persius: 'The belly's a great teacher of craftsmanship, / Bestower of brains.' This line is also quoted in Greek, 'Harsh hunger is the teacher of many men.' Xenophon called poverty 'wisdom learnt without a teacher: what wisdom persuades us to by speaking, poverty drives us to by the very thing itself.' Theocritus in the Fishers: 'Poverty alone, Diophantus, awakens the arts, / She is the teacher of toil, the mistress of studies.' This explains why Jupiter withdrew the readily available plenty of the Golden Age, 'That many arts should be hammered out / By thought and practice.' And so the familiar proverbial maxim says not inelegantly, 'By poverty's command, a man learns much.' The proverb may also refer to something we see happening, inexplicably: wealth goes to Midas and to the wicked, while the learned and the good are usually poor. On this subject there are two problems attributed to Aristotle. In one he asks why poverty usually elects to dwell with good men. He gives various reasons for this: one is that the wicked prefer to amass riches by hook or by crook rather than to have a long acquaintance with poverty, and so she flees from those who might take her as an excuse for great crimes, and turns towards the people who (she thinks) will use her with uprightness and moderation. Another reason he gives is that poverty lacks both strength and counsel, and thus being a woman hopes to find better support among the 'men of many tears' as the proverb has it. Or else, being bad herself, she avoids bad people, lest she should 'add fire to fire' as the saying is, that is, evil on evil, and become unbearable and incurable.
The other question he asks is why do bad men usually have money, which is not true of good men. Is wealth blind, he asks, and thus misguided in its choice? These questions seem more those of a poet and sophist than of a philosopher, especially a serious one, and I think it is hardly likely that they come from Aristotle. However, what is said about 'blind riches' is mostly taken from the Plutus of Aristophanes. Here Plutus, the god of wealth, is asked how he came to incur the evil of blindness? He replies as follows:
'Twas Jove that caused it, jealous of mankind;
For when a little chap, I used to brag
I'd visit none except the wise and good
And orderly: he therefore made me blind,
That I might ne'er distinguish which was which,
So jealous is he always of the good!
Lucian in Timon relates much the same sort of thing about Plutus, whom he makes not only blind but lame; always blind, but only lame when sent to good men - otherwise remarkably fleet-footed.

Χύτρης φιλία, Cupboard love. This applies to that widespread kind of friend who is attracted by the stewpot, not drawn by affection. On these, see Juvenal: 'He thinks you have been caught by the smell of his kitchen. And he isn't far wrong.' The Scriptures call these 'table-friends.' Plutarch in his book 'How to Tell a Flatterer From a Friend' says that such people were commonly called 'oil-flask and trencher-carriers' because they love from the stomach and not from the heart; those who are always on the spot when they hear 'water for the hands.' For Aristophanes the grammarian, in Athenaeus, book 9, tells how the washing of the hands which preceded a meal was called kata cheiros [on the hands], and after the meal nipsasthai [to wash]. If I am not mistaken, it is against them that the saying of Menander the comic poet is aimed, as quoted by Athenaeus: 'once hands are washed [for dinner] friends stick closely.' There is a proverb like this, The pot boils, friendship thrives.'

Αρχαιότερα διφθέρας λαλεῖς, You are talking of things older than the diphthera. This applies to people who tell nonsensical stories, or speak of things that are far in the past and out of date. A diphthera or tanned hide was some relic of the early concoctions of legend. They say that a diphthera was the skin of that goat which suckled Jove, on which (or so said the ancients) he wrote everything which happened. So the events which neither survive in the chronicles of the historians nor are preserved in the memory of men were said to be fetched from Jove's goatskin. Indeed you will often read in Aristophanes words like 'primitive, ancient' for 'nonsense,' I imagine because antiquity is so full of fables; and 'archaically' to mean crazily and foolishly. It is in the same style that we call old, obsolete, finished things kronika. So in Athenaeus, book 7, someone, Arrianus I think, says Those are victuals dating from Saturn's time, my friend.' The poets pretend that Saturn was ousted from his kingdom and Jove reigned in his stead.

This is in the Phormio of Terence: a young man, Antiphon, had a wife at home whom he could not throw out, either because he did not wish to, being desperately in love with her, or because it would not have been upright to do so, since she had been adjudged to him by the pronouncement of the magistrates; but neither could he keep her, because of the violent resentment of his father. And when his cousin called him happy, because he possessed in his house what he loved, he answered 'It's all very well, I am holding the wolf by the ears, as they say. For I cannot see how I can send her away, nor do I know how to keep her.' Later the pander asserts (as if referring to the proverb) that he has the same experience with Phaedria, whom he can neither keep on, because he pays nothing, nor reject, because he is terribly charming and promises mountains of gold. Donatus adds the Greek proverb in Greek words: 'I hold the wolf by the ears, and can neither keep him nor let him go.' Suetonius in his life of Tiberius: The reason for delay was fear of the risks threatening on all sides, so that often he said he was holding the wolf by the ears.' Plutarch in 'Precepts of Statecraft': 'A wolf, they say, cannot be held by the ears,' while men are particularly led by this part, that is by persuasion.
This is said about people who become involved in some affair which it would not be honest to abandon, and yet cannot be borne. It seems to have been derived from some event, like many other proverbs; or at any rate it springs from the fact that while the hare has very long ears and can easily be held by them, the wolf has ears which are short for its size, and there is no holding it in that way, but on the other hand it is most dangerous to let it escape from one's hands, since the beast has such a bite. Caecilius in Aulus Gellius, book 15 chapter 9, has the same idea but without the metaphor: 'For these are the worst friends, cheerful of face, / Dismal at heart, whom you can neither clasp nor let go.' Theognis alludes to it, even more distantly: 'My heart's so strangely moved by love for you / That I can neither love nor can I hate.' An imitation of this, it seems, is the line 'Not with thee can I live nor yet without thee.' Varro also give as an example of an adage: I hold a wolf by the ears.

Very close to this is the saying ἀναγκαῖον κακὸν, A necessary evil. There are people whom you cannot throw over because their help is needed in some way, but you can hardly tolerate them because of their immorality. This seems to come from the remark of a certain Hybraeas, recalled by Strabo, book 14. Euthydamus was a man with a certain overbearing quality, but in many ways useful to the state, so that his vices and virtues seemed to break equal. The orator Hybraeas in some speech spoke of him thus, 'You are a necessary evil to the state; we can neither live with you nor without you.' The emperor Alexander Severus decreed the abolition of the public accountants, but when he reflected that they could not be abolished without damage to the state, he called them 'a necessary evil.' Publius Cornelius Ruffinus was another of this type, thievish and miserly but all the same an excellent commander; Fabricius Luscinus preferred to be plundered by him rather than be sold into slavery, as Gellius tells us in book 4, and Cicero in the De oratore, book 2. It can be turned round to apply to wives, who are uncomfortable to live with, yet without them the commonwealth cannot exist. It can also be applied to things, as when one may say that a medicine is a troublesome thing, but a necessary one. Euripides in the Orestes: 'A possession painful, but necessary.' Not unlike this in form is the response of an oracle recorded by Pliny, book 18 chaper 6: 'By what methods should the fields be cultivated? Saith the oracle, by bad, by good: this means, in its riddling way, that the fields should be cultivated with the least possible expense.'

Οὐκ ἄνευ Θησέως, Not without Theseus. Here we mean that something is achieved with outside help, or we use it to mean that there is association and partnership in all things. For Zenodotus writes that Theseus was of assistance to many of the strongest men in their contests; for instance he was with Meleager in destroying the Calydonian boar, and he assisted Perithous in the battle against the Centaurs, and Hercules in his fight with the Amazons. The story of the boar is as follows: Oeneus the father of Meleager made offerings to the gods of the firstfruits of the year, but he left out Artemis. She, in her anger, sent a huge boar into the Calydonian country, which laid everything waste. Oeneus called for all the most valiant men to destroy it, promising rewards. Among those who competed was Meleager, who slew the beast, but after summoning Theseus to his aid. The rest of the story has nothing to do with the meaning of the proverb.
As to Perithous, the tale runs as follows: Perithous, the suitor of Hippodamia, made a banquet and invited the Centaurs, because they were kinsmen of his bride. As soon as they had warmed up with their wine, they began to try to take the bride by force, and a fight started. Theseus came to the help of Perithous and slaughtered many Centaurs.
About Hercules, they tell this tale: Eurystheus had laid on Hercules the task of stealing the girdle of Hippolyta queen of the Amazons. Hercules set out to fulfil this promise, but Juno, who was always hostile to him, took the form of an Amazon and spread abroad everywhere the news that a stranger, or rather an enemy, was coming to violate the queen and carry off by force the girdle which she wore as part of her royal insignia. When they heard this, the Amazons took up arms against Hercules. He, realising that this was no mistake, but the result of craft, killed Hippolyta and took the belt. Then, to take further vengeance on the Amazons, he went to war with them and defeated them, but with the help of Theseus.
Plutarch too mentions this adage in his life of Theseus, and he indicates that Theseus, as I have said, came to the help of many, but from his frequent contests he reaped no reward; and he quotes Herodotus as authority for this. Aristides recalls the proverb in his speech to the Thebans about military aid: 'When Hercules himself, however, was in need of a friend, Theseus conducted him to Athens and restored and revived him.' Thus whenever some deed is celebrated under a borrowed name, which has been achieved by the work of another, for instance if someone were to publish a book in his own name after using the work of a more learned man, this adage will be found apt: Not without Theseus. Or someone might say that no joyous chance can come his way 'without a Theseus.'

A proverb of this kind is reported by Eustathius on the second book of the Iliad of Homer, ἡ σφαῖρα κατὰ πρανοῦς, A ball on a steep slope (rolls or moves along, is understood). It is just like saying To cheer on the runner.' The ball easily runs down a steep slope of its own accord. This fits those who have taken up some way of life for which they seem naturally inclined; it agrees with that other phrase, 'the horse to the plain.'

Ἀφωνότερος τῶν ἰχθύων, As dumb as the very fishes; a proverbial metaphor about quite inarticulate people, who have no gift of speech. It will also suit a man of extraordinary taciturnity. Horace in the Odes: 'Thou that couldst lend the swan's song to dumb fish / If it pleased thee.' For fish make no sound, except for a very few, among them the dog-fish. Lucian Against An Ignoramus: Truly you are as dumb as a fish.' Again in Gallus: 'I shall be much more silent than fish.' Hence Plutarch in his Table-talk' thinks that the Pythagoreans abstained from fish because they recognised them as followers of their rule of life, owing to their silence, a thing peculiar to fish among all living creatures. All the rest have their own voices. Birds are for the most part songful; some of them even imitate human speech. So, among animals, does the manticore in Egypt, if we are to believe Pliny. Fish alone have no voice. Aristotle gives as a reason that they have no lungs, no windpipe, no gullet. There are a few which give out some sound or noise; among these are the dolphin, the gurnard, the maigre, the voca (which seems to be so called because it gives out a voice; that it is sacred to Mercury is revealed by Athenaeus, book 7), and the scallop. But he thinks this sound is not produced by the natural organ of the voice, but by the rubbing together of the gills, or from the internal organs round the belly. Plutarch thinks the fish is called ichthys by the Greeks because it has a compressed voice. And Lucian in Halcyon says, 'For the creatures which live in the water are voiceless.' Athenaeus in book 8 of his Doctors at Dinner quotes an author, Mnaseas of Patrae, who asserted that in the Clitorius, a river of Arcadia, there were speaking fish. He also cites Philostephanus, who wrote that in the river Aornus, which flows through the town of Pheneus, there was a fish called the poecilias which had a voice rather like that of the thrush. Aristotle, however, denies a voice to all fish, except the scapher and the porpoise. The ancients called any fish ellops, because it could not make a sound (from illesthai, the same as eirgesthai, to be confined or compressed, and ops, the voice). So in Theocritus we have ellopieuein for 'fishing.' Athenaeus adds that the disciples of Pythagoras do not abstain altogether from other animals, but some of them they use for food and some even for sacrifice; but fish alone they do not taste, holding them sacred on account of the 'silence' taught by Pythagoras.

Τρυγόνος λαλίστερος, As garrulous as a turtle-dove. This is said about chattering and extremely talkative people. The metaphor is taken from the nature of the bird, which makes a noise not only with its beak but with the hind part of the body, so they say; I imagine because when it coos it seems to wag that part too. This is quoted in Zenodotus from the Plocium of Menander. Aelian, book 12 chapter 10, recalls this proverb, and the bird speaking with both parts of the body. Theocritus in the Women of Syracuse calls talkative women 'turtle-doves': 'Like turtle-doves they will wear me out with their endless broad vowels.'

Βάτραχος ἐκ Σερίφου, A frog from Seriphos; used about silent men, and those who are quite unskilled in speaking or singing. Seriphian frogs, when transferred to Scyros, ceased to croak - hence the proverb. The collections of Greek proverbs taken from the books of Didymus, Tarrhaeus and others have it in this form. Suidas has it in the same words. It is said that in the isle of Seriphos there were mute frogs; Pliny recalls this, in book 8 chapter 58: 'In Cyrene,' he says, 'the frogs were mute, although vocal frogs were imported from the mainland and their kind still exists. They are mute at the present time on the island of Seriphos. The same frogs transferred elsewhere sing; this happened, as they say, in Sicendum, a lake in Thessaly.' Though in the common texts it is 'Seriphian cicadas' which are mentioned, not frogs, but Ermolao restored the right reading, relying on old manuscripts. Seriphus is one of the islands which the Greeks call the Sporades. But the words of Pliny do not seem to agree very well with the Greek compilations. He says the frogs were silent in Seriphos; while they declare the frogs stopped making any sound when transferred to Scyros, as if they were vocal in Seriphos and went mute in Scyros. However if you look more closely at the matter there is no absurdity here. Seriphus had mute frogs. These were taken to Scyros as a curiosity, and the Scyrians marvelled at their being mute, unlike their own frogs, and so they talked about Seriphian frogs and this became a proverb.

Αλλοι μὲν σπείρουσιν, ἄλλοι δ᾽ ἀμήσονται, Some sow, others will reap. This also recurs as follows, without the metaphor Ἄλλοι κάμον, ἄλλοι ὤνηντο , Some laboured, others gained the reward. Similar to this is what Fabius says in Livy, in the tenth book of his Rome From the Foundation: 'When one has planted a tree, for another to collect the fruit under it is intolerable.' Hesiod alludes to this when he writes in his Theogony: 'They draw another's toil into their own belly.' Theognis too: 'Give not to another the fruit of the work you have already done.' The same figure of speech is that used by Diocletian when he was not yet emperor: 'I kill the boars, but another enjoys the meat.' This is related in his life more or less to this effect. When Diocletian was among the Tungri in Gaul, as yet campaigning in small places, he spent some time in a certain tavern and became familiarly acquainted with a female druid. She scolded him for meanness, and he is said to have replied, not seriously but in jest, 'that he would be liberal when he became emperor.' To this the woman said, 'Do not jest, Diocletian, you will truly be emperor, once you have killed the boar.' Taking the woman's words as an omen, he began to hunt the boar with passion, but that was because he did not understand the riddle, which the outcome later made clear. For the emperor Numerianus had been slain by the conspiracy of Arrius Aper [boar] his son-in-law. When this was known, the soldiers elected Diocletian as their claimant and saluted him as Augustus. Then, so as to fulfil the Druid's saying, he stabbed Aper in public with his own hand, adding Virgil's phrase: 'By the right hand of great Aeneas you fall.' But while he was still an unknown man and had killed many boars without the slightest hope of empire, it is said that he used to say 'I kill the boars but another enjoys the meat.'

'Αλλότρια βάλλεις, You are making a bad throw. Said whenever things fall out against one's wishes. Taken from dice-players, when the results as they throw are as far as possible from winning. So when hope deceives us we aptly say 'It's a bad throw.' The adage is found in Diogenianus.

Αλλην δρῦν βαλάνιζε, Go and shake another oak-tree. This aptly fits those who are endlessly asking for something, or who beg for a loan over and over again from the same person. With this adage we may send those people away to din their requests into other ears and leave us alone. It is thought that the proverb arose because in old times human beings lived on acorns, the use of cereals not having yet been discovered. The people who shook the oaks and collected the acorns, and were hired to do so, were called balanistae, which means acorn-gatherers, or glandiarii. When these were taking a look round to see if a few acorns still remained on the tree, the passers-by would shout jestingly 'Go and shake another oak.' This cry was taken over by the public and turned into a proverb. It may well be applied to a business transaction which should be abandoned, since no profit can now be made out of it, or a friend who is to be forsaken because he has now ceased to be useful, or a teacher to be changed because there is nothing more you can learn from him.

To leave the nuts behind means to give up the interests and games of childhood and turn towards weightier and more serious matters. Persius: 'Our record, since we left the nuts behind, / And like wise uncles try to teach mankind.' The metaphor is adapted perhaps from the old wedding ceremonies, in which the bridegroom who was marrying a wife used to scatter nuts around, as if now renouncing his boyhood. So Catullus in his marriage song: 'Give nuts, boy, quickly, / Give nuts, beloved slave.' Virgil, Bucolics 8: 'Scatter the nuts, bridegroom.' However Pliny, in book 15 chapter 22, gives other reasons why nuts used to play a part in old nuptial rites. But it is best to quote his own words: The walnut, though it also accompanies the Fescennine songs sung at weddings, is considerably smaller than a pine-cone taken as a whole, but the kernel is longer in the same proportion. Moreover the walnut has a distinction of structure that is peculiar to it, in that it is protected by a double covering consisting first of a cushion-shaped cup and then of a woody shell. This is the reason why walnuts have become emblems consecrated to weddings, because their progeny is protected in so many ways; a more likely explanation of the custom than that it is due to the rattling rebound which it makes when it falls on the floor.' Festus also notes that it was customary at weddings for children to scatter nuts, as a good omen for the bride when she entered the house of her new husband. Servius adds that the boy catamites when they were retiring from their disgraceful servitude used to throw nuts as a sign that they were casting away all childish things.
It may be from this, or at any rate from children's games in which nuts play a part, that the proverb takes its origin. For boys used to play with nuts and knucklebones, as Horace is witness: '- Your knucklebones and nuts, Aulus.' To this form of the proverb can be attached the rest of these figures: 'Never to leave the nuts behind,' To return to the nuts,' To throw away the nuts,' To give the nuts a respite,' To indulge in, or go back to, the nuts/ and others like them.

Δὶς παῖδες οἱ γέροντες, Old men are children twice over. This is one of those proverbial titles of the Satires of Varro. It will suit those people who in advanced age cling to some childish occupations, unseemly and inopportune though they may be, or old men doddering with senility, turning back again as it were to childhood. Seneca says, 'We are not children twice, as is commonly said, but always; the only difference is that we play with bigger toys.' Plato in the Republic, book 1: 'Not only will the old man, as it seems, be a child twice over, but so will the drunkard.' Aristophanes in the Clouds: 'You will say you think this is the work of a child, / But I retort that old men are children twice over.' Sophocles in the Peleus:
I, the only guardian of the house,
Guide Peleus, aged son of Aeacus;
An aging man becomes a boy again.
Theopompus: 'It is rightly said that old men are children twice over.' Plato: The puerile old man seems like an old man twice.' Antiphon: To take care of an old man is like taking care of a child.' Lucian in the dialogue called Saturnalia: 'For thus I would prove true the proverb which says that old men become children again.'
Here comes in the remark of Varro in his On the Latin Language, book 3, where he says that sometimes in the Attellane farces the words pupum senem mean what the Oscans in their language call casnar [an old man]; for the ancients called a boy pupus. The proverb means not merely that old men turn silly by reason of their age, but that in all ways, as though they had finished their life, the old seem to go back to the beginning, as Aristotle shrewdly said in one of his Problems, where he asks how it may be decided which things are called first and which last. To begin with, there returns the whiteness and thinness of the hair, both usual in children, and then the lisp, as in a second infancy. The gums lose their teeth, or very few remain and those are loose, which again is a thing shared with babies. Indeed, the whole body, in old men, shrinks to a childish size, and there is a parallel loss of strength. Even the food they eat suits both ages. Finally there is their silliness of behaviour and triviality of mind, and the fact that they have no sense seems to suggest infancy in the old. In the Politics, Aristotle avers that after the age of forty-eight the mental powers decline. Hence, Euripides in the Bacchae: 'When I see your old age lacking sense.' So it comes about that old men delight in children, as if drawn by the love of like to like.

To throw old men of sixty off the bridge means to consign older people to idleness, as if they were doting and useless in all walks of life, and to cut them off from the exercise of all occupations. It originates from the fact that in old times people over sixty had no right to vote, their age incapacitating them from public functions; or it may be that the youth of Rome, wishing to be the only ones to cast a vote, drove the helpless old men headlong off the bridges. It had already begun to be the custom to vote from the bridge; and this opinion is accepted by Sisinnius Capito in Festus Pompeius as more likely than the widespread notion that after the city was liberated from the Gauls there was such dearth of food that they began throwing sexagenarians off the bridge into the Tiber.
Varro (On the Life of Our Fathers, book 2) explains that there was an honourable and religious reason: when they came to the fifth stage and were fifty years old, they were free at last from public business, relieved from care, at leisure. Thus some think that the phrase became a proverb, 'sexagenarians must be thrown off the bridge,' because they did not cast the votes, which was done by crossing the bridge. Nonius Marcellus: 'It was generally understood that "throwing the sexagenarians off the bridge" was a bad expression.' Macrobius in the Saturnalia, book i: 'Do you wish to take away from learned men the right of voting in the comitia, and so to speak, throw the sexagenarian elders off the bridge?' Ovid in the Fasti: 'Some think the weak old men were thrown from the bridge so that the young alone might cast their vote.' Old men are thus called depontani, unbridged, which is to say emeriti, relegated to leisure from civil administration. Plato, Laws, book 6, speaking of the function of his 'guardians of the laws,' does not admit to this office anyone under fifty years of age, nor does he allow them to continue in it after seventy; so that if a man of fifty became a magistrate, he would have twenty years in office; if he were sixty, only ten.
The proverb may be used to express aversion for old age, as useless for anything, and needing to be cut off from all the activities of life; or simply applied to those who owing to the weakness of old age have sought retirement, and accepted exemption from ordinary duties.

Δὶς κράμβη θάνατος, Twice-served cabbage is death. Pliny, book 20 chapter 9, lists crambe third among the species of brassica. Dioscorides, book 2, gives three kinds of crambe. The first of these, besides being efficacious otherwise in a number of remedies, even takes away the troublesome results of drunkenness and intoxication, if you eat it raw with vinegar before the meal, as Marcus Cato indicated. Aristotle thinks that the reason for this is that being cold, and having a juice which is mild and dispersive, it draws the vinous liquor into the bowels and the thinner liquor slides into the bladder; the cabbage itself remains in the stomach and cools the body. Thus the humours are drawn off in both ways and the cooled body allows the tipsiness to wear off. There is however a special quality in cabbage, which resists wine, and if it is planted in a vineyard the wine is weaker. Thus it was an accepted custom with the Egyptians and Sybarites to eat cooked cabbage before everything else; the custom of some men was to take cabbage-seed from an amethystine goblet before drinking, so as to be able to indulge in wine without fear of intoxication.
Athenaeus, book 1 says something like this, adding that in early timesthe cabbage and the radish were held to be the same thing. Theophrastus asserts that the grape-vine, even when growing, shuns the smell of radishes. But to return to the proverb. Suidas writes that cabbage used to be served at banquets in antiquity, but when recooked it produced such nausea that it became proverbial in Greek for aversion. Whenever they were describing something disagreeable repeated over and over again, not without disgust, they said 'twice cabbageis death' (that is, recooked). Poliziano thinks that Juvenal was referring to this adage in his seventh Satire:
You teach rhetoric, O iron-hearted Vettius,
When your troop of many scholars slays the cruel tyrants.
For what each has just learnt in his seat
He stands and declaims, reciting the self-same things
In the self-same verses; served up again and again
The cabbage is the death of the unhappy masters.
He means by 'cabbage served up again' an utterly boring speech which has ; to be listened to over and over again. This is close to the phrase we quoted in another place 'Corinthus son of Jove,' and it is the opposite of that other one, 'Beauty bears repeating twice and thrice.' Something lovely in itself still pleases, as Horace says, even if repeated ten times. A foolish thing is tolerated at the first taste for the sake of novelty, but when repeated is hardly bearable and causes disgust.
Yet this plant was highly celebrated in early times, so much so that it was not without veneration, and for this reason was called mantis, a prophet. It was the custom to swear by it, especially among the lonians, 'so help me, cabbage!' and this also might be seen as an origin for the proverb in the sense of aversion, as Athenaeus says in Doctors at Dinner, book 9.

Μηδ᾽ Ἡρακλῆς πρὸς δύο, Not even Hercules can take on two. The meaning is that no one so far excels in strength that he alone can be equal to a number of others. There is no disgrace in yielding to a multitude. The metaphor will be pleasanter, however, if we use it to say that no one, however learned, can stand up to two people in debate, or that one man is not equal to handling several business affairs at the same time, or that there is no resisting the prayers of two people begging for the same thing. The proverb might be turned into another form, in this way: if they say that Hercules is not sufficient against two opponents, how shall I, weak as I am, stand up to two Hercules? But I have explained shortly the way to use this proverb at the beginning of the book.
Plato in the Laws, book 11: 'It is true, and well-known in old times as a proverb, that it is hard to fight against two opposite things, as in illness or at many other times.' He indicates that we have a double battle to fight, against wealth and against poverty. He adapted the same in the Phaedo, where Socrates jokingly urges Phaedo to confute Cebes and Symmias in argument, and Phaedo replies, 'But it is said that even Hercules was not strong enough against two.' Catullus alludes to it in a marriage song, when he says 'Do not contend with two.' This thought, though not in the same words, is sometimes found in Homer, as in the Odyssey, book 20: 'It is difficult for one to hold off many.' Telemachus says this about himself and the suitors. Also in the Iliad, book 5: 'Aeneas did not wait, nimble warrior though he was, / When he saw the two men standing together.'
The origin of the adage is recounted in different ways. Some say that the Molionids once laid an ambush for Hercules, and he, alarmed by their numbers, did not dare to make a stand against them, but sought safety in flight, and so it came into everyday speech. More probable is what Suidas relates, that Hercules, having founded the Olympic contest, dared at first, relying on his strength, to contend with two adversaries and defeated them both. These, they say, were Creatos and Eurytus, whose father was Neptune and their mother Moliona. Then at the next Olympiad he met with two opponents again, and was overcome by them. Some say, however, that these were Laeus and Pherandrus, and it was these who defeated Hercules, not losing the fight to him. But Plato in the Euthydemus tells a very different story: he supposes that Hercules fought with the hydra at the same time as with a huge crab which came out of the sea, and Hercules gave way as the weaker, and for this reason begged the help of his nephew lolaus. But I will willingly transcribe his own words. In the dialogue I mentioned, Socrates is disputing with two brothers, sophists, and as usual, insolent fellows; he was, in fact, facing two monsters alone. Dionysodorus reproached him with running away, and not replying to their questions, and this was his answer. It is reasonable of me to take flight. For since I am unequal to either, why should I not flee from both? Certainly I am much weaker than Hercules, and he was not equal to sustaining this sort of fight, both against a sophistical hydra, so clever that when one head of speech was cut off many others sprang up, and against a sophistical crab of some kind coming out of the sea, and recently, as I think, arrived here. When Hercules was close pressed on the left by this creature and sharply bitten by its words, he called on his nephew lolaus for help, and he gave liberal assistance. If my lolaus Patroclus were to come, he would keep up the other side of the contest.' By this biting allegory Socrates is calling the two brother sophists hydra and crab respectively, himself Hercules, and Ctesippus lolaus.

Εἷς ἀνὴρ, οὐδείς ἀνὴρ, One man indeed is no man. The meaning is that nothing excellent can be achieved by one man, bereft of any help. To this belongs what Euripides says in the Heraclidae, The single-handed man is weak in fight,' and from the same author, 'One man does not see all.' The proverb can be turned to various uses: 'life has no sweetness without a friend to live with'; 'it is better not to trust to the judgment of one person'; in literary studies, if there is no companionship or rivalry as they say in the service of the Muses, it is cold and uninspired; or finally, about whatever business has to be conducted, which cannot be brought off properly without the assistance of someone else. Zenodotus mentions this proverb.

Ονος ἐν πιθήκοις, A donkey among apes. This occurs when a person finds himself among satirical and insolent people, himself being a dull fellow whom they mock with impunity. It comes in Aulus Gellius, book 2 chapter 23, where Menander the comedy-writer introduces into the plot of his play entitled Plocium a husband complaining of the insulting behaviour of his wife: 'This man's an ass among apes, as the saying goes.' The ape, as is well known, is a most impudent creature; it is not even afraid to tease a lion by clinging playfully to its rump. In our own day too there is a similar saying in common parlance, 'an owl among the crows,' when some doltish person happens to fall among impudent and sarcastic people. There is nothing to prevent it being used as a general phrase when someone finds himself involved in troublesome business or in a misfortune from which he cannot extricate himself.

Ονος ἐν μελίτταις, A donkey among bees. This has the same sense as the previous one, and is said when someone has the bad luck to fall among worthless and unmannerly people. The metaphor is clear enough. The adage, however, seems to have arisen from some occurrence. Suidas mentions it.

Ονος ἐν μύρῳ, A donkey wearing perfume. Used when delicacies are put before people for whom they are not fitting, and who do not know either how to use them or how to enjoy them. A donkey, indeed, prefers straw and hay to gold, or scented ointment, which he actually dislikes. There would be a place for this adage if an uneducated person should happen to meet with the best authors, which he would either neglect out of ignorance, or even distort; or if a man who is a stranger to the Muses should come to live among learned people, and could neither profit by their company nor even be happy in it. The proverb occurs in Diogenianus.

Οὔτε γῆς ὄτε οὐρανοῦ απτεται, It touches neither earth nor heaven. Said of a thing which is wildly absurd and out of place, and has no connection at all with the matter in hand. Lucian in his False Prophet: 'He sent me eight oracular responses pertaining neither to earth nor heaven, as they say.' Aristides in Cimon alludes jokingly to the proverb, and indicates that the metaphor comes from those who hang in mid-air, unattached on all sides.

Οὐδεν πρὸς ἔπος, Nothing to do with the verse. This applies to things which are far different from what was intended. It seems to come from the stage, where the actor expresses by his movements and gestures the kind of dramatic poem he is representing. Possibly one recited the verses and another acted the part. For there appears to have been one reciter, whose name is seen at the end of comedies: 'I, Calliopius, went through this.' Otherwise I cannot see the force of what Cicero says about the actor selecting a play for which he would be naturally fitted; the actor who speaks the prologue of a comedy of Terence complains that noisy plots have been allocated to him and less troublesome ones to the others. If the acting did not correspond to the metre of the poem, they would say 'Nothing to do with the verse.' Lucian in Philopseudes: These things have nothing to do with the verse, as they say, nor was I inquiring about these.' If anyone in the dances did not fit in with the rhythm of the dance, they called him akrotêtos, and he was said akrotein, to miss the beat.
Andrea Alciati, a luminary of our age not only in Roman law but in all kinds of learning, is no less to be admired for the rare sincerity of his mind than for his accurate grasp of all liberal disciplines. In the second book of his Dispunctiones he agrees with me about the meaning and use of the proverb, but differs somewhat on the question of its origin. He prefers to think that it was derived from the oracles, which used to be delivered in verse, preferably heroic verse, the inventor of which was said to be the Pythian Apollo. This was called in Greek epos, because the facts follow [hepetai] the oracle. This etymology is contributed by Eustathius at the beginning of the Iliad of Homer; and my friend Alciati thinks for this reason that more probably this phrase, 'nothing to do with the verse,' was used whenever events occurred which did not bear out what was promised or proposed. Ulpian made use of it in the Pandects, book 11, title De interrogatoriis actionibus, chapter 12: 'With regard to the Praetor's expression "declines to answer at all," later authorities took his words in the following sense: a man, they said, is held to decline to answer who does not answer the precise question he is asked, that is nothing to do with the verse.'
Suidas affirms that this phrase is sometimes used to mean 'rashly, without reason' or 'not to the point.' He quotes these lines from some unidentified poet: 'Should I speak so far from the verse, so senselessly, / Before I know the whole thing as it stands?' The first line in the Greek will stand, if for οὕτως you read Χ᾽ ὅτως. Aristophanes also made use of it in his Ecclesiazusae, a reference I have given in the proverb 'Out of tune.'

Οὐδὲν πρὸς τὴν χορδὴν, Nothing to do with the lutestring; aimed at those whose life is inconsistent, or whose behaviour is different from their words. Lucian, On Dancing: 'And nothing, as they say, to do with the lyre-string, for the foot says one thing and the rhythm something else.' Again in Dialogues of Courtesans: 'And because her foot answered truly to the lyre.' Plutarch in his essay 'On False Shame': 'And yet it is not because the foot is not attuned to the lyre as Plato says, that cities in conflict with cities, and friends with friends, inflict and suffer such disasters, but because the laws and justice are sinned against.' The passage Plutarch is quoting is in the Laws, book 7: 'Giving back tones in accord with the sound of the lyre. Then [it makes] a discordance and conflict every time the strings produce notes in a different rhythm from the one chosen by the composer of the song, and so on.' It seems to have been to this proverb that St Augustine alluded in a certain letter to Licentius: 'But if I play and you dance to another tune, even so I am not sorry.' Singing has its own delight, even when the person to whom the song is sung with the tender tones of love does not move a limb in response.

Μύρμηξ ἤ κάμηλος, Ant or camel. Referring to things which are violently unequal, and now tiny, now huge, just as if a camel were to be turned all at once into an ant. Lucian, in the Saturnalia, letter i: 'But as we now live, "ant or camel, "as the proverb says.' He is speaking of the unequal distribution of wealth among mortals, so that one has more than enough and another is in dire need. It can aptly be used too of persons who are inconsistent, and go to extremes in either way. Euripides describes this kind of man in the Troades: 'Why do you jump from one mood to another? You hate and love excessively whomsoever you chance upon.'

To smear someone's face is to give him empty words and make a fool of him by some form of trickery; it is found several times in good authors. Nonius Marcellus thinks it is taken from some silly kind of game, in which a person's face is smeared while he is asleep. Plautus in the Aulularia: 'I thought Faith was the one god one could have faith in, but she's smeared my face dreadfully.' Again elsewhere: 'I've got my face smeared all right.' Again in the Epidicus: 'If I'd deputed a less intelligent man to this business, one less clever at the job, I should have had my face smeared.' Marcus Varro in his Mysteria, cited by Nonius: 'To have defrauded the innkeeper of his money, to have smeared the goodwife's face with mud, while their cash softened up the customs men.' Sophocles in the Antigone: 'These also see, but they are smearing your face.' Virgil too in one of his Bucolics describes boys playing a trick on Silenus by smearing his face with mulberry-juice:
She stained his brow and temples
With mulberry-juice, and he, awake by now,
Smiled at their ruse, and said 'Fetters? What for?'

This occurs everywhere throughout the authors, with the meaning of cheating. Persius, fourth Satire: 'Well, just as you please, give empty words and fool your sinews.' Terence: 'It is difficult to give him empty words.' Ovid: 'Every lover gives empty words.' The last-named finely applies it to attempts to allay one's own anxieties: 'With study I engage my mind, and beguile my sufferings, /I try to see how I can give empty words to my cares.' But examples are so frequent and so clear that it would be waste of effort to track them down. I would only suggest that more pleasure is to be derived from the proverb if it is turned away from a simple matter of speech and used to express the fraud and imposture which are effective even without the colouring of words. For instance one could say that this world 'gives empty words' to its worshippers; that what they call the art of alchemy 'gives empty words' to those who study it, and that people who promise themselves something they can hardly hope for are 'giving empty words' to themselves.

To make sport of someone. There is a phrase in Plautus, Persa, which is less usual: addere manum, 'to put a hand to,' to make a laughing-stock of someone. I think it comes from people who put a hand to their ear and waggle it, to make fun of someone else. The words of Plautus are these: 'What do you say, you gallows, you wearer-away of the whip? How have you imposed on me today? Into what embarrassments have you led me? How have I been baulked [manus mihi addita est] about that Persian?' Again in the Poenulus: 'By these means I fairly played a trick [adii manum] on the greedy Venus.' Again in the same scene: 'I'll make the other gods and goddesses henceforth more contented, and less greedy, when they know how the procurer put a trick [addiderit manum] upon Venus.' Again in the Aulularia: 'Thus did I baulk [adii manum] all those rascals.' Again in the Casina: 'Were you two tripped up [addita manus] neatly enough?' Although I find it written in different ways, now adii and now addita. The more correct reading seems to me addidi, taking the metaphor, as I said, from a gesture of mockery; Persius recalls this: 'Nor a hand that can imitate by its motion a donkey's white ears.'

Περικείρειν τοὺς πλοκάμους, To cut the hair all round. This is a proverb in Greek, and means to make a butt of someone. For this is a joke usually played on stupid people: their hair is cut all round without their being aware of it. Lucian in the Misanthrope: 'You sat while they cut your locks.' He uses it again in his False Prophet.

Fucum facere, originally 'to apply a dye,' in the sense of practising an imposture and deceiving by skilful pretence, is frequent among good authors. Terence in the Eunuchus: 'Came secretly across another's roof, in order to play a trick on a woman,' fucum factum mulieri, where factum is a supine not a participle. Quintus his brother writes to Cicero: 'If you perceive that a man who has made you a promise wishes to play a trick on you, as they say, you must conceal the fact that you have heard this and know all about it.' For fucus is a species of plant, in Greek phykos, used for dying woollen cloth. Thus fucus may be found meaning simply 'dye,' and fucare 'to colour'; Horace in the Odes: 'coloured with crocodile dung.' Especially if we mean to say that the colour is not natural or original, but artificial or falsely applied, as in Horace again: 'Wool purple-dyed / Never regains the hue it once has lost.' So the cosmetic which women apply to their skin to hide blemishes to their beauty, as if they were putting on a mask, is called fucus; Plautus: 'They hide the body's faults with rouge,' fucus. And just as the fucus is colour added by art, so a mask is not a true face but an applied one. Seneca says wittily 'so that he likes the mask better than the face/ that is, he prefers to seem rather than to be. Lucretius too in book 3: 'Now from the inmost heart true voices come; / The mask is snatched away, the real is left.' Cornelius Tacitus in the Dialogue on Orators: Thus there was not lacking an excellent teacher, a man of real distinction, to show the true face of eloquence and not its image.' Thus we say people are 'wearing a mask' when their appearance belies what they really are. And things are called 'eye-wash,' offucias, when they are empty appearances, which trick the eyes of the spectator like sleight of hand. In Greek there is a single word for this kind of imposture, phenakizein, and the noun phenakismos; the contriver of the disguise is phenax. The compiler of the Etymologicum graecum - and a dishonest and corrupt writer he was - thinks the term came from pênêkê, a Greek word for false hair, which is galericulum in Latin.
Julianus, quoted by Ulpian in the Pandects, book 14 title Ad senatusconsultum Macedonicum chapter 9, used color in the sense of fucus: 'But Julianus adds' he says 'that if any color, any line of defence has been thought up to the effect that the son of the family who was proposing to accept the loan should give a surety.' Experts in forensic rhetoric also use the word 'colour' for a line of argument likely to carry conviction which they have in vented for the defence. Juvenal: 'Quick quick, Quintilian, please give us some colour.' And when that great expert is in difficulties, the wife caught in the act defends herself with the most impudent of 'colours':' 'Twas agreed of old / You should do what you like, and also I / Should please myself.'

Λευκὴν ψῆφον προσθεῖναι, To add a white stone. This means to vote approval, and we often find it among learned authors. It comes from the custom in Antiquity of placing pebbles in an urn to signify the opinions of the judges: white stones meant acquittal, black condemnation. If it happened that they were equal in number, the accused was dismissed. Aristotle treats the reason for this at length in his Problems. Ovid recalls the custom of voting by pebbles in the Metamorphoses, book 15:
With pebbles, black and white, in olden time,
'Twas custom to convict, or clear, of crime;
And thus the fatal vote was cast: each stone
Was black, that in the unfeeling urn was thrown.
But when, upturned, it poured them back to light
For counting, all the blacks had changed to white.
The younger Pliny says in one of his letters: 'To sharpen your critical powers I must confess that my friends and I are thinking of publishing it, if only you cast your vote' [your white pebble] 'for the proposal, mistaken though it may be,' meaning, if you confirm our error with your judgment. Lucian in the Apologia, 'Not considering it a matter of little importance for me to be given a white vote by you.' Plato, Laws book 2: 'I would not have given this vote.' To this may be added what Alcibiades says about not wishing to submit to the sentence of the judges: he says that he would not trust his own mother in such a dangerous situation, but would suspect her of being capable of putting in a black stone instead of a white. Aristides in Pericles puts it in one word, epipsephizein, meaning 'to assent,' and adopts this term as Platonic.

These belong to the same category: to mark with chalk for to approve, and to mark with coal for to condemn. This is because of what Pythagoras says, that white belongs to the nature of good, and what is black to that of evil. Thus we call happy things 'white' and villains 'black.' Cicero in his speech Pro Caecina, speaking of the witness Sextus Clodius Phormio: 'No less black and no less brazen than Phormio in Terence.' Also Horace: 'This man is black; beware of him, thou Roman!' and again in the Satires: 'Are they sane, to be marked with chalk, or coal?' Persius, imitating him, says in his fifth Satire: 'What to follow and what to avoid / You first marked, the one with chalk, the other with coal.' Horace again in the Odes: 'Let this fair day not lack a Cretan mark.' He calls the white stone a Cretan mark, because the ancients used to mark in this way days of good omen. It is true that some read Thressa, Thracian for Cressa, Cretan in this place, because the custom is said to have existed among the Thracians.
To this class belongs that other expression, 'to mark with a pearl,'which often occurs in literature, meaning to count something fortunate and prosperous. It arises from the superstition of the ancients, who used to mark every day in the year by means of the exact number of pebbles placed in an urn, or (among the Scythians) in a quiver, and by these pebbles they indicated which day they considered to have been prosperous, with a white stone, or chalk; which had been particularly lucky, with a pearl; on the other hand, the unlucky one was marked with a black stone. Persius: 'This day, Macrinus, mark with a finer stone.' Pliny recalls this superstition in book 7 chapter 40: 'Vain mortality, so ingenious in circumscribing itself, counts by the method of the people of Thrace, who put into an urn pebbles of different colour according to the experience of each day, and on the last day counts them all out separately, and thus decides about each one. What if that much-praised day with the white stone had in it the origin of evil?' Thus far Pliny. Plutarch in the life of Pericles tells a story not without relevance to this, which it would perhaps be appropriate to transcribe in his own words: 'Dividing the whole group into eight parts he had them draw lots, and he allowed those who got the white bean to feast and relax, while the others fought. Therefore those to whom something good happens call it a "white day" from the white bean.'
This is close to our way of calling important things 'matters of higher note' just as Cicero sends someone 'greetings of a superior brand.' Livy, decade i book 4, uses the phrase 'a sinister mark': Postumius had no sinister mark against him,' that is to say, he was not sullied by an imputation of cruelty.

To take back a move (or counter). This means to change an action for which one is sorry, or to alter the plan of some badly-arranged affair. Nonius quotes Cicero in the Hortensius: 'So I allow you, as in the twelve stones of old, to change your move [calculum] if you repent of any given proposition.' It appears to be adapted from people who make calculations, or more likely from the game of laterunculi (chess). In short, whatever metaphors are created out of counters or markers [calculi] take the form of a proverb. Thus to 'call to a reckoning' [ad calculos] means to initiate an audit or valuation. Cicero in his dialogue On Friendship: 'But such a view reduces friendship to a question of figures [ad calculos revocare] in a spirit far too narrow and illiberal, as though the object were to have an exact balance in a debtor and creditor account.' Valerius Maximus, book 4, the chapter on liberality: 'If one estimates the amount [ad calculos revocatur], it was small, coming from a piece of land of seven acres and that hidden away in Pupinia; if one regards the motive of the man who made the advance, it was more than any amount of money.' And 'to go back to the counters [calculi]' means to return to the argument, the consideration, the scheme. Cicero to Atticus: 'So let me now at all events return to the standards [calculos] I then rejected, and adopt counsels of safety (in some degree) as well as of glory.' And in Pliny's Letters 'to move the counters' means to put forward arguments. And he says 'to set out the counters on each side' when he means to weigh up the arguments each way; and 'let this counter be added' means 'this matter of importance is also to be considered.' There is no reason why one should not say 'a counter drops out' or 'to take a counter away.'

To prefix a theta. This means to condemn. Persius: 'And you may prefix a theta to the error.' Ausonius, in a choliambic poem against a gormandizing schoolmaster: 'Wretched pedant, ou to your obscenity, / May a cleft theta mark your name.' Some say this refers to the shape of the Greek letter, because it has somewhat the appearance of a human heart pierced through. I do not know if we are to believe Isidore, who writes in the first book of the Etymologies that it was a military custom to use the mark Θ for the slain, Τ for the survivors. Certainly there is a reference to the sign Τ in the Apocalypse, which bears the name of St John the Evangelist. But more likely to be true is what Asconius Paedianus writes, that in old times there were three marks on the lots cast into the urns in legal cases. Of these, Θ was indeed the sign of condemnation, Τ of absolution, while Δ stood for deferment, when they indicated that it was not sufficiently clear to them as yet, and the case should be tried again.

Αστροις σημειοῦσθαι or τεκμαίρεσθαι, To mark with stars or to tell by the stars. Eustathius on the fifth book of the Odyssey suggests that the saying concerns travellers on a long and deserted road, needing to mark their regional position by observation of the stars; and that the metaphor comes from seafarers, who when they are far enough out from land to have nothing but 'sky all around and all around them sea,' regulate their course by the indications of the stars, especially the Little Bear and the Great Bear. Thus Aratus in the Phaenomena; I will copy the translation of his verses out of the version of Germanicus Caesar.
Here the Great Bear, and lesser Cynosure,
Jove's nurses, shine; one guides the Greeks, great-starred;
Pure white, the other rules Phoenician ways.
The Great Bear shines unmatched in liquid splendour,
When Sun in Ocean's plunged his dazzling face,
Where with seven fires glitters the Cretan star;
More certain for the ploughers of the sea
Is Cynosure, whose short course turns itself
On steady hinge, and never once deceived
The craft from Sidon which had sight of her.
And Ovid imitating Aratus, in the fourth book of the Tristia:
Ye two beasts, great and small, one the guide
Of Grecian, the other of Sidonian ships.
Ye never-setting.
Virgil mentions the same thing in Book 5, speaking of Palinurus: 'While he spoke, he kept a good grip on the tiller - / By no means would he release it - and a steadfast gaze on the stars,' and elsewhere, 'All the stars he scanned as they slid through the quiet sky.' Likewise Homer in several places, as in the Odyssey, book 5:
And taking his seat artfully with the steering oar he held her
On her course, nor did sleep ever descend on his eyelids
As he kept his eye on the Pleiades and late-setting Bootes,
And the Bear, to whom men also give the name of the Wagon,
Who turns about fixed ever in the same place,
And she alone is never plunged in the wash of the Ocean.
Thus those people seem to 'tell the way by the stars' who use signs and conjectures skilfully worked out to inquire into or follow up a subject which would otherwise be difficult to investigate; or who by means of certain signs reckon up far in advance what is going to happen. Later on the meaning changed, so that people were said to 'note down the stars' when they pointed out something particularly worthy of notice.
To mark with an obelus is different: it means to affix a marginal sign shaped like a spit for confutation and condemnation. It is taken from Aristarchus, who gathered together the poems of Homer and arranged them in books, rejecting by means of 'obeli' or small dagger-signs prefixed to them the spurious lines, that is to say the counterfeit and substituted lines which did not seem to have the true feeling of the Homeric vein. Those, on the other hand, which seemed outstanding and genuine he marked with asterisks, little stars. Both Origen and St Jerome followed this method in Holy Scripture.
The very name of Aristarchus became a proverb, since he was the person who invented this system of approving or rejecting by means of critical marks. Cicero to Atticus: 'In short, he worked up most impressively the whole theme which in aristocratic style I am in the habit of embroidering in my speeches (you are their Aristarchus) all about fire and sword (you know my colour-box).' He calls Atticus the Aristarchus of his speeches, that is, the censor and emendator, because it was his custom to mark with red pencil anything which did not meet with his approval in the writings of Cicero. Cicero makes this clear in another place, Letters to Atticus, book 16: 'Your good opinion makes them sparkle the brighter in my eyes. I was terrified of those little red wafers of yours.' The same to Dolabella: The latter brings forward, I take it, record in two little lines of money advanced, and the other, a regular Aristarchus, obelizes them, while I, like an ancient critic, have to decide the matter.' Varro, also in his On the Latin Language, calls the grammarians who criticize books 'Aristarchs.' And Horace: 'He will become an Aristarchus,' that is, a censor and critic of others' writings. St Jerome often calls someone 'the Aristarchus of his time' because he condemns some things and approves others at his own sweet will.

Another which belongs to the same group is Notare ungui, to mark with the finger-nail, because it was the custom to make a mark with the nail against anything unsatisfactory. Horace spoke of drawing a cross-stroke with the pen, when he meant 'to condemn.' In the same way, the phrase 'critical mark,' censoria virgula, is found several times in St Jerome to express the power of correcting something and branding it as spurious. Again, in Quintilian, Institutions book 1, 'And this the ancient grammarians used so severely that they mark with some sort of critical sign not only single lines' and what follows. This is derived from the censors in Rome, whose duty it was to pick on anything in the behaviour of the citizens which needed correction, and to impose a fine. Here belong the sponge, the file and the chisel, which have become proverbial as instruments of emendation. A sponge wipes out what is unsatisfactory. A file removes excess and polishes crudity. A chisel shapes and fashions what is still unfinished. So Augustus said of his Ajax, which he had wiped out, that 'he had fallen upon his sponge.' A polished piece of writing is said to have been under the file, and the word 'sculpture' is used of well-chiselled prose.

To reverse the pen is to change what you have written. Horace in the Satires: 'Often reverse the pen.' In Antiquity they used to write on wax tablets with a writing-stylus, using one end, very sharp, to trace the letters in the soft wax, and the other broader end to rub out what they had written. Jerome Against Rufinus: 'As long as I did not refuse your praise, you followed me like a master, calling me brother and colleague, and declaring that I was orthodox in all things. But since I have not accepted your praises, and judged myself unworthy of being publicly commended by such a great man, you reverse your pen and you are showering blame on everything you praised before, producing both sweet and sour from the same mouth.' Jerome copied Cicero, who writes as follows in the fourth of his Verrines: 'He was at last thoroughly frightened and upset; and then he reversed the pen on his records, thereby making an end of all his chances of acquittal.' One also finds 'to stick in the stylus,' 'to attack with the stylus,' meaning to upbraid and reproach in one's writings.

He obtained every point; With everyone's votes. We read these phrases as a way of saying 'with everyone's agreement and assent.' The first is adapted from the custom of carrying round in election meetings a wax tablet on which people indicated by a dot, punctum, which of the candidates they were voting for; and the other from the system of voting by the judges, which we have just mentioned. Horace: 'All votes [punctum] he won, who mingled use with pleasure.' For those who write nothing but agreeable things please only the readers who seek for pleasure, and those who produce useful writings only win the approval of the readers in search of the useful. But the one who has combined pleasure with usefulness will win the approval of all. Horace again in his Epistles: 'Alcaeus I in his opinion [punctum] shine, He soars a new Callimachus in mine.' And again in the choliambic epigram quoted by Porphyrion:
This Rufus, noted maker of stork-pie,
This man's more elegant than both the Planci.
He didn't carry seven votes.
Aristides in Themistocles uses the phrase 'the common voting-pebble of the Greeks' to mean the consensus of all Greece. Cicero, Tusculan Questions, book 2, 'What fire have these men not been through who once used to gather in these things vote by vote?' He is speaking of the magistracies, which were allotted by the votes of single citizens. Apuleius in his Ass, book 6, says 'death in some form or other had been allotted to him by the general pebble' meaning the votes and opinions of all.

'Οψὲ ἀισθάνονται οἱ Κουμαῖοι, The people of Cumae learn wisdom late. This adage is mentioned by Strabo, Geography, book 13. He thinks these people were generally decried as foolish and absurd, because after two hundred years of exacting taxes at the port for the purpose of building the town, they did not stop paying them when the town was built. He adds another story: that the Cumaeans had built a colonnade with borrowed money, and then when they failed to repay the money on the appointed day, they were forbidden to walk there. Some time later there was a heavy rain, and the creditors sent out a crier in jest, to publish an edict that the Cumaeans must come under the colonnade. Thus admonished by the voice of the crier, they did so; and hence the origin of the proverb 'the people of Cumae learn wisdom late,' because it was only after receiving advice that they learned they should come in out of the rain. Stephanus remarks that Cumae and Lesbos both had a bad name for stupidity. The proverb does not apply to Cumae in Italy but to Cumae in Aeolis, which had been called Amazonium, and Phriconitis, or as Herodotus says in his Book 1, Phriconis. It resembles that other phrase, The Phrygians learn wisdom late.' There is no reason why it should not also be used with regard to people who only follow good advice when taught by their misfortunes.

Κακ᾽ ἐφ᾽ αὑτὸν ἕλκων ὥστε καικίας νέφος, Attracting trouble as the northeaster draws clouds. This is an iambic line, in common use as a proverb against those who are the very begetters and purveyors of their own troubles, in the way of lawsuits and affairs. The comparison comes from the nature of the wind called caecias, which as Pliny writes, 'blows between north and east,' and unlike any other of the northerly winds does not drive the clouds away but attracts them. I will give his own words: 'The coldest of the winds are those which blow, as we said, from the north. The north-west wind, corns, is close to these. These hold the others in check, and drive away rainstorms. The south wind and the south-west wind (auster and africus) are wet, especially the former in Italy. They say that in Pontus the caecias draws the clouds to itself.' Thus far Pliny. Aristotle in his De mundo thinks that the north-east wind blows roughly from the sun's point of rising in summer, and adds that some people identify it with the wind others call thraskias, which blows nearest to the argestes. Why it should be that this wind does not, like the others, drive the clouds away, but calls them to it, Aristotle attempts to explain in the Meteorological 'Either because another wind is blowing the other way at the same time; or because this one blowing from the highest part of heaven (say from the east) is not carried across the land, but makes a curving back on itself and turns towards the place from whence it came. And so it happens that it draws the clouds to itself.' So in his De mundo he counts the north-easter among what are called 'regressive winds.' In the Problemata, section 26, he gives two causes for this. One, he thinks, is that another wind is blowing contrary to the north-east wind at the same time. The other is in agreement with what I have said; that the north-easter blows from a higher region of the sky, namely that which lies towards the east; that this is loftier than the west, he deduces from the size and depth of the western sea. Thus it comes about that the north-easter, blowing into the western regions, collects the clouds together, and draws them towards itself by a spiral movement. Plutarch mentions this in his life of Sertorius; he writes that this general observed the nature of the north-east wind at a time when it happened to be blowing, and forced his adversaries the Cacitani (or as the Greek copies have it, Characitani) to surrender, in the following way. In front of the caves where they were keeping close, he threw up mounds of ashes. When these were disturbed by the onrush of the cavalry, the northeast wind sent so much dust into the mouth of the caves that the enemy could not endure it, and gave themselves up to Sertorius.
The adage is mentioned by Aulus Gellius, book 2 chapter 22, out of Aristotle, and also by Theophrastus in his book on the nature of winds. But both he and Aristotle mention it in such a way that it appears it can be used in a good sense; for he says 'attracting riches to himself as the north-easter attracts clouds.' Plutarch in his essay entitled 'How to Profit by One's Enemies': 'Just as the north-easter attracts the clouds, so a wicked life attracts disgrace.' In the 'Precepts of Statecraft' he makes use of it in a good sense. So it seems that it can be used about anything in either a good sense or a bad. 'This man gathers a swarm of learned men about him, as the northeaster attracts the clouds.' This man attracts money to himself, from everywhere, as the north-easter the clouds.' 'Every kind of good fortune follows that man, as the clouds the north-easter.' 'Wherever this man is there are disputes - he collects lawsuits as the north-easter collects clouds.' Similarly it may be used of things: 'Ambition is a turbulent thing, attracting to itself, as the north-easter attracts clouds, envy, strife, extravagance, and other troubles of the same kind.' 'Modesty attracts to itself the goodwill of all men, as the north-easter attracts clouds.'

To carry oil in the ear. This is in Martial. In this passage the commentator Domizio Calderini does not satisfy me, though otherwise he is a learned man enough. For the poet seems to be twitting a man with an inflexible, up-turned ear, a distinction made also in Greek ('having a proud and lofty ear'). Martial's poem is as follows:' Tis said he made a witty jest, Marullus, / Who said you carry oil in your ear.' Aristotle wrote in the Problemata: The ears are disturbed by water poured into them, but it is not so with oil. If by chance water gets into the ear, we relieve this by pouring in oil, for when the ear becomes slippery the water flows away. Thus divers have formed the habit of dropping oil in their ears, so that the water may do them less harm.' The adage seems to have originated from this, that is from the gesture of those who have some liquid injected and bend the ear upwards so that it will not flow out, which gives them the appearance of averting their ears and being unwilling to listen. I would think it could also refer to flatterers, who instil something like oil in the ear when they speak what is pleasant rather than what is wholesome. A different idea comes out of the phrase in Persius: 'Grating on delicate ears with the harsh truth.' To this meaning belongs the allusion in the Gospel to the sellers of oil. But if one chooses this latter sense, one must read the accusative case, in auriculam [into the ear]. But I did not think it right to omit the version which appears to have a proverbial meaning and which Martial's mention shows to have been commonly used.

Τί εἰ οὐρανὸς ἐμπέσοι;; What if the sky should fall? An ironically proverbial dig against people who in the safest of situations have absurd fears. Its origin is indicated by Aristotle in the fifth book of his Metaphysics, where he writes that early primitive men were convinced that the sky which they saw overhead was held up on the shoulders of Atlas. If he were to withdraw from under it, the result would be that it would fall from its height on to the earth. And this was not only a product of the poets' fancy, but asserted by some natural philosophers. Plutarch in his essay 'On the Face which Appears in the Orb of the Moon' quotes a certain Phenaces, who was afraid that the moon would fall upon the earth, and grieved for the fate of those who would be beneath it, like the Ethiopians and Taprobani, if such a weight should fall upon them; he was in fear too about the earth and the sky, if not held up by the pillars of Hercules. Theognis: Then on my head may fall vast brazen Olympus, / The thing so feared by men of olden time.' Terence in the Heautontimorumenos: 'What if I go back to the people who say, what if the sky should fall now?' Horace alludes to this in the Odes:
Were the vault of heaven
To break and fall upon him, yet its ruins
Would smite him undismayed.

Τὴν αὑτοῦ σκιὰν φοβεῖσθαι, To be afraid of one's own shadow. This is said of people who tremble like children when there is no danger at all. It comes either from those who catch sight of their own shadow and are suddenly frightened, or from the melancholies of whom Aristotle speaks, who on account of weak spirits in the eye see something like an image of themselves in the surrounding air, and then they think they see their own ghosts. Socrates says in the Phaedo of Plato, 'But you, afraid of your shadow, as they say,' that is, mistrusting yourself. Quintus to Cicero on seeking the consulship: The other indeed, in heaven's name, of what distinction is he? First, of the same aristocracy as Catiline. Of greater? No, but in his valour. For this reason, Manius, the man who feared his own shadow, you will indeed despise.' This passage, however, was corrupted in the manuscripts in more ways than one. Plutarch, decade 7 of the Table-talk,' The one who refuses and resents the name of "shadow" seems truly to be afraid of a shadow.' He is speaking of 'shadows' so called because they themselves were not invited by the host but followed an invited guest to the feast.

This seems to be a proverbial hyperbole, quoted by Aristotle in his seventh book on the state: ἀλλὰ δεδίοτα μέν τὰς παραπετομένας μυίας, 'but fearing even flies flitting by,' meaning that he is afraid from some trivial cause. Much the same thing is recalled in the Ethics, book 7, speaking of people who are so unnaturally timid that even if a shrew squeaks they nearly die of fear.

Ἀποῤῥαγήσεται τεινόμενον τὸ καλώδιον, The taut rope will break. Said of people who make extreme efforts and in doing so estrange those they are dealing with; thus they incur an entire loss because they are immoderately intent on gain. Lucian in one of his dialogues makes a bawd scold her daughter because she has shown scorn for her lover in too spirited a way at a banquet; the danger is, says she, that the young man in his annoyance and irritation will take his love and his money elsewhere. 'Look out,' she says, 'in case we snap the rope by pulling on it too much, as the proverb says.' Pindar, in Plutarch: 'to one loosing the rope of unbearable cares.' Although there is some difference here from the proverb, and it is more in agreement with the phrase in Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, about the need to undo the chains of business, and break them if they cannot be undone. The proverb can be applied in general to any attempt of the immoderate kind, which ends in trouble through excessiveness. Near this is the Hebrew saying, shrewd and not unpicturesque: 'Blow your nose too hard and you'll make it bleed.' And so says Publius' well-known maxim: 'Oft-wounded patience will to madness turn.' And the other similar saying, by the same author, I think, even if it bears the name of Seneca: 'A kind heart wounded makes for deeper rage.'

Ἐς τήν ἀμΐδα εἰνουρεῖν, To make water in the chamber-pot. When people are treated basely, or are appointed to some dishonourable function, who can be seen to be not unworthy of it, being dishonest and knavish themselves, as if they were made for disgrace. Lucian, On Salaried Posts: Therefore those would not suffer anything dreadful or unworthy, nor would these be considered insolent for, as they say "pissing into the chamber-pot.'" The chamber-pot, after all, was made for that. On the other hand Martial twits a certain Bassus with using a golden vessel for his excretions and drinking out of glass: 'You catch your belly's burden, unrepentantly, in gold (poor gold!); / But you drink from glasses, Bassus: dearer cost your stools.'

Γέλως ἰωνικός, An Ionian laugh. Said of the luxurious and pleasure-loving. For the voluptuousness of the lonians, like the extravagance of the Sybarites, became proverbial, the first being the most luxurious of the Greeks, the second, of the barbarians. Athenaeus, in book 12 of Doctors at Dinner, speaking of Ionian luxury, says there is a golden proverb which testifies to the way of life of that race, and I think he means this one. He also asserts in book 14 that there was a wanton, lascivious dance which was called Ionic. Valerius Maximus, in Memorabilia, book 2, tells how the lonians were the first to invent the custom of handing out scent and garlands at banquets, and having dessert, both notable incitements to luxury. Maximus Tyrius in his dissertation entitled The Aim of Philosophy: 'A man of Crotona loves the wild olive of Olympus, the Spartan loves weapons of war, the Cretan hunting, the Sybarite luxury, the Ionian dancing.' So Horace in the Odes: The maiden early takes delight / In learning Ionian dances,' meaning lascivious steps and less than decorous gestures. In Aristophanes too we have ionikôs, in Ionian fashion, for habrôs, meaning softly and delicately.

Γέλως μεγαρικός, A Megarian laugh. Said of those who make jokes at the wrong time, and - a thing Quintilian advises against - would sometimes rather lose a friend than a witticism; or whose arts have now become despised and put in the shade by better craftsmen following them. It can be fairly applied to old men who eagerly pursue indecorous games and the pleasures of youth, at a time of life when this is indecent. Ionian comedy had a vogue in its time, then came into disrepute and was mocked by the Athenians. This line of poetry on inopportune laughter is well known: 'It's a serious thing to laugh in the wrong place.'

Γέλως χῖος, The laugh of Chios. This refers to a wanton, lascivious game, for the Old Comedy rebuked the Chian way of life. The adage is mentioned by Diogenianus.

Whatever came into his mouth. Used whenever we speak of people talking freely and in security, without premeditation, saying whatever comes into their heads. This is what we do in the company of our loyal friends, with whom we can joke and chat with confidence. Cicero to Atticus, book 14: 'If there is nothing special, write to me whatever comes into your mouth.' Again in book 12, 'When we are together, and chatter away with whatever comes into our mouths.' This is applicable to those who talk rashly and without forethought, just as if their words were born not in their hearts but in their throats.

Clearly akin to this is a saying used by Lucian in his essay on 'How History Should be Written': 'Devising and inventing whatever comes in a rash moment to the tongue, as the saying goes.' Plato quotes this expression in the Republic, book 8, out of Aeschylus the tragic poet. Athenaeus in Doctors at Dinner, book 5, also used it: 'As the poet says, whatever comes in a rash moment to the tongue.' Isocrates in his Panathenaic Oration gives what is virtually an interpretation of it: 'I shall seem like those who talk rashly, in an arrogant and vulgar way, saying whatever comes into their heads.'

Τῷ Μώμῳ αρέσκειν, To satisfy Momus, This is a proverbial hyperbole. Hesiod in his Theogony mentions a certain Momus, whose mother (he says) was Night, and his father Sleep. This god has the habit of producing nothing of his own, but staring at the works of the other gods with inquisitive eyes, and if anything is lacking or wrongly done he criticizes it with the utmost freedom. Momus, in fact, means 'reproof in Greek. Aristotle On the Parts of Animals, book 3, speaks of him as one who reproached nature for having given oxen horns on their heads rather than on their shoulder-blades, no doubt so as to strike harder. Lucian was apparently making an allusion to this when he writes (Verae historiae, book 2) that he has seen some oxen whose horns were not on the forehead as they usually are, but under the eyes. That was the idea of Momus. The same Lucian recalls him in several other places, especially in the dialogue about philosophical schools, where he tells this story about him. Minerva, Neptune and Vulcan were competing with each other for the prize of the best craftsmanship. Each produced an outstanding specimen of his art: Neptune created a bull, Minerva planned a house, Vulcan put together a man. Momus was chosen a judge of the contest and assessor of the workmanship. He inspected the work of each one; apart from the deficiencies he had noticed in the works of the others, he particularly complained that in the making of the man the craftsman had not added some windows or openings in the breast, to allow an insight into what was hidden in the heart, which he had made full of caverns and winding sinuosities. Plato mentions this fable too. Philostratus in a letter to his wife writes about Momus in the following strain: he says that Momus could find nothing in Venus to carp at, except that he blamed her sandal for being squeaky, making too much of a chatter and a troublesome noise. If Venus had walked without the sandal, naked as when she came up out of the sea, Momus would have seen nothing at all to find fault with. This god is not as popular as the others, because few people freely accept true criticism, yet I do not know if any of the crowd of gods in the poets is more useful. Nowadays, however, our Joves shut out Momus and only listen to Euterpe, preferring flattery to wholesome truth. This Momus supplies various forms of adage, whether in Plato who writes in the Republic, book 6, that the study of philosophy is such that not even Momus could reprove it; or when the Venus of Lucian, about to face judgment, says she has no misgivings even if Momus is to be the judge; or when Cicero writes to Atticus, book 5; 'So far as concerns the capital object of your exhortations, the most important point of all, in which you are anxious that I should satisfy even that Momus Ligurinus, well, confound me if anything could be done more elegantly!' Therefore all these types of formula will have the appearance of a proverb; 'I would not hesitate to fight it out with you even if Momus were the judge.' That man's life is so free from faults that Momus himself could not carp at him.' This face is one with which Momus himself could not find fault.' 'I would not refuse the judgment of Momus.' These things may satisfy Momus himself.' And so on, whatever of the kind can be made up. Ovid's expression about the beauty of Adonis comes in here: 'Envy itself would praise so fair a face.' In short, all hyperbole of this kind takes on the look of a proverb, as when Terence says of a miserable family 'Salvation itself could not save this house if willing.' Again, on a strongly fortified place, 'Mars himself would never have made it yield.' On an inflexible and pertinacious man, 'Not even Vertumnus himself could bend his mind.' On a man-mad woman, This woman's appetite would not be sated by Priapus in person.' On something highly improbable, Peitho herself could not persuade one of this.' On something hard to conceal, 'Neither Harpocrates himself nor Angerona could hold this in.' 'In the middle of such a din Sleep himself could not manage to sleep.' On a suspicous and diffident man, That man could not have any faith in Faith itself.' This one would deceive Argus himself,' on a very clever person. This man is so much to be pitied, that Envy itself could not envy him.' But we have written an account of this form of speech at the beginning of this book.

To call on heaven and earth. This is what people are said to do who call out in vain; for those who despair of help from mankind usually cry out 'O Heaven! O Earth!' Theognetus in Athenaeus, book 3, and again in book 5: 'You have philosophized babbling to earth and heaven, / Who pay no attention to your words.' This is close to the phrase we have quoted elsewhere, 'You are speaking to the wind.'

To be shipwrecked in the harbour. This is in Quintilian, in the Insitutions: it means, to make a mistake at the very outset of a work. St Jerome adopts it in his second apologia Against Rufinus: 'As soon as I left the harbour I wrecked the boat.' Again to Pammachius: 'Leaving the harbour we immediately were wrecked.' It is taken from seamen, for whom it is a disgrace to dash the boat to pieces before they have left the harbour. Papyrius Fabianus takes it in a different sense, as reported by Seneca in his Controversies: 'You are sinking the boat in harbour,' referring to an old man who had begun to live luxuriously at the wrong age. It can well be said of all who have a final collapse after having almost finished their affairs with credit. The Greeks have the same saying: ἐν τῷ λιμένι προσκρούειν. A certain Nilus, a Greek author, quotes it thus: 'Do not be too elated lest you should come to shipwreck in harbour.'

To stumble or fail on the threshold is very close to the previous one. It is taken from people who are just going out of the house and immediately catch their foot on the threshold, before they have begun to do anything. Virgil: 'Why fail we on the threshold in disgrace?' - that is, immediately and when the battle has scarcely begun. Quintus Curtius, book 6, said less poetically: 'We stand on the very threshold of victory,' meaning, a victory is at hand. This is the opposite of what Seneca writes in his Letters to Lucilius: 'He fails at the top of the slope,' the metaphor being adapted from those who have almost climbed a mountain, and then give in from weariness when they are close to the summit.

The gelding at the gate. This is close to the foregoing ones. It is derived from a certain Sulpitius Galba, who was about to leave for his province when his gelding fell down at the gate. 'It makes me laugh,' said he, 'that you, my gelding, should be tired already, with such a long journey ahead of you, when you have just set out.' This remark turned into a proverb. The adage is mentioned by Festus Pompeius under the word Ridiculus, and he indicates that it is usable when someone loses heart at the outset of a thing scarcely begun. He explains clearly what a cantherius is, a castrated horse, differing from the equus [horse] as a barrow hog differs from a boar, a capon from a cock, a wether from a ram.

Ακονιτὶ, Without dust. The Greeks say this when someone reaches his objective easily, with no trouble, taking it either from the aphe, the handful of powder with which a man about to enter the wrestling-ring sprinkled himself, or at least from that not inglorious dust, as Horace wrote, which soils the contestants at Olympia, or those who wage war. Pliny, book 35: 'Alcimachus made a statue of Dioxippus, who carried off the prize in the pancratium at Olympia without touching the dust, or as they say akoniti.' Aulus Gellius, book 5: 'It is a cause of rejoicing that a surrender was quickly made and a bloodless victory ensued, without dust, as they say.' Horace in the Epistles:
What strolling gladiator would engage
For vile applause to mount a country stage,
Who at th'Olympic games could gain renown
And without danger bear away the crown?
One also finds ἀνιδρωτὶ, 'without sweat,' and ἀναιματὶ, 'without blood.'

Ερήμη δίκη, An undefended case, when there is no opposition. Taken from lawsuits in which sometimes one party withdraws and abandons the case to his opponent. So 'to win an undefended case' is to win against no resistance. Lucian in Jupiter tragoedus: 'What else then shall we seem to be doing than winning by default?' Again in Toxaris: 'And so many cities taken by you by default.' Socrates makes use of it in his defence in Plato: 'Bringing a charge against no opponent, the case being undefended.' Lawyers use for judgments by default a compound noun, eremodikia. So Paulus in the Pandects, book 4, title De minoribus, chapter Et si sine dolo: 'He also gets some relief in cases where judgment has gone by default. It is established that men of any age ought to be restored to the list after judgment by default, if they show that they had just cause for their absence.' Again in book 46, title Iudicatum solvi, chapter Quum quaerebatur: 'When security has been given for payment of any sum adjudicated, if the party does not defend the case and afterwards allows judgment to go by default, would he be committed by the clause having reference to the sum adjudicated, etc.' Again in the Code, book 3, title De iudiciis, chapter Properandum: 'But if a defendant should be absent, and a similar search go forward for him to the one we have ordered for the person of the plaintiff, even in the absence of the defendant judgment would go by default.' So Justinian. It is an eremodikion therefore, a judgment by default, when a case is decided in the absence of one of the parties.

Things that fall to our lot by chance, without our own doing are called in Greek ἄσπαρτα καῖ ἀνήροτα: they happen 'without sowing and without ploughing.' Lucian in The Parasite: 'He alone, according to wise Homer, does not plant with his hands or plough, but without sowing or ploughing he enjoys everything.' The same in the Teacher of Public Speaking: 'But to you everything may come without the toil of sowing and ploughing,' that is, without exertion. The adage seems to have arisen from the legend of the Fortunate Isles, of which Horace writes in the Odes: 'Where every year the land unploughed yields corn, / And ever blooms the vine unpruned.' But I think it comes from Homer, who describes the land of the Cyclops in this way, in the Odyssey, book 9:
We came to the land of the Cyclops, proud and lawless,
Who relying on the immortal gods
Neither sow with their hands, nor plough,
But all things grow wild without sowing and without ploughing,
Wheat and barley and vines which give good wine
And the rain of Jove makes them increase.

Εὕδοντι κύρτος αἱρεῖ, The sleeper's net makes a catch. This refers to people who get what they want without trying. It comes from an event which sometimes happens, when fish are caught entangled in the nets when the fishermen are asleep. Some attribute it to Timotheus the Athenian general, who had great success more from the favour of fortune than from his own effort, and was nicknamed Lucky. Some people who begrudged him this, depicted Fortune driving cities into the net while he lay sleeping near by. He gave them a mocking answer, according to Plutarch: 'If I capture such cities when I am asleep, what do you think I will do if I am awake?' Terence alludes to this when he says in the Adelphoe: 'What? Did you think the gods were going to do this for you as you slept? And the girl would be led home to your bedroom without any effort of yours?' There is a saying of the same kind in Livy, in book 7 of Rome From the Foundation: The one and only general in the war, who thinks that victory will fly down from heaven to light on him, without his doing anything.' Cicero in the Verrines, in his last speech: 'But I have not the same privileges as men of noble birth, who while they are asleep have all the honours the Roman people can bestow laid at their feet.' Today too it is commonly said of such people 'He does it more by good luck than good management.' And in Athenaeus, Eupolis the comedywriter: 'O city, city, / How fortunate you are rather than wise.' This agrees with the comments I shall make on the proverb The rashness of the Athenians.'

When the mule foals. A very old adage, used when we signify that something will never happen, or happens so rarely that it seems wicked and foolish to hope for it. It may seem to arise from what Herodotus says in Thalia: when the city of the Babylonians was besieged by Darius, a certain Babylonian shouted insults at Darius and his army, saying, 'What are you sitting here for, you Persians? Much better take yourselves off, you will only take our town "When mules give birth,"' obviously meaning that the time would never come, as mules are sterile by nature. But it came about soon after that a mule belonging to Zopyrus did have a foal, and by this marvel he was encouraged in the hope of taking Babylon, and took it. A similar thing is reported by Suetonius in his life of the emperor Galba. When this emperor's grandfather was making a sacrifice to avert the lightning, an eagle snatched the entrails from his hands and carried them off to an oak covered with acorns. This was interpreted to him as meaning that his family would attain imperial rank, but late. Laughing, he said, 'Yes when a mule foals.' Galba was so struck by this omen, that when later on he was planning revolution, nothing encouraged him so much as the foaling of a mule, and while others shuddered at this unlucky marvel, he alone accepted it as most propitious, remembering his grandfather's sacrifice and his remark. Pliny, book 8 chapter 44, writes as follows about sterility in mules: 'It has been observed that the offspring of two different species is a third species, and unlike either parent. Also that they themselves, which are born in this way, do not bring forth young in any kind of animal, and therefore mules do not foal.' Alexander of Aphrodisias alleges as a cause of this that when seeds of different nature and character are mixed together, they produce a third creature unlike either, and henceforth lose the force of the simple strains; just as when you mix black and white, both colours disappear and you have grey, neither the one nor the other, which is called leukophaion in Greek. But Aristotle is much more precise on this in his work On the Generation of Animals, book 2 chapter 6, where he refutes Democritus and Empedocles. However, it is recorded in the annals of Rome that mules often foaled, but this was regarded as a portent, as Pliny testifies in the passage just quoted. Theophrastus states that they commonly foal in Cappadocia. Aristotle On the Nature of Animals, book 1 chapter 6, states that mules mate and give birth in Syria above Phoenicia, but there the animal is of a special kind, even if similar.

At the Greek calends has much the same sense: that is, never. The Greeks did not have calends in the Roman manner, but 'new moons' and they settled their debts at the return of the moon; hence Strepsiades in Aristophanes' Clouds longs for a sorceress to cause the moon not to rise, by her spells, so that he will not have to pay his debts, seeing that the bankers give loans at the new moon, and interest increases moon by moon. Augustus was thinking of this when he said that some people 'would settle at the Greek calends,' meaning that they were never going to pay back a loan. Suetonius Tranquillus writes thus in his life of Augustus: 'Some of his letters, written with his own hand, show that he made frequent and prominent use of certain words in his everyday speech. In the same letters, when he means to say that some men will never repay, he says they will pay at the Greek calends.' A similar expression is used now by the learned when they say 'in the great year of Plato' which they think will never be.

Ακεσσαίου σελήνη, The moon of Acessaeus. This is said of procrastinators, who often find yet another reason to put off a piece of business. It comes from the behaviour of a certain seaman called Acessaeus. He was a lazy fellow, who used to postpone sailing because he said he was waiting for a more propitious moon. The Greeks, especially the Spartans, observed the moon with superstitious care when they were looking for omens to start something. Euripides hints at this in the Iphigenia in Aulis, when Agamemnon makes the reply that his daughter will be wedded when the right-hand curve of the moon comes in sight, meaning at full moon. Lucian in his essay On Astrology openly states that Lycurgus laid down a law for the Spartans, that they should not go into battle before the full moon. Aristophanes makes fun of this superstition; he says that 'at full moon' means late or never. And indeed when Datis and Artaphernes, generals of the king of Persia, had invaded Marathon, they were waiting for the full moon as the time to go into battle. Thus it was that before they came the Athenians took the initiative. Herodotus recalls this in book 6 of his History. Hence 'at full moon' is a proverbial way of referring to dilatory people and those who take any excuse for putting a thing off. The adage is mentioned by Diogenianus. I shall say something about 'Spartan moons' elsewhere.

Οπότε δι᾽ ἅρματος ἀστράπτει, When lightning strikes through Harma. Referring to things which are done slowly and late, or not often enough; or when the opportune moment for carrying something through is waited for too anxiously and with superstitious fervour. Strabo in his Geography, book 9, explains how the adage originated. He writes that there is a certain village near Mycaletus in Boeotia (or Mycalessus, in the territory of Tanagra) called Harma or 'chariot.' It is abandoned and deserted. There is also another different one with this name in Attica, where the population was part of Attica but similar to that of Tanagra, and on account of this resemblance they shared the same name. The Harma in Boeotia was so called because the empty chariot from which Amphiaraus had been thrown was conveyed to that place, where there is now a shrine to him. Others say that when Adrastus was in flight, his chariot was smashed in pieces at this place, but he himself was saved by the help of Arion. The proverb 'when the lightning flashes through Harma' arises from the action of the Pythian seers, who kept watch for a special sort of lightning that came from that place, and as soon as they had seen it sent offerings to Delphi. They used to keep watch every three months for three days in the month, and as many nights; and also from the hearth-altar of Jove the Thunderer, which is in the wall between Pythium and Olympium. Thus far Strabo. Plutarch clearly indicates the use of the proverb in his 'Table-talk': Tor those who give dinner-parties as infrequently as lightning flashes "over Harma," as they say, are forced to list every acquaintance and suitable person.' So it seems to be used of infrequent and uncertain things. It could also be applied in jest to things which we think will never happen, as they say 'at the Greek calends.'

Λίθος ἡρακλεία, ἢ λιθος Λυδή, The Lydian, or Heraclian, stone. This is said of people whose judgment is particularly sharp and precise. It is mentioned by Theophrastus in his book On the Nature of Stones. He says there is a stone called Lydian or Heraclian, which when rubbed will tell the quality of gold or silver. Some think that this is a kind of magnet, like the stone of Hercules, which attracts iron to itself, hence also called siderites, loadstone; but from the words of Theophrastus it is clear that the basanos or touchstone is meant, which in Latin is index. It was into this that the shepherd Battus was transformed, in Ovid, keeping even as a stone his tendency to betrayal. It is not called Heraclian from Hercules, but from Heraclea, a city in Lydia. Pliny recalls this, book 33 chapter 8: 'A description of gold and silver is necessarily accompanied by that of the stone known as coticula. In former times, according to Theophrastus, this stone was nowhere to be found, except in the river Tmolus, but at the present day it is found in numerous places. By some persons it is known as the "Heraclian," and by others as the "Lydian" stone. It is found in pieces of moderate size, and never exceeding four inches in length by two in breadth. With these stones persons of experience in these matters, when they have scraped a particle off the ore with a file for testing, can tell in a moment the proportion of gold there is in it, how much silver, or how much copper; and this to a scruple, their accuracy being so marvellous that they are never mistaken.' Theocritus alludes to this in Aites: That I may have a mouth like a Lydian stone,' suggesting that by this he might judge best between various kisses and tell whose they were - for such is the foolishness of lovers. The scholiast thinks these stones are found in Lydia, and hence the origin of the proverb. So that you should not doubt that he is speaking of the touchstone, there follows the 'gold-test': 'From whose influence the money-changer tries / The gold, if it be good.' The adage can be applied either to persons or things. To persons, in this way: 'You are the best judge of my writings, the very Heraclian stone, as they say.' Or like this: 'With the most brilliant flair for weighing up and judging mental quality, a very Lydian stone, as they say.' Or applied to things in this way: 'Freedom opens the minds of the young, but to grown men, to be given authority is the Lydian stone.'

Λευκῇ στάθμῃ, An unmarked rule. This means 'without selection, making no distinctions.' Aulus Gellius in the Attic Nights: 'For all those people, and among them especially the Greeks, read eagerly and widely and swept together everything they came across without discrimination, using a "blank ruler" as they say, simply intent on quantity alone.' Plutarch, in his essay 'On Garrulity,' says, The garrulous person is absolutely an unmarked rule as far as conversation goes,' because he talks nonsense with no discrimination about anything whatever. The adage is found in an expanded form in some writers: 'a white line against a white stone.' It is used for those who have no judgment, or for the stupid, or for people who base proof or exposition of doubtful things on doubtful facts. Sophocles in the Cidalion, in Suidas: 'Your words tell me no more, / Than a white line on a white stone.' Nonius Marcellus quotes Lucilius, book 30 - but in a corrupt form, in my opinion. Many of his sayings are like this: '- and he loved all, / For a white line marks nothing, makes no distinction.' Plato adopts it in his dialogue entitled Charmides, where Socrates says his attitude to beautiful boys can be described as 'a white rule against a white stone,' because he did not distinguish clearly between types of beauty, and loved them all alike. That well-known rope was smeared with red-lead so as to show up a difference, so Persius called it 'red-ochre': 'if he should set the red-ochre straight with one shut eye.'

Αὐτὰ δι᾽ αὐτῶν, Over and over again. This occurs in the collections of Diogenianus, about people who always teach the same things, or continuously repeat the same actions. It is not unlike that other which I have mentioned in another place, 'Corinthus Son of Jove.' It can also be applied to those who treat frivolities frivolously, for example a man who writes ignorant notes on an ignorant author, or obscenities about an obscene person.

In the best authors we often find Ad amussim, By rule (with examussim, examussatim, amussatim) put for 'with the utmost diligence,' 'with the most precise care.' Gellius, book 1 chapter 4: 'He inspected all these ancient writings with such care, weighing their merits and investigating their shortcomings, that you would say his judgment was made exactly by rule.' And we find amussitata for 'examined' in Nonius. This is taken from stone-cutters or carpenters, who test the evenness of their work with the familiar measuring-line. Festus however records, under the word examussim, that for some people the amussis is not a line or a rule but an iron tool used by blacksmiths for polishing. Persius, describing a poet composing finished verses, as I quoted above: 'Expert to stretch his verse, as if he should / Set the red-ochre straight with one shut eye.' Also in the Vir bonus, a poem on the good man which is ascribed to Virgil: 'That nothing gape, no corner jutting out / But all parts equal, by the unfaltering line.' Basil too uses it when writing to his nephews, recommending them to consider every branch of learning in its relationship with the final aim of felicity, just as stones, according to the Doric proverb, are 'marked out against the rule.' It may be thought to come from Homer's Odyssey, book 5, where he speaks of Ulysses building his ship: 'Trimmed with great skill and trued them to the line.' Again in the Iliad, book 15:
But as the line sets a ship's timber straight
For the skilled shipwright, master of his trade,
Taught by Minerva all that cunning art.
It also occurs in several other places in the same author.

To the finger-nail has the same meaning. The metaphor is taken from workers in marble, who draw the nail over the surface to test the joins in the stone. Horace: 'Fonteius, finished to the finger-nail,' that is, a really polished person. Again, in the Art of Poetry:
That poem you should blame,
Where time and tenfold proving has not shaped
The finished work, and smoothed it to the nail.
Virgil in the second book of the Georgics:
Let every alley, when your trees are set,
Square to the nail where'er it cuts the path.
Persius: 'So that each joint may let the searching nail / Glide o'er it smoothly.' Macrobius Saturnalia book 1 chapter 16: 'Nor could any other man's judgment be so misguided as not to admire the arrangement of the Roman year, thus refined as it is to the nail.' In the same way Greek has a word dionychos for something exact and precisely finished. Plutarch 'Precepts of Good Health: 'The very precise rule of life observed, as they say, to the nail' [dionychos].And exonychizein for 'to examine carefully.' Athenaeus uses this expression in book 3: 'You run your nail over everything that suits those who indulge in thorny discussions with you.'

Horace uses this phrase, To put back on the anvil, elegantly, for remaking, altering, correcting: 'Back to the anvil with your ill-turned verse.' In the same way they say 'to recook.' Quintilian, book 12: 'But particularly to Apollonius Molo, whom he had heard at Rome, he went to be improved and as it were recooked, in Rhodes.' So Horace: 'A quinquevir rehashed into a clerk.'

By the Lesbian rule. This is said when things are done the wrong way round, when theory is accommodated to fact and not fact to theory, when law is suited to conduct, not conduct corrected by law; or when the ruler adapts himself to the behaviour of the populace, though it would be more fitting for common people to conduct their lives according to the will of the prince; if only the prince himself has right conduct before his eyes as his rule and aim. Aristotle mentions this adage in his Ethics, book 5: 'For the rule of what is indefinite is also indefinite, like the leaden rule used in Lesbian architecture; the rule changes to fit the shape of the stone and does not remain a rule.'

Unworthy to hold out a chamber-pot to him. A proverbial hyperbole, describing total inequality, where there is no comparison on any grounds. Martial: 'May I die, if you are fit to hold a chamber-pot to Pylades, / Or be a swineherd to Pirithous.' It is indeed the most squalid service to present the chamber-pot for a man to piss into, and anyone unfit for this is obviously the lowest of the low. Hence St Jerome in a letter to Nepotianus lists this also among the sordid services of legacy-hunters: 'they themselves,' he says, 'bring the chamber-pot and lay siege to the bedside.' Plutarch in his 'Sayings of Spartans' recalls that a Spartan boy captured and sold by Antigonus obeyed the master who had bought him, in everything which was not dishonourable to the free-born. But when ordered to bring the chamber-pot, he refused this service, adding 'I will not be a slave.' The master got up, and the boy said 'You shall know whom you have bought!' Rushing up immediately to the roof, he threw himself down. There is a very common saying used in our own day: 'He is not fit to take off that man's shoes.' This adage is used in the Gospel by John the Baptist. People even say 'not to be named in the same day' when they want to describe utter inequality.

Cicero calls worthless men, entirely without forethought, 'loose broomtwigs.' Writing to Atticus, in book 7 of the Letters, he uses these words: 'Early on 25 January, I saw Caesar at Minturnae with the most absurd instructions, directed not to men but to a set of loose brooms, if ever there was one. Indeed it looks to me as though Caesar were deliberately making a mock of us.' Also in the Perfect Orator, disputing with those who despise rhythm in a speech, he uses this phrase 'to untie a broom' to mean doing a totally useless thing. For brushwood twigs bound together have a look of being something, and are useful for sweeping the floor. But if you untie them, nothing could be more useless or untidy. Cicero's words are these: 'If, however, anyone likes a loose style let him by all means use it, but in the manner of one who should take apart the shield of Phidias: if anyone ever takes it apart, he destroys the beauty of the composition but not the charm of the several pieces. In Thucydides, for example, I miss only the poetic structure, the ornaments are there. But when these people take a speech to pieces in which there is neither matter nor words which are not mean, they seem to me not to be taking apart a shield, but as the proverb has it - and if the expression is somewhat vulgar yet it is apt - to be untying a broom.'

Using all the holes (With all the stops out) means 'with a loud sound.' It is taken from flute-players: when they play with the holes in the instrument closed, the notes are subdued, but with all the holes open the sound is piercing. Quintilian, Institutions book 11: 'And then those words in which he opens almost every stop, as the saying is: "who, wherever they turn, look in vain for the familiar environment of the courts and the traditional procedure of the law."' The metaphor would be more graceful if a person were to inveigh against another 'with all the holes open,' that is, not opposing him privately but assailing him publicly and tearing him to pieces with accusations; or it might be to sing someone's praises 'with all the holes open,' that is, openly and splendidly. Perhaps there is a reference to this in that line of Greek poetry which Cicero quotes in his Letters to Atticus, book 2, from some poet or other: 'What our friend Gnaeus is up to now, I simply do not know. On tiny pipes he now no longer blows.' He seems to be suggesting that Pompey was promising great things from his agrarian law, and setting on foot great events. Athenaeus, book 4, speaks of a kind of flute which Anacreon calls 'half-holed,' smaller than the others and giving a less clear note, as the name itself shows.

Dion, book 1, quotes an adage of this sort: Tί γὰρ με ἔδει μακροῖς αὐλοῖς αὐλεῖν; Of what avail was it for me to play on the long pipes? They say that this fits people who have expended futile labour or expense. It comes from Otho, who had performed sacrificial rites after the slaying of Galba, and in these the entrails foretold an inauspicious outcome. He was sorry for the cost and trouble spent for no result, and is said to have spoken thus, 'Of what avail was it for me to play on the long pipes?' and his words turned into a common proverb. It was formerly the custom to play long pipes in religious rites, a custom later discontinued, according to Plutarch. Suetonius also recalls this in his life of Otho: The next day too,' he says, 'when a storm arose as he was taking the auguries, he fell down heavily and was heard to mutter over and over again, What have I to do with long pipes?' On this passage, I wonder what caused a certain person (a commentator of no obscure reputation) to reject the words of Suetonius as spurious and to prefer to substitute those of Dion; as if it were not permissible for authors to express the same thought in different words, or as if Suetonius has not phrased it more elegantly than Dion.

Eustathius, commenting on the Iliad, book 2, says that this line was celebrated as a proverb in old times: Εἴη μοὶ τὰ μεταξὺ κορίνθου καὶ σικυῶνοσ, 'What lies between Sicyon and Corinth, would it were mine!' This became a proverb because each of these towns was very wealthy and the intervening land of the utmost fertility. Aristophanes in the Birds says it arose from an oracle: 'But when wolves and gray crows dwell / In the space that lies between Corinth and Sicyon.' The commentator ascribes it to Aesop, who asked the advice of the oracle on amassing wealth and received this reply: 'If you possess what lies between Corinth and Sicyon.' Zenodotus quotes it, and Athenaeus in his Doctors at Dinner, book 5. It is apt when a person wishes for great things. It can also be applied in jest to one who goes on wishing and dreaming about something he cannot obtain. A similar metaphor is used by Theocritus in the Ergatinae: 'Would I possessed what they say Croesus had.'

These are proverbial hyperboles about people who deserve high praise. Cicero in his De oratore book 2: 'In which you seem to me to be a god/ that is, outstanding and supreme. Terence in the Adelphoe: 'I make a god of you,' meaning I exalt you with the highest praise. It derives from the fact that early men, when they looked up to someone for his excellent and unusual virtues, called him a god, or a son of the gods. This happened to Alexander the Great, Scipio Africanus, Octavius Augustus, and many others. Aristotle falls in with this in his Ethics, book 7: This heroic virtue they call more than human, and close to divinity. Hence Homer makes Priam speak of Hector in this way.' Iliad 24: 'He did not seem, / To be a child of mortal man, but of a god.' It was a particular way of the Spartans (as the same author says) to call someone whom they strongly admired 'a godlike man.' Socrates recalls this in Plato's Meno: 'And the Spartans, when they praise some good man, say "This man is divine."' Hence those customary phrases in Homer, 'like to god', 'of divine nature, 'equal to a god', 'absolutely divine.' On the other hand, men of extreme wickedness we call wild beasts, and that also is the commonest of terms in ordinary speech. St Jerome, writing to Augustine, turns this round in irony, and applies it to people who are not content with the ordinary judgment of men, but want something new - he calls them 'gods.' Quintilian, Institutions, book '1, tells us that a man of consummate perfection used to be called in common speech 'a mortal god': 'For the sages who are forming a person to be completely perfect, and as the phrase goes "a mortal god," think he should be taught with not only divine but human wisdom, etc.

To be in heaven is close to the foregoing; it means to be extraordinarily fortunate and renowned. Cicero to Atticus, book 2: 'Bibulus is in heaven, I don't know why, but they praise him as if "One man by his delay had saved our all."' The same elsewhere to the same: 'If however the bargain as respects myself is not observed, I am in heaven.' Elsewhere again: 'It is not incongruous that the tyrannicides should be lauded to the skies.' Horace alludes to this when he says, 'They link me with the gods above,' that is, they call me blessed and famous. And Theocritus in the Wayfarers, 'I shall rise to heaven before your eyes.' On the other hand, those who suddenly fall from the height of felicity are said to have 'fallen from the stars.' Cicero to Atticus, book 2, speaking of Pompey: 'What a sight! Only Crassus could enjoy it, not so others. He was a fallen star, one looked upon him as a man who had slid rather than moved of his own volition.' But consider, reader, whether this saying does not rather belong more to the one we have quoted elsewhere: 'Here's a third Cato, fallen from the skies!' This is related to the phrase 'to laud to the skies,' meaning to give the highest praise. Livy, decade 1 book 2: The talk runs through all the town: they laud the Fabii tothe skies.'