Adagia 601–700

Μισῶ μνάμονα συμπότην, I hate a pot-companion with a good memory. Used of those who publish freely to the outside world what is uttered without constraint among friends over their wine. Lucian in his Lapiths quotes it from some unknown poet. Martial has
No pot-companion welcome here
With memory so crystal-clear:
Procillus, kindly note.
This is a joke at the expense of one Procillus, who in the heat of a drinking-party was asked to supper next day and duly came, as though what a man says in his cups should carry any weight. Plutarch refers to the proverb in his first problem, right at the start of the 'Table-talk,' where he raises the question whether philosophy is a proper subject for conversation at a drinking-party. He thinks it is directed against those who keep up the pressure at a party, urging men to drink more than they want to and prescribing a fixed minimum which must be drunk; for some people who are not very heavy drinkers habitually evade this by introducing topics of conversation designed to make the other guests forget all about it. Then, if anyone happens to remember and insist on the rule, they pretend they have already drunk the prescribed amount. The Dorians in Sicily have epistathmoi who preside over drinking-parties and are in charge of the amount drunk, and call them 'remembrancers.' The Latin for this, according to Nonius is modiperatores, 'bottle-masters,' because they give orders how much people are to drink. And so the proverb will look like a neat fit for those who exact the prescribed amount of drinking at a party too strictly. Others take the proverb to recommend what is called in Greek an amnesty, that everything done and said at a party should be forgotten. In support of this they cite the stories of those in old days who held that Bacchus was the patron deity equally of canes and of forgetfulness, indicating by this, I take it, that any errors committed at a drinking-party ought not to be remembered, or at worst require only the light kind of punishment one might give a child. Caning was a normal penalty for children, as Juvenal for one can show: 'My hand like theirs has flinched beneath the cane.' Plutarch again, elsewhere in the same work, tells how the Spartans had a custom, if they entertained a friend or a visitor, to point out the door to him and say 'No word here spoken passes this.' Plutarch however rejects this custom, because he thinks the conversation at a drinking-party should be educated and improving and not frivolous, so that if it is repeated outside this will be honourable and do some good. He records the same custom in his life of Lycurgus, who instituted a tradition by which the oldest person present used to stand near the door, and as the guests entered for the party he would point out the doorway and say 'No word goes out through this.' Horace too thinks of it as one of the good features of agreeable entertainment in his Epistles book one number 5: 'True friends, and none to publish what we say.' Here too belongs that familiar Greek line 'For what a woman swears I write in wine,' because it suggests that what is uttered casually at a wine-party normally carries no weight. It alludes to a proverb I have recorded elsewhere, 'Writ in water,' of something that will disappear. At this point we may add that the ancients, as Plutarch testifies in his 'Table-talk,' had made out that Bacchus was the child of Forgetfulness; and someone in Plutarch humorously inverts this, saying that he should be called its father, not its child, because wine, especially in excess, deprives a man of his memory even before old age sets in.

To sit on two stools at once is to belong for certain to neither party, being of doubtful loyalty and trying to please both sides. Homer coins a new word alloprosallos, double-faced, and applies it to Mars, because he favours first one side and then the other. Macrobius in his Saturnalian Feast, book 7 chapter 3, tells how Laberius, the pantomime-actor, had been appointed by Caesar to the Senate, and Cicero 'would not make room for him, saying "I would move up, if we were not such a crowd." The actor tartly replied "When you sat on two stools, you had plenty of room," accusing the great man of disloyalty. In any case, Cicero's words "if we were not such a crowd" were a jibe at Caesar, who admitted so many men to the Senate indiscrimi- nately that the official fourteen rows of seats would not hold them all.' Thus Macrobius; and it is generally agreed that to intrigue with both sides is most dishonourable. Solon however passed a law to punish those who in civil strife had taken neither side.

Close to this, I think, is another: To whitewash two walls out of the same bucket, signifying to earn thanks twice over for the same thing, and lay two people equally under an obligation to you by a single act. Marcus Curius in a letter to Cicero has: 'But pray, my eminent friend, do not show this letter to Atticus. Leave him to enjoy his error and to suppose me a man of honour, not one with the habit of whitewashing two walls out of the same bucket.' For Curius wished to be most highly thought of equally by both Atticus and Cicero, and so to divide his single self that Cicero should get the interest while Atticus held the capital. It is clearly derived from the men who put plaster on walls. A similar adage in Greek is to be found in Suidas: δύο τοίχους ἀλείφεις, You are plastering two walls, applied to those who in party strife make overtures to both sides. To the same class belongs the Hebrew prophet's 'going lame in both legs' and the Gospel phrase 'serve two masters,' and again what is said in the Apocalypse of those who are 'neither hot nor cold.'

A similar phrase is in popular use today, which, I think, if nothing else, deserves a place among the adages of Antiquity: With one daughter you wish to get two sons-in-law, when a man promises to do the same kindness to two people at once, or when for a service that he has done for one of a pair he expects both to be grateful.

Who knows what evening in the end will bring? Cited as the title of one of Varro's Menippean Satires both by Aulus Gellius and by Macrobius, and no doubt it was proverbial, like most of his other titles. It gives us a salutary warning, not to be so much elated by the fair prospect of our successes at the moment that we abandon thought for the future, and not to be confident about anything until we have seen the outcome. The same thought is current in our own day: 'It is not bedtime yet,' when people mean that things can still turn out very differently. It is clear that Virgil alludes to the proverb, when he says in the first book of his Georgics, 'In short, what evening in the end will bring,' referring to weather-signs derived from the sunset. It can also be connected with Solon's famous warning Ὅρα τέλος μακροῦ βίου., Wait till you see the end of a long life. Livy in his fifth decade, book 5: 'When things go well, one should form no proud or violent designs against anyone, nor trust to the prosperity of the moment, for what evening will bring is still uncertain.' King Philip referred to the same thing in Livy's fourth decade, book 9, when he ended his reply to the Thessalians with the veiled threat that 'the sun of all their days had not yet set.'

Πολλοί τοι ναρθηκοφόροι, παῦροι δέ τε Βάκχοι., For many bear the wand, few feel the god. A hexameter line current in Greece as a proverb, meaning that many mortals enjoy the outward signs and even the reputation of virtue, who lack virtue itself. Similarly, not all are really theologians who wear the bonnet of a doctor of divinity or are honoured with that title. Not all are poets who go about under that name. Not all are monks who are burdened with the cowl. Not all Christians who play a Christian's part in outward observance. Not all of noble birth who wear collars of gold. Not all virgins who have flowing hair. Not all kings who are distinguished by a crown. Not all bishops who wear the twin-peaked mitre or carry the silver crook. Not all are popes who are called Your Holiness and glorified by the triple tiara. Not all are emperors who boast an eagle on their banners. It is not pogonophory or tribonophory, as Plutarch expresses it, wearing of beards or cloaks, that makes the philosopher. This adage is drawn from the ceremonies of the Bacchanalia, during which in a fit of religious ecstasy they brandished thyrsi, a kind of wand wreathed in vine-shoots. Plato uses it in his dialogue called Phaedo. There is an elegant allusion to it in Plutarch's 'Against Colotes': 'One of his friends, Aristodemus of Aegiae, - you know the man, I think, a disciple of the Academy, no mere wand-bearer but a passionate devotee of Plato.' He calls a 'wand-bearer' one who is an Academic philosopher in name and dress alone, not in reality. Herodes Atticus also made a good remark about a man with a cloak and long hair and a beard down to his waist: 'Beard and cloak I see; I do not yet see the philosopher.'

Marcus Varro in the second book of his Agriculture has expressed the same sentiment in a different metaphor: 'But not all those' he says 'who hold the lyre can play it.' To this, I think, we can add a neat remark of Seneca's, that some people 'prefer the mask to the face.' By face, he meant the state of affairs in which a man looks like what he is; by mask, when a man purports to be what he is not. This can also be diverted for use against avaricious people, if you say that the rich are not those who possess wealth but those who know how to use it, just as not everyone is a lyre-player who carries a lyre, but only the man who knows how to play it properly. He is not a king who happens to possess wide dominions, but he who knows how to govern.

Πολλοὶ θριοβόλοι, παῦροι δέ τε μάντιες ἄνδρες., Many the casters of lots, but few can you find that are prophets. A verse-line like the last, and like that in common use in Greece. Philochorus, cited by Zenodotus, tells us that there were once three nymphs, Apollo's nurses, who dwelt on Parnassus, and were called the Thriae; whence came the later custom of giving the name thriae to dice and to the lots used by soothsayers. Hence the word thrioboli for those who cast lots into the divining-urn. Some maintain that the theory of divining by lots was invented by Minerva, and was more successful than the oracle at Delphi; so it was turned into something false and useless by Jupiter, who wished to give pleasure to Apollo. Then, when mortals once again frequented the Delphic oracle, the Pythia made this pronouncement: Many the casters of lots, but few can you find that are prophets.

The same sense is given by another line: Πολλοὶ βουκένται, παῦροι δέ τε γῆς ἀροτῆρες., Those who can goad an ox are common, the man who can plough is rare. Many pretend to be what they are not. In Antiquity they ploughed with oxen, as has been said above, and goaded them with a very long reed or shaft fitted with a sharp point. The practice exists to this day in Italy.

Πίθηκος ἐν πορφύρᾳ, An empurpled ape. The proverb can be applied to various purposes: for example, to men whose true nature, though they may be wearing very fine clothes, is obvious from their expression and behaviour, or to those who have some inappropriate dignity thrust upon them, or when something nasty in itself is unsuitably decked out with ornament from some unconnected or external source. What could be more ridiculous than an ape dressed in purple clothes? And yet this is a thing we quite often see in a household where they keep apes or monkeys as pets: they dress them up with plenty of finery to look as much like human beings as possible, sometimes even in purple, so as to deceive people who do not look carefully or have seen nothing like it before, in hopes that the monkey will be greeted as though it were a person, or if a man sees through the deception, the joke will be funnier still. How many apes of this kind one can see in princes' courts, whom you will find, if you strip them of their purple, their collars and their jewels, to be no better than any cobbler! It will be more elegant if the comparison is stretched a little, for example, to those who aim at a venerable appearance with a long beard and a flowing gown. Augustine somewhere calls such men rather neatly 'cloak-deep philoso- phers.' And Ammianus, book 14, calls a certain Antigonus 'a philosopher no wiser than his cloak.' Of sages whose wisdom goes no deeper than their beards I have already spoken.

Πίθηκος ὁ πίθηκος, κᾄν χρύσεα ἔχῃ σύμβολα., An ape will be an ape, though he wears gold on his uniform. Corresponds to what has preceded, pointing out that the trappings of fortune do not change a man's nature. The adage is quoted by Lucian in his harangue Against an Ignoramus. It seems to derive from the well-known Egyptian monkeys that can dance like human beings. Lucian tells a story to the following effect. There was once a king in Egypt who taught a number of monkeys how to dance; for no animal looks more like a human being, and in the same way none is more able or more ready to mimic human actions. So having learnt the art, they immediately began to dance, dressed in scarlet uniforms and wearing masks. For a long time the performance was extremely popular, until some clever fellow among the audience brought a quantity of nuts secreted in his pocket, and scattered them. The moment they saw the nuts, the monkeys forgot their dancing, resumed their true nature, and instantly became monkeys again instead of dancers. They trampled on their masks, they tore their clothes to shreds, and fought each other for the nuts, while the spectators roared with laughter. A similar story is told of the cat which was elegantly dressed by Venus and admitted to the company of her ladies-in-waiting. And it played a woman's part pretty well, until a mouse ran out of some hole or other, when it made quite clear that it was only a cat after all.

Ὄνος παρὰ Κυμαίους, An ass at Cumae. Applies to those who, though ridiculous and absurd, are valued none the less by people who do not know them, simply for their novelty; or to men who achieve some appointment which they do not deserve, by a freak of fortune, and thereby (as often happens) become arrogant and boastful. Demosthenes has a neat remark to this effect in the first of his Olynthiac Orations: 'Undeserved success starts fools on misguided courses.' In line with this is that verse quoted from Aeschylus: 'A fool's prosperity is hard to bear.' I have told elsewhere the story of the runaway ass which posed among the good people of Cumae as a lion.

Ὁ θυμὸς ἔσχατον γηράσκει, Resentment grows old last of all. The opposite of this is a remark of Aristotle who, according to Laertius, when asked what grows old faster than anything else, replied 'a kind action.' The two are put together by Cicero: 'Please a man, and he forgets it; hurt him, and he remembers.' For it is the common way of mortals to remember an injury stubbornly enough, and to forget kindness done to them with the greatest ease. The Greek adage seems to be taken from Sophocles, who says in the Oedipus Coloneus
Resentment knows no age, save only death,
For there's no feeling that can touch the dead.
Homer makes the same point in his surely very charming fable about Prayers and Mischief or Infatuation. Infatuation he makes out to be a goddess who sends disasters and confusion upon the affairs of men, giving her very keen sight and great swiftness of foot. After her, and some way behind, follow the Prayers, goddesses who do their best, he says, to mend the confusion caused by Infatuation. These he describes as cross-eyed and lame, making the point, no doubt, that men are quick to take offence and slow to be reconciled, because they have a long memory for injuries. I will append Homer's actual lines from the ninth book of the Iliad:
For Saturn's mighty son begot the Prayers,
Wrinkled and lame, squinting with sidelong glance.
Where Mischief went, they follow in her train
To mend the harm that she doth leave behind.
Mischief herself, mighty and fleet of foot,
Runs far in front and quite outstrips them all;
O'er the wide earth she harmeth mortal men,
While they pursue, the damage done to mend.
He who reveres Jove's daughters at their coming, -
Him they will help, and listen to his prayers;
But if he spurns and sternly says them nay,
They seek their father Jove, and beg that straight
Mischief may haunt the man and make him pay.
He mentions the same goddess Infatuation in the nineteenth book of the Iliad, where Jupiter, thinking that it is her doing that he has been deceived by Juno, seizes her by the hair and throws her down to earth headlong, forbidding her ever to return to the society of the gods. This invention of Homer's is thought by some people to be close to the Christian belief that Lucifer was hurled down from Heaven.

Legacy-hunters, the people who haunt a man when he is making his will, are known in a familiar image as 'vultures,' from the way they hang over a rich man with no children as though he were a corpse. For it is characteristic of the vulture to feed exclusively on carrion, and nature has therefore given it, according to Pliny, such foresight that it flies two or three days beforehand to the place where there will be corpses, and so is accustomed, as Basil the truly Great records, to follow an army from one camp to another in a great column. In one respect it is less noxious than those human beings who hang over rich men's deathbeds: it never touches the fruits of the earth, nor does it ever kill or even pursue any living creature however unfit for combat; it feeds on nothing but corpses, whether they have died a natural death or are the leavings of other animals, and among these it refrains none the less from corpses of its own kind, that is, of other birds. So Plutarch tells us in his 'Antiquarian Problems'; to say nothing for the moment of what the Egyptians believe, for they hold that all vultures are female and conceive by the east wind, just as trees are fertilized by the west wind. It is therefore surprising that this bird, which does so little harm, should have such a bad name. Thus those who have the audacity to blackmail the rich or to poison them, are called 'kites,' while those who fish for a place in their wills merely by acting as toadies and flatterers are proverbially referred to as 'vultures.' Seneca in letter 96: 'If you're a vulture, wait for your carcase.' Martial in his sixth book:
Silanus' only son is deadly sick:
Round with your present, Oppianus, quick!
'O cruel fate, this monstrous blow that struck!'
Let's see which vulture now will be in luck.
Diogenianus records this adage in his collections, but in another form: Ἅπερ γυπὲς, Vulture-fashion. He tells us it is used of those who lie in wait for a man in hopes of a legacy or some other advantage.

Horace uses a similar image of someone who had outwitted the man who hoped for a legacy in his will, when he says that he tricked the gaping crow; for the crow, like the vulture, is always on the look-out for carrion. Often he says, 'Some jack-in-office, petty clerk rehashed / Has played your gaping crow a pretty trick.' He speaks of one Coranus, who deluded his father-in- law Nasica with great hopes of a legacy, and when he died left him 'save lamentation, nought.' It looks as though this adage was made up in imitation of the Greek expression λύκος ἔχανεν., A wolf with open mouth, so that one might say equally well He's tricked the gaping wolf, or κόραξ ἔχανεν., A crow with open mouth.

Greek also uses κρώζειν,, to croak, proverbially for hovering over a prey or for foolish chattering. Aristophanes in the Plutus: T hear you croak. You think I've helped myself, / And want your share.' The scholiast points out that this is a proverbial expression directed against those who croak like crows to no good purpose. The words are spoken by Chremylus an old man, who says he is well aware what Blepsidemus is up to; he is attacking him from all quarters in hopes of extracting a confession, in order no doubt that once he is in the secret he may claim his share of the spoils. Persius in his fifth satire: 'Croaking mysterious nonsense to yourself.' St Jerome too uses it in his letter to Rusticus the monk.

Ἐν οἴνῳ ἀλήθεια., Wine speaks the truth. An adage found in many classical authors, meaning that strong drink strips the mind of its pretences and brings out into the open what is hidden in a man's heart. That is why Scripture forbids wine to be given to kings, because where strong drink reigns there are no secrets. Pliny, book 14 chapter 22, writes that wine 'betrays the secrets of the mind so effectively that men in their cups will say what will cost them their lives and cannot even repress remarks that will recoil and cut their own throats. It is a common saying' he adds 'that there is truth in wine.' There is a well-known saying, attributed to an eminent Persian, that torture is unnecessary to get at the truth; wine is much more effective. Horace confirms this in the Odes:
Tough wits to your mild torture yield
Their treasures; you unlock the soul
Of wisdom and its stores conceal'd,
Arm'd with Lyaeus' kind control.
Again in the Art of Poetry:
So kings are said to ply with cups galore
(Strong drink their thumbscrew) him they would explore:
Is he the stuff of which a friend is made?
And again elsewhere: 'Drink's the one key that opens every door.' The proverb is also expressed in the second book of Athenaeus in this way: 'Wine and truth,' because those who have drunk too much not only blurt out their own secrets but make rash statements about other people too. In Plutarch's life of Artaxerxes, when Mithridates has said something insolent in his cups, Sparamixas says 'No offence taken, Mithridates, but when the Greeks speak of "wine and truth'" and what follows. Greek has another common proverbial saying: 'What is in the heart of the sober man is in the mouth of the drunkard.' Theognis: 'Silver and gold by fire the craftsman tries; / 'Tis wine displays the mind before our eyes.' Athenaeus cites this line from Euripides: 'Bronze the face mirrors, and strong drink the mind.' He also quotes Ephippus: 'Liquor in plenty forces one to speak, / And tipsy men, they say, will tell the truth.' But he also preserves in book 10 a saying of Anacharsis that men as they get drunk are filled with false ideas, and then tells a story not without its point. One of the guests had said to Anacharsis 'You have married a very ugly wife.' 'Yes' said he, T quite agree. Hey, waiter, bring me a good strong drink, and I'll make her look handsome.' So it's not only the lover, but the drinker too, who 'thinks what's foul is fair,' as Theocritus puts it. And yet how can a man speak the truth whose judgement is unsteady? Truth however is not always opposed to falsehood; sometimes its opposite is pretence. A man can speak sincerely and what he says may be false; and what he says can be true though he does not speak the truth. Last but not least, the proverb aims, not at the madness of intoxication, to which things that are fixed appear to be going round and round and single things appear double or treble, but at the more moderate stage which clears away false shame and disguises. Alcibiades in the Symposium of Plato: 'What follows you would never have heard me say, unless first I had recalled the proverb that Wine without children or with children speaks the truth.' From these words it is clear that the same proverbial expression was current about childhood as about wine. A similar proverb is still in common use today, to the effect that you never hear the truth from anyone, save only from three kinds of person: children, drunkards and madmen. To this I think one should add another proverbial line: 'A slip of the tongue is wont to tell the truth.' For what a man lets fall unawares is commonly thought to be true, because only then is it free from any suspicion of falsehood. Such slips of the tongue are picked upon as indications that can be trusted: 'For "Neoptolemus" I thoughtless cry / "Orestes" - sign that better days are nigh.' Cicero finally in his Topica lists among those whose remarks carry conviction children, sleepers, persons caught off their guard and drunkards.

Βοῦς ἐπὶ γλώττης. , An ox on the tongue. Used of those who do not dare say freely what they think. A metaphor either from the great mass of the animal, as though it crushed the tongue and did not let it speak, or from the fact that in Athens there was once a coin with the figure of an ox. In Rome too king Servius first struck bronze coins with sheep and oxen on them, according to Pliny, book 18 chapter 3. Plutarch in his 'Antiquarian Problems' tells the same story, the reason being that in early times almost all wealth took the form of flocks and herds, whence some suppose that pecunia, the Latin for money, is derived from pecora, cattle. And so those who kept their mouths shut for fear of a pecuniary penalty, or had not the face to speak because they had taken bribes, were said to have 'an ox on the tongue.' Julius Pollux, in the ninth book of his Vocabulary where he explains this proverb, more or less agrees with this, adding that the coin itself was commonly called an ox. Further, that in the festival in Delos, if someone was due to receive an award, the herald announced by custom 'Such-and-such a man shall receive so many oxen.' An ox in this sense, he says, was worth two Attic drachmas, whence some people supposed that it was a Delian and not an Attic coin. He adds that in the laws of Draco there was mention of a ten-ox payment, which would mean ten coins; and that there were those who thought that Homer too had spoken of the coin, not of the animal, when he tells of exchanging 'gold arms for bronze, arms worth a hundred oxen / For arms worth nine.' But this view is refuted by Julius Pollux in another passage, where he shows that exchange of goods already existed without coins. The author of the scholia on Homer, in the second book, records that the ox was honoured among the Ancients for many reasons, but particularly because it is sacred to Apollo; and so on one side of the coin they stamped an ox and on the other a king's head. But he gives the adage in the form Βοῦς ἐπὶ γλώττης βέβηκεν., An ox treads on my tongue, pointing out that this is used when a man kept silent for money. Theognis: 'An ox is on my tongue.' Philostratus in his Life of Apollonius: 'He was the first of men to restrain his tongue, inventing "An ox sits upon it" as a principle of silence.' He speaks of Pythagoras, the apostle of silence. Again, in his life of the sophist Scopelianus:" 'Nor should we be surprised if some people, who are tongue-tied themselves and have set upon their tongues the ox of silence.' It occurs also in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus; 'The rest for me is silence; on my tongue / A great ox treads.'

Ἀργυράγχην πάσχει, He has the silver-quinsy. Related to the preceding, and derived from a story told by Aulus Gellius in his Attic Nights book 9 chapter 9, and also by Plutarch in his life of Demosthenes. It runs as follows. A mission from Miletus which had come to Athens to ask for help had been bitterly attacked by Demosthenes in the assembly, and his opposition made it seem unlikely that they would get what they wanted. The question having been put off to the next day, the envoys approached Demosthenes in person, and bought him off with a large sum of money, not to speak against them. Next day, when the question was due to be reopened, he appeared in the assembly with a great woollen bandage round his neck, pretending that he had a synanche, a quinsy, and that this prevented him from speaking in the normal way. At which someone in the audience who suspected he was shamming shouted that this was no ordinary quinsy but an argyranche, a 'silver-quinsy.' A synanche is a complaint the name of which is commonly corrupted by physicians to 'squinancy.' Aretaeus of Cappadocia speaks of it in his first book among acute complaints, and points out that it has two names, either kynanche because it is common among dogs or synanche because it impedes and restricts the breathing.

'Ἵππος με φέρει, βασιλεύς με τρέφει, A king feeds me and a horse carries me. Listed among Greek proverbs, with the following note of its origin. A young man was serving in King Philip's army; and when urged to apply for his discharge and abandon a soldier's life, he refused to do so, saying he had a horse to carry him and a king to feed him. By which he meant that he lived in the greatest comfort, never walking on his own feet or buying food with his own money. Horace alludes to this in his Epistles, when he puts into the mouth of Aristippus the words 'Tis a far better and more glorious thing / To ride a horse and be fed by a king.' Commenting on this passage, Acron tells us of this proverb, which is also recorded by Diogenianus. It is taken clearly from some tragedy, for it forms a line of verse, an anapaestic dimeter.

Καὶ κόρχορος ἐν λαχάνοις., Blue pimpernel too is a vegetable. Said normally of worthless men who are anxious to be thought of some importance. For blue pimpernel is a kind of greenstuff very little thought of, which is given by Pliny, book 21, in a list of vegetables. Elsewhere he records it among plants that grow wild. He tells us that blue pimpernel is a plant 'used for food in Alexandria, with crinkled leaves like those of the mulberry,' which has many medicinal uses. Theophrastus recalls the proverb in his work on plants, book 7 chapter 7, where he classifies corchorus among the vegetables that can be eaten either cooked or raw, but says that proverbially it had a bad name for bitterness. Suidas and Hesychius inform us that some thought the corchorus was a fish, much despised and of no value, like the hippurus. Aristophanes in the Wasps has 'And then we laid hands on the pimpernel.' Here too the scholiast has not failed to mention the proverb.

There is apparently some difference between that and κολοιὸς εν ταῖς Μούσαις , A jackdaw among the Muses, an ignoramus among eminent scholars, an inarticulate person among practised speakers. It will be rightly used also of men who advertise themselves by a display of spurious learning and brazenly interrupt those who really know. The jackdaw is a bird that cannot sing a note, but chatters tediously all the time. Related to this is a phrase used by Virgil in his Bucolics: 'A cackling goose amid the tuneful swans.' That swans are musical is so constantly repeated in the work of every poet that no fact is better known, although no one has had the good fortune to hear them singing. Nor is there any shortage of philosophers who try to explain the phenomenon. Aelian adds that they do not sing unless a west wind is blowing. Hence also the proverbial expression κύκνειον ἆσμα, A swan-song. Geese on the other hand greet one with a most tedious cackling. Hence when an ignorant man is chattering in educated company, it will be a suitable moment to use the adage A goose among swans.

Τὸν ἐπὶ φακῇ μῦθον, The story on lentils; we must supply You are telling. When someone introduces the name of some contemptible and worthless person into a conversation concerned with men of outstanding merit. So the phrase runs in all the current texts of Aulus Gellius, book 13 chapter 28. But I gladly subscribe to a correction by Ermolao, who restored the text so as to read τὸ ἐν φακῇ μῦρον, Perfume on the lentils. This is appropriate to any man or subject brought in at entirely the wrong moment in some quite unsuitable context; for instance, if you were to involve a philosopher in a riotous party of young men, or to start an argument over the wine on some serious theological topic, just like some silly fellow pouring perfume on a dish of ordinary lentils. According to Dioscorides, lentils also impair the eyesight, lie heavy on the stomach, damage the intestines, have a bad effect on sinews, lungs, and head, and cause nightmares. The adage will also be useful when several things that are unlike one another are confused. Fronto's words in Gellius run as follows: 'But mind you do not suppose that "many mortals" should always be used for "many men" and in all contexts, or it will be a case (to quote the Greek title of a satire of Varro's) of perfume on lentils.' Cicero also uses it in the first book of his Letters to Atticus, letter 19; 'A mission with full powers was to be sent' he says 'to visit the communities of Gaul and ensure that they should not join the Helvetii. The members were Quintus Metellus Creticus and Lucius Flaccus and, the perfume on the lentils, Lentulus Clodia's son.' Though this passage suffers from the same defect as that from Gellius. Aristotle quotes the adage in his De sensu et sensili: 'For there is much truth in the gibe levelled at Euripides by Stratis, that when cooking lentils it is a mistake to add perfume,' though of the monstrosities offered in that passage by our current texts, the less said the better. Athenaeus also cites it in book four of his Doctors at Dinner: 'I wish to give you now some wise advice: / When cooking lentils, add no unguent in,' from the Phoenissae of the comic poet Stratis. He also cites from Sopater's Necya: 'Here comes Odysseus, prince of Ithaca, / The perfume on our lentils! Courage, heart!' He further adduces the proverb-collector Clearchus as having included 'Perfume on the lentils' in his list of proverbs, adding that it occurs in Varro and that many Latin authors used it as a proverb but without knowing whence Varro got the iambic line. I think Aristophanes had it in mind when he says in the Peace: 'Won't you plant thyme thereon and pour on unguent?' This unguent I take to be oil to which scent has been added, something like what is used by hairdressers; otherwise, to pour ordinary oil on lentils would be nothing outrageous. Athenaeus in book two cites this trimeter from Eupolis: 'A nasty dish in an expensive sauce.' The vegetable of which we speak is among the most familiar in ancient authors, to be classed with onions, chives, and garlic, and some have even written a panegyric on lentils. Some things are admirable in themselves, but none the less will not go together; so the man of taste needs to learn what goes with what. The philosopher Diocles was celebrated as a gourmet. When asked by someone which was the better fish, conger or bass (lupus, wolf-fish, in Latin), 'One boiled,' he replied, 'the other grilled.' So Horace speaks of the poet who is no good in war, but 'has his point in peace.' Whenever a task is entrusted to someone not really suitable, you will fitly say 'This is perfume on lentils.'
I will add a further point. In the authorities I find this word spelt in two ways, sometimes with an acute accent φακήν and sometimes with a circumflex φακῆν, and this happens so often that it can scarcely be due to ignorance or accident. Hence I conjecture that φακῆν is derived by contraction from φακέαν; for we find φακεάς in Athenaeus. He also tells us that λεοντῆν is a contracted form for λεοντέαν. And so those who accept this derivation prefer to use φακῆ; those who prefer the common form have ignored the source of it, and written φακὴ and φὰκὴν.

More or less akin to this is an adage among the Hebrew proverbs, A gold ring in a pig's snout. For so it runs in Proverbs, chapter 11: 'As a jewel of gold in a swine's snout, so is a fair woman which is without discretion.' For use when something outstanding in itself is distributed in the most unsuitable places; if, for instance, wealth falls to the lot of a blockhead, beauty to a woman without brains, blue blood to a coward, eloquence to a rascal, public office to a man with no experience of the world. Not only do these gifts do those who possess them no credit, they actually make them more ridiculous. There was a time when some sort of gold ring worn in the ears was thought to be an ornament, especially among barbarians. Further, a bronze ring is inserted in a pig's nose so that they can do less damage to the fields by digging them up with their snouts, a habit peculiar to this creature, whence the idea that pigs first showed men how to till the soil. If you were to put a gold ring in a pig's snout, the result would be utterly ridiculous. In Greek a line of Menander is current which is much to the same effect: 'I hate the rogue who speaks like an honest man.' Here belongs a story told by Aulus Gellius in the Nights. When a man of very bad reputation had made a proposal likely to be of great public benefit, they arranged for it to be put forward by someone else who was honourable and right-thinking, and voted on in his name, regarding it as absurd that a bad man should be the source of a good plan or a good policy. To these we must add a line of Antiphanes cited in the sixth book of Athenaeus: 'A stinking sheatfish on a silver dish.' Some think that this fish, the silurus, was what we commonly call the sturgeon, of all fishes by far the most highly valued.

Close to this is the adage 'Ἐν ἐλεφαντίνῳ κουλεῷ τὸ μολύβδινον ξίφος., In an ivory scabbard a leaden sword, which arose from a remark made by Diogenes the Cynic philosopher. When a young man who was very handsome had said something disgusting and obscene, he said The scabbard is ivory, but the sword you draw is lead.'

Απαντοκτὼ, All eights. When we wish to convey that nothing is lacking, or when many things have a strong resemblance. The proverb is thought to have arisen as follows. The poet Stesichorus is said to have been buried in great state in the town of Catania, with a monument ingeniously designed entirely in groups of eight units - eight columns, eight steps, eight corners; and hence the phrase All eights gained its proverbial currency. It is also mentioned by Julius Pollux in his ninth book, where he treats of the game of dice, which consists, he says, of numbered throws one of which is called a Stesichorean, showing in fact eight pips, and gets its name from this monument. Some say that the man who brought the Corinthians together to form one city divided the whole body of citizens into eight tribes, and hence the phrase in common use. And some writers tell us, giving Evander as their authority, that there are eight gods who control the sum of things, Fire, Water, Earth, Sky, Moon, Sun, Mithras, and Night; but the Persians equate Mithras with the Sun. Others again say that there were eight kinds of contest in the Olympic games, and that that is the source of the adage All eights. If I too may hazard a conjecture regarding this conundrum, it might very well be derived from a story told by Plutarch in his essay 'On the Divine Sign of Socrates.' The people of Delos, he says, and the other Greeks received an answer from an oracle in Egypt that there would be no end to their troubles until they had doubled the altar that stood in Delos. Not having understood what the oracle meant, they foolishly doubled all four sides of the altar, and were surprised to find they had produced a solid eight times as large, through ignorance of the ratio which produces a linear double. On this problem, however, they consulted Plato, who was a leading expert in geometry, and he replied that the god had rebuked the Greeks for their lack of education and was telling them to make a proper study of Geometry. This proverb was clearly a favourite with the Emperor Heliogaba- lus; for Aelius Lampridius tells us that he had a trick of inviting to the same dinner-party eight bald men, eight men with bad sight, eight sufferers from the gout, eight deaf men, eight black men, eight very tall men, and eight men who were very fat and gross.

Πάντα μία κόνις., All is one and the same dust. Used of things that are indistinguishable. Lucian: 'But to us, all is (as they say) one and the same dust,' alluding to the ashes of the dead, between which the eye can see no difference. Related to the proverb I shall exhibit elsewhere, 'Of the same meal,' for the Ancients used 'meal' where we use 'flour.'

'Ἡ ἅμαξα τὸν βοῦν ἐλαύνει., literally The wagon drags the ox. Of something that happens the wrong way round: for instance, of a wife laying down rules for her husband, of a pupil correcting his master, of a people giving orders to their prince, of reason subservient to the emotions. Lucian in his Terpsion: 'But now, in the words of the proverb, the wagon often runs away with the ox.' The image derives from carts rolling backwards down a slope and dragging their oxen after them.

Ἀφ᾽ ἵππων ἐπ᾽ ὄνους., From horses to asses. When a man turns aside from an honourable vocation to something less reputable; for instance, a philosopher turned ballad-singer, a theologian turned schoolmaster, a merchant turned street-hawker, a steward turned cook, a blacksmith turned strolling player. It will also be suitable when someone has sunk from affluence to a humbler station. Procopius the sophist in one of his letters: 'As the proverb has it, we have come down from horses to asses.'

The opposite of this is that phrase in Plautus, To rise from asses to oxen, in the sense of passing from a lower walk of life into a richer stratum of society. For it is thus expressed in Plautus' Aulularia by Euclio, a man of modest means, when a rich man wanted to marry into his family:
The thought that has occurred to me is this:
You're influential, Megadorus, you
Are rich, and I'm the poorest of the poor.
If I give you my daughter, as I see it,
We're ox and ass; and when I'm yoked with you,
If I can't share the burden, I the ass
Fall in the mud, and you'd take no more heed
Than if I never had been born at all.
And you would hate me, my own class would flout me,
Nor could I find sure shelter if we parted;
Asses would use their teeth, oxen their horns.
'Tis a great risk, to rise from ass to ox.
So Plautus. The allegory looks as though it must be borrowed from some fable, which at the moment does not occur to me.

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Γῆς βάρος., A burden on the earth. Used of a man who is absolutely useless, who does nothing but make the earth heavier by the amount he weighs. It is recorded among the Greek adages, and takes its rise from Homer, where Achilles in the eighteenth book of the Iliad, resenting his idleness and his failure to go out to battle with the rest of the army, uses these words: 'while by the ships / I sit, a useless burden on the earth.' Again in the Odyssey, book 20,
Such is this homeless beggar that you bring,
His mind on food and drink, not honest toil
Nor deeds of might, vain burden on the earth.
Plato has it in the Theaetetus: 'They think they are being told that they are not merely absurd, vain burdens on the earth.' A pleasant story, which is I think by no means off the point, is told by Athenaeus in his eighth book. A well-known lyre-player called Stratonicus was in Corinth on a visit. An old woman stared at him intently for a long time; and at length he said 'What's the matter with you, my good woman? Why do you stare at me like that?' 'I was wondering' she replied 'how your mother could have borne you for ten months, when it is pain and grief to the city that has to bear with you for a single day.' Such people would be well matched by the epitaph which according to Athenaeus, book 10, marked the grave of Timocreon of Rhodes, a poet but also a glutton and a drunkard:
I ate, I drank, I cursed, and all is said:
Now I, Timocreon of Rhodes, am dead.

Ἀράβιος αὐλητής., An Arabian piper, or Ἀράβιος ἄγγελος., An Arabian messenger, is used of those who once they have started on something never stop. This is said by Horace to be a besetting sin of singers: when invited to sing they can never be induced to start, and if they start unasked they never cease. A phrase is cited from Menander: T see I have aroused an Arabian pipe.' Julius Pollux in his chapter on talkative people recalls the adage in the form An Arabian pipe. The Medea of Cantharus is also cited: 'He started up an Arabian on the lyre.' And this line about the Arabian piper is common in Greek: 'Plays for one drachma, and will stop for four,' because it took a very small fee to induce him to play and nothing but a large one could stop him. The origin of the adage is supposed to be the reluctance of free-born people in the old days to learn the pipes as a thing beneath them; the art was confined to slaves, most of whom were produced by Arabia. It then became so fashionable among the free-born that anyone who could not play was thought uneducated, until Alcibiades threw away his pipes, having seen in the mirror how misshapen they made his face. It will also suit sufferers from the disease for which Greek has the word aperantologia, the inability to stop talking. Sophocles has written something to their address: 'Who loves to talk for ever has not seen / How grievously he tires his company.'

Τὸ τέχνιον πᾶσα γαῖα τρέφει, A skilled man need never starve. A proverbial maxim, the point of which is that there is no more reliable provision for a journey than a good education or some technical skill. You cannot be stripped of these by robbers, and wherever you go they keep you company without adding any weight to your baggage. Suetonius tells us that Nero once received from the astrologers a forecast that his empire would be taken from him; and hence Nero's celebrated answer: 'Art fills your hand in every land,' by which he hoped to secure some indulgence for his own efforts in music, which is a luxury to a prince and his bread and butter to a man in private station. Consequently, when he understood that his hour had come, he kept on saying 'That such an artist as myself should perish!' as though it were an outrage that a performer good enough to make a living anywhere in the world should now be starved to death. (For on that point I do not accept the opinion of those commentators who offer a different explanation for this passage in Suetonius.) Nor was Nero ever more infuriated by criticism than when someone had said he played badly. The same thing happened to Dionysius tyrant of Syracuse, who when he was deposed from power opened a school in Corinth, where he taught small boys reading, writing, and music. The words Suetonius quotes are clearly a six-foot iambic line, which has been corrupted by the alteration of a few syllables; it will perhaps be mended thus: To Τὸ τέχνιον γε πᾶσα γαῖα ἐκτρέφει . Among the Greek maxims there is a line of the same sort, which is not very different from our proverb: Λιμὴν ἀτυχίας ἐστὶ ἀνθρώποις τέχνη., 'Skill is a man's best harbour in distress.' Sensible men therefore, even if they have abundant resources, compel their children all the same to learn some sort of skill, so that they may have some way to earn their keep even if luck changes and they lose all their money or are condemned to go into exile. But as things are now a great many people who have no money of their own grow old in the households of the rich; and if they are turned out from there, they must either beg their bread or take up what they have not laid down, against Plato's principle. The author of the Latin Cornu copiae cites a proverb very like this, which was I suppose in common circulation: Sua cuique ars pro viatico est, Every skilled traveller can pay his way. This is to be sure the most respectable sort of journey-money, provided the skill itself is respectable. But now the world is full of travellers who possess no skill, but carry round a stock of licenses and dispensations, as they call them, which they have purchased and must sell again to pay their way.

Meaning, You were not in this class of person. A metaphor from the album, the whitewashed board on which in old days the names of jurors were posted. Pliny in the preface to his History of the World: 'When I was composing this work, you were not on this roster,' you were not, that is, in the number of those whom I believed would read it. There was also the praetor's roster or album, on which laws and approved forms of action were written up. In the first book of the Pandects, in the title De edendo, Labeo, as cited by Ulpian, 'says that a man performs the act of publication who produces his adversarium to the album and makes clear what he intends to put forward.' And in this passage at any rate the word must mean, not the adversary with whom he has a dispute but his adversaria, the notes he has taken down extempore on a tablet to refresh his memory. Cicero uses the word in this sense in his speech Pro Roscio, more than once. Andrea Alciati thinks we should read adversaria and not adversarium, in book three of his Dispunctiones. Besides which, in the second book of the same work in the first title much is said about the album. Quintilian in book 11 of the Institutiones: 'Some of whom transferred their attention to the album and the subdivisions of the law,' pouring scorn on the specialists in legal niceties and forms of action, who derived their knowledge of the law from the praetor's roster rather than from the works of eminent lawyers. Livy in the ninth book of his first decade: 'He published the civil law, which was enshrined in the secret archives of the priests, and posted a calendar near the market-place on a whitewashed board, so that it might be possible to know when action at law was permitted.' Apuleius in book 6 of his Metamorphoses speaks of an album or roster; for when Jove is to make a speech to the assembled gods, he makes him begin as follows: 'Ye gods, whose names are entered in the Muses' roster.' In these words I seem to detect a veiled but elegant allusion by the writer to the gods who have been invented by the poets, as though only those are members of the divine fraternity who have been established in it by the Muses, who supply poets with their inspiration.

A proverbial exaggeration, used of men who never lose their temper and are of a placid disposition, derived from the nature of a fluid which is more silent and smoother than any other. Plautus in the Poenulus: 'I'll see to it: you'll find this dog as smooth as any oil.' Oil is so tranquil in nature that it can even calm the sea, the most cruel thing there is, and 'that is the reason, they say, why divers sprinkle oil from their mouths, because it tames that element which is so wild by nature, and carries light down with them.' The authority for this is the second book of Pliny. It is confirmed by Plutarch, and the reason for the practice is given, in his essay 'On Natural Causes.' Again, in the sixth decade of his 'Table-talk,' when giving the reason why Homer, who mentions so many liquids, reserves his epithet ὑγρὸν, which means wet or liquid, for oil alone, he demonstrates that oil contains nothing rough, but is smooth from every point of view, and therefore gives very clear reflections, as mirrors do. Besides which, when shaken or struck it makes no sound, unlike all other fluids, nor has it any antipathy to fire, but feeds it in silence. Lastly, there is no liquid which covers so wide an area when spread over the body, or takes longer to dry, or is more effective as an emollient or demulcent. Plato too uses this adage in the Theaetetus when speaking of knowledge, for he compares those placid natures which approach the business of learning and discussion in an equable and tranquil spirit to oil with its steady flow: 'But he makes such a placid and cautious, yet at the same time effectual, approach to learning and discussion, always in such a gentle fashion like a stream of oil silently flowing, that you wonder how anyone of that age could behave like this.'

Very similar to this is a phrase used by Cicero in his Letters to His Brother Quintus, book 2, where he says 'Let me tell you that in public affairs and in my private feuds I am and shall be just what you think I ought to be - as soft as the tip of the ear.' Ammianus, book 19: 'In other things unduly severe, in this department he was, as the saying goes, as soft as the tip of the ear.' The image is derived from that part of the ear which is the softest, most flexible, and most pliant part of the human body, having no bone in it to stiffen it, no cartilage to harden it, and no sinew to stretch it tight.

Απίου πεπαίτερος, As ripe as a pear. The same image is used by Theocritus: 'Sure riper than a pear is he.' Apios in Greek means a radish, or a kind of pear.

To the same class belongs τῆς σπογγιᾶς μαλακώτερος, As soft as a sponge. For this is the phrase used by a toady in some comedy which is quoted by Plutarch in his essay 'On the Difference between Flatterer and Friend':
Send me, Nicomachus, to fight this warrior.
Unless I thrash the wretch into a pumpkin
And make his face as soft as any sponge ...
In the same way they said 'As soft as a pumpkin.' So Theopompus, cited by Athenaeus, book 2: 'Things have become as soft as a pumpkin or a gourd.' To this class belongs a thing he quotes from Epicharmus: 'As for me, I'm mild as mallow/ because mallow is a vegetable with relaxing qualities. Then there is 'As soft as any fancy-boy.' Plautus in the Aulularia: 'With all this beating I'm as tender as any fancy-boy.' For the Ancients called dancers and pantomime- actors 'fancy-boys' because of the gestures they used when they sang. Catullus likewise: 'Thallus you tender fancy-boy, as soft as rabbit fur.'

Τοῖς εὐτυχοῦσι και τρίμηνα παιδία., How happy he who has a three- months' child. A proverbial line, pointing to the happy position of princes and rich men, whose flatterers turn everything to their credit and who regard themselves as having a licence to do just as they please; so much so that what in a man of the people is disapproved of as a great disgrace is cried up in them as a virtue. The origin of the proverb is made clear by Suetonius Tranquillus, who begins his life of the Emperor Claudius with these words: 'The father of the Emperor Claudius, whose forename was Drusus but had previously been Decimus and later Nero, had married Livia when she was already carrying Augustus, and within three months she had her baby, giving rise to the suspicion that he was the result of her adultery with his stepfather. Whether true or not, it made immediately popular the line "How happy he who has a three-months' child!"' For births in the seventh, tenth, and eleventh months are legitimate; in the fourth and eighth they seldom survive and are very rare; in the third month viable births are unknown. The authority is Pliny, book 7 chapter 5.

'To pluck by the ear' was used by the Ancients in the sense of 'to remind,' the image being taken from a traditional practice by which those who intended to bring a lawsuit against another party plucked by the ear a man whom they proposed to call as a witness, as though they wished to refresh his memory. Hence that phrase in Horace's Satires: 'May I call you as a witness? whereupon I turn my ear towards him.' In old days the forehead was sacred to Genius, as Servius tells us in his commentary on Virgil's Silenus, the fingers to Minerva, the knees to Pity, and in the same way the patron of the ear was the goddess of memory, whom the Greeks called Mnemosyne. Virgil in his Silenus:
My chosen theme was kings and battlefields,
But Cynthius, warning, plucked me by the ear:
'Fat, Tityrus, should be a shepherd's ewes,
But fine and delicate the song he sings.'
Which Calphurnius imitates in his Bucolics with: 'For grudging want oft plucks me by the ear / And bids me mind small things.' Calphurnius gave the proverb fresh elegance by transferring it from persons to things; though 'want' in this passage can be taken for a deity. Seneca in book 4 of his De beneficiis: 'I shall not give it you as a present; I shall redeem my undertaking and pluck myself by the ear. I will punish my rash promise with a loss.' And again in book 2: 'I will have a word with myself and pluck myself by the ear' (meaning, I will give myself a lecture, to ensure that I do not make the same mistake again). He uses it in the same way in other passages as well, for instance in one of his letters: 'Let someone then be on the watch, who can pluck us by the ear from time to time, send common rumour packing and put the other side when public opinion speaks well of us.'

There is an exaggerated expression current as a proverb Οὗτος ἄλλος Ἡρακλῆς., He's a second Hercules, used of somebody who is immensely energetic and shows great endurance. A play with this title is on record among the Menippeans of Terentius Varro, and it would be surprising if it were not proverbial. Aristotle in book seven of his Eudemian Ethics: 'For a friend wishes to be, as the saying goes, a second Hercules, another this.' Plutarch says that Theseus was given this as a nickname because he did many valiant deeds with Hercules as his model. Laertius in his Lives of the Philosophers tells us that the philosopher Cleanthes also was commonly called a second Hercules because of his exceptional endurance whatever the burden, so much so that he spent his nights raising water out of a well in order to earn enough to keep himself by day, and was nicknamed Phreantles instead of Cleanthes; yet with unabated energy he did marvellous work in the daytime in philosophy. Clearchus,5 cited by Zenodotus, offers us another story as the source of this adage. He says that Briareus, another person who was also given the name Hercules, went to Delphi, where he carried off a number of the treasures and monuments which were preserved there in accordance with some ancient custom. He then proceeded to what they call the Pillars of Hercules, and in the same way seized what there was there. After that, the Tyrian Hercules came to Delphi to consult the oracle, and the deity replied 'He's a second Hercules.' And this oracle, he says, passed on into an adage. Many people refer the origin of this saying to a certain Titormus, an oxherd who is reported to have shown himself in many instances superior to Milo. Milo, confessing himself beaten, raised his hands to heaven and cried 'O Jupiter, is this a second Hercules you have begotten for us?' Here belongs that remark in Theocritus' Herdsmen: 'They say he vied in might with Hercules,' to which the herdsman replies: T too beat Pollux, mother used to say.' For Pollux was a champion boxer. And the nasty Greek toady in Juvenal compares his rich and flabby patron to Hercules 'holding Antaeus high o'er mother earth.' Macrobius in the third book of his Saturnalia writes as follows: 'The Salii he assigns to Hercules on account of their rich stores of recondite learning, for that deity is regarded by the pontifices also as identical with Mars. And so it is stated in Varro's Menippean, the title of which is He's a second Hercules, for in the course of a long account of Hercules, he proved that he was the same as Mars.' It was the same in Rome: a man of prodigious strength called Ruticellus was nicknamed Hercules. He could pick up his mule, as Varro records, who is quoted by Pliny, book 7. Whereas Hippocrates the physician 'received by decree from the Greeks the same honours as were paid to Hercules, by way of reward for having foretold the onset of a pestilence from Illyria and dispatched his pupils to the various cities to deal with it,' for Hercules too was held to be alexikakos, an averter of mischief. The authority for this is Pliny again, in the same book. In fact this name Hercules seems normally to have been applied in common speech to all men of exceptional strength, just as a serious and wise man was called a Cato. Varro lists forty-three men who bore the name Hercules, adding that it was given as a distinction to anyone who had performed some great feat of strength. Macrobius too bears witness in his Saturnalia that many shared this name before ever Amphitryon had a stepson. Similarly generals of outstanding courage were given the name Achilles, among whom was Lucius Siccius Dentatus, known for his prodigious courage as the Roman Achilles: he had fought in one hundred and twenty engagements against the enemy, and had never received a wound except in front. The authority for this is Aulus Gellius, book 2 chapter 11. Last but not least they give the name Achillean to any argument or demonstration that cannot be surmounted or impugned.

Used of a man of whom you disapprove intensely and who surpasses the beasts themselves in wickedness. Directed against a rhetorician called Regulus, who is painted in his true colours by Pliny in several places in his letters, where this adage is also recorded. But before his time Cicero had aimed this shaft at Clodius in his speech Pro donto sua: 'He drafted death-warrants for you, he was your confidant and your right-hand man, this foulest not merely of two-legged creatures but of four-legged ones too, when you ruined the commonwealth.' The Emperor Alexander uses the same image in Aelius Lampridius: 'Lately, members of the Senate, as you will no doubt remember, when that most disgusting not only of two-legged creatures but of four-legged ones too put forward the name of Antoninus'; by which he meant Heliogabalus, of all emperors that ever were the most effeminate, such that he might well be called the Roman Sardanapalus. In this phrase the use of a common noun adds a fresh emphasis which is not without its merits, just as we often say 'no living creature' when we mean 'no man.'

'Ἀδαμάντινος, Adamantine, to take the place of 'inexorable' or 'inexhaust- ible.' This proverb owes its existence to the incredible hardness of the stone in question, of which Pliny in book 37 writes as follows: 'Pieces of adamant are detected when placed on the anvil, for when struck they reject the blow with such violence that iron splits in two and anvils themselves are shattered. Its hardness in fact is indescribable, and at the same time it is naturally proof against fire and never grows hot. Hence its Greek name, which means when translated "indomitable force".' Thus Pliny. Hence anything invincible and impregnable we call 'adamantine.' Hesiod: 'Their stubborn souls were made of adamant.' Theocritus in Amaryllis: 'She'll spare even me a glance maybe; / No piece of adamant is she.' Nor is it irrelevant that Homer imagines Vulcan catching Venus and Mars in a net knotted with links of adamant, or that Virgil made out of adamant the gates and pillars of the infernal regions. Socrates in Plato's Gorgias speaks of 'adamantine arguments' by which he means 'inexpugnable.' Again in book 10 of the Republic he uses 'adamantine grip' of grasping something firmly: 'A man must hold this opinion in a grip of adamant before he descends to the world below.' Plutarch in his life of Dion: 'As a result of this, the relaxation relating to this young man advanced and spread little by little, and eventually softened and destroyed the adamantine chains by which the elder Dionysius had said that he would leave the monarchy anchored.' Horace in the Odes: 'Or Mars in adamantine armour clad,' and in another passage: 'Let harsh Necessity but choose to drive / In your roof-tree her adamantine nails.' In the same way Augustine attacking Manicheus: 'But when I proceed to demonstrate the explicit and inescapable reasoning which follows from these propositions and is attached to them, as the saying goes, by chains of adamant.' Finally, a certain number of writers have earned the nickname 'adamantine' by their indefatigable endurance in research, the scholar Didymus for example and Origen the theologian. Pindar uses it to much the same effect in his Isthmians in the fifth ode, where he praises a certain Lampon who stands out among other men of great strength as Naxian emery does among other stones: 'You might say that this man among other athletes was like a Naxian whetstone, master of metals, among other stones.' Pliny, book 36 chapter 7, speaks of Naxian emery, which for long was highly regarded, and says that from it the whetstones are called Naxian which occur naturally in the island of Cyprus. Naxos however is one of the Cyclades, not far from Paros, whose marble is celebrated for its brilliant white colour. The scholiast on Pindar puts this Naxos in Crete, on what authority is uncertain. Pliny puts a town called Naxos in Sicily. Stephanus indicates that this name, like so many others, was shared by several places, and adds that Cretan whetstone was called Naxian, with a Greek name Naxias. But he suggests that this proverb applies more to the discrimination and testing of things that were liable to mislead than to physical strength, of which I have spoken above in connection with Lydian stone. We should do well therefore to consider whether for Cyprus in Pliny we ought not to read Crete or Naxos.

By a similar metaphor Hard as iron and Tough as bronze are used of things of which we wish to convey that they are solid and firmly fixed. Virgil: 'Had I an hundred tongues, an hundred mouths, / A voice of iron.' In which passage he seems to have reproduced Homer's famous lines in the second book of the Iliad: 'Had I ten tongues, ten mouths, / A voice unwearied and a heart of bronze.' Horace in the first of his Epistles: 'Be this your wall of bronze,' of an unshakeable resolve. Homer in book 22 of the Iliad: 'Truly an iron heart is in thy breast.' Again in Odyssey, book 5: 'In my breast there lies / No heart of iron, but compassionate.' And in the Iliad, book 23, he calls the power of fire strong as iron: 'Fire strong as iron comes into his heart.' It is rather different when Cicero says of Atilius that his writing is hard as iron, meaning that he is harsh and unskilled. In the arts we call things hard which lack skill, and soft when they have the grace of perfect art. Cicero's words, in the first book of the De finibus, run as follows: '... but think I must read the Electra badly translated by Atilius; who is described by Licius as a writer with an iron style. But he was a writer all the same, so that he must be read.' He speaks of him again in his On Divination as a very harsh bad poet.

A similar image is to be found in Persius' words 'My heart-strings are not of horn.' For an animal's horns are very hard, and have no sensation, and so are hoofs too. Though the adjective might be derived not so much from cornu, horn as from cornus, a cornel-tree, the wood of which is notoriously hard. Persius' lines are in his first satire, and run as follows:
When I take pen in hand, should something good
Emerge (a phoenix this; but if it should,
However rare the bird), I was not born
Afraid of praise; my heart-strings are not horn.
Hence those who are deficient in human sympathies are said to have hearts of oak, adamant, flint, iron, and horn.

Αἰάντειος γέλως, An Ajax-laugh. Of those who laugh without reason and like madmen, and will be aptly used of men who enjoy pleasures which end in death and who will soon be dead, or of those who rejoice in doing wrong and will one day pay the penalty. A laugh of this kind is admirably described by Homer in book 20 of the Odyssey: 'But among the suitors Pallas Athene roused laughter unquenchable, driving them out of their wits. And they were laughing now with alien mouths; dripping with blood was the meat they ate, and their eyes brimmed with tears, for their hearts were set on lamentation.' The adage took its rise from the story of Ajax. Ajax is said to have so greatly resented that Ulysses should be preferred to himself in the choice of a successor to the armour of Achilles that in his anger he went mad, and fell with drawn sword upon a flock of farm animals under the impression that he was laying low the Greek army. He then hung two great swine from a beam and flogged them, thinking they were Agamemnon and Ulysses, who were special objects of his wrath as being the judge and the winner. So he attacked these swine with peals of laughter and all the abuse that his 'glittering bile' suggested. Then, when he returned to his senses, partly from shame and partly fear, he killed himself. It will be turned not unsuitably against those who laugh without reason which is commonly regarded as proof of insanity or foolishness. This finds support from the proverbial line 'The fool will laugh when 'tis no laughing matter.'

Κυνὸσ δίκην, A dog's revenge, is a Macedonian adage, applied to those who unexpectedly pay the penalty to the victims of some injury they have inflicted in the past. It arises from the sad end of Euripides the tragic poet. In Macedonia there is a village which takes its name from the Thracians who once lived there. One of King Archelaus' hounds once went astray and found its way there; and the Thracians, as their custom is, killed it, offered it as a sacrifice, and ate it. When Archelaus heard what had happened, he fined them a talent. Being unable to pay, they persuaded Euripides to appeal to the king to remit the penalty, and he did so. Later however, when he was walking in a forest by himself, and Archelaus was returning from hunting, the hounds surrounded the poet, tore him in pieces, and ate him; and it was widely believed that these hounds were the offspring of the hound which the Thracians had sacrificed. Hence the adage gained currency in Macedon, A dog's revenge; with which one must understand 'He has suffered' or whatever suits best. Valerius Maximus in his ninth book, in the chapter on rare forms of death, records that Euripides had been invited to dinner by Archelaus king of Macedon, and was torn in pieces by hounds on his way home that night. The story that these hounds had been set on him by a rival is confirmed by Aulus Gellius in book 15, chapter 20, of the Attic Nights. Suidas adds that these rivals were Arrideus a Macedonian and Crateuas a Thessalian, two poets who were jealous of Euripides' reputation; and they made up the story that he was torn in pieces by the king's hounds. There is another version, to the effect that he was dismembered not by hounds but by women, late one night when he was on his way to visit a youth called Craterus who was Archelaus' bedfellow. Gellius too bears witness that Euripides was a misogynist, a woman-hater. As regards the earlier theory, a not so very dissimilar tale is told by Plutarch in his dialogue 'A Comparison between Living Creatures of Land and Sea.' King Pyrrhus, he says, was once on a journey, when he came upon a dog on guard over the corpse of a murdered man; and when the king discovered that it had gone for over two days without food and could not be dragged away from the corpse, he gave instructions for the dead man to be buried and the dog to be brought away by his own entourage. A few days later a levy was held to recruit soldiers for the army, and as the king sat there they all filed past him. The dog was there too, and lay very quiet to start with, until he saw his master's murderers filing past; at which he flew into a fury and attacked them noisily, barking constantly and looking back at Pyrrhus from time to time, in such a way that not Pyrrhus only but all those present had their suspicions aroused. As a result, with several other clues coming in, as so often happens, from other sources, the two were arrested, confessed their crime, and were duly punished. He adds that in the same way the men who murdered Hesiod were identified by Hesiod's dog, and paid the penalty. After this, he tells the story of something which happened, he says, in his own day. A man broke into a temple of Aesculapius, seized various gold and silver offerings, and escaped secretly and (as he thought) undetected. But a temple watchdog - his name was Capparus, for he deserves not to perish without a name - when he saw that none of the temple staff paid any attention to his barking, pursued the escaping criminal. To begin with, though stones were thrown at him, he would not leave the man; when day broke he kept out of range, but watched him and followed at a distance, refusing all offers of food. When the man went to sleep, the dog lay down near by, and when he moved the dog followed in the same fashion. If they met any travellers on the road, he rushed up to them wagging his tail, but that one man he attacked, barking furiously. This news was passed from hand to hand, and at the same time both dog and man were recognized; they seized the criminal and carried him off to punishment, preceded by the dog now wild with joy at the success of his hunt for the guilty man. So it was decreed that the dog should have his meals at the public expense, and this duty was entrusted to the priests. But we must return to our proverb. Clearly, it can properly be used in this further context, when the author of some wrongdoing is deliberately concealed; for example, when a man's enemy is poisoned, and the story is put about that he died of a fever, or when a prince sends his servants to someone's house and strips it, and they spread a report that it has been attacked by burglars, or when a tyrant makes away with a man he hates and puts all the blame for it on his officials, as though they had done it without his knowledge. This seems to be the origin of a saying widely current in Germany in our own day when something happens which undoubtedly causes damage though the culprit is in doubt and no one can be held responsible; they say it must have been caused by the bite of a dog.

A man's private property is called his kingdom. Thus Meliboeus in Virgil says: 'Far in the future shall these wondering eyes / Behold my kingdom - some few ears of grain?' Scaevola, a character in Cicero's Orator. 'Had we not been in your kingdom, we should not have put up with that,' meaning 'on your country estate,' for he was addressing Crassus in the country- house at Tusculum which at that time was Crassus' property. Besides which there is a popular saying to the effect that every man is king in his own house, and it looks as though this has come down from Antiquity, for in Homer in the first book of the Odyssey there is a line 'But in my house I will myself be king.'

The phrase In your grove and shrine is found in Plautus in the sense of 'in your power, within your discretion, under your protection, in your hands.' It is a metaphor from the shrines and groves dedicated to deities. It differs to some extent from Cicero's expression in his speech in defence of Aulus Caecina: 'You are now in my camp and garrison,' meaning 'You are on my side, what you say supports my case.'

Plautus uses a similar image in the Casina: 'He knows that if he gets his way in this, / The thing he loves will be safe in his own fold,' meaning, it will be secure and ready to hand, for what is shut up within our own walls is surely and safely ours. The words are used of an old man who was scheming to get the servant-girl he had taken a fancy to married to his farm-manager, the plan being that he could then enjoy her in the country when he pleased, and his wife be none the wiser. Again in the Rudens: 'My master is to arbitrate, and I / To appear before him - safe in my own fold.'

When we wish to convey that a man is so much bound to us by what we have done for him that he is now wholly and certainly ours, we say that he is 'at our service,' using a word that really means he owes us bronze money, because in early times all money was coined in bronze, the use of gold for striking coin not yet having been invented. I remember reading this in Cicero in book 13 of the Letters to his Friends: 'And, I must say, I have always had the feeling that you were at my service on account of your connection with my friend Lamia and your special relation to him.' Again in book 15: 'Thank you for introducing Marcus Fabius to me as a new friend, though I gain nothing out of that since he has been at my service for many years now and is a man I like very much.'

Ἀπὸ τῶν ἁπαλῶν ὀνύχων, Since the time their nails were soft, in the sense of 'from earliest childhood.' A metaphor from puppies whose claws have not yet grown hard. Cicero: 'Since your nails were soft, as they say in Greek.' Horace in the Odes: 'And ere her nails are hard, her head / Is full of wanton thoughts of bed.' Plutarch in his essay 'On the Education of Children': 'in proportion as they love their children from the heart and, as the phrase goes, from the finger-nails,' meaning from the earliest days of childhood. He speaks of mothers who feed their own babies at the breast.

The same sense is conveyed by 'From the cradle,' meaning from a man's earliest years. Plautus in the Pseudolus: 'This slave now, from Carystos newly come, / What sense has he made since he left the cradle?' Livy too: 'Steeped from the cradle in the hatred of tribunes.' Cicero uses 'the cradle of an orator' for his first introduction to fundamental principles. And Virgil: 'The cradle of our race.' Aurelius in book one of the Pandects, in the title De officio praefecti praetorio: 'Such was the cradle from which the prefect's authority took its rise, and it has grown deservedly to such proportions that from the praetorian prefects there is no right of appeal.' Aristotle in the Ethics, book 2, uses 'from infancy,' 'from childhood,' and cites the latter phrase from Plato. The passage in Plato is in the tenth book of the Laws: 'So now, believing the stories we heard from our nurses and from our mothers from earliest childhood when we were still fed on milk.' 'Toys' can be used in the same way for the years of infancy.

Related to the two I have just mentioned, From the cradle and Since the time their nails were soft. Cicero in book 3 of his Tusculan Disputations: 'But now, from the moment we come into the light of day and are allowed to live, we pass our days right from the start in every form of perversity and in most erroneous opinions, so that we seem almost to have imbibed error with our mother's milk.'

Πρὸ τῆς νίκης τὸ ἐγκώμιον ᾄδεις., You sing your song of triumph before you have won the day. Used of a man who boasts prematurely when the battle is not yet over. In Greece those who had shown gallantry in battle received a tribute of praise in prose or verse, the special name of which was an encomium. We still have a poem by Theocritus in praise of Ptolemy which is called his 'Encomium,' and Lucian's encomium on Demosthenes. In Rome ovations, supplications, and triumphs were the reward of valour, so that one can use the phrase 'Before you have won the day you get your triumph ready.' Plato in the Lysis: 'Before your victory you write your own triumph-song and sing it.' On the same lines is Plato's remark in the Theaetetus: 'We shall look like cocks of a very poor strain if we drop the argument suddenly and start crowing before we have won'; for it is that creature's habit to celebrate its victory by crowing. Here belongs that aphorism I have recorded elsewhere on the authority of Solon, 'Look to the end of a long life,' and also Pindar's observation in the Isthmians, 'Even for those who strive the outcome is all uncertain till they reach their goal at last.'

Πάντας γ᾽ ὑφέλκων οἷα μαγνῆτις λίθος., All things attracting, like a magnet stone. This line is cited by Suidas from Pisides, and has the look of a proverb. The metaphor is drawn from the natural quality of a stone which attracts iron to itself and holds it there, which some suppose to be identical with the so-called Heraclean stone of which I have spoken elsewhere, in the proverb Lydius lapis. This remarkable effect is extolled by Pliny, book 36 chapter 16, as follows: 'What is more difficult to move than solid stone? Yet nature supplies it with feeling and hands. What so hard, so doughty a fighter as iron? Yet it capitulates and does what it is told, and it is attracted by the magnet; that substance which masters everything else runs towards something unsubstantial, and the closer it approaches the more it is paralysed, held fast and clasped in its embrace. For this reason another name for it is siderites, the iron-catching stone, and some call it Heracleon; magnet was the name given it by its discoverer, according to Nicander, and it is found in India.' Thus far I have given Pliny's actual words. Among many kinds of magnet he speaks of one from Ethiopia, the pull of which is so powerful that it will draw to itself not only iron but another magnet, and the stone is therefore so highly valued that it fetches its own weight in silver. He mentions also one called haematite, which exerts no particular force in attracting iron but is remarkable for another peculiar property. Not only is it blood-red in colour (hence its name), but if rubbed, it oozes blood. This stone, then, has such miraculous powers that it has given rise to a proverb. Suidas cites Euripides, from the Oeneus: 'Like the magnet-stone, / It draws the mind and lets it go again.' This is related to one which I have given elsewhere: 'Drawing to itself, as a north-easter draws the clouds.'

To carry wood to the forest is to wish to supply someone with things of which he already has a large supply. Horace in his Satires:
When I, born overseas, would write in Greek,
In after-midnight hour, when dreams speak plain,
I saw Quirinus, and he said 'Refrain:
Wood to the forest would be no more mad
Than to the serried ranks of Greeks to add.'
On the same lines we speak of carrying water to the sea. I have used both images together in one of my epigrams: 'To send my Pietro verses sure would be / Wood to the forest, water to the sea.' They both agree with one I have recorded elsewhere, Owls to Athens.

Τό φῶς ἡλίῳ δανίζεις, You are lending light to the sun. When we give a very learned man a lesson, or offer advice to an extremely wise man, or try to expound something quite obvious in itself, or deliver a panegyric on something that is famous enough in its own right. For the sun is reckoned to be the source of all light, accustomed to lend light and not borrow it. This is recorded in the collection which goes under Plutarch's name. There is something very like it in Quintilian: those, he says, who try to shed light on things clear enough in themselves behave as a man would who should try 'to add some mortal gleams to the sun in his splendour.'

A proverbial expression, used ironically of those who ask others to give them what they themselves have plenty of at home. Cicero, writing to his brother Quintus: 'Since it seems that by now the springs themselves are thirsty, I will write what you ask, if I have room.' He means that his brother is a more fluent versifier than he is himself, although he asks for a piece of verse just as though he himself was barren in that line. Cicero again, in the Letters to Atticus, book 12: 'That he should have come, not to a thirsty spring but to Erine, as you say in your letter, especially at such a difficult moment.'

This will suit those who shift responsibility for their own faults onto something else or who are, as it were, so expressly adapted to some form of wickedness that they cannot fail to commit it. Catullus, attacking Caesar: 'Mentula makes cuckolds? With a name like that, what else would you expect? So the proverb runs: The pot picks its own greens.' A pot is born for the cooking of greens; alternatively, it would be most absurd to make the pot responsible for its choice of greens, for it will cook only what has been put into it by someone else, so the pot is not to blame but the person who puts rotten greens into it. There is not much to choose between this and the phrase quoted as proverbial by Tertullian from Homer: 'Iron of itself draws a man on.' This I have dealt with in another place, in the proverb Remove the opportunity to go astray. Likewise: The pot helped itself to the lentils.

Οἰδίποδος ἀρά, The curse of Oedipus. Of tragical and great disasters. The collectors of Greek adages cite the following story from Aeschylus. Eteocles and Polynices, in accordance with custom, used to send their father a forepart from every sacrifice. One day, through ignorance and inattention, they sent him a haunch, which is one of the hinder parts; and he, thinking this was done to insult him rather than from forgetfulness and inadvertence, laid a terrible curse on them. Others tell how Oedipus, discovering that he had killed his own father and had been living with his mother as her husband, tore out his eyes with his own hands. When this became public knowledge, the local people drove Oedipus out of their city. As he went into exile, he laid a curse on his sons for failing to defend their father in his calamity. And his curses were by no means ineffectual, for the young men killed each other, their mother committed suicide, and Oedipus himself was killed by a thunderbolt. The nature of these imprecations is roughly suggested by Diogenes the Cynic philosopher in Laertius, who used to say humorously that he had incurred 'the curses in the tragedy,' for he had no home and no city, was deprived of a native country, was poor and a vagabond, and lived from day to day. Sophocles in the Oedipus tyrannus makes his hero actually unaware who it is that Phoebus has said must be exiled as having polluted the country with his crimes; and he calls down many curses on the culprit, that is, on his own head. Euripides in the Phoenissae: 'He lays most frightful curses on his children'; it is Jocasta speaking of Oedipus. Again in the Oedipus Coloneus he makes Oedipus lay a curse on Polynices, praying that he may be killed by his brother and kill him in return:
These curses with you take,
Which I call down on you. Ne'er may you win
Your native land by arms, and ne'er return
To hollow Argos. By your brother's hand
May you be killed, and kill him in your turn
Who drove you out. This curse I lay upon you
And call the ancestral deeps of hell to witness,
and what follows. Horace calls this form of cursing 'execration' in the Odes: 'With curses I will hound you; no sacrifice shall purge my execration.' That this kind of imprecation by parents on their children was a formidable thing is shown by Homer in the Iliad, book 9, where Phoenix tells how he was exposed to his father's imprecations and how what they had called down upon his head came to pass. Homer's lines run as follows: 'He prays that never on his knees may sit / A son of mine, and the gods heard his prayer.'

Appropriate to men of humble station and modest means, who none the less live as well as their resources permit. Plautus in the Stichus:
Rich men from gilded cups and goblets drink,
We from our Samian crocks; - and yet we live,
We live and build the walls we can afford.
So Plautus. Even today there is a popular saying to the effect that Little birds build little nests.

Terence in the Eunuchus: 'How all things do change!' This pronouncement means that in the affairs of mortal men nothing lasts for ever, nothing stands still, but all things ebb and flow as it were in a series of tides. By these turns of fortune all things are conveyed from one set of men to another, empire and wealth and glory and happiness and learning and all else whether desirable or undesirable. Sophocles in the Oedipus Coloneus has an eloquent descrip- tion of these vicissitudes in human affairs:
The gods alone know neither age nor death;
All else almighty Time confounds in one.
Earth's strength decays, decays the strength of man;
Faith dies and falsehood burgeons in its place.
The same wind never lasts 'twixt friend and friend,
City and city; but for some forthwith,
And for some later, what was sweet turns sour
And what was hateful pleases in its stead.
Homer too in Iliad 6: 'Victory changes sides from man to man,' and again in Iliad 18: 'The god of war / Impartial slays the slayer in his turn.' Nor should we pass over in this context the same poet's very beautiful invention of the two great jars out of which Jupiter blends in varying proportions the affairs of mortals. The lines occur in the last book of the Iliad, and it will not be off the point to add them here:
For on Jove's threshold two great jars are placed
Filled with his gifts - one full of bad, one good.
From these he mingles what he gives to each,
Whose pleasure is the thunder, and so man
Now meets with evil fortune, now with good.
The adage looks as if it were drawn from an answer given by Aesop. When he was asked (so Laertius says) what Jupiter was doing, he replied 'Bringing down high things and exalting things of low degree.' Euripides in the Ion: 'Such is man's lot: nothing remains in place.' Euripides in the Supplices: 'For heaven again turns all things upside down.' Theognis in his moral maxims: 'Now for this man, now that Jove tips the scale, / That now he should be rich and now have nought.' In these lines, I may remark in passing, Theognis alluded to that passage in Homer, Iliad 8, where Jupiter weighs in a golden balance the fates of Trojans and Greeks. There is also in circulation a line to the same effect: 'All things do change that under heaven abide.' And another popular saying 'Man's life' (is, we must understand) 'a wheel,' because human affairs come round again and again and as it were revolve in cycles, as Fortune spins her wheel. Pindar too in the Theron: 'With joys and sorrows different tides at different times befall men.' Homer in several places calls victory a turncoat.

Μεταβολὴ πάντων γλυκύ, literally Change in all things is sweet. A proverbial maxim used by many authors and especially by Aristotle in the second book of his Principles of Rhetoric: 'And variety is pleasant, for change is part of the order of nature. What never changes breeds a distaste for the established order, Hence the saying that variety is the spice of life.' It is used by Aristotle again in book 7 of his Eudemian Ethics. Evidently derived from the Orestes of Euripides: 'Change in all things is sweet.' Virgil has it in mind in his Bucolics: 'And sing by turns, for turns the Muses love.' There is also an elegant moral sentence to this effect: 'Nothing is sweet unless refreshed by change,' and another very like it: 'Good things grown too familiar turn to bad.' Such is the nature of things, so hard to please are human tastes, that nothing can be so sweet as not to provoke satiety if you continue with it a little too long, and there is no excellence that can long give pleasure. Hence too that line in Juvenal: 'Pleasure more pleasant made by sparing use.' In fact variety has such force in everything, that the charm of novelty sometimes makes very bad things acceptable in place of good.

This adage signifies that work extorted from the unwilling is never as good as we could wish, nor should one use the services of those who do not readily lend us their help. In Plautus' Stichus, Panegyris adjures her father not to get husbands for her and her sister against their will, saying 'To go a-hunting with reluctant hounds / Is folly, sir,' and adds a maxim that explains the metaphor: 'That wife's an enemy / Who's married to a man against her will.'

A similar saying is still in use in common speech: that it is a mistake to drive the cart with reluctant oxen or harness unwilling horses to the carriage. It looks as though it were taken from Theognis: 'Unwilling am I; drive me not by force / Of whip and goad, nor yoke me to your car.'

Κιχάνει τοι βραδὺς ὠκύν, Slow catches up with swift. Appropriate to the man who is physically weak, but by skill and cunning overcomes one who is stronger than he is. The adage derives from the eighth book of the Odyssey, where a very amusing story is told about the lame god Vulcan. He had reason to suspect Venus his wife of a secret liaison with Mars, and not having the strength needed to catch the adulterer, he took refuge in his technical skill and invention. He covered his bed with very fine invisible chains made of adamant, and having done so pretended he was going abroad. Then when Mars and Venus were clasped in each other's arms, they found themselves caught in the net, and the more they twisted this way and that, the tighter they were bound. Lo and behold, Vulcan suddenly returns, and having been warned by the Sun, invites all the gods to be witnesses of the adulterous pair caught in the act. At which point Homer comments:
Slow, says the proverb, catches up with swift:
So lately Vulcan, slow though he may be,
Caught Mars, the swiftest of the Olympian gods.
Lame as he is, he won the day by craft,
And Mars the adulterer's penalty must pay.
The same lesson is taught by the fable of the fox and the crow, who pursued the same quarry, and the fox though he was slower secured it by a trick; also by those of the crab that ran a race with the fox, and the lark that contended in flying with the eagle. Something of the sort happens even in fish: very slow-moving species catch very fast ones by cunning. Among these is the ray, which hides itself in sandy or muddy places, stretching out those fine hairy structures it has to attract other fish, and those it attracts it draws into its mouth. The torpedo in the same way conceals itself in sand or mud, paralyses any fish that come within range, and proceeds to eat them. It even tries to play the same trick on human beings. The sting-ray, in Greek trigonis, also hides, but on a different system. Thus it happens that, though themselves sluggish, they are sometimes taken with a grey mullet in their stomachs. The authority for this is Aristotle in book nine of his work on the nature of animals. Pliny however in his ninth book avers that the grey mullet has an exceptional turn of speed, and when afraid of attack from some other fish throws itself clear over a ship. Theognis reports the adage in this form: 'The slow by cunning overtake the swift.'

There is no conflict between that and something Diogenes Laertius records in his life of the philosopher Menedemus from a satire by the poet Achaeus, the title of which is Omphale: 'The swift, they say, fall victims to the weak, / And soon the eagle to the tortoise yields.' Menedemus, he says, used habitually to quote these lines against those who competed with him for civic office. They can be taken ironically or in their straightforward sense, when a man defeats a more powerful opponent by skill, and achieves by determina- tion what he cannot do by brute force.

There is a line current as a proverb in Greek Ἄκαιρος ἔυνοι᾽ οὐδὲν ἐχθρᾶς διαφέρει, Goodwill untimely differs not from hate. Suidas under the word akairos, untimely, tells how Hippolytus replied in these words to Phaedra his stepmother, when she confessed that she had fallen in love with him. It will be appropriate for those whose zeal to be of service without regard to timing actually does harm, or who are too solicitous and become a nuisance. Those for example who take a friend to task at an unfortunate moment, or make a man unpopular by excessive and ill-timed praise of him, or supply a young man with money and thus enable him to go to the dogs. A second line very like it is in circulation: 'The friends who hurt us differ not from foes.' Horace glanced at this when he wrote in his Epistles 'All such provoking fondness I disclaim,' and again elsewhere: 'For sure a foolish fondness of the heart / Hurts whom it loves.' Seneca likewise in book 2 of the De beneficiis: 'Often there is nothing to choose between the kind presents of our friends and what our enemies wish may befall us. Our friends' untimely kindliness forces us into the very position in which our enemies would wish to see us. Yet what could be more discreditable than the state of affairs which happens constantly, that there should be no difference between hatred and good- will?' In this passage from Seneca, for the word vota which I have restored to the text from ancient copies, the common run of codices had acta. I had to mention this for fear that someone in ignorance might remove as a blemish the reading that in old days was familiar in many texts. Here belongs that line from Ennius which Cicero praises so rightly in book 2 of his De officiis: 'Kindness ill-placed unkindness I would call.' The proverb will gain something in effectiveness if the application is a little far-fetched: if one were to say, for instance, that none do so much harm to humane studies as those who handle them with more zeal than discretion. Or, nothing harms a man's reputation more than foolish praise. Or, good fortune is more damaging than bad.

Γνῶθι καιρὸν, Consider the due time. Prominent among the familiar sayings of the Seven Sages; ascribed, like most of them, to several authors and used by almost everyone. Hesiod: 'Observe the mean: due time is best in all.' Theocritus alludes to it in the eleventh idyll: 'Some blooms in summer, some in winter blow.' Isocrates too in the Ad Demonicum remarks that in all things there is less satisfaction if they are done out of due season. So important is it in all business to observe the due and proper time. The same message is to be found in the Greek maxims 'Small things are great when in due season given' and in another 'It always pays to know when time is ripe.' Besides, there is Pindar in the Pythians: 'The proper time likewise is of all things the chief.' And Horace's familiar tag 'Sweet is folly in its proper place.' Such is the force of Opportunitas, of Timeliness, that it can turn what is honourable into dishonour, loss into gain, happiness into misery, kindness into unkindness, and the reverse; it can, in short, change the nature of everything. In the beginning and ending of any business it has especial influence, so that the Anicents, we may well think, had good reason to endow it with divinity, though in Greek this god is masculine, and his name is Kairos, Due Time. Her image was represented in the old days as follows. She had wings on her feet and stood on a freely-turning wheel, and she spun very rapidly round and round. The forepart of her head was thickly set with hair, the back of it bald, so that her forehead could easily be grasped and the back of it not at all. Hence the phrase 'to seize the opportunity.' Thus both a learned allusion and an elegant image were produced by the unknown author of the line 'Long in the forelock, Time is bald behind.' Besides which, it is a pleasure to add the epigram by Posidippus on this subject, which was unaccountably omitted by Poliziano, and runs as follows: "'Where did the sculptor come from?" Sicyon. "And his name?" Lysippus. "And who are you, the subject?" Due Time, master of all things. "Why go on tiptoe?" I am always running. "Why have a pair of winged sandals on your feet?" I fly with the wind. "Why carry a razor in your right hand?" To show that I am keener than a razor's edge. "And your hair, why so long over your face?" That he who is beforehand with me may seize it. "The back part why so bald?" Because once I have run past a man on my winged feet, never for all his longing shall he seize me from behind. Such, stranger, did the artist make me, and set me in the forecourt to be a warning to you and your fellow men.' My version of these verses is not meant to compete with the Greek original; it is, as usual, uninspired and quite extempore, as the poem itself will have made clear even if I said nothing, my sole purpose being to make it intelligible to those who know no Greek. Nor will it be off the point to add an epigram by Ausonius, which, as Poliziano points out, is evidently derived from the Greek, although it differs in certain respects, and in particular by the addition of Remorse as Opportunity's companion. The poem runs like this: '"The artist's name?" Phidias. "What, the man who made the great statue of Athena?" Yes, and the Jupiter, and I am the third of his masterpieces. I am the goddess Opportunity, so seldom seen, recognized by so few. "Why stand on a wheel?" I cannot stay still in one place. "And why those winged sandals?" I am always in flight, and the good fortune of which Mercury is patron I provide when I please. "Do you hide your face with hair?" I have no wish to be recognized. "But why bald behind?" That I may not be seized as I run past. "And who is your companion?" Let her tell you herself. "Tell me, pray, who are you?" I am the goddess who was not named even by Cicero himself, she who punishes what is done and not done in such a way that there are regrets afterwards; and so I am called Remorse. "Now I turn to you again: you must tell me what business she has with you." When I take wing, she stays behind; if I pass any man by, she remains with him. You yourself, while you ask these questions and waste your time in idle curiosity, will find that you have let me slip.'

Τὸν λύχνον ὄζει, It smells of the lamp, of something which has been the object of thought and much work has gone into the polishing of it. Derived from the practice among keen students of working late by lamplight to finish some elaborate piece, if they want to produce a special effect. It used to be a common criticism of Demosthenes that his arguments smelt of the lamp, because his speeches were all written and thought out in advance before he left home. Hence too the well-known tribute to him, that he used more oil than wine. For he was temperate and drank only water, and even when a very old man could still be found toiling away by the light of his humble and yet famous lamp.

This became proverbial because they worked with such exceptional dili- gence, so that a man is said to study by the lamp of Aristophanes or Cleanthes who ponders every detail with great diligence and meticulous care. Varro in the first book of his On the Latin Language: 'Studying as I do not merely by Aristophanes' lamp but by Cleanthes' as well, I was unwilling to pass over those who develop the significance of words, as poets do.' I suppose the adage to refer to Aristophanes the grammarian. Then there is the modest lamp of Epictetus too, which won its place in history by being sold for a great sum after his death. But when Juvenal asks 'Am I not right? / These themes deserve Venusia's midnight lamp,' it is finding out rather than writing up that he has in mind.

Licence in the Old Comedy reached such a pitch that, beside prominent citizens, the gods themselves were lampooned by name, as is clear from Aristophanes, who treats Jove, Mercury, Aesculapius, and all the other gods with contumely in the Plutus; Bacchus too in the Frogs gets far from respectful treatment. Since in those early days plays of this kind were performed in wagons by young men, their faces smeared with wine-lees to make them unidentifiable, who uttered offensive remarks at the expense of any convenient target with great freedom, this gave rise to the adage Ὡς ἐξ ἁμάξης λαλεῖν, To speak like a man on a wagon, for public and gross abuse. Aristophanes criticizes this in the Clouds in the words 'No joking now, don't treat me like those poor devils smeared with lees,' unless we prefer to attribute this to a custom which lasted in Athens even into later centuries. During a festival called the Lenaea it was the custom for poets to compete in writing verses intended to make people laugh, which they recited sitting in wagons amid an exchange of mutual abuse. Some trace the phrase to the feast called the Greater Eleusinia, in which women rode along in carts, and as they rode the custom was for them to abuse one another. Lucian in Jupiter tragoedus: 'As he spares none of the gods, but speaks his mind freely from the wagon and "fastens alike on innocent and guilty".' Demosthenes too holds it against Aeschines that he had brought against him charges speakable and unspeakable, like a man on a wagon. As a result, merely to speak of the licence of the Old Comedy has a proverbial ring about it. St Jerome writing to Rusticus the monk: 'I shall name no names; I shall not borrow the licence of the Old Comedy and pick out special people for criticism.' I suppose Aristophanes alluded to this in the Knights: 'Alack, you have nothing to say from the wainwright's shop,' wainwright being a name for those who build wagons.

Lucian alludes to the same custom when he writes in his Eunuchus 'And they poured whole cartloads of abuse on one another.' He speaks of two philosophers engaged in an acrimonious dispute, and means by this exaggerated phrase as much abuse as a wagon could carry. The image itself belongs in its nature to the class of proverbs, when we speak of 'cartloads of promises' or 'shiploads of tempting offers,' to indicate extravagantly generous promises. Greek also has hamaxiaia, 'words that need a wagon' to mean magnificent or splendid, which is derived from the word for wagon. Alexis, quoted by Athenaeus in the ninth book, adapts it to bear a favourable sense: 'He set the table by us, then brought round / A wainload of good things.'

If we wish to convey that a man's tricks are no longer hidden from us and that we cannot be taken in by him in future, we shall say very aptly 'Let someone pull you out who doesn't know you.' This is recorded by Quintilian in his sixth book: 'What they call an adage is very similar; and proverbs skilfully adapted, for instance that reply to the man who had fallen into the water and was calling for help, "'Let someone pull you out who doesn't know you.'" Quintilian's words, otherwise rather obscure, receive something like an explanation from Horace's Epistles, where he is speaking of an impostor called Planus, who used often to fall down deliberately, pretending he had broken his leg, and make pitiful appeals to the passers-by to pick him up. Any stranger who did not know the trick and came up to help him was promptly fleeced by the impostor. But the time came when his deception had become generally known; and one day he really broke his leg and implored people to pick him up, and no one helped him, because they all supposed that this was Planus up to his old tricks. He suffered in fact what is said to have been foretold by Aristotle who, when asked whether anything was achieved by telling lies, replied 'Yes: that nobody will believe you when you speak the truth.' Horace's lines run as follows:
Let Planus at the cross-roads break his leg:
Has he once fooled you? You will never stop
To pick him up, though tears roll down his cheeks,
Though he by great Osiris swears 'tis true.
'This is no fooling. You hard-hearted brutes,
Help the poor cripple!' 'Find a stranger first'
Harsh-voiced his fleering neighbours all reply.
It may be added that planus is recorded by Aulus Gellius, book 16 chapter 7, among the unusual words used by Laberius the writer of mimes, and he says it means 'a cunning rogue.' Though the same noun is used by Cicero and with the same meaning, in his defence of Cluentius. It is the Greek pianos, and means both a vagabond and an impostor. The same proverbial sense can also be expressed in this way: 'Find a foreigner' or 'find a stranger,' as Horace puts it. This too will be a suitable retort to those who have deceived us in the past and thus made us more circumspect and less credulous for the future. There is something like it in Juvenal: 'He goes the rounds and finds no innocents,' for innocents are easily taken in. Much the same is that Greek proverb 'No fox a second time,' where we supply 'is taken in.'

To fart in someone's face I find in use as a proverbial expression for the display of dislike and contempt. Horace in the Satires: 'Do you really mean / To fart in the face of a pack of curtal Jews?' Aristophanes in the Plutus: 'And fart in the face of penury,' and again elsewhere in the same play: 'And break wind in the face of penury.' This was a way for those who had now become rich to show their contempt for poverty. The same author in the Clouds: 'And fain would I out-fart your thunder-claps.' The speaker is Strepsiades, who is making a humble address to the Clouds and showing contempt for Jove's thunderbolts. The scholiast adds that this is derived from a device used on the ancient stage, by which small stones were poured from a great jar into a bronze vessel so that they made a sound like thunder, and this was a way of making a noise in answer to the thunder. I think myself that there is an allusion to the ancient custom of poppysmos, smacking the lips; for in the old days when they saw lightning it was the custom to make an answering noise by smacking the lips, which they supposed to be a protection against being struck by lightning. Aristophanes in the Wasps: 'And if I send a lightning- flash, they smack their lips'; at which some people by way of a joke would break wind, as though this were a clumsy way of imitating the smacking noises made by other men. The Cyclops, in Euripides' tragedy of that name, to show his contempt for Jove's thunder, speaks as follows: 'Then I drink a great bucket of milk, and raise my skirts and rumble fit to match Jove's thunderbolts.'

Ἐς Τροφωνίου μεμάντευται, He has consulted the oracle in the cave of Trophonius. Of a man who is exceptionally gloomy and severe, because there used to be a tradition that anyone who had gone down into the grotto of Trophonius never smiled again. Aristophanes in the Clouds: 'I took such a fright, / I might have been down in Trophonius' cave.' The story of Trophonius in Greek takes several forms. Some say that this Trophonius was a very great expert in the cutting of rocks, and made an underground shrine at Lebadeia in Boeotia, which is commonly called the shrine of Trophonius from the name of the builder. Later, those who wished to consult the oracle sat according to custom naked in the entrance to the grotto, and from there were suddenly swept underground by something like a blast of wind. They brought some cakes with them, which they threw to the ghosts and serpents they encountered. After which, having received their oracle, they were returned to the surface by way of another cleft in the ground. Others give the following account. There was a king of Stymphalus, which is part of Arcadia, called Agamedes; he married a wife called Epicaste, and Trophonius was his son. These two were quite the most skilful craftsmen of their time, and had undertaken to build the temple at Delphi. They had also constructed a treasury of some kind in Elis for Augeas to keep his gold; but later they loosened the joints round one particular stone which they had left with this in mind, forced an entry by night, and made a practice of helping themselves to the gold, with the help of Agamedes' brother Gercyon and a son of Epicaste. This very greatly puzzled Augeas; but by pure chance Daedalus, who was trying to escape from Minos, took refuge with him, and Augeas begged him to think of some device by which he could detect the thieves. So Daedalus with great skill constructed some snares, in which Agamedes was caught. When Trophonius saw that there was no way out, he cut off Agamedes' head so that he was unrecognizable, and escaped with Gercyon to Orchomenus. When Augeas, guided by Daedalus, pursued them to Orchomenus, they escaped from there too, one of them (Gercyon) to Athens or, as Callimachus has it, to Arcadia, and the other to a place in Boeotia called Lebadeia. There he made himself a dwelling underground, and remained for the rest of his life. After his death, it was widely believed that infallible oracles were delivered there, and they started offering sacrifices to Trophon- ius as though he were a deity. Some say that Agamedes and Trophonius stole some works by Daedalus and escaped, and that while Trophonius was making his escape the earth opened and swallowed him alive near Lebadeia. Some years later, when the Boeotians were suffering from a pestilence, they consulted an oracle, which replied that they must honour the shade of Trophonius. They had no idea where his grave was, and discovered it on the evidence of bees; for when they saw some bees issuing in quantities from a hollow in the ground, they inferred that that must be the place. So they decided to send someone down into the cave to investigate. A man therefore went down, and found himself confronted by two serpents; but by throwing them cakes soaked in honey he managed to escape unharmed. Hence arose the custom that those who propose to enter the cave of Trophonius take some cakes down with them. Before descending they were purified for a specified number of days with the prescribed ceremonial, living to a strict regime in the mean time; and then they put on a sacred robe and went down, spear in hand some people say, to ward off any attack by the snakes. Cicero in the first book of his Tusculan Questions records that Trophonius and Agamedes, having finished the temple of Apollo at Delphi, did obeisance to the god, and asked him by way of reward for their labours not for anything definite, 'but for what was of all things best for mankind. Apollo declared that he would give them this in two days' time; and when the second day dawned, they were found dead.' Later authorities tell the story like this: that there was a man called Trophonius who was excessively eager to be famous, very like Empedocles. This man built himself an underground dwelling, where he delivered oracles; and then, when he died of starvation, his place was taken by a spirit which continued to utter oracles, and thereafter from superstition a number of people lowered themselves into the cave and spent several days there. This story about Trophonius seems to me so close to the tale about St Patrick's cave in Ireland, that one might well believe one of them derived from the other. Though there are plenty of people who make the descent even in our own day; but first they utterly exhaust themselves by fasting for three days, so that they cannot be in their right minds when they enter. Those who have gone down say they have lost all desire to smile for the rest of their lives. Plutarch in his essay 'On the Divine Sign of Socrates' tells how a certain Timarchus went down into the cave of Trophonius, and on his return recounted the astonishing sights he had seen, not unlike what Bede and some other Christian authors have reported of the nether regions. Cicero too in the third book of his De natura deorum mentions this Trophonius, and so does Herodotus in book one. But the greatest nonsense on this foolish subject is talked in Philostratus by Apollonius, a man whose disquisitions on philosophy should in my opinion be confined to this topic. Lucian, that adamantine persecutor of all superstition, mocks this Trophonius in several passages, and Menippus too makes fun of him, saying that he came back from the lower world by way of Trophonius' cave. The cave is mentioned by Euripides in the Ion: 'What oracle bring you from Trophonius?' And again in the same play: 'You visit the precinct of Trophonius.' My account of Trophonius' cave is borrowed partly from the scholiast on Aristophanes and partly from Zenodotus.

Φρουρᾶς ἄδων, Singing at his post, was used in the old days of a wakeful and industrious man, and came from the habit that men on sentry-duty have of singing, either to beguile the tedium of their watch or to prevent their falling asleep on duty. Thus Strepsiades in the Clouds of Aristophanes, who has made a bad start in Socrates' school:
Lost is my money, lost my ruddy cheeks,
Lost are my life and soul, lost are my slippers,
And what is worse, as I sing at my post,
I'm almost lost myself.
The proverb is expressed in two forms, with phrouras and phrouros, and there is a play on the word phroudos, which means 'lost' or 'vanished.'

Ἁλώνητον ἀνδράποδον, literally A slave exchanged for salt. Used in ancient times of any barbarian and worthless creature, for the merchants of those days who carried salt into the interior used to return with slaves from the barbarians. And it was a practice peculiar to the Thracians to exchange slaves for salt; whence that line in a comedy: 'A true-blue Thracian are you, bought with salt.' Such is more or less what Zeonodotus tells us.

Ἁλῶν δὲ φόρτος ἔνθεν ἦλθεν ἔνθ᾽ ἔβη., A load of salt has vanished whence it came. A proverbial iambic line for those who cannot look after their gains, or make an ill use of gains ill-gotten. The source of the adage is something that once happened. A certain merchant had chartered a ship and loaded it with salt, and while the crew were asleep the sea got in and caused a sharp rise in the bilge-water, which dissolved and ruined the salt and sank the ship itself; with the result that what had originated in sea-water (out of which salt crystallizes) returned to sea-water again as it dissolved.

This is the wording of another adage derived from the same event: Ἅλας ἄγων καθεύδεις. , You sleep on a cargo of salt. It will be suitable for a man who behaves in an idle and careless fashion at a moment of danger, because salt is so easily spoilt if bilge-water gets access to it.

The preceding maxim finds a counterpart in those words in Cicero's second Philippic: 'But, as some poet has observed, ill gotten ill spent.' With regard to Cicero's doubts about the authorship, in Plautus in the Poenulus we find 'Ill gotten ill employed.' Festus Pompeius cites from Naevius 'Ill gotten ill spent.'

Ὅς αὐτὸς αὑτὸν οὐκ ἔχει, Σάμον θέλει., He who is not his own master desires to be master of Samos. This will suit people who demand something outrageous, or who concern themselves with details and neglect the larger issues. Derived from an anecdote preserved by Plutarch in his 'Sayings of Spartans.' When the Athenians had surrendered their city to the victor, they asked that he should at least let them keep Samos, and his reply took the form 'When you are not your own masters, do you expect to master other men?' And hence came the proverb: 'Who does not own himself would Samos own.' Dion the sophist in his essay 'On Disbelief adapts it neatly to a different meaning: 'How can a man who is not his own best friend make a good friend for someone else?' It will also fit those who expect to control others when they themselves have no self-control.

At one time a favourite adage in Greece, the point of which is that natural endowments however distinguished, if not put forward, might as well not exist. Persius seems to have had this in mind when he wrote 'Knowledge is naught if no one knows you know.' Something of the sort can be found among Hebrew proverbs too, in fact in Ecclesiasticus chapter 20: 'Wisdom that is hid and treasure that is hoarded up, what profit is in them both?' This proverb with which we deal is recorded by Suetonius in his life of the emperor Nero, who forgot, he says, what was expected of an emperor, and had such a passion for music that he not merely practised without exception all the tricks used by professional singers to preserve or improve the voice, but actually had ambitions to appear on the stage, making play among his circle with the Greek proverb 'Hidden music has no listeners.' Aulus Gellius uses the same phrase in the last chapter of book 13 of the Nights: 'You know, professor, that saying - it must be an old one - that music however excellent is worthless if kept hidden.' Lucian uses it in his Harmonides: 'Though secret and hidden music, they say, is no use to anyone.' Ovid no doubt had this in mind when he wrote 'Though Thamyras and Orpheus you outsing, / Music unheard's a very pointless thing.' But there are some human beings who either through an inborn fault of character or even by deliberate choice conceal what they know and dislike imparting it to others. Such men sometimes suffer the fate of being disregarded, because they are supposed to be ignorant. To these we may ascribe what is called in Greek τυφλὸς πλοῦτος, blind riches, resources which are kept secret and hidden away. Plutarch speaks of them in this fashion in several passages, and so does Lucian. Plutarch in his life of Lycurgus tells us it was a common boast among the Lacedaemonians that in their country Plutus, the god of wealth, was kept without honour, as lifeless and motionless as a painted image. For Lycurgus had drafted the constitution in such a way that no one could find riches either useful or ornamental.

The wood of the fig-tree, breakable as it is and useless for almost any purpose, has given rise to several proverbs. In Greek 'a figwood fellow' is someone weak and worthless, for instance Theocritus in his Ergatinae: 'Lest someone pass and say Here be figwood fellows; here's more wages wasted.' The scholiast points out that the proverb is derived from figtree wood, which is so fragile and weak as to be useless, whence also the expression a figwood prop, for a useless one. In Aristophanes in the Drones, one of the characters asks another 'Of what wood are you?' and the reply is 'Fig-wood.' The scholiast on the passage points out that fig-wood makes a very acrid and unpleasant smoke. Elsewhere, in the Plutus, a sycophant threatens that if he had found a figwood fellow of the same sort as himself, he would avenge the injury: 'If I find a like-minded man, a figwood fellow like myself.' And again in the same poet and the same play: 'This figwood mighty god of yours I will this day compel to pay the penalty,' using the phrase 'figwood god' to mean a weak and powerless one. Horace alludes to this when he introduces Priapus saying T was once a figwood trunk, a useless log,' and a little further on T opened up and let out a good old figtree fart.' Lucian speaks of 'a figtree mind' in his Against an Ignoramus: 'Having a lame and figtree mind.' Alexander the false prophet had the same thing in mind when he burnt the works of Epicurus on a fire made of fig-wood to show that he thought the philosopher worthless. Also 'a figwood prop' in Greek for support that is weak and worthless; Aristophanes in the Lysistrata 'Who would have been to us a figwood prop.' 'A sword of fig-wood' for calumny. 'A boat of fig-wood' for an inferior one that cost very little. In Naxos too, where Bacchus has two names, one, Baccheus, they represent as god of the vine, the other, Meilichius, as patron of figs; for meilicha is a Naxian word for fig. Bacchus is regarded as having introduced not only the grape but the fig too; so Athenaeus, book 3. The converse image is used by Theocritus in his Aites: 'The golden men of old.' Similar are 'sacred line of defence,' 'sacred anchor' for 'sheet anchor,' and 'strength of adamant.'

Used of a man with a sore throat and one who has suddenly lost his voice. It will have more point if used of those who fall silent from fear of something, though otherwise bold enough. Virgil in the Eclogue they call his 'Moeris': 'Moeris his voice is losing now; the wolves / Caught sight of Moeris first.' Servius tells us that according to the naturalists wolves have this innate power: if they see a man before he sees them, he loses his voice, and there is no shortage of philosophers who try to explain this. Socrates, as reported by Plato in the first book of the Republic, made an allegorical use of this, saying that Thrasymachus would have robbed him of his voice, had he not by great good fortune seen the man first. 'When I heard that,' he says, T was struck dumb. I was terrified at the sight of him. I really think that had I not seen him before he saw me, I should have been speechless.' Theocritus in Idyll 14: 'You will be speechless; you have seen a wolf.' It is worth noting in passing that Theocritus has inverted the sense, for he says that the man struck dumb has seen a wolf, not been seen by one. But in any case Theocritus alluded to the proverb, for he meant that the man had seen a rival whose name was Wolf.

Ὅσσα ἐν ὀνείρῳ βλέπεις, Whatever you see in a dream, is used of extravagant desires. For to dream that what you wish is true is a thing that can happen to anyone, like Micyllus in Lucian, who dreams that he is rich and powerful. In Theocritus there is a fisherman who dreams of a golden fish. And men of the humblest sort sometimes dream they have married queens. A shepherd in Theocritus' ninth eclogue says 'I possess all you can dream of, many ewes and many she-goats.' The scholiast gives the form 'Your dreams come true,' and quotes a line from Homer 'Not if you brought me all false dreams can bring.' The line is found in the poet in the first book of the Iliad, but in a slightly different form: 'Not if you brought gifts countless as the sand.' Cicero seems to have glanced at this in his attack on Sallust: 'Just lately you could not pay off the debt on your family home, and how is it that, like a man who dreams he is a millionaire, you have suddenly acquired a most valuable suburban estate, a country house at Tibur, and all those other properties of Caesar's?'

Porsena's property was a name given to goods sold very cheap, for instance if they were booty seized from the enemy. Livy in the second book of his Rome from the Foundation writes that the expression had survived to his own day; he thinks it arose from the fact that 'Porsena's property' was customarily sold in Rome in wartime, and the practice as well as the name continued in peace as well, because otherwise this custom of selling the goods as enemy property would not be appropriate 'when the king's departure had been so peaceful.' If this does not commend itself, he finds 'a more peaceable origin' for the practice. He thinks it 'most likely that when Porsena' in accordance with the agreed terms 'departed from the Janiculum, leaving a well-stocked camp into which he had collected the booty from the fertile farmland of Etruria which was not far away, he made a present of it to the Romans, the city being then short of supplies after the long siege. To prevent the people from falling on these goods and wasting them, they were sold as enemy property and called Porsena's property, the name indicating a welcome gift rather than the sale by auction of a king's possessions.' The phrase will perhaps be suitable if applied to things which come to us as a gift or by favour of fortune and without any effort on our part. For Livy does not indicate how the adage was used.

We speak of Leonina societas, Going shares with a lion, when all the profits go to one of the partners, while the rest are forcibly done out of them; such a partnership as is often shared with kings or men of very great power though of lowly origin. It occurs in the Pandects, in which Ariston, as quoted by Ulpian, records a legal opinion given by Cassius to the effect that a valid partnership cannot be formed where one party is to take all the profits and the other bear any loss, and Cassius used to call this, he says, 'going shares with a lion.' The name Cassius gives it, which is without a doubt proverbial, evidently derives in any case from a fable of Aesop the Greek author, which is still current and goes as follows: A lion, an ass, and a vixen had formed a partnership, on the basis of sharing in common anything they might catch. When they had secured their quarry, the lion ordered the ass to divide it up. The ass, donkey that he was, divided it into three equal shares. Infuriated to find himself put on the same level as the other two, the lion turned on the ass and tore him in pieces. That left the vixen; and the lion told her to make a fresh division. So she allotted almost the whole prey to the lion and kept only a few scraps for herself. The lion approved her distribution, and asked her who had made her such an expert in dividing. And the vixen's answer was: T saw what happened to the ass.'

Τὰ ἐκ τοῦ τρίποδος, Spoken from the tripod, is customarily used of what we passionately wish to be thought unquestionably true. The adage is found in several forms: As though from the tripod, This is straight from the tripod, of something as indubitably true as if it came from the oracle of Apollo. Cicero in one of his letters to Brutus: 'Imagine that you have received this reply from the oracle of the Pythian Apollo.' A metaphor from the oracular tripod, whether Delphic or Pythian; for these two oracles once commanded supreme confidence among men everywhere. Of the Pythian oracle Strabo in the ninth book of his Geography attests that it was once the most popular of all, and that this is clear from the substantial treasuries built there for the storage of religious funds and from the works of the most famous artists; furthermore from the Pythian games which are held there and from the innumerable oracles that survived in writing. Of the tripod he gives the following account. Reliable authorities, he says, record that the god's actual dwelling is a deep and curving cavern with a fairly narrow mouth, and that an exhalation issues from this which is an effluence from the deity. Over the entrance stands a tall tripod, and when the Pythian priestess climbs onto this she inhales the spirit of prophecy, and utters replies some in verse and some in prose. So in the comedy: 'Apollo himself never uttered a truer word.' Plato in book 12 of the Laws: 'Not if Pythian Apollo said so himself.' There are other metaphors too which have a proverbial ring: Whatever he says he wishes to be taken as an oracle, Whatever he says he wants to be a law, and the Stoic dogmata or decrees, and Cato's words in Pliny about physicians This too you must take as spoken by a prophet,' that is, believe that what I have said will come true. Pliny himself elsewhere: 'And would that most people thought this was false and not the utterance of a prophet.' Plutarch too in his essay 'On the Difference between Flatterer and Friend': 'Then, having heard what the man has to say, he goes off, declaring that he has heard not an opinion but an oracle.' In any case there is some difference between this and what Athenaeus records in the second book of his Doctors at Dinner - that in contests in honour of Bacchus the prize was a tripod, and thus the man who spoke the truth was said to speak 'straight from the tripod.' The tripod, he says, was a cauldron on three feet; and of this there were two sorts, one sacred to Apollo because of the truth of his oracles and the other to Bacchus, in which wine was mixed, because those who are drunk speak the truth, as I have remarked on the proverb Wine speaks the truth. Galen uses a similar image in the first book of his On the Natural Faculties, As from some inner shrine: 'For this Lycus maintained, with the air of one uttering an oracle from some inner shrine, that what is superfluous in the nourishment of the kidneys constitutes urine.'

A Sibylline leaf in Latin carries the same idea, for instance in Juvenal's 'Take my word for it, I read you a leaf from the Sibyl's book,' meaning an undoubted fact. Aristophanes in the Peace: 'These lines are nought to do with me; no Sibyl uttered them.' The adage is taken from the Sibyl of Cumae, whose oracles have a very great reputation. It was her practice, as we know from Marcus Varro, to write her oracles on palm-leaves. This is followed by Virgil in the third book of the Aeneid:
There shall you see that frenzied prophetess
Who in her rocky cave foretells the future,
Trusting her knowledge to the tenuous grasp
Of leaves; and what upon those leaves she writes,
She sets in order due and leaves it locked
Within the cave, and there it lies unmoved
Nor shifts its place.
And again in book 6: 'But this I pray: write not your oracles / On leaves, light playthings of the sweeping wind.'

Ἀδελφὸς ἄνδρὶ παρείη, Let a man's brother stand by him. Commonly used of help that one can trust, because in moments of danger a man's brother hardly ever leaves him in the lurch. In Plato, in book 2 of the Republic, Adeimantus takes over from Glaucon the argument with Socrates, and says 'No, Socrates, we have not yet really dealt with this. Why so? Because we have not yet settled the point which needed settling more than anything.' 'Very well,' replies Socrates, 'let a man's brother stand by him, as the proverb runs: if he has left something out, you must help him.' He also says the adage comes from Homer, in the Protagoras where Socrates calls on Prodicus to defend Simonides his fellow-citizen from being maligned by Protagoras. T find myself he says 'calling on you for help, just as Scamander in Homer, when he is hard-pressed by Achilles, calls on Simoeis: "Dear brother, let us both withstand this man."' The passage is in Iliad 21. Again in Iliad 22 in the same way Hector, who is already being worsted by Achilles, calls on his brother Deiphobus to come and help him. For Pallas had appeared to him in the likeness of Deiphobus and Hector, deceived by this, appeals to him in vain. 'And with a mighty shout he summoned Deiphobus of the white shield.' And when Deiphobus abandoned him, he knew that his last hour had come. Plutarch in his life of Caesar records that when Caesar caught hold of the sword, Casca sought his brother's help in the same way, and that too in Greek: 'Help, brother, help.'

Μὴ εἰκῆ τὸν Ἄβυδον., Not rashly to Abydos (should you sail, understood). Run no serious risk without good reason. For instance, if one were advising somebody not to plunge into a prince's court too readily, because such a venture does not always succeed; or not to become involved in drunken parties, because as a rule one does not succeed in escaping unharmed; or not to read poetry because so often it corrupts the mind. Athenaeus in book 12 tells how Alcibiades, having received his property from his trustees, set sail for Abydos on the Hellespont and was there corrupted by luxury and dissipation, so that this would be not unlike the well-known line 'Not all men have the luck to get to Corinth.' The inhabitants of Abydos had a bad reputation as tale-bearers, and one might suppose that for this reason it was not safe to live there. The adage is recorded by Stephanus and Suidas. Stephanus gives the adage in the form 'If not even unadvisedly to set foot in Abydos,' let no one, that is, go there without misgivings; he indicates that it was applied to headstrong people, and adds that it was habitually directed at the inhabitants of Abydos in the island of Miletus. I was once shown a village in Picardy, which no stranger could ever pass (so they told me) without being the target of vulgar abuse.5

Μία χελιδὼν ἐαρ οὐ ποιεῖ, A single swallow does not make a summer, meaning that one day is not time enough to acquire virtue or education. Or that one thing well done or well said is not sufficient to earn you the reputation of a good man or a good speaker, for many good qualities go to make this up. Or that to obtain certainty on some question, one single theory is not enough. If a great many approaches lead to the same result, then and then only will your theory be acceptable. It can so easily happen that one swallow should appear early by mere chance. This is derived from the natural habits of the swallow, which is the herald of early summer, for it flies away when winter comes. Whence Horace's phrase 'When Zephyrs blow and swallows first appear,' which refers to the early summer. Aristotle in the first book of the Ethics: 'One swallow makes no summer, nor does one day'; and in the same way it takes more than one day or one short space of time to make a happy man. Aristophanes in the Birds: 'He seems to me to need full many swallows,' where the scholiast sees a reference to the proverb I have just recorded, One swallow does not make a summer. There is something akin to this in Sophocles' Antigone: 'What one man owns can never make a city.' For just as one swallow does not make a summer, so one man does not make a commonwealth nor one coin a rich man.

Δάνεισόν μοι μαρτυρίαν, Lend me your evidence, meaning Give evidence in my favour, and when you need it you shall have mine in exchange. Rightly aimed at those who praise and recommend each other turn and turn about, or support one another on a system of exchange, or who testify to give satisfaction and overlook their duty to the truth. Cicero in his Pro Flacco rejects Greeks as witnesses and rates their honesty very low, observing: 'Let me say what I think about the Greeks as a whole. I grant they have a literature, I recognize the width of their education, I do not grudge them the charm of their language, their intellectual ability, their abundant eloquence, and any other claims they make I shall not resist. But honesty and respect for the truth in giving evidence they as a nation have never developed, and of the meaning of such things and their importance and the weight they carry they have no idea. "Lend me your evidence" - where did that come from? No one supposes that we owe that to Gaul or Spain. It belongs entirely to the Greeks, so much so that even those who have no Greek know the actual Greek words for it.' What Cicero says makes it clear enough that in his time this adage was exceptionally familiar.

When rascals and men of no reputation admire and cry up one another. The image is taken from mules which, like other beasts of burden, have a habit of scratching one another with their teeth. The phrase is cited by Nonius Marcellus as the title of one of Marcus Varro's Menippean Satires, and must surely be proverbial. Ausonius in the second preface to his Monosyllaba: 'But to end with a proverb what I began with an adage, mules scratch one another.' Varro also mentions this in the third book of his On the Latin Language, though the wording is most foully corrupt, for which the passage of time is not so much to blame as the common run of printers, whose only object seems to be the utter extinction of all good books. For the text runs thus: 'Philoptorus, a female friend of the man who in old age calls a boy pusus and a girl pusa. The result will be mutuant mulinam.' I think we should read mutuum muli and understand scabunt. Symmachus in one of his letters: 'The proverb says that mules scratch one another, and for fear I may be within reach of that, I hold back behind clenched teeth what I would say in praise of you.' It looks however as if the adage could not be correctly understood except in a derogatory sense, as for instance if two ignorant men were to praise each other or two cripples or two rascals. This recalls Horace's anecdote of the two brothers who enjoyed mutual back-scratching and an exchange of panegyrics in turn.
Rome had two brothers; one the spoken word
And one the law pursued. And how they purred!
How oft reciprocal the butter flew! -
'Gracchus has met his match.' 'And Mucius too!'
He also criticizes poetasters who, bad as they are, listen to each others' recitations with rapture:
Alcaeus I in his opinion shine,
He soars a new Callimachus in mine.

There is a phrase related to this in Terence's Phormio, 'They help each other out,' used of the young men who get into scrapes and defend one another in turn. It looks as though it might be a metaphor from neighbouring farmers who have a custom of lending a hand with the work in both directions, or from craftsmen, especially coppersmiths, who sometimes share their work.

There also belongs here a humorous turn which gave rise to a proverb, about old men rubbing one another. The story is told by Aelius Spartianus in his life of the Emperor Hadrian. Hadrian once saw an old soldier in the baths, who was too poor to keep a slave, rubbing himself down against the marble walls, and presented him with a few slaves and the money to maintain them. A number of other veterans, seeing what a success that had been, began likewise to rub themselves down against the marble when they were within sight of the emperor, hoping in this way to extract some more bounty from their prince. He however sent for the old men and told them to rub each other down in turns, and in that way they would not need slaves. This humorous turn afterwards became a common proverb. There is also a well-known retort of Scipio Aemilianus, 'Beasts must be rubbed down by someone else because they have no hands'; by which he meant that those who are not capable of famous exploits need an expert in publicity, through whom they can secure a reputation.

Τὸν ξύοντα ἀντιξύειν, If someone rubs you rub him in return. Recorded in the collections of Diogenianus. It is only fair to oblige a man who has obliged you and to repay one kindness with another. Suidas thinks the metaphor is drawn from donkeys nibbling one another, and that it can be used in either sense, of the exchange of mutual assistance or abuse. There is a well-known and rather neat moral maxim to the same effect, which is ascribed to Seneca but wrongly, 'Your neighbour will treat you as you treat him.' Aristides in his united defence of the four orators: 'Scratch my back and I'll scratch yours is proverbially credited, I think, to donkeys; but our Homeric enthusiasts would surely compare Pericles to a lion rather than a donkey.' Here belongs that other phrase, 'One hand washes the other,' which Plato cites in the Axiochus: 'On every point he follows that tag from Epicharmus, One hand washes the other; give first and take afterwards.' Though the Aldine edition reads φωνεῖν for φρονεῖν, not 'he follows' but 'he repeats'; and the trochaic tetrameter in Greek will run better if you read λάμβανέ τι for λάβε τι. I have already quoted this elsewhere, but with a different text, following a defective copy, because as yet I had no Greek Plato at hand which I could consult. It seemed advisable to draw the reader's attention to this, for fear someone might accuse me rashly of inverting Plato's text. Though, as far as the sense goes, it makes no difference at all whether you read κνίζει or νίζει, since whether one hand scratches the other or washes it, the exchange of services is exactly the same.

It was not my intention to mingle with this series the proverbs which belong to theologians, not that I despise them, but partly because I thought this showed a proper respect for Holy Writ and partly because they are universally accessible. There is however one which I shall add without hesitation because it chimes in so exactly with what I have just said. It comes in the Proverbs of Solomon, chapter 27: 'Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.' In Hebrew it is expressed like this - forit is something to hear an adage in its original language: [hebrew].