Adagia 501–600

Aulus Gellius in his Nights, book 2 chapter 6, records that this line circulated in old days as a proverb: Πολλάκι καὶ κηπωρὸς ἀνὴρ μάλα καίριον εἶπεν, Even a gardener oft speaks to the point. It warns us not to despise salutary advice because it comes from a humble source; for it sometimes happens that a man of lowly position and of no account, or of very little education, says something that even persons in high place should not despise. A counterpart is Caecilius' remark in Cicero's Tusculan Questions: 'Under a ragged coat oft wisdom lies.' Nor does that line in Plautus disagree, in his Captivi: 'How oft concealment hides our greatest wits!' As for the Greek adage, I think the reader should be warned that it is found in this form in all the texts of Gellius I have yet seen. But, as I remember, my misgivings were aroused one day, and the existence of some corruption was pointed out to me, by Paolo Bombace of Bologna, much the most learned of the teachers of the humanities in that city, and by far the most celebrated; and rightly so, for it was he who first began to teach both Greek and Latin there with equal qualifications both publicly and in private. He is in any case a man of exquisite taste and very keen judgment; and I myself am so closely linked with him both for his outstanding and many-sided learning and for his exceptional charm of character, that I doubt whether I have ever had a more intimate relationship with any fellow-creature or more enjoyed any man's society. I remember his saying once, in the course of those long literary discussions we used to have, that he did not like the word keporos, gardener, in that proverb in Gellius, and thought that it was clearly spurious and interpolated. He himself suspected, he said, in view of many similar corruptions in the text of that author, that the word moros, fool, had been replaced with keporos by some keen gardener. At the time, although this seemed highly probable, and the opinion of so eminent a scholar carried great weight with me, yet I did not dare to disagree all by myself with the consensus of so many copies. In the course, however, of my desultory wanderings among Greek authors, I fell in by chance with a collection of extracts, which bore no compiler's name but might have been put together by Stobaeus or at any rate excerpted from him. There I found the following line, cited from a tragedy of Aeschylus called The Phrygians: 'Even a foolish man oft speaks to the point,' with kai môros for kepôros. Without hesitation I voted, and I consider that all scholars should vote, for my friend Bombace's proposal that môros should be read instead of keporos, all the more so as the same sentiment in so many words is still current among us at the present day: 'Even a fool sometimes speaks a wise word.' Moreover it balances the opinion I have quoted above from Euripides: 'Fools in their folly speak.' For, true as that is, yet it does occur sometimes that a silly man, either by accident or inadvertently, says something excellent and very much to the point. We often see this happen. What could the most exquisite wit have produced more apt than the greeting of which Suetonius tells, offered to Pompey and Julius Caesar by a man somewhat unsettled in his wits? - 'All hail, our gracious king and queen!' It being remembered that Pompey was suspected of plans to make himself king, and rumour had it that Caesar had been enjoyed as his consort by King Nicomedes.

Αμαλθείας κέρας., Amalthea's horn, or A horn of plenty. When we wish to convey that there is abundance of everything, we speak of a cornucopia or horn of plenty. The image is taken from a very early myth, told by our authorities in various forms. In some it runs like this. Rhea, having given birth to Jupiter, hid her baby in Crete for fear of his father, to be nursed by two nymphs, Adrastea and Ida, daughters of Melisseus. They fed him on the milk of a she-goat called Amalthea; and Jupiter, when he was grown up, set this goat among the stars, where it is called in Greek the Heavenly She-goat. One of its horns he gave to the nymphs who had nursed him as a reward for their kindness, bestowing on it the remarkable property of producing a generous supply of anything they might want. Ovid in book 5 of his Fasti tells a rather different story:
The Naiad Amalthea in a grove
On Cretan Ida hid the infant Jove.
Conspicuous roamed, Mount Dicte's flocks among,
The lovely mother of two likely young,
A goat, with lofty backward-curving horn
And teats such as Jove's nurse might well adorn.
She gave the god her milk; but on an oak
One horn, half of her pride, (good lack!) she broke.
The nymph retrieved it, wreathed it in sweet slips,
Filled it with fruit and set it to Jove's lips.
When he won heaven, and on his father's throne
Jove reigned invincible and reigned alone,
Stars he his nurse and nurse's horn did make;
Still in the sky 'tis famous for her sake.
We read also how Hercules gave the Aetolians a horn of plenty, because he disciplined a horn or branch of the river Achelous, and thereby turned a region previously barren into most fertile country, the horn presumably representing the hardness of his labours and its plentiful contents the resulting fertility. So 'Horn of Plenty' was chosen by Phocion, a philosopher of the Peripatetic school, as a title for his book, as Aulus Gellius tells us. Pliny too informs us that several Greeks used this rather grandiloquent label for their compilations, as though they contained everything without exception, and whatever one wanted was to be sought and found there. Lucian in his Salaried Posts in Great Houses writes 'And you shall possess Amalthea's horn, and drink hen's milk.' Philostratus calls Dion the sophist 'a horn of Amalthea,' because he was so packed with excellence of every kind. One of Plautus' slaves calls a letter in the play a horn of plenty, because he sees himself getting so much advantage out of it. Aulus Gellius, book 14 chapter 6: 'With these words he offered me a stout volume packed, so he assured me, with information of every kind. I accepted it with alacrity, feeling as if I had acquired a horn of plenty.' Philoxenus in Athenaeus calls a table loaded with delicious desserts of many kinds a cornucopia. Suidas quotes a line: 'There, where life seems an Amalthea's horn'; it is an epic hexameter.
The adageis also used in the form 'A heavenly she-goat.' One of the old comedies pillories a certain Polyagrus who lived on his wife's immoral earnings, and calls her a heavenly she-goat, because she brings him in a large income, as Plutarch records in his essay 'How to study poetry': 'How blest is Polyagrus! - he who keeps / A heavenly goat to bring him gold enough' (Polyagrus means 'landed proprietor'). Again in another place, in an attack on the Stoics, he has 'But he who is blest with the Stoic Amalthea,' making fun of the paradoxical theory of the Stoics, who reckon that their ideal wise man possesses everything - wealth, freedom, health, and royalty. Horace in his Odes: 'And Plenty, lavish with her brimming horn.'

Ορνίθων γάλα, the milk of hens, has the same meaning, for we use it of rich people and people who have everything they want, and sometimes of things that are hard to find and therefore precious; so that it is an extravagant way of saying that one lacks absolutely nothing. Pliny in the preface to his History of the World, making fun of the artificial and pompous titles adopted for their books by certain Greeks, says: 'They have used names like Kerion, which they wish to be understood as Honeycomb; others Amalthea's Horn meaning a horn of plenty, as though you could expect from their work a drink of hen's milk.' Aristophanes in his Wasps:
Not for hen's milk itself would I forego
That life of which you would deprive me now.
Eustathius on the fourth Odyssey cites this adage from a play by Anaxagoras called Eggs. Again, Aristophanes the comic poet in his play The Birds:
On you, your children and your children's children
Health, wealth and happiness will we bestow,
Life, peace and youth and laughter, dance and song,
Hen's milk indeed, till you're foredone with blessings.
Strabo in book 14 of his Geography records of the fields in Samos that they were commonly said, on account of their great fertility, actually to produce hen's milk; and he notes that this is found as a proverbial phrase in Menander the comic poet. Athenaeus, in book 9 of his Doctors at Dinner, adduces these lines from an author of the Middle Comedy called Mnesimachus:
There waits that rarer stuff of which they tell,
Hen's milk and pheasants exquisitely plucked.
Again, in book 9 he cites from Numenius: 'And what they call hen's milk.' The same author suggests in book 3 that some people thought hen's milk was white of egg.

'Not to be asleep to everyone' is a phrase used of those who are not every man's lackey, and whose complaisance has its limits. It is thought to be derived from certain husbands who are too ready to oblige, and knowingly expose their unfaithful wives, sometimes pretending to be asleep over their wine in order to give the lover freedom to do as he pleases. This kind of complaisance is pilloried in Juvenal's lines:
He knows his cue and gazes at the floor
And, while he winks, he snores - or seems to snore.
Plutarch, in the essay entitled 'Eroticus,' tells an amusing story which illustrates this. A man named Galba had invited Maecenas to dinner; and when he began to understand from his guest's nods and winks that he had taken a fancy to his wife, he let his head sink little by little as though he were falling asleep. Meanwhile, one of the servants stole up to the table and started filching the wine; at which point he became wide awake, and cried: 'Wretch, couldn't you guess that I'm asleep to no one but Maecenas?' The saying is recorded also, with the same explanation, by Festus Pompeius, quoting Lucilius and showing that the original is a certain Capius, who was nicknamed Snorer because he used to pretend to be asleep, so that his wife could entertain her lovers with greater impunity. He also points out that Lucilius refers to this. Cicero too makes use of it in the seventh book of his Letters to Friends: 'In old days it was "I'm not asleep to everyone," but for me, my dear Gallus, it's "I'm not a slave to everyone."' Cicero's point seems to be that one of these, 'I'm not everyone's sleeper,' was traditional; the other, 'I'm not everyone's slave,' was new. Both are at any rate proverbial; but the former is applicable to the foregoing of one's rights, the latter to the doing of a menial service. Cicero again, in his Letters to Atticus, book 13, has: 'It is nice to enjoy hating someone and, as the saying goes, not to be everyone's slave.'
This passage, as a matter of fact, if I may mention this in passing, seems to me not free from fault. Perhaps he wrote: 'and, just as there is a saying, "not to be asleep to everyone," so not to be everyone's slave.' I may add that this same word servire, to be a slave, contains an element of metaphor, as when we say 'to be a slave to one's theatre, to circumstances, to one's own faults, to one's wife's temper, to the public, to one's private profit,' in the sense of being ready to do anything to oblige.

Σαρδιανοὶ ὤνιοι, Sardinians for sale. In the brief treatise called Lives of Famous Men which some ascribe to Pliny and a few to Suetonius, though the style of both authors is against this, an adage is recorded of the form 'Sardinians for sale,' referring to any transaction that is infinitely long and interminable. This is said to spring from the fact that Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, after his conquest of Sardinia in his second consulship, 'brought back such a quantity of prisoners that the length of time taken in selling them became proverbial.' Plutarch in his 'Roman Questions' adduces another reason: a regular custom had grown up of old in Rome that those who produced games on the Capitol proclaimed 'Sardinians for sale,' and a boy came forward with an ornament hung round his neck in jest, which they call a bulla. He thinks this custom arose from the fact that the inhabitants of Veii, an Etruscan people, had waged war for a long time against Romulus, and their city was the last that Romulus captured. Though Livy in his first book recounts that the people of Veii were defeated by Romulus, but that after his victory he refrained from attacking their fortified city. From there he brought to Rome the king himself and a great many prisoners with him, and put them up for sale. Moreover, as the Etruscans were Lydians in origin, a fact recorded also by Herodotus in his first book, and the capital of Lydia was Sardis, he has reason to advertise Etruscans for sale under the name of Sardians or Sardinians. Plutarch tells the same story, though somewhat differently, in his life of Romulus. Tn the conquest of Veii the leader of its people was captured, and though an elderly man, was thought to have conducted the campaign with great imprudence for a man of his years. Hence a custom grew up that whenever the Romans sacrificed a victim to celebrate a victory, they brought an old man through the Forum up to the Capitol wearing a purple robe and with a bulla round his neck, which was then the badge of childhood, while the herald proclaimed "Sardians for sale." Veii is an Etruscan capital, and the Etruscans are thought to have been emigrants from Sardis.' Cicero uses the adage in his Letters to Friends, book 7, writing to Gallus: 'Here's a lot of Sardinians for sale, each worse than the last.' Cicero is thinking of contemptible wretches and also, if I am not mistaken, of natives of Sardinia; for he has just said: 'I regard it as a gain not to have to put up with a man who is more pestilential than his birthplace.'

Δασύπους κρεῶν ἐπιθυμεῖ, The hairyfoot is hungry for meat. Said of those who ask others for something they have plenty of at home. For the hairyfoot is of the same family as the hare; and the hare, as Pliny says in book 8 chapter 55, 'is a harmless animal and edible and prolific, and is born to be the prey of everything else. It is the only creature beside the hairyfoot to carry a succession of offspring within itself at one time: while suckling one, it has in the womb a second covered with fur, a third hairless, and a fourth conceived but immature.' It is called 'hairyfoot' from the long hair on its shaggy feet.

Some suppose to be identical with the preceding a line we find in the Eunuchus of Terence: 'A hare thyself, and goest in quest of game?' It is the retort of the braggart soldier to a youth from Rhodes who was making advances to the soldier's strumpet, though the boy was of an age when he was quite capable of taking a strumpet's place himself. Donatus gives various explanations of the allegory, suggesting that this proverb is appropriate to effeminate young men, because the hare provides the most tasty meat from its hinder parts, as it were its thighs and buttocks, and it is those parts that make it so much sought after; or because it is pursued by hounds, as lovers pursue the young man; or because, as naturalists tell us, it is of uncertain sex, male at one time and female at another. These fancies seem somewhat pointless to me, and I think it both simpler and nearer the truth to connect it with the Greek proverb of the hairyfoot hungry for meat. Flavius Vopiscus, in his life of the emperor Numerian, says that the adage in Terence comes from Livius Andronicus, the earliest of the Roman comic poets.

Pliny in his Letters uses this phrase to mean 'with equal zeal and equal effort.' It will be suitable for those engaged on an enterprise in commmon, in emulation and with comparable energy. A metaphor from oxen drawing a wagon and putting equal force into the yoke. Pliny's words are: 'The desire to succeed, and especially to succeed in professional matters, has an element in it of reluctance to admit a partner; but between us there was no competition and no disagreement, for we were both matched in double harness, and strove not for our own hand but to win the case.' Theocritus in his Aites: Tn double harness matched each loved the other,' of the love which is mutual and equal and, as Greek puts it, isorropon, well-balanced. Close to this are St Jerome's words addressed to Augustine: Tn Rome there are said to be a great many people with both skill and courage enough to take you on, and to argue with you about Holy Scripture, matching step for step.' The Greeks have another proverb, 'We draw the selfsame yoke, both you and I,' of which I shall treat in its proper place.

'To bundle together' is used also by Pliny of doing something in one operation and everything together, not separately. 'We were afraid,' he says, 'that we should run short of time and voice and breath, if we tried, as it were, to bundle together so many accusations and so many defendants.' A metaphor from those who tie many things together to make them easier to carry. For 'collectively' Greek uses syllebden, in one grasp.

Ἅλα καὶ τράπεζαν μὴ παραβαίνειν, Transgress not salt and trencher. Do not neglect the society of your friends, or Do not breach the unwritten laws of friendship. In the old days eating salt with a man and sharing his table cemented a friendship, and in Antiquity friends used often to dine together. So Diogenes Laertius also testifies in his life of Pythagoras, and Theocritus in his Hylas concurs: 'Since these two comrades ever shared one mess,' speaking of Hercules and Telamon. Then Hecuba in Euripides, to empha- size the wickedness of Polymnestor, speaks of the hospitable board: 'He oft had shared a common table with me.' And in 1 Esdras, chapter 4 we read: 'We therefore, mindful of the salt we have eaten in the palace, because we think it wrong to watch injury done to the king, etc' Hence it is that, as we learn from Alexander in his memoir of Pythagoras, quoted by Laertius as before, Pythagoras said that we ought not to break bread, that there might be no division of a thing that brought friends together. It was also his opinion that salt was of all things the most appropriate to set on the dinner-table, because it puts us in mind of equity and justice, it keeps sound and preserves whatever it takes to itself, and it is made of the purest substances, of water and sea. Origen in the second book of his Against Celsus refers to a satirist from Paros, who attacked Lycomantes because he had transgressed salt and trencher. He turns this also against Judas who betrayed Christ. Again in his commentary on Matthew he says of Judas 'Nor did he bethink him of the bread and salt that they had eaten together.' And it may well be that Christ himself, the founder of our religion, alluded to this, as it seems to have been his policy to hide his deepest mysteries in the very commonest things of daily life, for he knew that this emblem would be despised by the Jews and welcomed by the Gentiles. Among the Macedonians, at any rate, it was an ancestral custom, when they ratified a treaty which they wished to be especially sacred, that both parties should partake of a loaf cut in two with a sword; so Quintus Curtius, book 8.

'Ἴκελος Βακήλῳ, καὶ Βακηλος εἶ, Like Bacelus, and You are a regular Bacelus. Used of catamites and effeminate men, or men of large build but thick-headed. Derived from the physique and behaviour of a certain Bacelus. Suidas says that bakelos properly means a eunuch, and is therefore used of effeminates, because this is the defect from which that class of men most commonly suffer. Antiphanes in his Carians attacks a man called Bacelus, as quoted in Athenaeus, book 4: 'Seest thou not Bacelus / Dancing with his arms without a blush?' Suetonius mentions him in his life of Augustus, whose regular habit it was to use a peculiar word bacelus for a fool, though in the common run of copies the word is baceolus. Ermolao thinks that in Quintilian too Bacelus could rightly be read for Bagoas. Quintilian's words run as follows: 'But the most distinguished sculptors and painters, when they wished to represent very beautiful bodies by painting or modelling, have none the less never fallen into this error of taking some Bagoas or Megabyzus as a model for their work.' I myself do not see why Quintilian's text need be changed, since bagoas in some barbarous language means eunuch, and under that name Lucian introduces a philosopher who looks just like a eunuch in face and body. Ovid too in his Amores gives the name Bagoas to the slave who is set to keep watch over a girl: 'Bagoas, you who guard my mistress dear.'

Βάταλος εἶ, You're a regular Batalus, was said in old days by way of insult to effeminate men. Plutarch shows that the nickname was given to Demosthe- nes as a boy, and used to his discredit by his enemies. He adds various explanations of the name: either there was a fluteplayer called Batalus, an effeminate who was the first man to come on the stage wearing women's sandals and who castrated music, if I may use the phrase; or there was an obscene poet called Batalus; or batalos is a name given in Attic Greek to a part of the body that cannot be mentioned without indecency. This is referred to by Libanius. The same man, Demosthenes I mean, at an advanced age was similarly given the insulting nickname Argas, either because someone of that name was the promoter of several bad laws, or because, as Suidas thinks, an argas is a kind of serpent. There is also a Greek verb batalizesthai, to follow a scandalous and effeminate way of life.

Country people have a proverb: 'He gave the cart a good shove downhill.' Commonly used, it is clear, of those who urge a man in a direction to which he was already tending of his own accord. A metaphor from loaded carts, which are commonly tipped over to empty them; and this is more easily done in the direction towards which they already tilt because of a slope in the ground. Donatus pointed to this adage in his explanation of Parmeno's words in the Eunuchus: 'You'll quite upset me presently.' This idea is not far removed from that remark in Plautus' Curculio: 'Advice is nearly as good as a helping hand.' The words are spoken by a pandar, who will be all the more ready to break faith when advised by a money-lender to do what he intended to do anyhow, with or without advice. The same thing is elegantly expressed by Sophocles, quoted by Plutarch in his life of Artaxerxes: 'How easy 'tis to preach transgression!' For most men, the road from better to worse runs downhill.

Ἐν καρὶ τὸν κίνδυνον, Risk it on a Carian: make a risky experiment on a person or thing of little value, so that if anything goes wrong, there will be no great loss to suffer. This adage took its rise from the character of the Carians. They are a people, as Pomponius Mela tells us, 'of uncertain origin; for some think them autochthones (natives, that is, of the country), some Pelasgians, some Curetes, and their national passion for fighting is such that they habitually fight for pay even in the wars of other peoples.' Hence Theocritus in his Praise of Ptolemy wrote 'And Carians that love war.' Herodotus too in Euterpe indicates that the Carians were by nature barbarous and fit to be slaves, prepared to endure any hardships if they are paid for it. Aristophanes suggests the same thing in the Birds: 'If he's a slave and a Carian.' Strabo in book 14 of his Geography tells how the Carians once roamed all over Greece, fighting in various places as mercenaries, and that in fact they were such outstanding fighters that weapons of war are commonly called Carian by the poets: Anacreon has a Carian breastplate, Alcaeus a Carian crest, to which Aristophanes alludes in the Birds. Suidas writes that the Carians were the first mercenary troops, because they set such a low value on their own lives. Those therefore who had hired Carian troops had a habit of posting them in the front of the battle-line, that they might receive the enemy's first onset at their own peril; or they were thrown into a battle at the point where its outcome looked most uncertain. The Persians in their native tongue had a word kardakes for those who lived by plunder. The reputation of the Carians is rivalled, it seems, in our own day by the Swiss, born fighters, but in other respects a straightforward sort of men with absolutely no vice in them, and quite good enough, in my opinion, to forego this, the only stain on their characters; for they would achieve distinction in literature and all other honourable subjects, if they would give up fighting and attend to these instead. This adage is used by Socrates in Plato's Euthydemus, when he tells them to make an experiment in transformation on himself rather than anyone else, as on a worthless Carian, who will be no great loss if you destroy him in the process. 'If you young men are afraid,' he says, 'make the experiment on me as your Carian; for I am an old man, and quite ready to face the risk, and I hand myself over to Dionysodorus here, as to a modern Medea of Colchis. Let him destroy me; let him boil me, if he wishes, in a cauldron; let him do what he likes, provided he makes me a good man.' He refers to it again in the Laches, when he says that those who are starting to teach and making trial of their skill to the great peril of the young, must remember that it is no Carian mercenary but the children of the citizens that are at risk. Aristides imitates him in his Panathenaic Oration: 'Making the experiment on the proverbial Carian, and not on their own persons.' Cicero uses the same phrase in his speech Pro L. Flacco: 'Why, is not all Caria the subject of a common proverb in your language, that if you wish to make an experiment with some risk attached to it, you should for preference risk it in Caria?' This passage is clearly corrupt, and I have no hesitation in asserting that we should read, not 'in Caria' (in Caria) but 'on a Carian' (in Care). The opposite of this is Aureo piscari hamo, To fish with a golden hook, of which I will treat elsewhere.

The same is true of Ἐν πίθῳ τὴν κεραμείαν μανθάνειν, To learn the potter's art on a big jar, used of those who from the start practise their skill on the largest projects, though it is wise to proceed gradually from small things to great. For a potter does not start by making a big jar immediately, which is a vessel of the largest size, but sundry small pots, which will not involve heavy loss if something goes wrong. This is roughly the sense in which Plato uses it in the Laches: 'We must ensure that we do not run this risk, not with the proverbial Carian, but in our sons and our friends' sons, so that it happens to us exactly as the proverb says, that we learn our potting on a big jar.' Dicaearchus turns the proverb to mean something different: he makes it say that every craftsman ought to practise his own art, a coachman by driving carriages, a shipmaster by steering his ship, a physician by curing the sick, as though it were absurd for a potter to try driving a carriage, which is someone else's business, instead of making a big jar. And thus the well-known principle will apply here too: 'Let each man ply the trade that he knows best,' and Horace's remark in his Epistles:
Who knows not ships will fear to venture aught,
Nor southernwood prescribe, who's not been taught;
Leeches their physic, smiths their hammers ply -
Skilled and unskilled, we all can versify.
Gregory the Theologian makes a similar use of it in his Apologia defuga: 'To attempt to teach others before they are properly educated themselves, and like the potter learning on a big jar, as the saying is, to practise piety on the souls of other people, seems to me the height of folly.'

Close to this is Ne sutor ultra crepidam, Let the cobbler stick to his last - let no one, that is, attempt to judge of matters which are far removed from his own skill and calling. This adage took its rise from Apelles, the famous painter, of whom Pliny, book 35 chapter 10, tells the following story: 'When his work was finished, he would expose it in the porch to the view of passers-by, hiding behind the picture to listen to their comments on its faults, because he thought the public a more strict critic than himself; and they say that he was criticized by a cobbler for painting one loop too few on the inner side of a pair of sandals. Next day, finding his criticism had been attended to, the man went proudly on to criticize the drawing of a leg; and Apelles looked out indignantly and told him when passing judgment to stick to his last. These words became proverbial.' So much for Pliny. There is a similar story in Athenaeus: Stratonicus the lyre-player said to a smith who was arguing with him about music 'Can't you see that you're not sticking to your hammer?' His nephew's remark in his Letters points the same way, that no one can judge a work of art properly unless he too is an artist. And Aristotle's saying in the first book of the Ethics that everyone is a proper judge of the things he knows about. Also what he wrote in the second book of the Physics of a blind man disputing about colours - words which have become proverbial among academics of our own day for disputing on subjects of which a man knows nothing. To the same opinion we may refer what Fabius Pictor says in Quintilian, that the arts would be fortunate if none but artists were their critics.

Varro in his Agriculture, book 1: 'And since, as they say, the gods help those who help themselves, I will invoke the gods first.' He indicates that divine help is commonly available, not to the idle, but to industrious men who try as hard as they can. To this I think we should refer those lines in Homer which have already become proverbial: 'Some things, Telemachus, will you devise / In your own heart; some too will heaven suggest.' Cicero used this in book 9 of his Letters to Atticus: 'You have to do everything unprepared. But nevertheless "some you'll devise, some too will heaven suggest."'

Close to this is Σὺν Ἀθηνᾷ καὶ χεῖρα κίνει, Let Minerva help you, but make a start meanwhile yourself. The adage warns us not to relax our efforts in reliance on divine assistance. It is specially appropriate to women: their woolwork has Minerva as its patron, and they ask her aid, but press on with no less energy all the time. Some think it arose from a carter whose ass stuck fast in the mud, and when he ought to have helped it out, he did nothing and appealed to Hercules. The god replied, as the story goes, that he should set his hand meanwhile to help his donkey in distress, and that heaven would help him then, but not before. Others produce another tale: when a man was to enter a contest, he asked Minerva whether he would emerge victorious, and the answer was yes. However, when he entered the ring and stood there with folded arms, his opponent knocked him out, and he lost. To this adage belongs that most elegant line cited from a tragedy by Agathon in Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics, book 5: 'Art fond of fortune, fortune fond of art.' The following iambic line is quoted by Suidas to the same effect: 'First take your coat off, and then say your prayers.'

Whenever we bring something to a conclusion with no outside help, by our own wits and such strength as we possess, we are said to do it by our own prowess or on our own merits; also when something is done at our own risk. Cicero in his De officiis, book 3: 'This gap then I propose to fill, with no outside help but, as they say, by my own prowess.' Again in his second Philippic, speaking of Deiotarus: 'For the king himself on his own initiative and with no support from Caesar's memoranda, as soon as the news of Caesar's death reached him, recovered his property by his own prowess.' In the second book of the Code, in the title Ne liceat potentioribus, chapter 1: 'It was an inspired provision of his late imperial majesty that most sapient emperor Claudius our kinsman, that all such persons should be cast in their suit as might have secured the assistance of powerful patrons, in order that with this threat in prospect, questions at issue in the courts should be decided on their own merits, in preference to reliance on the resources of powerful persons in high place.' And again in book 3, title De iudiciis, chapter 11: 'This rule being observed beyond a peradventure, that neither of the parties engaged in a suit and none of the judges may so act, that the case does not proceed on its own merits; but absolute freedom must be left to the judge by counsel on either side.' A metaphor, it would seem, from supreme commanders, who fight a campaign on their own initiative and with their own forces; for Plautus too has 'With my own forces' instead of 'By my own prowess.' Other phrases have a proverbial ring, such as vario Marte, dubio Marte, iniquo Marte, when Mars, representing the fortunes of war, is said to be changeable or doubtful or unfair. This adage is almost the opposite of one I have recorded elsewhere: Οὐκ ἄνευ θησέως, Not without Theseus.

It is an old saw in very frequent use even in our own day, that a man's wisdom is useless who is wise only for others. Plato in the Hippias major says: 'And many agree that the wise man should be wise above all for his own benefit.' Cicero too uses it in a letter to Trebatius, showing that it comes from a tragedy on the subject of Medea: 'And since I have begun to play Medea's part, always remember that line "He whose wisdom nought avails him, all in vain is counted wise."' It is a trochaic verse. Again in his Letters to Friends, book 13, writing to Caesar the emperor: 'And so I betake me from Homer's grand style to the true precepts of Euripides: "Wisdom I hate that's not wise for itself," a line most highly praised by the elder Praecilius.' Again, in the first book of the On Divination he quotes against soothsayers the lines of Ennius:
They whose wisdom tells them nothing yet show other men the way;
'Riches shall be yours' they promise, yet themselves must beg their bread.
Lucian in his Apology quotes 'Wisdom I hate that's not wise for itself.' Alexander turned the same line against Callisthenes because, he said, he did not adapt himself to the characters of those he lived with, but made it clear that he disapproved of everything that went on. And this freedom of speech cost the excellent man his life, while that contemptible toady the philosopher Anaxarchus was held in high esteem. This principle is so precisely observed by our contemporaries, that one would be thought unworthy to be called a human being who could not find some means of promoting his own advantage. In this class falls that thing in Suetonius: 'Observe a second Sulla, fortunate / Not for Rome's benefit but for his own.'

Donkey in a ditch: a country proverb, but it has a military origin. Can be used whenever someone is obliged to do what he is quite incapable of, or when something will be extremely complex or dangerous. The story comes in Livy, book 3 of the third decade. He tells how, when Fabius had laid siege to Capua in the second Punic war, Jubellius Taurea, the most renowned of the Campanian knights, challenged the first comer in the Roman army to single combat, and one Claudius Asellius dared to step forward. When they had dodged each other for a long time in open ground, the Campanian called to his opponent to come down into a hollow way, since otherwise it would be a contest between the horses instead of their riders. The Roman, whose courage ran to deeds not words, came down at once; whereupon Taurea again got the better of him with a remark which has passed into a country proverb. 'Don't you know' he said 'how little a donkey can do in a ditch?' Although from Livy's words the sense of the adage is far from clear, we can easily guess what it means. It conflicts with one of which I shall speak elsewhere: Equum in planiciem, The horse to the plain. A horse is of the greatest value on an open plain, and is very little use in a ditch.

Τάλαντα Ταντάλου., The talents of Tantalus. Used of immense wealth. Tantalus was a Phrygian who became a byword for his enormous riches, so that he is supposed to endure even in the nether regions the sort of frustration that these grasping rich men feel in the midst of their piled-up wealth. Horace, when he says of Tantalus:
In vain he grasps the cup he fain would quaff -
At you this story points: how dare you laugh?
shows that the lesson of this myth is aimed at those who are at the same time both rich and mean. Plato uses the adage in the Euthyphro. Suidas says it occurs in Epicharmus and in Anacreon. It also takes another form, with an elegant play on words: Tantali talenta talentizat, meaning He weighs and hoards as much as Tantalus. That Tantalus moreover was a man of great wealth is shown by, among other things, that line from a tragedy quoted by Plutarch in his essay 'On Exile': 'The fields I sow are twelve days' journey long.' In another passage he calls immense riches 'Tantalic wealth.' Antiphanes, cited by Athenaeus, book 6:
Such once was Thribon's, who was gently stripped
Of all the fabled wealth of Tantalus.

Theocritus uses a similar expression in idyll 8, when he writes of the 'talents of Pelops': Not Pelops' land nor Pelops' wealth I crave, Talents of gold, nor to outrun the winds. In Attica moreover a talent was the largest sum of money they knew. The lesser talent weighed sixty pounds, the greater talent weighed eighty. Hence these lines in the Phormio: Geta If anyone would give him a great talent... Demipho Great talent? Rather give him a great thrashing. And Aristophanes: 'What? Turn Opuntian? / Not I! Not for a talent of pure gold!' which means, I would not sacrifice the sight of one eye, however much you gave me.

Μίδου πλοῦτος, The riches of Midas, and Μίδου πλουσιώτερος., As rich as Midas, have passed into a proverb on account of the great wealth of a king of that name, which gave rise also to numerous stories. Statius in his poem on Pollius' villa at Sorrento: 'Richer than Midas' wealth and Lydian gold.' This Midas was a tyrant of Phrygia who, if we believe the fables of the poets, in return for his hospitality to Bacchus was permitted by the gods to wish for anything he liked, and it would be given him. He prayed that whatever he touched might instantly be turned into gold. The historians tell us that, when he was a child, ants piled grains of wheat on his lips as he lay asleep; the soothsayers said this meant that he would be the richest of all mortal men, and so it turned out. Pliny gives him first place in his list of outstandingly rich men, in book 33.

Aristotle uses as a proverb - and it has long ago passed into a proverb among educated men - that famous saying in Hesiod, 'which all men repeat' as Aristides says in his defence of Pericles, to the effect that whatever is spread by popular rumour is rarely devoid of all foundation. It comes in the second volume of his poems, which has the title Works and Days:
And shun the fearful rumour of mankind.
Rumour's an evil thing, so lightly raised,
Grievous to bear and hard to put away;
Rumour dies hard that many folk have uttered;
Rumour herself's a sort of deity.
The statement can be taken in two ways, either that a thing which is in every man's mouth and accepted by popular opinion does not seem wholly false, or that a rumour, false though it may be, once it has already spread in public cannot be wholly suppressed. And so it warns us to take great care that we may never have the misfortune to become a byword even unjustifiably through some rash act. In calling Rumour a deity, he agrees with Homer, who in several passages introduces a character called Ossa; for this is his name for Rumour regarded as a goddess. And Virgil imitates him in the fourth book of the Aeneid: 'This the foul goddess o'er the lips of men / Spread broadcast.'

Although there is no saying of Hesiod's that has not become proverbial, I myself prefer to list those which, being wrapped up in riddles, come closer to proverbs in form. An example of this may be found in these lines from the book I have just quoted:
Building thy house, leave not the roof unplaned,
Lest clamorous crows upon it perch and croak.
Proculus the commentator tells us that this passage is taken in two ways. Some think the poet is warning us that every man should see that the building of his house is finished before the winter, for fear that he may then have no means of keeping out the cold; for the crow, he says, is a symbol of winter, as being a winter bird. Moreover, while it is true always, it is most true in the winter months that 'There's no place like home,' as the proverb runs. Others think it means that a building once begun ought not to be left half finished, for fear you become a public laughing-stock, and the passers-by speak against you, and criticize your infirmity of purpose in not finishing what you have started. For this custom of criticizing others is a speciality of common people, as the Gospel parables indicate. It was this habit of persistent denigration that the poet meant to indicate by his crow; for the crow is a noisy and obstreperous bird, so that it has given rise to the proverbial use of the verb 'to croak.' But Proculus for his part prefers to take the expression in a general sense: every piece of business to which we have once set our hands ought to be brought to its proper conclusion, so that nothing at all is lacking, and everywhere we ought to strive for complete- ness. The further removed this can be from its literal use, the more elegant it will appear, and the more like a true proverb: for example, if one were to urge a man not to abandon humane studies, but to put the finishing touches to what has been so admirably started, for fear he many become an object of general derision by giving up something well begun, and bring against him Hesiod's words:
Building thy house, leave not the roof unplaned,
Lest clamorous crows upon it perch and croak.

There is another puzzle in that passage, in the lines that immediately follow:
Nor from unhallowed vessels take thou aught
To eat nor wash.
Cicero too suggests that it was irreligious to eat food out of the dish, for he writes as follows in book 2 of his Definibus: 'And yet we shall find profligates who in the first place are so devoid of scruples that they eat out of the dish, and then so far from the fear of death that they have ever on their lips that verse from the Hymnis: "Six bare months of life suffice me; Death is welcome to the rest."' It is a trochaic line. Suetonius in his life of Vitellius relates that 'his greed was not only so great but so ill-timed, that even at a sacrifice or on a journey he never controlled himself, but when at the altar would snatch fat and spelt-grains almost out of the fire and eat them there and then, and the hot food in a wayside eating-house, even if it was two days old and half-eaten.' As far as the plain sense goes, it tells us not to fall greedily upon our food like brute beasts, but to wait until we have first offered the first-fruits to heaven. For in ancient times, as Plutarch tells us in his 'Table-talk,' even daily food was included among things sacred; and so, when they were about to eat, they used to consecrate the first-fruits to the gods, and then they would proceed to their repast with no indecent haste but with a certain solemnity, with hands duly washed, as they might to some sacred meal. This custom survives to our own day among well-conducted Christians. But it will be more like a proverb, if we understand it to mean that we must not rob our underlings and servants or strip them heartlessly of what is theirs, but must leave them in possession of some portion of their money, for them to live on. It will perhaps be found suitable for those men too who are greedy, and therefore in a hurry, and are eager to snatch an advantage before the right moment comes, and reap their harvest, as it were, before the crop is ripe; for example, the man who demands on the spot something bequeathed or promised to him, when it would be more courteous to say nothing for some days, or he who has lately come into a position of power and begins at once to despoil the people with his exactions, or who, when betrothed to a girl, does not wait for her to be of full age, does not wait for the marriage ceremony, but beds her forthwith. It is taken from the liturgy of sacrifices, which in old days included a meal.
With this belongs a phrase I have reported elsewhere from Athenaeus, book 9: Ἀπὸ τηγάνου,, A patella, Straight from the pan. In book 6 he quotes from Pherecrates the iambic line 'Said he ate whitebait straight out of the pan.' Some used the form teganon for a pan, the Ionic eganon; hence the compound verb apoteganizein, to eat from the pan. Thus Phrynichus, quoted by Athenaeus book 6, uses it: 'Sweet indeed, this eating from the pan, and no scot paid,' meaning, if there is nothing to pay and you are allowed to do it free. Again, in another passage, he quotes from Archestratus 'Snatching it from the spit'; said of a woman who was described as eating the sacrificial meat before it had been offered. The same author in his sixth book quotes from Anaxandrides:
Let 'em gape as they will at the painter's great skill,
As it hangs in its frame very nice:
Here's art, if they can, that they snatch from the pan,
And it's gone from the pot in a trice.
In general it will be possible to adapt this to anyone who embarks on something heedlessly and, as the saying goes, with unwashed feet.

Plutarch in his 'Greek Questions' records a proverb in the following fashion: 'Whence came the proverbial saying: This is sovereign? Dinon of Tarentum, when he was general, being a soldier of long experience, put forward a proposal which was voted down by the citizens; and when the herald announced the result, he held up his right hand and cried "No! This is stronger." So the story is told by Theophrastus. Apollodorus in his Rhytinus adds that when the herald said "There are more votes on the other side," he retorted "But these are better," and ratified the opinion of the minority.' From this we may infer that the phrase was commonly used to convey that some proposal was better or more profitable, although the majority thought otherwise, or when those who were fewer in number commanded greater resources. In this class would fall, to illustrate what I mean by examples, the following. 'Most men measure felicity by happiness and wealth, and very few are devoted to virtue; but do not be moved by the majority, for this is sovereign.' Again: 'There is almost no one in the prince's entire household who does not wish you well; but one man is against you, and he is so universally powerful that he can lord it almost over the prince himself. And so, if all depended on a vote, success is already yours; but this is sovereign.' Porphyrion touches lightly on the proverb, as it were with a finger-tip, in his note on that passage in Horace's Epodes:
Let us bind our citizens all with a solemn oath:
It is time to be gone, for those at the least
Who stand out from the ignorant throng.
Although the reading of many copies τὰ χερείονα νικᾷ is, I think, corrupt. It will be more correct, if I am not mistaken, to write καῤῥόνων νίκα - not 'The worse counsel wins' but 'Victory is with the better party.' For the ode is a rhetorical piece, and urges a unanimous vote in favour of emigration. If however it is impossible for the best policy to commend itself to the multitude, at least let the soundest opinion win the day, even if supported by fewer votes. Plato writes to the same effect in the first book of the Laws, that it is the most admirable sort of victory when the crowd give way before their betters, and in decisions the weight of votes gets more attention than their number. His words, in the book I mentioned, run as follows: 'For wheresoever the better citizens do overcome the multitude and the worser sort, that city would rightly be said to surpass itself, and such a victory would most justly redound to its credit; and the converse, where the converse happens.' Pliny had the same point in mind when he complains in his Letters that votes are counted and not weighed. Here belongs also that remark in Livy: 'The larger party defeated the better.' Homer points the same way in the first book of the Iliad: 'Since the worse counsel wins.' Nor should one pass over in this context a story told by Diogenes Laertius of the philosopher Zeno. When Zeno saw that Theophrastus was made much of and highly praised because he attracted a larger audience, his answer was: 'His choir is larger, but mine sings more in tune.'
There will therefore be scope for this adage, when we declare that the quality of those who think well of us is more important than the quantity; or when we propose that we should follow not the opinion of the majority but the best course, even if it has very few votes; or when we say that the support of two or three people eminent for wealth or popularity or influence is worth more than the goodwill of the multitude, who are superior in numbers but inferior in all else. In the same way, a character in Plautus says that he thinks nothing of those lesser gods, provided he may enjoy the favour of Jove alone. And it will not be absurd to bring this in, whenever one force is greater than all the rest; one might say, for instance, 'This course has more public support, has more reasons in its favour, is based on justice, is enjoined by the law; but the other is the winner. For "such is my will and pleasure."' For inevitably everything must give place whenever the king utters an oracle like those words of Agamemnon in Homer: 'If he says no, I'll take her for myself.' In the same way Lucian speaks in his Captive of those 'who think might is right.' Pyrrhus, when asked by one of his children, who was still very young, to whom he proposed to bequeath his kingdom, replied 'To whichever of you has the sharpest sword.' Plutarch in his life of Pyrrhus thinks this runs very close to that curse in tragedy, that brothers may divide their family inheritance 'by the sword's whetted edge.' And so, when confronted with those who use violence and, as Ennius puts it, 'by iron win their way,' who make might their right and for whom 'the laws are silent amid the clash of arms,' it will be right to give an ironic twist to the saying 'This wins the day' and 'This is sovereign.' For the Greek word kyrios means not only 'master' in the proper sense, but any person who has the final say. Suidas shows that they spoke of a 'sovereign assembly' in which magistrates were normally elected. Aristophanes in the Acharnians uses kyrios of an assembly in which he says, using a related verb, that they cast their sovereign votes. Sometimes it can be applied to things as well as people, as by Euripides in his Iphigeneia in Aulis: 'My words, not his, deserve to win the day.' For the slave's point is, that, for all that he is of lower standing than Menelaus, he has the advantage over him of a more just cause. Not far from this are Cicero's words in the In Pisonem: 'But I will say nothing of the way in which each of us was elected. By all means let Fortune be mistress of the hustings.'

Δήλιος κολυμβητής, A Delian diver. Commonly used in old days of an expert swimmer who could swim on the surface of the water. The adage took its rise, or at least won greater currency, from a remark of Socrates. When Euripides once showed him a book by Heracleitus, who was nicknamed 'the prince of darkness' for the deliberate obscurity of what he wrote, and asked him what he thought of it, the story goes that he replied: 'Splendid, where I could understand it and, I daresay, where I could not; but you need to be a Delian diver if you are not to drown in his depths.' Socrates referred at the same time both to the proverb and to the excessive profundity of Heracleitus' abstruse opinions, which were such that without the help of a really powerful swimmer there was some danger that the reader of his book would sink without trace. Laertius in his life of Heracleitus attributes this dictum to a certain Crates, who was the first, he says, to introduce Heracleitus' book on nature to the Greek public, and paid it this tribute.

Ἐκ τοῦ λέγειν τὸ λέγειν πορίζεται, By speaking we learn how to speak. Syrianus, the commentator on Hermogenes, criticizes the sophist Evagoras for holding that fluency in speaking is a matter merely of practice and not theory, and that we achieve readiness of speech by speaking, 'supposing' he says, 'as the vulgar proverb has it, that by speaking one learns how to speak.' Cicero also used it in the first book of his De oratore: 'In this' he says 'they are misled by what they have been told, that men normally contrive to become good speakers by speaking. There is truth also in the opposite saying, that a bad style is most easily acquired by speaking badly.' Pliny in the sixth book of his Letters: T observe that many men of small talent and no education have become good advocates by practice in advocacy.' The adage also has a wider application, to skill in any field, which is most appropriately acquired by practice, the best teacher of any subject. Hence all statements will have a proverbial flavour which are of the form 'You will learn building as you build, music as you play, tactics on the field of battle, writing as you ply your pen.'

Πολλοὶ κἀγαθοί, Many good men and true, was used in old days as a proverb. Derived from a sacrificial rite in which the celebrant, when about to offer sacrifice, used to ask who was present. The assembled company then replied 'Many good men and true.' This they did partly to secure a good omen, for it was important at a sacrifice to avoid all unlucky words, in Greek euphemein; partly to give anyone with a crime on his conscience a chance to leave the sacred mysteries. Plutarch in his 'Table-talk': 'Since many good men and true are here to support Plato.' But I have referred to this before. Aristides too alluded to this in his Pericles: 'But he gave evidence in his favour ungrudgingly and unequivocally, as one would expect of a good man and true.' Homer's phrase 'great and good' is also current as a proverb, and is found here and there even in Aristophanes. The proverb therefore will be in place whenever we wish to convey, of witnesses or judges or colleagues, that they are well-chosen and by no means to be rejected.

Ἀνδρῶν ἡρώων τέκνα πήματα., Great men have trouble from their children. The Ancients observed that in character the sons of distinguished men fall far short of their forbears. Hence Demosthenes' remark that 'good men, as though by a kind of destiny, produce bad sons.' This opinion of his is reported by Aristides in the Cimon. The scholiast, whoever he was - and he was neither idle nor ignorant - quotes on this passage the proverb I have just recorded. Even today it remains current as a humorous saying, that the wisest fathers have most fools as their children. Euripides in the Heracleidae applies this opinion widely to mortals in general: 'One among many haply you may find / No worse man than his sire.' Homer says the same in several passages, especially in Odyssey book 2:
Few sons indeed are equal to their fathers;
Most men are worse, few better than their sires.
Aelius Spartianus holds forth on this theme in his life of the Emperor Severus, showing with many examples how it often happens that men who are distinguished for courage or literary gifts or the favours of fortune either have no children at all, or leave offspring of such a kind that it would be better for humanity if they died childless.

Euripides is evidence for the currency as a proverb of the maxim that a bad father does not beget good children:
Alas, how true that ancient saying runs:
An evil father ne'er begat good sons!
This dictum finds support in the proverb Mali corvi malum ovum, An ill crow lays an ill egg. Also in that line of Theognis: 'For ne'er on squills do roses grow,' and others of the kind, which shall be recorded in their places.

Aristides in his Themistocles: 'But for Themistocles the sequel was always greater than what went before, and he felt the force of the proverb "one wave left me and another caught me up," until at length he emerged victorious from the third great wave.' There seems to have been a proverbial verse, which Aristides has distorted somewhat to fit his sentence; it will read properly like this: τὸ μέν μ᾽ ἔλιπε κῦμα, τό δ᾽ ἐγκατελάμβανεν. The image is taken from men on a dangerous voyage, who after one wave has hit them always expect another, as squall follows squall. And sailors in peril actually count the onset of the waves; for they have a special fear of every tenth wave, which the Ancients called a 'tenner,' a decumana. The Greek name for those very heavy squalls was trikumia, the 'great third wave.' This can be neatly adapted to the onset of misfortunes when, as often happens, one calamity succeeds another, according to that proverbial verse 'Fortune is ne'er content to strike but once.'

Ἐκ δυοῖν ποδοῖν καταφεύγειν., To make for shelter with both feet, putting your best foot first. Aristides in his Panathenaic Oration: 'And this first point alone, that all who needed help made for shelter in Athens just as though they were really putting their best foot first, with never a glance at any of the other cities, is clear and weighty evidence, better than any inscription on a monument, that she was pre-eminent from the start.' The man who equipped this author with explanatory notes, which are by no means to be despised, tells us that the proverb is derived from men in a hurry running, so that it seems to resemble ἀμφοτέραις χερσὶν Take both hands to it, which we use to express care and speed in the finishing of a task; or from sailors, as one might say 'with two helms. ' For the rudder or steering-oar of a ship they call its foot, because as the ship is turned by it this way and that, she may be thought to take as it were a step forward by means of it. Thus it would come close to the proverb we have treated of elsewhere, To lie at two anchors. And so we can take either of two meanings, that their custom was to seek refuge in the city eagerly and as fast as they could, or that they found there the safest refuge of all. Though Aristophanes in the Birds used it to convey the idea of speed, when he wrote 'We flew up from our country, best foot first.' The commentator points out that this is taken from ships that run with the wind, so that the sense is 'with very great energy and effort.'

Τίς ἄν θύρας ἁμάρτοι, Who could miss the gate? Commonly used when someone entirely misses the truth and comes to quite the wrong conclusions. Aristotle uses it in the Metaphysics, book 2, right at the beginning; and in all the copies which I have been able to consult, I find the word spelt thuras, gate, with a u. Besides which, Argyropylus renders it by janua, a gate, and he is a competent translator and a philosopher no one can despise. Then again Averroes, who is now the greatest authority in our schools of philosophy, makes it quite clear in his exposition of the passage that he is thinking of a gate. Again, in the commentary of Alexander of Aphrodisias I find in the same way thuras, gate. If it were at all permissible to dissent from so many copies and such great authorities, I myself would think the text more likely to be right if we read theras, the target, with an e in place of the u. That thuras should have crept in is not surprising, in the first place because the mistake was a very easy one, the corruption of a single letter, and probably quite accidental, especially as there is almost no difference in the sound. And then the point of the metaphor could be made more obvious and easier to grasp, so that it deceived even practised philosophers, who were not of course as familiar with the underlying story as they were with the hackneyed image of the house-door typifying the first steps in cognition. Last but not least, that the manuscripts should agree among themselves will not seem remarkable to anyone who is even moderately experienced in the evaluation and comparison of codices; for it often happens that the error of one archetype, provided it displays some semblance of the truth, is propagated thereafter into all the copies which are, so to speak, its progeny, 'be they its children's children, and all that ensue thereafter.' I say this with no desire for a fight to the death, should someone perchance disagree with me, partly because this would be against my principles, partly because I am well aware what a slippery slope it is and a perilous business, to make any change in these eminent authors. All I will do is to put forward conjectures that appeal to me. If anyone thinks they fit, he will subscribe to my opinion; if not, he will hold to his old view all the more readily because, even when challenged, it has won the day. In the first place, then, considerable doubts were raised in my mind by a very old and also very accurate manuscript of the speeches of Aristides the rhetorician, in which I find not only theras, target, in the text, but also a reference to a very ancient story, and with it to an author from whom this proverb of Aristotle's might, if I am not mistaken, have gained currency. What Aristides says, then, in the speech entitled Pericles runs as follows: 'And so, before you have shot any of your opponents, you hit and bring home one of your friends; you have the same experience as Peleus in Pindar, who missed the target he was aiming at and instead killed Eurytion, who was very dear to him.' I am supported here by the extant scholia on that author, which bear no definite title, it is true, but are evidently the work of a disciplined intelligence by no means ill-informed. Consequently I shall append his remarks without hesitation, in case anyone should be interested to see them: 'Pindar recounts' he says 'in his Hymns how Eurytion, son of Irus whose father was Actor, and who was one of the Argonauts, was accidentally killed by Peleus when they were hunting together. He calls him dear because they were kinsmen; for Peleus' first wife, before his marriage to Thetis, had been Actor's daughter Polymelos, and Actor was the father of Irus, whose son Eurytion was.' And so it seems not unlikely that the adage started with Pindar, and was used by Aristotle as usual without giving the name of his authority; so that we are to understand that he misses his target who not only fails to hit the animal in the place he intended, but misses his quarry entirely and does not even touch what he was aiming at. Now I would not expect anyone to accept this, unless it is seen to agree by the rule, as they say, with what Aristotle is saying. For in this passage the philosopher is discussing our knowledge of the natural world, which is at the same time, he says, both easy and difficult. In favour of its being easy, he points out that everyone achieves it to some extent; in favour of its difficulty, that no man's knowledge is exact. The proposition that no man ever existed who achieved no truth at all in his cognition of the natural world is reinforced, as it were, with a proverb; for who, he says, could miss the target? As though to possess an exact knowledge of the details was just like aiming at some selected point and hitting your mark without fail; while conversely, to fall short entirely would be like missing your quarry completely, and deflecting your cognition like a missile upon something quite different. But to satisfy my reader, however captious and hard to persuade he may be, let me add Aristotle's actual words from the book to which I referred: 'Enquiry respecting the truth is in one way difficult and in one way easy. Witness the fact that no one can attain to it as it deserves, nor wholly fail to do so; but while every individual makes some statements about nature, by himself he contributes little or nothing of importance to our knowledge; but when all this is put together, it amounts to something substantial. So that if it seems to hold good, as we say in the proverb, Who could miss the gate?, from one point of view the enquiry would be easy; but the fact of grasping the whole and being unable to grasp the part shows how difficult it is.' In what Aristotle says, I see no place for a gate; but the familiar resemblance between beginning something and finding the gate or way into it provided, if I am not mistaken, a handle for the error. No: Aristotle means that a man misses his target, if he fails entirely to achieve his object, which he goes on to call 'grasping the whole,' as it were to possess it in a confused way and in general terms; the contrary of which he calls 'grasping the part,' meaning to possess something exactly, and not merely to hit your quarry no matter how, but to pierce some definite part of the beast which you have specially chosen. Although on this passage the commentator adduces so many possible meanings, that he seems to have found no one meaning satisfactory. He also observes that there is a difference of opinion on the text; and whenever that happens, I immediately suspect that there is some underlying corruption. Otherwise, 'simple is e'er the language of the truth,' as Euripides so truly puts it.
There is still in reserve my most powerful weapon - Alexander of Aphrodisias, who, apart from the fact that all he says openly supports my view, informs us specifically that the image in the proverb is taken from archers, none of whom as a rule fails to hit a large target, something like a whole animal, though they may sometimes miss a small one. But it will be best to transcribe what he says too, so far as it contributes to the elucidation of the proverb: 'In my view, the fact that so many men attempt to express an opinion on the subject, and that none of them is wholly off the point, shows that the treatment of the subject is by nature within our scope; but the fact that no one has treated of it as it deserves is evidence that it is important and difficult, and that we ought not to make the study of it merely a sideline. We ought on the contrary to get a firm grasp of it, because it is in accordance with our nature, but in no careless spirit, because of its difficulty. And he encourages us by what he says, neither to despise it as something quite easy, nor again to abandon it because it is all so difficult. So that if it seems to hold good, as we say in the proverb, Who could miss the gate?, the fact that all those who say anything on the subject say something sensible, would be an indication that it is easy; and this he demonstrates by adding the proverb, Who could miss the gate?, which is used of easy things with nothing difficult about them, and is derived from archers who shoot at a mark. For if the target set before them is narrow, they do not find it easy to hit; but if it is a wide target, to hit it is not difficult, but they all do so easily.' Down to this point I have been quoting Alexander; and this makes it, I think, abundantly clear that we should read theras, target or quarry, and not thuras, gate. Though I leave this whole question, for what it is worth, to the judgment of the learned. If anyone is specially attached to 'gate,' he will have material with which to defend his choice without being at all absurd. For I think it quite possible that a practice which we see in some places today was followed no less in Antiquity - I mean, that the bank of earth which supports the target is protected on each flank, and behind it as well, by walls with an overhanging roof, so that the open side, from which the target is accessible, may have somewhat the shape of a doorway. Consequently, a man must needs be extremely incompetent who not merely fails to hit the target, or its supporting bank, but even misses the way in to it, which it would be hard for anyone not to achieve. To me however it seems nearer the truth to refer the adage to the story in Pindar. But on this, as I have said, the learned must pronounce. I am satisfied to have done my duty as a commentator by putting forward for consideration what I have found in the authorities and what I think myself.
Close to this proverb, perhaps, is a phrase we find in Plato's Phaedrus: 'Lysias has missed the whole point.' Lucian alludes to this humorously in his Timon, when he says that Jove's thunderbolt, which he had hurled at the philosopher Anaxagoras, missed its target through lack of skill and hit the temple of Castor and Pollux by mistake. The form of the expression recalls Toto aberrare coelo, To be the whole sky wide of the mark, and Tota aberrare via, To be entirely on the wrong road, which I have recorded elsewhere.

Ἁλμυρὸν γειτόνημα, A briny neighbourhood, said of a barren, countrified, and boorish part of the world. Aristides in his Themistocles: 'Be it a briny neighbourhood, as the saying goes.' The commentator adds that the adage is taken from Alcman the lyric poet. Plato in book 4 of the Laws: 'In reality not a very briny and bitter neighbourhood.' Can be applied either to a piece of business that is very toilsome but unrepaying, or to tiresome neighbours. Drawn from farmland close to the sea, which is often unsuited to cultivation; thus Virgil too condemns salty ground as the least fertile of all. Besides which, we observe that people likewise who live near the sea are more inhospitable than other men, as though they acquired some unpitying quality from that most pitiless element.

Πρὸς ἐῤῥωγυῖαν ᾄδεις., You sing to a break (we must understand either a broken string or a broken lyre). Suidas shows that it is used habitually of those who labour in vain. It was an ancient practice to accompany yourself as you sang on the lyre; and if it had a broken string, you would try in vain to sing in tune, because it would not answer. The fable of the grasshopper that took the place of a broken string has already been told elsewhere. Though it will not be without point if adapted when someone's kind actions evoke no response, or when one tries to persuade a man deaf to persuasion or asks forgiveness of the unforgiving.

Ασκῷ or ἀσκίῳ μορμολύττεσθαι., To terrify, or be terrified, with a wineskin. Used normally when someone either feels a baseless fear or inspires it. Taken from those who frighten children or nervous people by making a noise with empty containers; more likely perhaps of those who use the noise of such vessels to scare away birds, as Aristophanes indicates in the Birds. It is preserved by Diogenianus, who regards it as related to ἀσκῷ φαυλίζειν., to rout with a wineskin. Hesychius gives this as one word, ἀσκοφαυλίζειν., of baseless fear. He thinks the same sense is conveyed by τῇ σκιᾷ μορμύσσῃ., You terrify with a shadow.

Μορμολυκίοις ἐκφοβεῖς τὸν λέοντα., You terrify the lion with a mask. Recorded in the same source. Will be applicable to empty threats and bugbears that are merely laughable. Although, as Pliny says, 'this great and savage animal is terrified by turning wheels and empty chariots, even more by the crests and the crowing of cocks, but most of all by fire.' If memory serves, I have found in some author or other that the lion does take fright even at scarecrows and at those who wear masks. The adage is used by Seneca, book 2.

Αρχὴ Σκυρία, To rule in Scyros. Of a tedious and trifling sovereignty. The island of Scyros, once the home of Pelasgians and Carians, is rocky and infertile and produces nothing worth having. Suidas adds that some authorities refer the proverb to Theseus who, having invaded the kingdom of Lycomedes and made adulterous overtures to his wife, was thrown over a cliff; whence it appears that a ruthless government was called 'a Scyrian regime.' We read also of the Scyronian rocks; but whether this has any connection with our proverb I do not know. If we follow the first interpretation, the adage will apply elegantly enough to any office that, apart from an empty title and tedious administrative duties, brings no advantage with it. Zenodotus is the authority.

Μετὰ Λέσβιον ᾠδόν., But second fiddle to a Lesbian. This adage they used to indicate that someone came in not first but second. It is close to Nihil ad Parmenonis suem, Nothing like Parmeno's pig. A Spartan proverb, which arose on the following occasion, described by Suidas. Sparta was rent by faction, and the Spartans consulted an oracle, which told them to send for a musician from Lesbos. So Terpander, who was a native of Lesbos (in fact, of Antissa), was sent for, and dispatched to Sparta. His playing calmed their passions with such success that he put an end to all the strife and reconciled the citizens. As a result, the Spartans held Lesbian musicians in the highest esteem, and after hearing a performance by anyone else, they would say at once 'But second fiddle to a Lesbian.' Zenodotus cites this proverb from a play by Cratinus, Chiron by name. This adage is recorded by Plutarch in his essay 'On the Delays of the Divine Vengeance' - though to me at least the style does not read like Plutarch's. Nothing however will be found to prevent our diverting this proverb from persons to things; for instance, a man asserting that education is desirable, but only if one has made money first, might say 'But second fiddle to a Lesbian.'

Καλλιππίδης, Callipides was an old proverbial name for someone who, with business to be got under way, threatened great activity and got nothing finished or, as Terence puts it, 'though constantly in motion never moved.' Cicero, in book 13 of his Letters to Atticus: 'As for what you say about Varro, you know that in the old days I wrote speeches or something of a kind that made it impossible to bring Varro in. After I started on these more academic subjects, Varro had announced that he would make some grand and important dedication to me. Two years went by, and that old Callippides though he never stopped running was not a foot further forward.' Cicero uses these words to emphasize how slow Marcus Varro was, holding out great hopes and in fact never finishing anything. Suetonius Tranquillus in his life of Tiberius: 'Eventually he allowed prayers to be offered for his safe voyage and return, so that it was a current jest to call him Callipides, from the man in the Greek proverb who was always running and never progressed so much as a foot.' Thus Suetonius; but it is not quite clear whether the whole point of the proverb lies in the name Callipides, which is derived from fine horses, or whether there was some other proverbial saying at Callipides' expense, as it seems one can conjecture from what Suetonius says. And then who this Callipides was, whose speed without progress is criticized in the adage, is far from obvious, except that it seems not unlikely that we should understand it of Callipedes the tragic actor, of whom Plutarch speaks in his 'Sayings of Spartans' in a passage that runs somewhat as follows: 'Of the objects of popular enthusiasm he seemed to be perfectly unaware. It happened one day that Callippides, a tragic actor who enjoyed a great reputation in Greece and was universally admired, first put himself in his way and greeted him, and then thrust himself pompously and prominently among his entourage, expecting the king to open a friendly conversation. At length he broke out: "Does your majesty not recognize me? Have you not been told who I am?" Whereupon Agesilaus looked him up and down, and said "Why, are you not Callippides the busker?" - deikêlictas, which is a Spartan word for an entertainer.' So Plutarch. Deikêlon in Greek means an image, and so an imitation or representation; Eudemus is the authority. Hence the Spartans seem to have got their word for an actor of mimes - a word which itself we derive from mimesis, the Greek for imitation. We may suppose therefore that this Callipides, or whoever was the man in question, used gesture in such a way as to give an impression of remarkable agility, while remaining in the same spot. This name is also recorded by Aristoph- anes in the Clouds, and he indicates that it is derived from hippos, the Greek for horse.

Βαλανεύς., Bathman, One who takes money in the baths. Commonly applied as a term of abuse to someone who is too inquisitive, because men of this sort living in idleness and having no business of their own to occupy them, have a habit of minding other people's; like Horace's Damasippus who 'minds others' business, having lost his own.' The same is true of barbers - Horace again:
A tale, I guess, to every barber known
And every blear-eyed lounger in the town.
Plato in book 1 of the Republic seems to use it of garrulous people. Not but what inquisitiveness and garrulity are closely related faults, as Horace for one will show: 'Shun him who questions asks: he's sure to blab.' The adage is recorded by Diogenianus.

Βάκχης τρόπον., Like a Bacchant. Used habitually of sullen silent people, from their resemblance to the Maenads we hear so much of, when inspired by Bacchic frenzy. Here too Diogenianus is the authority. Juvenal however referred it to a life of intemperance: 'Who look like Curius, live like Bacchanals.'

Seneca in the third book of his On Anger records a proverb of the form Weariness loves a wrangle, or It is the weary man who picks a quarrel. The sense in which this was used in Antiquity is not entirely clear. If conjecture is permitted, the object seems to be certain bad-tempered people who are over-ready for a quarrel, not because they suffer an affront but because they are depressed for some other reason, just as those who suffer misfortune are awkward and irascible. But I will subjoin Seneca's own words, from which I think it will be possible to infer that this is the sense of the proverb: 'And so men whose digestion is not above suspicion, when about to embark on important business, should control by eating the bile of which fatigue is a principal cause; either because lack of food concentrates the vital heat and impairs the blood, checking its course through the veins, which are bound to suffer, or because the body when reduced and weakened becomes a burden on the mind. It is surely the same cause that makes men lose their tempers more easily when they are tired through ill-health or old age. Hunger and thirst likewise should be avoided for the same reasons, for they exasperate and inflame the spirits. There is an old saying that a weary man loves a wrangle; and this is equally true of a man who is hungry and thirsty and of everyone who has something on his mind. Like a sore place, which hurts at a light touch to begin with, and afterwards at the mere suspicion of a touch, a mind thus situated takes offence at trifles, so much so that some people are aroused to pick a quarrel by the way they are greeted, and written or spoken to, and asked a question. Sore places can never be touched without protest.' So much for Seneca. Also to the point is Pliny's observation, book 22 chapter 24: 'In the same way to be more inclined to anger when tired and thirsty.'

A gladiator plans his fight in the ring. This points out that we should sometimes change our plans to suit changing circumstances and, as the phrase goes, take our cue from events. This too is recorded by Annaeus Seneca in book 3 of his Letters to Lucilius. 'You understand by now' he says 'that you must extricate yourself from these outwardly attractive but unhealthy preoccupations. You ask how you are to achieve this. Some things can be demonstrated only by a man on the spot. A physician cannot prescribe the right moment for meals or baths by letter; he must feel the pulse. There is an old proverb, A gladiator plans his fight in the ring. The look in his opponent's eye, the movement of his hand, the very angle of his body has its message for him as he watches. What is commonly done, what ought to be done, can be conveyed in general both in speech and writing. Such advice can be given not only to those at a distance but even to posterity. But when it should be done, or how, no one will teach you convincingly from a distance. You must make up your mind on the facts.' Thus far Seneca. Caesar in book 5 of his Gallic War: 'As commonly happens to those who are obliged to form their plans right in the thick of the affair.' We speak also of basing our plans on circumstances as they arise.

Ἀμουσότερος λειβηθρίων, As ignorant as any Libethrian. A proverbial exaggeration appropriate to a thoroughly uneducated man, completely innocent of any commerce with the Muses. The proverb is derived from the rustic ignorance of the tribe of that name. They say that the Libethrians were very stupid, and despised music and poetry and, in short, all elegant subjects, so much so that some authorities suppose it was among them that Orpheus met his death. Of this persuasion is Zenodotus, who writes that the Libethrians were a tribe in Persia. Servius believed there was a Libethrian spring, from which Virgil in his Meliboeus took the name Libethrides for the Muses. Pliny in his fourth book mentions a spring called Libethra, placed by him in Magnesia which is adjacent to Thessaly. Solinus calls it Libethrus, the masculine form. Strabo too in book 9 of his Geography mentions Libethrus. 'In this place' he says 'there is a temple sacred to the Muses, a spring called the Horse Fountain, and a cavern sacred to the Libethrid Nymphs. From which one may suspect that those who consecrated Helicon and Pieria and Libethrus and Pimpleia all to the Muses, were Thracians. They were called Pierians; but they died out, and the Macedonians possess these places now.'

Τὸν οἴκοι θησαυρὸν διαβάλλεις., You speak ill of, or traduce, the treasure you have at home, which means that you criticize and tear to bits your own advantages. Very like the phrase from Horace which I have recorded elsewhere: 'To ply the axe on one's own vines.' Aristides the rhetorician in his Pericles: 'We shall be speaking ill of the treasure we have at home, if we object to this.' No man in his right mind misrepresents and vilifies what he holds stored up at home; everyone prefers what he has, and looks askance at what belongs to others. This will be applicable to those people also who cannot keep their own secrets.

Annaeus Seneca in his Letters to Lucilius, letter 114, says: 'The Greeks have a proverb to the effect that as men's life is, so is their talk.' The Greek proverb is to be found in Aristides, in his second defence of rhetoric against Plato: 'And the proverb is not at variance with this which says that as a man's way of life is, so is his talk, and equally the reverse,' as a man's talk is, so is his character. This view is confirmed by a remark which Diogenes Laertius records among the sayings of Solon, that 'Speech is the image of action.' Persius in his fifth satire concealed the same opinion in a metaphor, when he said:
Skilled by a tap to tell what solid rung,
What was mere plaster of a varnished tongue,
indicating of course that a man's mind can be gauged from what he says, just as jars are tested by the noise they return when struck with the knuckles. And again in the third:
Strike the flawed jar: cracked sounds its rifts betray,
And doubtful rings its green and ill-baked clay.
And this retains its value as a proverb, not only when a man's talk proves him to be of bad or good character, but when we gauge a man's gifts from his style and form a view of his whole habit of mind simply from the way he expresses himself. A pompous man will have a bombastic style, a humble man a style that is mean and lifeless; a rough man will have a crude style, a bitter man a style that is acrimonious and offensive, the foppish and the self-indulgent one that is flowery and slipshod. In a word, a complete image of a man's way of life and the whole force of his character is reflected in his style as in a mirror, and the very secrets of his bosom can be detected from clues, as it were, that lie beneath the surface. Thus Seneca says that the luxuriant and pleasure-loving nature of Maecenas can be inferred even from the way he writes.
With this belongs what Socrates in Plato says to Charmides: 'Speak, that I may see you,' knowing no doubt that he will form a judgment on him from what he says. Again in the Gorgias he says that he does not know Perdiccas' son Archileus, because he has never had a conversation with him. But in common parlance people say that they know someone they have merely set eyes on, though a person's mind cannot be truly seen except through what he says.

Ἡ ψελλὴ οὐ πιττεύει., The girl who stammers doesn't b-b-believe. A proverbial jest, used of someone who tries to conceal his shortcomings, though he makes them more obvious even while he does so; if a man, for instance, were to deny that he has a lisp, and could not deny it without lisping in the process. For πιττεύει is put instead of πιστεύει, since those with a defect of speech most often have difficulties with two letters, s and r. This comes in Suidas. The lisp of Alcibiades is famous: he pronounced r as I, not, I imagine, from some defect but more as an affectation. In the Wasps of Aristophanes one character says Theolos for Theoros and kolakos for korakos: 'You thee? Theoluth hath a toady'th head,' and the other replies 'So Alcibiades lisping spoke the truth.'

Τοῖς αὑτῶν πτὲροῖς ἁλισκόμεθα., We are shot with our own feathers. Aristophanes in the Birds: 'And this we guessed, as Aeschylus would say, / Not taught by others, but with our own feathers.' Aeschylus, as the commentator tells us, in his play The Myrmidons, calls this a Libyan proverb, because it derives from a fable located in Libya. The story runs as follows. An eagle was struck by an arrow, and when it saw that the shaft was made to resemble and imitate feathers, it said 'Thus not by others, but with our own feathers / Are we undone.' Athenaeus uses this in book 11: 'And thus not by others but with your own feathers are you undone, as that wonderful poet Aeschylus puts it.' Appropriate to those who provide the occasion for their own misfortunes, like Chremes in Terence's Heautontimorumenos, when he urges his slave to aim some trick at Menedemus, and shortly afterwards is himself a victim of Menedemus' wiles.

Ἀγαθοῦ δαίμονος., A blessing on it! or Here's luck! These are the words of a man who hopes for good fortune as he starts some undertaking, like that remark too in Persius: 'May it be for the best!' It will therefore be more amusing if turned into a joke against a man who enters upon something trivial in itself with as much pother as if it were of the greatest importance; for instance, if some miserly man were to steel himself to broach a cask of wine or put some ancient cheese on the table, saying 'Well, here's luck!' Zenodotus, and equally the scholiast on Aristophanes, make it clear that the proverb arose from the old custom at the end of dinner, when the table was cleared, of bringing on neat wine; this dram was called a health to the agathos dairnon, the good spirit or spirit of luck. As the authority for this invention the scholiast on Aristophanes' Wasps cites Theopompus; nor does it differ from what he adduces from Apollodorus. And this opinion seems to have the support of Aristophanes in the Knights: 'Heavens, no! but a neat dram to bring good luck.' Again, in the Wasps: 'Never may I drink a dram of unmixed fees to bring good luck,' and in the same play 'And drink a health to good luck.' Rather different in the Peace: 'Now the time has come to snatch a hasty dram to bring us luck.' Though Athenaeus in his Doctors at Dinner, book 11, shows clearly that after washing their hands, which was the practice at the end of dinner, they used to bring in a loving-cup which took its name from Good Fortune - a habit which, to be sure, still persists in Germany. This cup was called, as he makes clear, the rinse-cup, because it was brought on after they had washed their hands, a custom scrupulously observed to this day in England. Antiphanes in his Lampas: 'Toss off a rinse-cup to the god of luck,' and the same author elsewhere: 'But yet a rinse-cup to the god of luck.' Any man who had taken this cup in hand invited someone else to drink after him, as the same authority makes clear. Now there was a custom among the Ancients that those who drank wine with someone, or were about to drink themselves, first uttered in order to secure a good omen the name of someone, whether god or mortal, and put this name in the genitive case; as for instance in Lucian, in his Lapiths, the Cynic philosopher Alcidamas toasts the bride in the name of Hercules. It is the same in Horace: 'Quick! Here's to the new moon, here's to midnight, here's to our new augur! Fill, boy, fill!'
Others prefer to think the proverb derived from an ancient custom of making the first cup a health to the Good Spirit, and by these words securing a favourable omen, with reference to Bacchus as a native and domestic deity. Furthermore, the second day of each month was called in Antiquity the day of the Good Spirit. It is said also that there was a shrine of the Good Spirit in Thebes; and there is even an island of that name in the Indian Ocean, as Stephanus assures us. Plutarch, in the third decade of his Postprandial Problems, makes it clear that in Antiquity it was the custom not to start drinking wine without first pouring a libation to some deity, that the draught might do them no harm, but rather good, as though it were a medicine. In Athens too on the eleventh of the month they used to offer the first-fruits of their wine, and called that day the pithoenia. The Boeotians on the other hand, on the seventh day of the opening month, after doing sacrifice to the Good Spirit, used to sample their wine after the west wind had sprung up, because that wind especially rouses and changes wine, so that what has survived it now seems likely to keep; the month is called prostaterios. Aristides in his Themistocles seems to have alluded to this proverb when he says 'But among the Greeks he took the place of a Good Spirit'; though this more properly belongs with Bonus genius and Malus genius, of which I have treated elsewhere.

Ἐφ᾽ ὕδωρ κακός., A rascal at the water, was said in the old days of men of the lowest class, employed in the meanest occupations; the reason being that in Antiquity those who habitually supplied litigants with their allocation of water were regarded as disreputable, and as far the most contemptible members of society. For, as I have pointed out elsewhere, the Ancients used to measure the length of speeches in a law-court against a clepsydra or water-clock. Competitors too were given a ration of water put into the clepsydra. This water was poured in, and the outflow measured, by poverty-stricken and worthless individuals. So those who performed this task were regarded at Athens as outcasts, devoid alike of property and of esteem, just as in Roman law a stigma attaches to actors and certain servants employed in other forms of public competition. There is another which resembles this: βάλλ᾽ ἐς ὕδωρ., Off with you to the water, ie to perdition.

Φωκέων ἀρά., Phocaean imprecations. Of an oath enforced by many sanctions. In olden time when they ratified a treaty they employed to protect it from violation not merely exchange of promises and clasping of right hands and sacrifice but imprecations too, to hang over the head of anyone who might not abide by the agreement. This it was possible to infer from Euripides, who has the following lines in his Iphigeneia Aulidensis:
Suitor with suitor make a covenant,
With oaths exchanged and pledge of clasped right hands,
Burnt sacrifice, libations duly poured,
Calling down imprecations on his head.
The proverb, to return to our subject, took its rise from an incident such as the following. Once on a time the Phocaeans, a people of Ionia, by common consent abandoned their native soil, having bound themselves with curses and imprecations never again to think of returning to their own country. So, in accordance with an oracle of Diana, and led by Aristarchas, they made for Narbonese Gaul, and there founded the most flourishing city of Massilia. The story is touched on by Herodotus in his first book, and by Strabo in his fourth; and it is alluded to also by Horace in his Epodes: 'Maybe, in common council or the better part at least, you seek some expedient whereby to live without these evils and these toils. No better plan could be than this, as Phocaea's citizens deserted under oath ancestral field and hearth, and left their temples to be lairs for wild boars and ravening wolves ...' And then he explains what sort of thing this rite of imprecation was: 'But let us swear an oath to this effect: when the time comes that rocks rise from the sea-bed and float, then it shall be no sin to return, nor need we hesitate to set sail for home, when once the Po's waters wash the top of Mattinata, once lofty Appennine pushes out into the sea, once a strange passion makes monstrous unions of unheard-of lust, tigress submitting gladly to be trodden by stag, pigeon and kite in adulterous union, while trustful herds have no more fear of tawny lions and goats with slippery scales love the salt sea. This let us swear, and all that can cut us off from the sweet pleasure of returning home; and under these imprecations with all our fellow-citizens let us be off.' Stephanus makes Phocaea a city of Ionia, of which an inhabitant is Phocaeeus, as in Herodotus, or Phocaeus, and has another of the same name in Mycala which is part of Caria. There is also Phocis, a part of Boeotia near Mount Parnassus, the people of which are Phoceis and Phocicoi. I thought it well to mention this, because some fall into mistakes through the resemblance of the names. For it is from the Phocaeans or Phocaeensians of Ionia that this proverb is derived, while from the Phocici of Boeotia comes Phocensium or Phocidensium desperatio, which I shall report elsewhere. The proverb is recorded by Zenodotus.

Συβαριτικοὶ λόγοι., The language of Sybaris (or Tales from Sybaris). Hesychius tells of a man called Acopus, presumably a native of Sybaris, who worked so hard to secure a suitable rich and luxuriant prose style that he gave rise to a humorous proverbial saying: an exquisite and highly polished style was called 'the language of Sybaris.' The luxury of dinner-parties in Sybaris has been touched on in the proverb Sybaritica mensa. Similarly an Asiatic style of writing became proverbial; for there is much truth in the remark that as man's life is, so is his language. This will be suitable also for an arrogant and bombastic style, for the Sybarites were criticized for their pride; see Sybaritae per plateas.

Ἀπὸ γραμμῆς ἄρχεσθαι., To start from scratch, is used of those who begin at the very beginning of something. Aristides the sophist in his Themistocles: 'This was the first crucial test which Themistocles underwent; begin here to watch the man at work, and start from scratch.' The person who provided this author with scholia thinks this proverb is related to A lore exorsus, Beginning at home. To me it seems more closely related to those of which I have spoken elsewhere, A capite, From the head downwards, and A carceribus, From the pens. For so they called the place from which the horses were dispatched at the start of a race, for which another name was oppidum (Festus is our authority). The image is taken from competitors in a race in the stadium; for one special line is laid down for them, on which they must stand level until they get the starting signal, as the commentator on Aristophanes shows in the passage I shall shortly quote. Tertullian in his Adversus Marcionem, book 1: 'Back you go then to scratch again! Back on your marks!' When he says 'to scratch,' he means 'Right back to the beginning.'

'Απὸ βαλβίδων., From the starting-rope or starting-pens, means the same as the adage we have just given. Aristophanes in the Wasps: 'Yes, right from the starting-rope I'll tell you how it all began,' that is, beginning at the beginning. The scholiast makes it clear, as I have just said, that the image is borrowed from the race-course, at which the carceres were a kind of pen or enclosure from which the race started, called in Greek balbides or apheteriae. Close to these a line was drawn, on which the competitors took up their positions. Hence those phrases, which are common in Latin authors too, A carceribus ad metam and A meta ad carceres, From starting-point to finish and vice versa, of which I have cited examples elsewhere.

Νέα χελιδὼν., The first swallow. Suidas cites this adage from the Birds of Aristophanes, by a slip of memory I suppose, for it occurs in that poet in his Knights in the following lines:
I played those cooks a pretty trick. I said to them, I said:
Look, boys! Spring's come. You see, there's the first swallow overhead.
Then while they gaped I helped myself to a nice piece of meat.
he scholiast tells us this is a proverbial image, which means the same as 'the beginning of spring,' because that is the season when the bird appears. So in Horace: 'When Zephyrs blow and swallows first appear.' Suidas says it was in current use when a trick was played on someone. This is taken from a children's game. One party elaborately pretends to see the first swallow, and shows it to the rest; then, while the others are absorbed in looking for it, they help themselves to what they want. Theognis in the eighth book of Athenaeus states that it was a regular custom in Rhodes to issue a public invitation to the swallow every year at the beginning of spring, which they called chelidonizein, summoning it with the formula 'The swallow is here, is here, bringing lovely seasons, bringing lovely years.' So it will fit those who deceive and do harm by inspiring false hopes.

Διὸς ἐφκέφαλος., Jove's brain, and βασιλέως ἐγκέφαλος, The king's brain. Used of exceptionally succulent and delicious food, or of people who live a soft luxurious life. Clearchus, cited by Zenodotus, writes that in Persia rich dinners are called Jove's brain and the king's. Athenaeus, book 12, tells us that Sardanapalus rewarded the inventors of some new pleasure with a dish of 'Jove's brain and the king's,' something very delicious I suppose. And again in book 14 he lists 'Jove's brains' among the great delicacies of the second course. In Apuleius, in his first Apologia, Ennius is quoted as saying: 'Why pass over the wrasse, great Jove's brains, or very near it? / Off old Nestor's home they catch very big, very good ones.' Ephippus in Athen- aeus mentions 'Jove's brain' among the luxuries of the second course. He also calls dishes he prefers 'the flower of nectar,' and tells us in another passage that wine was called by Aristophanes 'Venus' milk.' Again in another place he indicates that delicious dishes were called 'Food for Helen.'

Ακίνητα κινεῖς., You move what should not be moved, will fit those who either attempt something impossible, or violate sacred things, or change a solemn agreement, or launch scandalous attacks on people whose authority entitles them to respect. Zenodotus thinks it arose from the solemn prohibition on moving altars or tombs or shrines, which are rightly the objects of some sort of respect and reverence. Plutarch in his essay 'On the Divine Sign of Socrates' writes that a man who was trying to raise the ghost of a dead friend heard the words 'Move not what should not be moved.' He uses it again in the 'Eroticus' of a man who was thought to be undermining the accepted view of the gods. Plato records it in the Laws, book 8, where he brings forward a law which he calls the statute of Jove god of boundaries, forbidding any alteration of a neighbour's bounds, be he fellow-citizen or stranger, and any removal of the frontiers of a city or region, and ordaining that everyone should rather move an immense rock than a small stone, if the stone is fixed by treaty and on oath, thinking, as he says, that this really is to move what should not be moved.' Again in the Laws, book 11: 'For that saying which holds good in many contexts, that one ought not to move what should not be moved.' He mentions it also in book 3 of the same work. And in a certain epigram are the words 'Not Death himself grasps what may not be moved.' Sophocles in the Antigone: 'You'll make me utter what should not be moved.' And again in the Oedipus Coloneus: 'Words that may not be moved 'tis pain to speak.' Plutarch in his essay 'On Listening' speaks of 'desire moving strings not to be moved,' and again in his 'On Garrulity': 'Moving the heart-strings that should not be moved.' There is an elegant allusion to this in an oracle to be found in Herodotus' Erato: 'Delos I'll move, though moved she may not be.' For with the same words he glanced at the fable, or fact if you prefer, of Delos floating freely at first, and then being anchored fast to please Apollo. Whence Virgil's 'Granted to stand unmoved and spurn the winds.'

Μήτε μέλι μήτε μέλισσας., No bees, no honey. Used commonly of those who refuse to tolerate a drawback which is tied up with something advantageous; for example, if a man could not endure bees because they have stings, and therefore will be unable equally to enjoy honey, which he is very fond of. For heaven has so blended the affairs of mortals that gains are always accompanied by loss. Tryphon the writer on grammar gives this among the figures of speech as an example of the proverb, and illustrates it from Sappho the poetess of Lesbos: 'For me no honey and no bee.' There is a well-known maxim to the same effect: 'Bear now what hurts, and reap the benefit.' Here too belongs that thing in Plautus: 'Take the rough like a man, and the smooth is yours hereafter.' Homer points to the same thing, I suppose, more indirectly but elegantly all the same, in his plant the moly, when he gives it a black root and a milk-white flower. The black root he means for a symbol of the toil and trouble by which one arrives at that peace of mind which is the reward of virtue perfected.

Βὴξ ἀντὶ πορδῆς, A cough for a fart. Used in practice when someone in a state of confusion pretends one thing to conceal another; for instance, if a man caught in the house of an unfaithful wife were to maintain that he was there to buy or sell something. A metaphor from those who, when they break wind, conceal the fact with a resounding cough - a class of men who are quite often detected even today, and cause considerable mirth.

Υπὲρ τὰς κορώνας βεβιωκώς., As long-lived as the crows. A proverbial exaggeration for persons of very great age, taken from that bird's prodigious life-span, of which Plutarch writes as follows in the essay entitled 'On the Obsolescence of Oracles,' citing Hesiod who 'in the person of a Naiad' thus puts together the different life-span of various living creatures:
Nine generations of men the crow with her chatter outliveth;
Four crows yield to the stag and three stags yield to the raven.
Nine long ravens' lives will not see the end of the phoenix;
We the Nymphs can live ten times as long as a phoenix,
We the long-haired daughters of Jove who is lord of the aegis.
What seems to be a version of these lines of Hesiod was produced by someone, I know not who, and is to be found with the other pieces in the Appendix to Virgil; it goes something like this:
Four score and sixteen years runs the full span
Of men; nine times as far the noisy crow;
And the crow's age four times outlives the stag;
Thrice the swift stag yields to the raven's years,
Nine times the phoenix, that its life renews,
Outlives the raven, and ten times do we,
The Hamadryads, longest-lived of Nymphs,
Surpass the phoenix. Such the span of life
That living creatures bounds; but all the rest
God only knows, time's secret who controls.
It was equally a pleasure to add these lines, because I hope thereby to secure forgiveness for myself when I translate so often extempore, as I shall be compelled to do, if I seem sometimes not to have rendered everything quite precisely; for these lines will have shown how much latitude the ancients allowed themselves when translating poetry. The same view is repeated from Hesiod with great point and brevity by Pliny: 'Hesiod' he says 'allots to the crow nine times our span of life; four times that amount to the stag; and three times more to the raven.' Though some authorities regard all this as fabulous; among them Aristotle, who thinks that no living creature lives longer than man except only the elephant. Martial: 'And outlived every crow' of a woman who lived to an inordinate old age. Horace too in the Odes: 'But Lyce meant to keep to match the years / Of some old crow.' It was to the same effect that that great philosopher on his deathbed envied the crows that length of days, which nature had denied to man. Synesius in one of his letters: 'It is right that the most just man should govern us for a crow's span of years.'

Τιθωνοῦ γῆρας., The old age of Tithonus. The myth tells how Aurora fell in love with Tithonus, and how he was taken up into heaven and bathed with some heavenly elixir, as a result of which he lived to such an immense age that at length he prayed to be turned into a grasshopper. Lucian has in one of his dialogues 'And the old man was living longer than Tithonus.' This same character of Tithonus is introduced as a marvel of longevity by Ariston of Chios in his book on old age; so Cicero tells us in his Cato. Suidas records the adage in the form 'May you sink deeper into old age than Tithonus!'

In the same way, in Latin at any rate, the great age of Nestor became proverbial; for Homer in book 3 of the Odyssey says he lived for three generations: 'Thrice has he ruled, they say, over a whole generation of men,' and he asserts this likewise in the first book of the Iliad. So too Juvenal: 'Now starts to count his years on his right hand,' meaning that he has outlived three generations. In a word, any expression drawn from creatures which are exceptionally long-lived will have the air of a proverb; for example, 'as old as a phoenix,' which lives (as we are told by Hesiod) nine times as long as a raven, and 'as old as a stag' or 'as a raven,' and 'as old as Tiresias,' who is said in the tragedy to have outlived six generations of men, and 'as old as a Chinaman,' for the Greek historians tell us that the Chinese live for three hundred years. Anyone who needs examples of this sort of thing should read Lucian's Marcrobioi, which means Men of great age, and Pliny, book 7 chapter 48.

Lucian has a neat remark in his Philopseudes, 'For he is already outliving his spindle,' meaning that he has already reached his allotted span. This is an allusion to the spindle with which, if we may believe the poets, the Fates are supposed to draw out the thread of the lives of mortals. Theologians also speak of the fated bourn of life, when they mean the period allotted to a man, which none may outlive.

In the Andria of Terence a young man, not particularly intelligent himself, makes a most intelligent and apt remark:
Good counsel to the sick is cheap enough,
When we ourselves are well; but in my place
You would think different.
This seems to derive from an oracular saying of the philosopher Thales. According to Laertius, when asked what is the most difficult thing to do, and what is the easiest, he replied, 'The hardest is to know yourself, and the easiest to give another person good advice'; and in the comedy the author has added elegance by his metaphor. Euripides in the Alcestis: 'Grieve not o'ermuch, but bear it like a man.' This is Hercules consoling Admetus on the death of his wife; and his response 'To advise is easy; to bear wrongs is hard.' Close to this is the proverbial saying:
To counsel others, all men have a mind,
But when we err ourselves, then are we blind.
This observation is drawn from human nature. Everyone gives invalids good advice on what to avoid and what to do, and often they take them up for not doing what they are told in order to get well. When they fall ill themselves, those fine precepts are no help at all, and they need advice and criticism from others too. In fact, all inordinate desire is a sickness of the mind, by which it is virtually blinded, so that it either cannot see what it needs for its own well-being or, if it sees, cannot pursue it. Thus Phaedria in Terence puts his hand into the fire 'well knowing what he does' and 'goes to his doom with his eyes open.' Horace too pursues what he ought to avoid, and 'shuns what he believes will do him good.' An avaricious man sometimes sees clearly what a monstrous thing ambition is. Conversely the ambitious man is well aware of the disease from which the miser suffers. Each of them prescribes admirably for a complaint from which he himself is free, and neither knows how to treat his own.

Τὰ ὑπὲρ ἡμᾶς, οὐδὲν πρὸς ἡμᾶς, The things that are above us are nothing to us. A remark of Socrates which discourages us from restless enquiry into heavenly things and the secrets of nature. It is referred to as a proverb by Lactantius, book 3 chapter 20, 'Of these' he says 'I will choose one which enjoys universal approval and is well known, and was regarded by Socrates as a proverb: That which is above us is nothing to us.' It can be diverted also for use against those who talk loosely about the business of princes or the mysteries of theology. It will further be possible to turn it upside down: The things that are beneath us are nothing to us - when we refer to trivial affairs, the importance of which is too small to demand care on our part.

What has already become common gossip is said to be 'known to all the barbers and blear-eyed men,' because in the old days it was in the gatherings at the barbers' shops that rumour flourished. Aristophanes suggests this in the Plutus:
And yet 'twas often said, by Hercules,
While men were sitting in the barber-shops,
That he had suddenly waxed very rich.
And Antipho in Terence gets news of his girl in the barber's. Horace too says of the barber's: 'There with shaven poll / Sailors safe home long-winded perils tell.' And again in his Satires:
A tale, I guess, to every barber known
And every blear-eyed lounger in the town,
where by his reference to something widely known he made the sense of the proverb clear; for blear-eyed men sit doing nothing in the barbers' shops in search of some treatment for their eyes. On the talkative habits of hairdressers Plutarch has many interesting things to say in his essay 'On Pointless Garrulity,' one of which I shall give myself the pleasure of repeating. 'When there was talk once,' he says, 'in a barber's shop about Dionysius, and they said his tyranny was like adamant and unbreakable, the barber remarked with a laugh "What a way to speak about Dionysius, when I constantly have my razor at his throat." As soon as Dionysius heard what the man had said, he crucified his barber,' and thus, as Pliny puts it, his words cut his own throat. That barbers as a class should talk so much he attributes to the tendency of all very talkative men to congregate in their shops and sit there doing nothing, and he thinks that constant exposure to their chatter has infected the barbers themselves with the same complaint of garrulity. This is why Theophrastus, as Plutarch also tells us, called barbers' shops 'teetotal drinking parties,' thinking that the endless talk in them made men virtually intoxicated. Bath-attendants suffer from a bad reputation of the same kind, because public baths likewise are places where men sit idle, uttering any gossip that comes into their heads.
It was for some such reasons that the Ancients called smithies leschai, talking-places, as Joannes Grammaticus makes clear, because on cold days in the winter a crowd of humble folk used to gather there to keep warm, and there they sat doing nothing and passed the time in idle talk. Such places seem designed for lazy men, and Hesiod warns the husbandman to avoid them: 'Pass by the smithy in the winter-time, / Its warmth and gossip.'

There is great elegance in that phrase in Horace 'The ox would wear the trappings and the lazy nag would plough,' which expresses an inborn fault in human nature, men's constant envy of another person's lot and contempt and dislike for their own, their wish for things they have never tried and rejection of what they know. For 'trappings' means what we normally call riding-saddles, added with the object of giving the rider a more comfortable seat. The Ancients ploughed with oxen, not with horses. The allegory looks as though it was taken from a fable of some sort. The sense without the metaphor is given in Terence's 'We are dissatisfied with what is ours.'

Ovid changed the metaphor while expressing the same meaning:
Another's crops are heavier still than thine
And heavier udders grace thy neighbour's kine.
Persius in his sixth satire: 'What care I if that cantle of my neighbour's / Is better land than mine?' Then there is a well-known moral maxim to the same effect, one of those, I fancy, by Publius which are quoted by Aulus Gellius: 'Other men's goods we like, and they like ours.' And Horace:
How is't, Maecenas, no one likes the lot
That reason chose, or chance cast in his way,
But envies those who follow other paths?

There was no doubt an element of proverb in it when Aristophanes said in the Plutus that the same man who has already finished the wine must drink up the dregs as well; the man, that is, who has prospered in everything must not complain if his luck turns: 'But yet, if you saw fit to drink the wine / You must drink up the dregs.' The words are spoken by Chremylus about a woman who had once been popular in the springtime and flower of her youth, and now was old and was spurned by a young man.

In Greece the riches of Croesus king of Lydia were a byword, to which Solon's remark gave special currency. So it was in Rome with the wealth of Marcus Crassus, who was even given the extra name of Dives, the Rich. He refused to call a man wealthy unless he could support a legion out of his yearly income. His estates amounted to two billion sesterces. Several other men are recorded in Pliny, book 33 chapter 10, and also in chapter 3, as possessed of inordinate wealth; and among them is Aristotle, the sainted philosopher and virtually the god of theologians in our own day, whose heirs are said to have produced seventy dishes for sale by auction. But they did not pass in the same way into common speech, and so there is no call to mention them here. There will be more wit in the adage as a figure of speech if we also change the number, as St Jerome does: 'You may give yourself the airs of Croesuses and Dariuses, but a full pate and a full purse are not inseparable.' Horace used 'the treasures of Arabia' for piled-up wealth, with a proverbial air, just as he used 'Persian splendours' for over-elaborate and expensive decorations.

Τὸν Πακτώλου πλοῦτον., The riches of Pactolus, is a phrase used somewhere by Philostratus to express very great wealth. The Pactolus is a river in Lydia that rises under Mount Tmolus and abounds in gold-bearing sand, whence it gets the epithet in poetry chrysoroas, streaming with gold. The same story is told of the Tagus in Spain, the Ganges in India and the Hebrus in Thrace. To these Pliny adds the Po in Italy, and says that no gold is of higher purity than what is found in rivers, as being rendered very fine by friction due to the current. Horace in the Epodes:
Rich you may'be in flocks and lands,
For you Pactolus roll his sands.
Juvenal:
No prize is worth it, not the golden sand
That shady Tagus rolls into the sea.
Exaggerations like this can be adapted to various ends. One might say, for instance, 'This enormous expense is more than anyone could support, even if he had the Pactolus flowing through his garden.' 'This man's greed is more than the Tagus itself could satisfy.' 'He had no ordinary ambitions, but in his mental picture it was to be all Pactoluses and Taguses.' Or 'He promised one Pactolus after another,' riches pressed down and running over.

On the other hand, with Irus and Codrus their poverty provided material for a proverb. Ovid: 'Irus he straight will be, who late was Croesus.' Codrus comes in Juvenal: 'All Codrus' furniture packed in one cart.' Irus is mentioned by Homer in Odyssey, book 18, where he is said to have been a common beggar in Ithaca, a great big man to look at, whose name from birth was Arnaeus, but the young men called him Irus because he would carry a message wherever one was needed. It was he who was matched against Ulysses, who was then thought to be a beggar too, and Ulysses threw him out. Hecale too is celebrated for her poverty, and is mentioned by Plautus in the Cistellaria: 'It all answers my hopes, you'll ne'er be Hecale.' Ovid too speaks of her: 'Hecale no husband, Irus had no wife; / And why? He was a beggar, she was poor.' In how many different ways these phrases can be used has been shown at sufficient length in the introduction to this book.

Μυσῶν ἔσχατος, Farthest of the Mysians. Strabo in his Geography, book 12, records that the people of Mysia were so much despised as to give rise to a proverb. This is used by Cicero in his speech Pro Flacco: 'Is there any phrase in Greek so commonplace and familiar as to call a man "the lowest of the Mysians," if you despise him?' And again, in a letter to his brother Quintus: 'Unless perhaps you think I am moved by the complaints of one Paconius of whom I know nothing and who is not even a Greek but a Mysian or, more likely, a Phrygian,' in which of course he shows his contempt for the race. Great contempt therefore, and very lowly station, can be expressed with this adage.

Εσχατος Μυσῶν πλεῖν, To be the last of the Mysians on a voyage, used to be said in a humorous and proverbial way of a man who laboured in vain. The origin of the proverb, as generally happens, is given in more than one fashion. Some say that once, when the Greeks were suffering from a pestilence, they received a reply from the oracle that they should sail to the last of the Mysians. At first they wondered what the oracle meant. At length, after wandering around for a long time, they found that Aeolis was situated on the edge of Mysian territory, and that was where the god had told them to move to. Others write that Telephus after killing his uncles enquired of the Pythian oracle where he should move to (for it was the custom in Antiquity for those who had killed anyone to go to another country); and the reply was that he should migrate to the farthest region of the Mysians. So he went to Teuthrania, which is on the edge of Mysia, and became the prince of the country. Some give as the reason for his flight not the murder of his uncles but the search for his mother, whom he found eventually in Teuthrania. The proverb was used when anyone was ordered to do something hard and difficult.

Κινεῖν ἤ θίγειν τὸ ἕλκος, To rouse or touch on a sore place, is to arouse pain, and to mention something which may hurt us very much. Terence: 'Was anything less necessary than to touch on this sore place?' Donatus in his note on the passage tells us there is an underlying proverb. The Emperor Augustus (so Suetonius tells us) felt the shameful behaviour of his two daughters called Julia and his grand-daughter of the same name as something worse than death, and was accustomed not to refer to them except as his three boils or three malignant ulcers, because it gave him great pain even to think of them. The same metaphor was used with the greatest elegance by Cicero in an attack on Clodius who, when the common people were already exasperated by famine, was goading them still further into fury with his incendiary speeches: 'So you were like the finger that scratched this sore spot.' Plutarch 'On Flattery': 'When he had scratched the sore of secret talk.'

When grief or resentment which has softened with the passage of time is roused afresh, this is called 'rubbing up old sores.' The source of the metaphor is familiar; it is taken of course from a physical wound which has now closed up and is covered with a scar, but can be opened afresh by rubbing, so that the original pain of the wound returns in force. Cicero, writing to Atticus: 'I don't scratch the sores that Appius has left behind him.' Again, in his attack on Rullus: 'For I would not be thought to be rubbing up old sores inflicted on the body politic,' and he speaks of 're-opening wounds' in his De oratore, book 2. We speak also of rubbing up the memory, or jogging the memory, which means administering a mild reminder, but nearly always with intent to annoy.

Metaphors derived from the bodily senses, being more or less ready to hand and taken as it were from what is very close to us, are nearly all proverbial, as I have pointed out at the beginning of this work. 'To scent out,' for instance, in the sense of to discover, and to establish some fact by intelligent detective work. 'A whiff of something for suspicion and rumour. Cicero has 'There's a certain whiff of dictatorship.' 'To nose out' in Terence's Adelphoe for to detect. 'To smell' (Terence again) for to be suspected. 'To stink' for being offensive or under suspicion. Hence too people are said to have 'a keen nose' and to be 'keen-scented,' with its converse 'thick in the head.' In fact the nose by itself became proverbial for critical judgment; Horace's 'Not that no nose was theirs.' And things which we do not like 'have a bad smell.' Here belong phrases like 'It smacks of falsehood,' 'They are redolent of Atticism,' 'They smell of the lamp.' We often use 'a taste of something' as though it meant our first acquaintance with it, as if we sipped a thing or tasted some kind of sample. Cicero writing to Atticus: 'Get a taste of the man,' and again 'That Latin Atticism of yours must be savoured again after an interval.' And thus we use 'that first flavour' to express that first experience of a thing which we acquire in childhood more or less from our nurses. And a thing we like is said to 'please the palate.' And we say 'swallow something' when we accept some normally unpleasant experience as though we did not feel it, taking the metaphor from those who drink nasty medicines as though against the protests of their sense of taste. Hence we find several times in Cicero and Quintilian 'to swallow the tedium' or 'to digest the inconve- nience' of something. Related phrases are 'They smack of arrogance,' 'They have a whiff of adolescence.' Also 'to stomach' for to overcome something unwelcome. 'Sickening' of something insupportable to listen to. 'To vomit out,' to utter what passion did not allow us to repress. And 'to spit out that trouble from one's heart,' 'to bespatter' a man with abuse as one might with spittle, 'to spit upon' as expressing contempt. 'His gorge rises' for 'he is indignant.' The sense of sight also provides many metaphors, as 'to bear someone in one's eyes' for to love him dearly and be concerned for him; 'to be in someone's eyes,' 'to have someone's eyes upon one' to express memory and being remembered and thought of. 'Look out for,' be concerned about something and take thought for it; 'look forward,' plan for the future; 'look down on' of contempt; 'look up to' of admiration; 'to wink at' for to ignore deliberately; 'to be blind' for to be deluded and make errors of judgment. But to pursue this to greater lengths is not my present intention and would be a boundless task. And so, although materials of this kind have some family relationship to proverbs, to collect them in greater detail and more precisely is not now my purpose, especially since this department has already been taken in hand by a native of Britain, Richard Pace, whom I often think of, and always with pleasure; a young man (to say nothing for the moment of his character, which is fully worthy of his abilities) expert alike in Greek and Latin literature, and possessed of unusual experience in the reading of authors in every subject. Then he is very keen-sighted in picking up things which the common run of readers pass over, as the saying goes, with unwashed feet; and last but not least, his judgment is by no means that of a young man, but refined and scrupulous. With the Muses' blessing, he has formed, as I say, and I believe is now engaged on, a project which (unless I am much mistaken) will be of great value to all who wish to make progress in polite literature; he intends to collect all the notable metaphors to be found in classical authors in both tongues, with all the pointed and elegant phrases and other jewels and ornaments of style, and arrange them in a single volume.

Plautus in the Epidicus used a proverbial phrase of great elegance when he wrote 'The sowing and reaping there are none of mine,' meaning 'The business you speak of is nothing to do with me, for neither risk nor profit is to my account.' The metaphor is very familiar. The man who sows a field does so at his own expense and risk; the man who reaps takes the proceeds and is in the clear. This is the opposite of what Plautus has in the Mercator: 'Yours is the ploughing and the hoeing yours, / Yours is the seed, yours too the harvesting.'

'Ἀφ᾽ ἑστίας ἄρχου., Start from your own hearthstone, begin at home; make a beginning, that is, with your own family and household. This will rightly be addressed to magistrates and to critics of the lives of other people, whose first duty is to correct the faults of their own dependants and the way they live. For hestia in Greek means hearth, what in Latin we call Lar and Vesta. Aristophanes in the Wasps: 'No, no: / To crush my man I must begin at home.' Taken from the ancient custom at sacrifices of offering the first-fruits to the Lares, the household gods. Aristocritus, cited by the scholiast, tells the following story. When Jupiter had defeated the Titans and achieved supreme power, he offered Vesta the choice of anything in the various parts of his kingdom that she might select. First she asked for virginity, and then for the first-fruits of all sacrifices offered to the gods by men. Hence, he says, it became the custom to assign the first share in every sacrifice to the Lar or household god. Plato uses this adage in the Euthyphro: 'So I could wish, Socrates, but I fear things may turn out differently. For the man who tries to do you wrong seems to me to be simply set on injuring the city at its very hearthstone.' Plutarch in his essay 'On Having Many Friends': 'First of all, beginning at the very hearthstone, as it were.' He uses almost the same words in his treatise 'On the Delays of the Divine Vengeance.' He also makes use of them in the essay he wrote 'Against Herodotus.' Aristides in his Pericles: 'But it was his choice, beginning at his own hearthstone, to pursue equality rather than to excel other men.' The scholiast points out that the phrase is normally used of those who are either good or bad from the very outset. It is like saying 'From the cradle,' because the Lar welcomes infants at the moment of birth.

There is a phrase in Horace related to this, 'If I on my own vines the axe may ply,' which means to begin with myself and tear poets to pieces although I myself am one. It may be supposed a metaphor from those who cut down a vineyard or who damage newly planted vines out of spite. Horace in his Epistles: 'A poet's oft his own worst enemy, / If I on my own vines the axe may ply.'

Aulus Gellius says that this Homeric line, which comes from the fourth book of the Odyssey, was always current as a proverb: Ὅττι τοι ἐν μεγάροισι κακῶν τ᾽ ἀγαθῶν τε τέτυκται., The good or ill that's wrought in our own halls. Others attribute this to Socrates; Diocles ascribed it to Diogenes, as Laertius tells us. Socrates used this saying to discourage the study of nature and the supernatural and also of the whole field of mathematics, and to recall people to the pursuit of moral philosophy, on the ground that it alone deals with things in which we are really concerned. Plutarch employs it like a proverb in his essay 'On the Maintenance of Good Health': 'If he thinks it more becoming to him to be seen taking some interest in geometry, dialectic, and music than in enquiring into and trying to find out "the good or ill that's wrought in our own halls."' The lesson of this line is that we should attend as far as we can to the things that concern our own selves and not enquire into outside things which are no business of ours. Martial has a witty attack on a man called Ollus who suffered from this fault, being a most painstaking observer and most keen critic of misconduct in others, while he himself had an unfaithful wife and a daughter ready for a husband and on top of that an unpaid tailor's bill. Diogenes the Cynic philosopher, who, as I said just now, was constantly quoting this line, used to say that schoolmasters made great fools of themselves with their passionate researches into the misfor- tunes of Ulysses while ignoring their own. To this we may also refer that line in Homer which is almost hackneyed, for it comes in the sixth book of the Iliad and books 1,8, and 21 of the Odyssey, 'Go home now, and attend to your own tasks.' Plutarch defines inquisitiveness as 'a love of hearing about other people's misfortunes,' and says that inquisitive people are like vampires, who put their eyes away for safe keeping while they are at home and replace them when they go out, with the result that at home they can see nothing and are very clear-sighted out of doors. Those who make such an inverted use of their sight are a fair target for that line in Sophocles about old men: 'Far-sighted they, but blind as bats at home,' for old men suffer from a difficulty in seeing things close to them and can see clearly what is at some distance; a fact for which Plutarch supplies an explanation in the first decade of his 'Table-talk.'

To venture down into oneself is for a man to contemplate his own faults. The image is taken from undercrofts or cellars, into which people descend and can then see what is kept there in store. But the reference is to those cavernous recesses of the human heart, which Momus thought should have been supplied with windows. Persius:
None, none dare venture down into themselves.
They watch the wallet hanging on the back
Of him that walks before.

Homer's line seems to have a very near neighbour in another place, also in Persius: 'Be your own lodger, and you'll shortly come / To learn how scant the gear you have at home.' You must live at home, this means, in order to learn how little your possessions amount to. A metaphor from those who live in princes' households and, as commonly happens, wax fat on the wealth of other men as though it were their own, when if they had to board at home they would scarcely have a salt-cellar to set on the table. 'Be your own lodger' therefore means 'Measure yourself by the scale of your own possessions and rate yourself by the advantages and disadvantages that are really yours.' I suspect that we should place here those words of Cicero in his Cato major: 'Live in his own house, as the saying goes.'

The same idea was expressed in a different image by Persius in his sixth satire: 'Let your own harvest your expense dictate,' spend, that is, only so much as you can really afford. A metaphor from the husbandman, who measures what he can spend by the produce of his land year by year; for, as Plautus says, no man can keep going if his expenses outrun his income. A man who makes a great pretence of wealth was described by Alexis, according to Athenaeus, book 6, by the elegant word ptochalazôn, a 'beggar-bully,' for this clearly conveys the combination of pomp and penury. Nowadays the world is full of men of this class, who unite the swagger of a tyrannical bully with the vow of poverty.

To the same line of thought belongs that verse in Horace: 'Tis right each man should measure his own strength / On his own scale and by his own foot's length.' Lucian, in the essay entitled On Behalf of the Images, has 'But you should judge between the two and measure each on his own scale,' the phrase being of course just what Horace used, except that he added 'by his own foot' as if to explain what he had said. Pindar too: 'But one should ever observe the limit in all things, each man according to his own condition.' And Aristophanes in the Birds: 'Now measure yourself off to somewhere else.' The message of the adage is that no man should inflate himself beyond his own condition, and he should gauge his own worth not by the praise of those who flatter him or by public opinion or by the favours of fortune but by his own genuine gifts and by his powers of mind. A metaphor from those who gauge the dimensions of the human body as a multiple of the length of the foot. In fact, the exact stature of every individual is seven times that length, if painters and sculptors are to be trusted. Here too belongs that line in Martial: 'For he who weighs his load can bear the weight.'

Catullus (it is an iambic line): 'We look not in the wallet on our backs,' which means that we do not see our own faults, while watching with sharp eyes the faults of others. The proverb took its rise from one of Aesop's fables, which is told as follows by Stobaeus: Aesop said that each of us carries two wallets, one in front and the other behind hanging from our shoulders; and in the front one we put what other men do wrong and our own failings into the back one. Persius:
None, none dare venture down into themselves.
They watch the wallet hanging on the back
Of him that walks before.
Horace: 'Will learn to look / At what hangs on the back he never sees.' St Jerome: 'But this is a real reason for friends to correct one another, if we cannot see what we do ourselves and concentrate, as Persius says, on the wallet of other men.'

This blind self-love, so characteristic of human nature, has been pilloried not only in the poets but in the Gospels too (for they will have no objection to being appealed to in this context), when they say that there are some men who can see a mote in their brother's eye and cannot see a beam in their own, meaning that they take offence at the smallest faults in others and flatter then- own however great. For so it runs in Matthew: 'Why do you see the mote in your brother's eye, and take no note of the beam in your own eye? Or how will you say to your brother, Let me cast the mote out of your eye? - and look at the beam in your own eye!' Such is the literal sense of the Greek. St Jerome has: 'Who through the beam in his own eye would try to extract the mote from another man's.' Men of this class are pointedly criticized by Horace:
Blear-eyed with salves, you scarce discern your faults,
Yet in your friends' shortcomings there's no eagle,
No Epidaurian serpent sees so clear.
And again elsewhere: 'Who his friend's pardon for his boils demands, / 'Tis fair that his friend's warts he should forgive.' This in itself has all the look of a proverb. The boils of which he speaks are a much greater disfigurement than the warts, which elsewhere he calls wens.

Porphyrion points out that this is a proverb, which tells us not to forget our condition and attempt what is beyond our powers; and he thinks it derives from the fact that in the old days generals who were 'under canvas' slept in tents made of skins. To me it seems more likely to be connected with the famous ass at Cumae, who dressed himself, according to the fables, in a lion's skin and thus passed for some time as a lion. But this did him very little good when he was detected and became a universal laughing-stock, and then was stripped of the hide that was not his and beaten to death with cudgels. Nor would it be absurd to refer this to Cleon the Athenian who, after starting life as a leather-seller or cordwainer, was made general in command of an army and by the favour of fortune won a victory and captured Pylos; then robbed and despoiled his native city and thus became excessively rich; then at length was overthrown by another man and roughly handled, and paid the penalty, all because he had not stayed quietly among the skins where he belonged. Cleon is a character in the Knights of Aristophanes, and is criticized from time to time by the same poet in other places. It is of him, in fact, that Plautus seems to have been thinking when he makes his braggart and swaggering soldier 'clad in an elephant's hide and not his own,' either to show that he was a blockhead or because he used to tell of feats beyond his powers. Horace: 'Aye, and rightly too, / Because I had not stayed within my skin.' Martial addresses a shoemaker who, like Cleon, had risen to great riches and hoisted his sails to catch the favouring winds; but was then reduced again by his extravagance to his original poverty, so that for the future he could be nothing but a cobbler.
'You've had your fun,' he says, 'but mark my words: begin,
My cobbler friend, to stay within your skin.'
Seneca too in his letters: 'They banish the wise man from everything and compel him to stay inside his own skin.' Ovid brings out the point without using the metaphor, in this way: 'Take my advice: he who lives hid, lives best. / Let each man with his lot contented rest.' Lucian too alluded to it in his Images: 'They remain no longer within their proper sphere,' said of people who have been promoted by strokes of good fortune and are not sufficiently mindful of where they belong. In conclusion, it would not, I think, be unreasonable to refer our proverb to the story of the flaying of Marsyas, who did not sufficiently remember who he was and challenged Apollo to a contest, in return for which he was stripped of his skin.

In Horace's Epistles we find a metaphor which is no doubt proverbial, To spread wings greater than the nest, in the sense of enhancing your estate and position in society, which were small and modest when you inherited them from your forebears. If this is achieved by honourable conduct, it is greatly to a man's credit, so far am I from thinking it should be reckoned a fault. 'A freedman's son,' he says,
'with modest fortune blest,
Tell how I spread wings greater than the nest;
Add to my virtues and demean my birth.'
The image is derived from fledgling birds which grow so big, as then- plumage sprouts, that the maternal nest cannot hold them.

In our own day this adage is current in many parts of the world. They tell a man who criticizes other people's faults to spit into his own bosom, as though warning him to remember his own private errors and desist from arrogant attacks on the way other men live. That the Ancients did the same can be inferred from the words of Pliny, who in book 28 chapter 4 writes as follows: 'We also ask for forgiveness from the gods for expressing some unduly optimistic hope by spitting in our bosoms.' In the same chapter he also says on the authority of Salpa that the stiffness in any numbed limb can be eased by spitting into the bosom. Neither of these practices is very far from our current proverb; for the man who criticizes others offends by a kind of self-centred optimism, as though he hoped that no one would ever be able to blame him for anything of the kind, whereas nobody exists who is not the victim of some fault or other, and the man who is unconscious of his own mistakes (which is a kind of insensibility) is the victim of a sort of numbness. Seneca in book 7 of the De beneficiis: 'It may be that if you examine yourself carefully, you will find the fault of which you complain in your own bosom.' Lucian in his defence of the essay On Salaried Posts in Great Houses: 'And that you did not spit in your own bosom before you began your accusations,' and again in his Wishes: 'You are above yourself from over-eating, Adimantus, and you don't spit in your bosom nor remember who you are, though you may be a ship-owner,' which is a joking attack on a friend, who seems to have forgotten himself and imagines he is immensely rich, and did not spit in his bosom to remind himself who he really was. Theocritus makes the same point in his sixth eclogue. Polyphemus, after speaking rather boastfully about his own good looks, says: 'But to avert the evil eye I spat thrice in my bosom as the hag Cotyttaris taught me.' The scholiast adds that in his own day the custom still survived for women to spit into their bosoms to avoid the evil eye. He also quotes a line from Callimachus: 'O fortune, why do women spit in their bosoms?' Here perhaps belongs a phrase from Lucian's Necyomantia: 'When he had spat three times in my face.' Nor is it irrelevant that Persius in his second satire tells how the maternal aunt protects the baby's brow and dribbling lips, 'with magic finger and purifying spittle.' An ancient practice referred to by Athenaeus in his first book, of wiping the face three times to drive away misfortune, took its rise from the same superstition. He quotes the following line from a poet of Cyrene: 'To men with face thrice wiped god gives good luck.'

To the same line of thought belong those three sayings which are easily the most famous of all the utterances of wise men, so much so that, as Plato bears witness in the Charmides, they could be seen inscribed by the Amphictyons in front of the doors of the temple at Delphi as maxims worthy of the god. The first of these is Γνῶθι σεαυτόν, Know thyself, which recommends modera- tion and the middle state, and bids us not to pursue objects either too great for us or beneath us. For here we have a source of all life's troubles: every man flatters himself, and blinded by self-love takes to himself without deserving it all the merit that he wrongly denies to others. Cicero in the third book of letters to his brother Quintus: 'As for that famous Know thyself, you must not think it was uttered merely to reduce our self-conceit; we should also recognize our own blessings.' There is also a line preserved among the proverbial maxims: 'That Know thyself is useful everywhere.' Nonius Marcellus quotes a satire by Varro, the title of which was Know Thyself. Ovid in his Art of Love: 'Those world-famous words, / That every man should to himself be known.' Juvenal: 'And Know Thyself descended from the sky.' Ovid gives Pythagoras as the author of this rule; Socrates in Plato thinks it started with Apollo. Plato in the Phaedrus: 'I cannot yet achieve the self-knowledge of the Delphian inscription.' Some think that this too was taken from that ocean we call Homer; for Hector in Homer, while attacking everyone else, fought shy of Ajax whom he knew to be stronger than himself. As the poet says, 'he shunned an encounter with Ajax son of Telamon.' Diogenes ascribes it to Thales, but cites Antisthenes as giving it to Phemonoe, though he says that Chilon appropriated it. Thales when asked 'What is difficult?' replied 'To know oneself.' Asked 'What is easy?' he said 'To give another man good advice.' Macrobius in the first book of his Commentary on the Dream of Scipio records that when someone asked the Delphic oracle by what road he could arrive at happiness, the answer was: 'If you have learnt to know yourself.' The same reply was given by the oracle to Croesus, as we learn from Xenophon in his Cyropaedeia. The Greek proverb-collections cite this line from Antiphanes: 'Friend, if you're mortal, think as mortals should.' The same principle is expressed by Pindar in the words 'Mortal desires are fit for mortal men.' Demonax, asked when he had begun to be a philosopher, replied 'As soon as I began to know myself.' Socrates when judged by the oracle of Apollo to be the only philosopher in Greece, though Greece was full of them, explained this by saying that the others professed to know what they knew not, and that he defeated them because he knew that he knew nothing, and that was the only thing he professed to know. But Socrates was outdone in modesty on this point by Anaxarchus, who used to maintain that he did not even know that he knew nothing. Menander the writer of comedies has one of his characters correct this universally accepted dictum: 'This Know thyself in many ways is wrong; / Far better were it, other men to know.'

The second embodies almost the same principle in different words: Μηδὲν ἄγαν, Nothing to excess. Terence in the Andria puts it in the mouth of one of his characters, Sosia the freedman, as though it were widely known. Diogenes Laertius ascribes it to Pythagoras. Aristotle in book 3 of the Rhetoric gives Bias as the source, where he is treating of the ungoverned passions of the young who, he says, go wrong in every field through enthusiasm; for they love to excess and hate to excess too, while the aged are different, for (to borrow Aristotle's own words) 'they follow the advice of Bias, loving as though they might one day hate and hating as though they might one day love.' Some attribute it to Thales, some to Solon, according to Laertius. Plato cites it in one place from Euripides. And there is no lack of people who trace it back to Homer as the fountain-head, who has the following lines in Odyssey 15: 'That host I like not who beyond the mean / Both loves and hates; reason is always best.' Again in Iliad book 10: 'O son of Tydeus, praise me not too much / Nor too much blame me.' Personally I should prefer to trace it back to Hesiod, who has in his Works and Days the line 'Observe the mean; due time is best in all.' So Euripides in several places and especially in the Hippolytus: 'So what there is too much of I like less / Than the old rule of nothing to excess.' Pindar, cited by Plutarch: 'The wise have ever praised exceedingly this saying Nothing to excess.' Sophocles in the Electra: 'Be not over-angry with those whom you hate, but let not your enemies slip out of mind.' Plautus in the Poenulus: 'Moderation, sister, in all things is best.' Here too belongs that Homeric tag, in book 13 of the Iliad: 'But in all things there comes satiety, / In sleep and love, sweet song and gracious dance.' Pindar seems to have imitated this in the Nemeans: 'In honey lies satiety, and in the delightful flowers of love.' Pliny in his eleventh book: 'Most destructive, even in every walk of life, is that which is carried to excess.' Horace: 'All things are ruled by reason, have fixed bounds, / Within which only can the right hold firm.' And again: 'Virtue's a mean 'twixt vices either side.' Phocylides: 'Measure's the best of all things.' And Alpheus in an epigram: 'This Nothing to excess I like excessively.' Quintilian writes that moderation is sovereign in delivery, as in everything else. Finally Plutarch in his life of Camillus tells us that piety is halfway between contempt of the gods and superstition, and that 'piety and the principle of nothing to excess are best.' And there is nothing in the whole world in which one cannot go wrong by excess, except the love of God, as Aristotle too admits in different words, putting wisdom in the place of God. Here belongs a quotation from some poet, given by Athenaeus in his first book, on the virtues of wine: 'All human cares it drives from out the heart / With reason drunk, but to excess, 'tis worse.'

'Ἐγγύα, παρὰ δ᾽ ἄτη., Stand surety, and ruin is at hand. All three of these are thought by Socrates in Plato to belong to the same line of thought. For he who gives a guarantee for another man makes a promise regarding something which it is not in his power to guarantee, the honesty of someone else. But he attributes the first of them to Apollo and thinks the other two were added by mortals. Pliny, book 7 chapter 32, ascribes them all equally to Chilon, qualified by their being treated as oracles; 'again' he say 'mortals have admitted Chilon the Lacedaemonian to a partnership in the oracle by writing up his three precepts at Delphi in letters of gold, viz that everyone should know himself, that he should desire nothing to excess, and that misery is the bedfellow of debt and litigation.' Pliny has explained the meaning of 'stand surety.' We give a guarantee on behalf of a man when he is borrowing money, and it often happens that the guarantor is obliged to repay the lender in cash. We also give a guarantee to the judges that we will produce the accused, and if he lets them down it is those who have gone bail for him who are punished. This saying too is traced back to an origin in Homer, who has a line in the eighth book of the Odyssey: 'Worthless the pledges given by worthless men.' Chersias in Plutarch's 'Symposium of Plato' refers this to the story in Homer about the goddess of Mischief who, because she had been present when Jupiter stood surety for the birth of Hercules, was hurled by him down to earth. These three sayings are cited with approval by Plutarch in his essay 'On Pointless Garrulity.'

Οἶδε τὸ λευκόν καὶ τὸ μέλαν., He knows what white is and what black. This can be taken in two different ways, either He knows the difference between right and wrong, or He knows something known to the veriest ignoramus; for the difference between white and black is too obvious to be lost on anyone. Aristophanes in the Knights says that 'Not a soul but knows Arignotus, of those who know what white is and what high stirring music' The scholiast points out and expounds the proverb. This seems to be taken from men in very early days, who could distinguish two colours in nature only, white and black, as Pompeius records.

Said commonly of a man entirely unknown. Cicero in the second Philippic: 'No one save friends ever left me anything, so that a touch of regret might be sweetened by the windfall, if such it was. But you! A man you had never set eyes on, Lucius Rubrius of Cassinum, left you his heir. How that man must have loved you! He knew not whether you were dark or fair, and passed over his own brother's son.' Quintilian, in book 11 of his Principles of Rhetoric, says: 'one of the poets maintains that he does not care greatly whether Caesar is dark or fair,' putting his finger no doubt on Catullus, among whose surviving poems is one addressed to Caesar: 'Caesar, to flatter you I don't much care, / Nor yet to know if you be dark or fair.' Apuleius in his defence against a charge of witchcraft: 'Up till quite lately I was perfectly content not to know whether you were fair or dark, and I do not really know you even now.' St Jerome attacking Helvidius: 'Who pray knew of you before this blasphemous outburst? Who thought you worth twopence? You have got what you wanted, and your crimes have made your reputation. Even I, who write against you and live in the same city as yourself (how you stammer and change colour!), do not know, as the saying goes, whether you are fair or dark.' Horace in the last of his Epistles: 'Whose features change; now fair he is, now dark,' where Porphyrion points out that 'fair and dark' is a proverbial expression for good and bad, and that Horace 'has related fair to generous or prosperous and dark to mean or miserable.' Matron makes a pretty use of this, as quoted in the fourth book of Athenaeus, when speaking of the cuttlefish: he says that though only a fish, it alone knows the difference between black and white, because the cuttlefish itself is white, but has a black juice which it spreads when afraid of being caught.

An idiom very like this is 'I do not know that he exists,' when you mean you are utterly and completely ignorant of a man. Cicero in the ninth book of his Letters to Friends, writing to Papyrius: 'I am aware that before now I have had letters from kings at the ends of the earth, thanking me for having proposed that they should be given the title of kings, when not only was I ignorant that they had the royal title, I simply was not aware that they existed.' Very like this is a phrase in the Wasps of Aristophanes: 'He would not even have known that I existed,' meaning that he would have paid no attention to me whatever. Theocritus too in his Sorceress: 'And knows not whether I am dead or alive.' Plautus uses it with the same sense in the mouth of Euclio: 'You'd take no more heed / Than if I never had been born at all.'