Collected Works of Erasmus: Adages: I vi 1 to I x 100, Volume 32 9781442670662

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C O L L E C T E D W O R K S OF E R A S M U S V O L U M E 32

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COLLECTED WORKS OF

ERASMUS ADAGES IvilTOIxlOO

translated and annotated by R. A.B. Mynors

University of Toronto Press Toronto / Buffalo / London

The research and publication costs of the Collected Works of Erasmus are supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The publication costs are also assisted by University of Toronto Press.

www.utppublishing.com University of Toronto Press 1989 Toronto / Buffalo / London Printed in Canada

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Erasmus, Desiderius, d. 1536. [Works] Collected Works of Erasmus Partial contents: v.32. Adages Ivil to IxlOO / translated and annotated by R. A.B. Mynors. Includes index. ISBN 0-8020-2412-2 (v. 32) i. Erasmus, Desiderius, d. 1536.1. Title. PA85OO 1974

876'.04

C74-6326-X rev.

Collected Works of Erasmus The aim of the Collected Works of Erasmus is to make available an accurate, readable English text of Erasmus' correspondence and his other principal writings. The edition is planned and directed by an Editorial Board, an Executive Committee, and an Advisory Committee. EDITORIAL BOARD

Alexander Dalzell, University of Toronto James M. Estes, University of Toronto Charles Fantazzi, University of Windsor Anthony T. Graf ton, Princeton University Paul F. Grendler, University of Toronto James K. McConica, University of Toronto, Chairman Erika Rummel, Executive Assistant Robert D. Sider, Dickinson College J.K. Sowards, Wichita State University G.M. Story, Memorial University of Newfoundland Craig R. Thompson, University of Pennsylvania EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

Harald Bohne, University of Toronto Press Alexander Dalzell, University of Toronto James M. Estes, University of Toronto Charles Fantazzi, University of Windsor Anthony T. Graf ton, Princeton University Paul F. Grendler, University of Toronto James K. McConica, University of Toronto Ian Montagnes, University of Toronto Press R.J. Schoeck, Universitat Trier R.M. Schoeffel, University of Toronto Press, Chairman Robert D. Sider, Dickinson College J.K. Sowards, Wichita State University G.M. Story, Memorial University of Newfoundland Craig R. Thompson, University of Pennsylvania Prudence Tracy, University of Toronto Press

ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Danilo Aguzzi-Barbagli, University of British Columbia Maria Cytowska, University of Warsaw O.B. Hardison jr, Georgetown University Otto Herding, Universitat Freiburg Jozef IJsewijn, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Robert M. Kingdon, University of Wisconsin Paul Oskar Kristeller, Columbia University Maurice Lebel, Universite Laval Jean-Claude Margolin, Centre d'etudes superieures de la Renaissance de Tours Bruce M. Metzger, Princeton Theological Seminary Clarence H. Miller, St Louis University Heiko A. Oberman, University of Arizona John Rowlands, British Museum J.S.G. Simmons, Oxford University John Tedeschi, University of Wisconsin J. Trapman, Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen J.B. Trapp, Warburg Institute

Contents

Foreword ix Adages i vi i to i x 100 i Notes 283 Works Frequently Cited 390 Table of Adages 391

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Foreword

The aim of this translation of the second five hundred of the Adagia is to present, as in the preceding volume (CWE 31), an English version of the final form of a steadily augmented and revised work as left by Erasmus in 1536 and published in the Opera omnia of 1540. The purpose of the notes is to identify the sources on which Erasmus drew, and to show how his collections increased and fresh comments suggested themselves from the Adagiorum Collectanea of his Paris days (1500) into the Aldine Chiliades of 1508 and its successive revisions published in Basel in 1515, 1517/8, 1520, 1523, 1528, 1530, 1533 and 1536. To pursue the use made of individual adages in the vernacular literatures and in the graphic arts would have been the task of a lifetime; it is the aim of this version to serve as a tool to workers in those larger fields. None of the serial volumes (CWE 31-36) should be judged in isolation. It is the intention of the Editorial Board to conclude the Adagia with an introductory volume (CWE 30), in which it is hoped to trace the progress of the work in its compiler's hands, to relate it to the printed sources available to him (which might well constitute a survey of the appearance in print of all classical literature), and to say something of the printed editions and summaries of the Adagiaa and of its relation to similar collections made by others. There will also be the necessary indexes. And that will be the place to acknowledge the debt which these notes must owe, not only to living scholars, but to the army of textual editors and compilers of commentaries, dictionaries, and concordances, without whom they could never have been put together. The Editorial Board and University of Toronto Press are pleased for the opportunity to express once again their gratitude to the patron of the Collected Works of Erasmus, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, for its generous support of the research and publication costs of the edition. RABM

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ADAGES IvilTOIxlOO

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i Saepe etiam est olitor valde opportuna locutus Even a gardener oft speaks to the point Aulus Gellius1 in his Nights, book 2 chapter 6, records that this line circulated in old days as a proverb: Even a gardener oft speaks to the point. It warns us not to despise salutary advice because it comes from a humble source; for it sometimes happens that a man of lowly position and of no account, or of very little education, says something that even persons in high place should not despise. A counterpart is Caecilius' remark in Cicero's2 Tusculan Questions: 'Under a ragged coat oft wisdom lies/ Nor does that line in Plautus3 disagree, in his Captivi: 'How oft concealment hides our greatest wits!' As for the Greek adage, I think the reader should be warned that it is found in this form in all the texts of Gellius I have yet seen. But, as I remember, my misgivings were aroused one day, and the existence of some corruption was pointed out to me, by Paolo Bombace4 of Bologna, much the most learned of the teachers of the humanities in that city, and by far the most celebrated; and rightly so, for it was he who first began to teach both Greek and Latin there with equal qualifications both publicly and in private. He is in any case a man of exquisite taste and very keen judgment; and I myself am so closely linked with him both for his outstanding and many-sided learning and for his exceptional charm of character, that I doubt whether I have ever had a more intimate relationship with any fellow-creature or more enjoyed any man's society. I remember his saying once, in the course of those long literary discussions we used to have, that he did not like the word keporos, gardener, in that proverb in Gellius, and thought that it was clearly spurious and interpolated. He himself suspected, he said, in view of many similar corruptions in the text of that author, that the word mdros, fool, had been replaced with keporos by some keen gardener. At the time, although this seemed highly probable, and the opinion of so eminent a scholar carried great weight with me, yet I did not dare to disagree all by myself with the consensus of so many copies. In the course, however, of my desultory wanderings among Greek authors, I fell in by chance with a collection of extracts, which bore no compiler's name but might have been put together by Stobaeus5 or at any rate excerpted from him. There I found the following line, cited from a tragedy of Aeschylus6 called The Phrygians: 'Even a foolish man oft speaks to the point,' with kai mdros for keporos. Without hesitation I voted, and I consider that all scholars should vote, for my friend Bombace's proposal that mdros should be read instead of keporos, all the more so as the same sentiment in so many words is still current among us at the present day: 'Even a fool sometimes speaks a wise word.' Moreover it balances the

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opinion I have quoted above from Euripides:7 Tools in their folly speak/ For, true as that is, yet it does occur sometimes that a silly man, either by accident or inadvertently, says something excellent and very much to the point. We often see this happen. What could the most exquisite wit have produced more apt than the greeting of which Suetonius8 tells, offered to Pompey and Julius Caesar by a man somewhat unsettled in his wits? - 'All hail, our gracious king and queen!' It being remembered that Pompey was suspected of plans to make himself king, and rumour had it that Caesar had been enjoyed as his consort by King Nicomedes. 2 Copiae cornu A horn of plenty 'AfAaXOeias Kspas, Amalthea's horn, or A horn of plenty. When we wish to convey that there is abundance of everything, we speak of a cornucopia or horn of plenty. The image is taken from a very early myth, told by our authorities in various forms. In some1 it runs like this. Rhea, having given birth to Jupiter, hid her baby in Crete for fear of his father, to be nursed by two nymphs, Adrastea and Ida, daughters of Melisseus. They fed him on the milk of a she-goat called Amalthea; and Jupiter, when he was grown up, set this goat among the stars, where it is called in Greek the Heavenly She-goat. One of its horns he gave to the nymphs who had nursed him as a reward for their kindness, bestowing on it the remarkable property of producing a generous supply of anything they might want. Ovid2 in book 5 of his Fasti tells a rather different story: The Naiad Amalthea in a grove On Cretan Ida hid the infant Jove. Conspicuous roamed, Mount Dicte's flocks among, The lovely mother of two likely young, A goat, with lofty backward-curving horn And teats such as Jove's nurse might well adorn. She gave the god her milk; but on an oak One horn, half of her pride, (good lack!) she broke. The nymph retrieved it, wreathed it in sweet slips, Filled it with fruit and set it to Jove's lips. When he won heaven, and on his father's throne Jove reigned invincible and reigned alone, Stars he his nurse and nurse's horn did make; Still in the sky 'tis famous for her sake.

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We read also3 how Hercules gave the Aetolians a horn of plenty, because he disciplined a horn or branch of the river Achelous, and thereby turned a region previously barren into most fertile country, the horn presumably representing the hardness of his labours and its plentiful contents the resulting fertility. So 'Horn of Plenty' was chosen by Phocion, a philosopher of the Peripatetic school, as a title for his book, as Aulus Gellius4 tells us. Pliny5 too informs us that several Greeks used this rather grandiloquent label for their compilations, as though they contained everything without exception, and whatever one wanted was to be sought and found there. Lucian6 in his Salaried Posts in Great Houses writes 'And you shall possess Amalthea's horn, and drink hen's milk/ Philostratus7 calls Dion the sophist 'a horn of Amalthea/ because he was so packed with excellence of every kind. One of Plautus'8 slaves calls a letter in the play a horn of plenty, because he sees himself getting so much advantage out of it. Aulus Gellius,9 book 14 chapter 6: 'With these words he offered me a stout volume packed, so he assured me, with information of every kind. I accepted it with alacrity, feeling as if I had acquired a horn of plenty.' Philoxenus10 in Athenaeus calls a table loaded with delicious desserts of many kinds a cornucopia. Suidas11 quotes a line: There, where life seems an Amalthea's horn'; it is an epic hexameter. The adage is also used in the form 'A heavenly she-goat.'12 One of the old comedies pillories a certain Polyagrus who lived on his wife's immoral earnings, and calls her a heavenly she-goat, because she brings him in a large income, as Plutarch13 records in his essay 'How to study poetry': 'How blest is Polyagrus! - he who keeps / A heavenly goat to bring him gold enough' (Polyagrus means 'landed proprietor'). Again in another place,14 in an attack on the Stoics, he has 'But he who is blest with the Stoic Amalthea,' making fun of the paradoxical theory of the Stoics, who reckon that their ideal wise man possesses everything - wealth, freedom, health, and royalty. Horace15 in his Odes: 'And Plenty, lavish with her brimming horn.' 3 Lac gallinaceum Hen's milk , the milk of hens, has the same meaning, for we use it of rich people and people who have everything they want, and sometimes of things that are hard to find and therefore precious; so that it is an extravagant way of saying that one lacks absolutely nothing. Pliny1 in the preface to his History of the World, making fun of the artificial and pompous titles adopted for their books by certain Greeks, says: They have used names like Kerion,

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which they wish to be understood as Honeycomb; others Amalthea's Horn meaning a horn of plenty, as though you could expect from their work a drink of hen's milk/ Aristophanes2 in his Wasps: Not for hen's milk itself would I forego That life of which you would deprive me now.

Eustathius3 on the fourth Odyssey cites this adage from a play by Anaxagoras called Eggs. Again, Aristophanes4 the comic poet in his play The Birds: On you, your children and your children's children Health, wealth and happiness will we bestow, Life, peace and youth and laughter, dance and song, Hen's milk indeed, till you're foredone with blessings.

Strabo5 in book 14 of his Geography records of the fields in Samos that they were commonly said, on account of their great fertility, actually to produce hen's milk; and he notes that this is found as a proverbial phrase in Menander the comic poet. Athenaeus,6 in book 9 of his Doctors at Dinner, adduces these lines from an author of the Middle Comedy called Mnesimachus: There waits that rarer stuff of which they tell, Hen's milk and pheasants exquisitely plucked.

Again,7 in book 9 he cites from Numenius: 'And what they call hen's milk/ The same author8 suggests in book 3 that some people thought hen's milk was white of egg. 4 Non omnibus dormio I'm not asleep to everyone 'Not to be asleep to everyone' is a phrase used of those who are not every man's lackey, and whose complaisance has its limits. It is thought to be derived from certain husbands who are too ready to oblige, and knowingly expose their unfaithful wives, sometimes pretending to be asleep over their wine in order to give the lover freedom to do as he pleases. This kind of complaisance is pilloried in Juvenal's1 lines: He knows his cue and gazes at the floor And, while he winks, he snores - or seems to snore.

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Plutarch,2 in the essay entitled 'Eroticus/ tells an amusing story which illustrates this. A man named Galba had invited Maecenas to dinner; and when he began to understand from his guest's nods and winks that he had taken a fancy to his wife, he let his head sink little by little as though he were falling asleep. Meanwhile, one of the servants stole up to the table and started filching the wine; at which point he became wide awake, and cried: 'Wretch, couldn't you guess that I'm asleep to no one but Maecenas?' The saying is recorded also, with the same explanation, by Festus Pompeius,3 quoting Lucilius and showing that the original is a certain Capius, who was nicknamed Snorer because he used to pretend to be asleep, so that his wife could entertain her lovers with greater impunity. He also points out that Lucilius refers to this. Cicero4 too makes use of it in the seventh book of his Letters to Friends: 'In old days it was "I'm not asleep to everyone," but for me, my dear Callus, it's "I'm not a slave to everyone."' Cicero's point seems to be that one of these, 'I'm not everyone's sleeper,' was traditional; the other, 'I'm not everyone's slave,' was new. Both are at any rate proverbial; but the former is applicable to the foregoing of one's rights, the latter to the doing of a menial service. Cicero again,5 in his Letters to Atticus, book 13, has: 'It is nice to enjoy hating someone and, as the saying goes, not to be everyone's slave.' This passage, as a matter of fact, if I may mention this in passing, seems to me not free from fault. Perhaps he wrote: 'and, just as there is a saying, "not to be asleep to everyone," so not to be everyone's slave.'61 may add that this same word servire, to be a slave, contains an element of metaphor, as when we say 'to be a slave to one's theatre,7 to circumstances, to one's own faults, to one's wife's temper, to the public, to one's private profit/ in the sense of being ready to do anything to oblige. 5 Sardi venales Sardinians for sale ^apdavoi &VLOI, Sardinians1 for sale. In the brief treatise called Lives2 of Famous Men which some ascribe to Pliny and a few to Suetonius, though the style of both authors is against this, an adage is recorded of the form 'Sardinians for sale,' referring to any transaction that is infinitely long and interminable. This is said to spring from the fact that Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, after his conquest of Sardinia in his second consulship, 'brought back such a quantity of prisoners that the length of time taken in selling them became proverbial/ Plutarch3 in his 'Roman Questions' adduces another reason: a regular custom had grown up of old in Rome that those who produced games on the Capitol proclaimed 'Sardinians for sale/ and a boy came forward with an ornament hung round his neck in jest, which they call

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a bulla. He thinks this custom arose from the fact that the inhabitants of Veii, an Etruscan people, had waged war for a long time against Romulus, and their city was the last that Romulus captured. Though Livy4 in his first book recounts that the people of Veii were defeated by Romulus, but that after his victory he refrained from attacking their fortified city. From there he brought to Rome the king himself and a great many prisoners with him, and put them up for sale. Moreover, as the Etruscans were Lydians in origin, a fact recorded also by Herodotus5 in his first book, and the capital of Lydia was Sardis, he has reason to advertise Etruscans for sale under the name of Sardians or Sardinians. Plutarch6 tells the same story, though somewhat differently, in his life of Romulus. 'In the conquest of Veii the leader of its people was captured, and though an elderly man, was thought to have conducted the campaign with great imprudence for a man of his years. Hence a custom grew up that whenever the Romans sacrificed a victim to celebrate a victory, they brought an old man through the Forum up to the Capitol wearing a purple robe and with a bulla round his neck, which was then the badge of childhood, while the herald proclaimed "Sardians for sale." Veii is an Etruscan capital, and the Etruscans are thought to have been emigrants from Sardis.' Cicero7 uses the adage in his Letters to Friends, book 7, writing to Callus: 'Here's a lot of Sardinians for sale, each worse than the last/ Cicero is thinking of contemptible wretches and also, if I am not mistaken, of natives of Sardinia; for he has just said: 'I regard it as a gain not to have to put up with a man who is more pestilential than his birthplace.' 6 Dasypus carnes desiderat A hairyfoot hungry for meat AmrvTrov? Kpstbv iTnQvpei, The hairyf oot is hungry for meat. Said of those who ask others for something they have plenty of at home. For the hairyf oot is of the same family as the hare; and the hare, as Pliny1 says in book 8 chapter 55, 'is a harmless animal and edible and prolific, and is born to be the prey of everything else. It is the only creature beside the hairyf oot to carry a succession of offspring within itself at one time: while suckling one, it has in the womb a second covered with fur, a third hairless, and a fourth conceived but immature.' It is called 'hairyfoot' from the long hair on its shaggy feet. 7 Tute lepus es et pulpamentum quaeris A hare thyself, and goest in quest of game? Some suppose to be identical with the preceding a line we find in the Eunuchus of Terence:1 'A hare thyself, and goest in quest of game?' It is the

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retort of the braggart soldier to a youth from Rhodes who was making advances to the soldier's strumpet, though the boy was of an age when he was quite capable of taking a strumpet's place himself. Donatus gives various explanations of the allegory, suggesting that this proverb is appropriate to effeminate young men, because the hare provides the most tasty meat from its hinder parts, as it were its thighs and buttocks, and it is those parts that make it so much sought after; or because it is pursued by hounds, as lovers pursue the young man; or because, as naturalists tell us, it is of uncertain sex, male at one time and female at another. These fancies seem somewhat pointless to me, and I think it both simpler and nearer the truth to connect it with the Greek proverb of the hairy foot hungry for meat. Flavius Vopiscus,2 in his life of the emperor Numerian, says that the adage in Terence comes from Livius Andronicus,3 the earliest of the Roman comic poets. 8 Pan iugo Matched in double harness Pliny1 in his Letters uses this phrase to mean 'with equal zeal and equal effort.' It will be suitable for those engaged on an enterprise in commmon, in emulation and with comparable energy. A metaphor from oxen drawing a wagon and putting equal force into the yoke. Pliny's words are: The desire to succeed, and especially to succeed in professional matters, has an element in it of reluctance to admit a partner; but between us there was no competition and no disagreement, for we were both matched in double harness, and strove not for our own hand but to win the case.' Theocritus2 in his Aites: 'In double harness matched each loved the other,' of the love which is mutual and equal and, as Greek puts it, isorropon, well-balanced. Close to this are St Jerome's3 words addressed to Augustine: 'In Rome there are said to be a great many people with both skill and courage enough to take you on, and to argue with you about Holy Scripture, matching step for step.' The Greeks have another proverb,4 'We draw the selfsame yoke, both you and I,' of which I shall treat in its proper place. 9 Uno f asce complecti To bundle together 'To bundle together' is used also by Pliny of doing something in one operation and everything together, not separately. 'We were afraid,' he says, 'that we should run short of time and voice and breath, if we tried, as it were, to bundle together so many accusations and so many defendants.' A

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metaphor from those who tie many things together to make them easier to carry. For 'collectively' Greek uses syllebden, in one grasp. 10 Salem et mensam ne praetereas Transgress not salt and trencher Transgress not salt and trencher. Do not neglect the society of your friends, or Do not breach the unwritten laws of friendship. In the old days eating salt with a man and sharing his table cemented a friendship, and in Antiquity friends used often to dine together. So Diogenes Laertius1 also testifies in his life of Pythagoras, and Theocritus2 in his Hylas concurs: 'Since these two comrades ever shared one mess/ speaking of Hercules and Telamon. Then Hecuba in Euripides,3 to emphasize the wickedness of Polymnestor, speaks of the hospitable board: 'He oft had shared a common table with me/ And in i Esdras,4 chapter 4 we read: 'We therefore, mindful of the salt we have eaten in the palace, because we think it wrong to watch injury done to the king, etc/ Hence it is that, as we learn from Alexander in his memoir of Pythagoras, quoted by Laertius5 as before, Pythagoras said that we ought not to break bread, that there might be no division of a thing that brought friends together. It was also his opinion that salt was of all things the most appropriate to set on the dinner-table, because it puts us in mind of equity and justice, it keeps sound and preserves whatever it takes to itself, and it is made of the purest substances, of water and sea. Origen6 in the second book of his Against Celsus refers to a satirist from Paros, who attacked Lycomantes because he had transgressed salt and trencher. He turns this also against Judas who betrayed Christ. Again7 in his commentary on Matthew he says of Judas 'Nor did he bethink him of the bread and salt that they had eaten together.' And it may well be that Christ himself, the founder of our religion, alluded to this, as it seems to have been his policy to hide his deepest mysteries in the very commonest things of daily life, for he knew that this emblem would be despised by the Jews and welcomed by the Gentiles. Among the Macedonians, at any rate, it was an ancestral custom, when they ratified a treaty which they wished to be especially sacred, that both parties should partake of a loaf cut in two with a sword; so Quintus Curtius,8 book 8. 11 Baceli similis Like Bacelus Like Bacelus, and You are a regular and Bacelus. Used of catamites and effeminate men, or men of large build but

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thick-headed. Derived from the physique and behaviour of a certain Bacelus. Suidas says that bakelos properly means a eunuch, and is therefore used of effeminates, because this is the defect from which that class of men most commonly suffer. Antiphanes1 in his Carians attacks a man called Bacelus, as quoted in Athenaeus, book 4: 'Seest thou not Bacelus / Dancing with his arms without a blush?' Suetonius2 mentions him in his life of Augustus, whose regular habit it was to use a peculiar word bacelus for a fool, though in the common run of copies the word is baceolus. Ermolao thinks that in Quintilian3 too Bacelus could rightly be read for Bagoas. Quintilian's words run as follows: 'But the most distinguished sculptors and painters, when they wished to represent very beautiful bodies by painting or modelling, have none the less never fallen into this error of taking some Bagoas or Megabyzus as a model for their work.' I myself do not see why Quintilian's text need be changed, since bagoas in some barbarous language means eunuch, and under that name Lucian4 introduces a philosopher who looks just like a eunuch in face and body. Ovid5 too in his Amores gives the name Bagoas to the slave who is set to keep watch over a girl: 'Bagoas, you who guard my mistress dear.' 12 Batalus Batalus BdraXo? el, You're a regular Batalus, was said in old days by way of insult to effeminate men. Plutarch1 shows that the nickname was given to Demosthenes as a boy, and used to his discredit by his enemies. He adds various explanations of the name: either there was a fluteplayer called Batalus, an effeminate who was the first man to come on the stage wearing women's sandals and who castrated music, if I may use the phrase; or there was an obscene poet called Batalus; or batalos is a name given in Attic Greek to a part of the body that cannot be mentioned without indecency. This is referred to by Libanius.2 The same man, Demosthenes I mean, at an advanced age was similarly given the insulting nickname Argas,3 either because someone of that name was the promoter of several bad laws, or because, as Suidas thinks, an argas is a kind of serpent. There is also a Greek verb4 batalizesthai, to follow a scandalous and effeminate way of life. 13 Bene plaustrum perculit He gave the cart a good shove downhill Country people have a proverb: 'He gave the cart a good shove downhill.' Commonly used, it is clear, of those who urge a man in a direction to which

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he was already tending of his own accord. A metaphor from loaded carts, which are commonly tipped over to empty them; and this is more easily done in the direction towards which they already tilt because of a slope in the ground. Donatus1 pointed to this adage in his explanation of Parmeno's words in the Eunuchus: 'You'll quite upset me presently.' This idea is not far removed from that remark in Plautus'2 Curculio: 'Advice is nearly as good as a helping hand.' The words are spoken by a pandar, who will be all the more ready to break faith when advised by a money-lender to do what he intended to do anyhow, with or without advice. The same thing is elegantly expressed by Sophocles,3 quoted by Plutarch in his life of Artaxerxes: 'How easy 'tis to preach transgression!' For most men, the road from better to worse runs downhill. 4 In Care periculum Risk it on a Carian Risk it on a Carian: make a risky experiment on a person or thing of little value, so that if anything goes wrong, there will be no great loss to suffer. This adage took its rise from the character of the Carians. They are a people, as Pomponius Mela1 tells us, 'of uncertain origin; for some think them autochthones (natives, that is, of the country), some Pelasgians, some Curetes, and their national passion for fighting is such that they habitually fight for pay even in the wars of other peoples/ Hence Theocritus2 in his Praise of Ptolemy wrote 'And Carians that love war.' Herodotus3 too in Euterpe indicates that the Carians were by nature barbarous and fit to be slaves, prepared to endure any hardships if they are paid for it. Aristophanes4 suggests the same thing in the Birds: Tf he's a slave and a Carian/ Strabo5 in book 14 of his Geography tells how the Carians once roamed all over Greece, fighting in various places as mercenaries, and that in fact they were such outstanding fighters that weapons of war are commonly called Carian by the poets: Anacreon has a Carian breastplate, Alcaeus a Carian crest, to which Aristophanes6 alludes in the Birds. Suidas7 writes that the Carians were the first mercenary troops, because they set such a low value on their own lives. Those therefore who had hired Carian troops had a habit of posting them in the front of the battle-line, that they might receive the enemy's first onset at their own peril; or they were thrown into a battle at the point where its outcome looked most uncertain. The Persians8 in their native tongue had a word kardakes for those who lived by plunder. The reputation of the Carians is rivalled, it seems, in our own day by the Swiss,9 born fighters, but in other respects a straightforward sort of men with

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absolutely no vice in them, and quite good enough, in my opinion, to forego this, the only stain on their characters; for they would achieve distinction in literature and all other honourable subjects, if they would give up fighting and attend to these instead. This adage is used by Socrates in Plato's10 Euthydemus, when he tells them to make an experiment in transformation on himself rather than anyone else, as on a worthless Carian, who will be no great loss if you destroy him in the process. 'If you young men are afraid,' he says, 'make the experiment on me as your Carian; for I am an old man, and quite ready to face the risk, and I hand myself over to Dionysodorus here, as to a modern Medea of Colchis. Let him destroy me; let him boil me, if he wishes, in a cauldron; let him do what he likes, provided he makes me a good man.' He refers to it again in the Laches, when he says that those who are starting to teach and making trial of their skill to the great peril of the young, must remember that it is no Carian mercenary but the children of the citizens that are at risk. Aristides11 imitates him in his Panathenaic Oration: 'Making the experiment on the proverbial Carian, and not on their own persons/ Cicero12 uses the same phrase in his speech Pro L. Flacco: 'Why, is not all Caria the subject of a common proverb in your language, that if you wish to make an experiment with some risk attached to it, you should for preference risk it in Caria?' This passage is clearly corrupt, and I have no hesitation in asserting that we should read, not 'in Caria' (in Caria) but 'on a Carian' (in Care). The opposite of this is Aureo piscari hamo, To fish with a golden hook, of which I will treat elsewhere.13 15 In dolio figularem artem discere To learn the potter's art on a big jar The same is true of To learn the potter's art on a big jar, used of those who from the start practise their skill on the largest projects, though it is wise to proceed gradually from small things to great. For a potter does not start by making a big jar immediately, which is a vessel of the largest size, but sundry small pots, which will not involve heavy loss if something goes wrong. This is roughly the sense in which Plato1 uses it in the Laches'. 'We must ensure that we do not run this risk, not with the proverbial Carian, but in our sons and our friends' sons, so that it happens to us exactly as the proverb says, that we learn our potting on a big jar/ Dicaearchus2 turns the proverb to mean something different: he makes it say that every craftsman ought to practise his own art, a coachman by driving carriages, a shipmaster by steering his ship, a physician by curing the sick, as though it were absurd for a potter to try driving a carriage, which is someone

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else's business, instead of making a big jar. And thus the well-known principle3 will apply here too: 'Let each man ply the trade that he knows best/ and Horace's4 remark in his Epistles: Who knows not ships will fear to venture aught, Nor southernwood prescribe, who's not been taught; Leeches their physic, smiths their hammers ply Skilled and unskilled, we all can versify.

Gregory5 the Theologian makes a similar use of it in his Apologia defuga: To attempt to teach others before they are properly educated themselves, and like the potter learning on a big jar, as the saying is, to practise piety on the souls of other people, seems to me the height of folly.' 16 Ne sutor ultra crepidam Let the cobbler stick to his last Close to this is Ne sutor ultra crepidam, Let the cobbler stick to his last - let no one, that is, attempt to judge of matters which are far removed from his own skill and calling. This adage took its rise from Apelles, the famous painter, of whom Pliny,1 book 35 chapter 10, tells the following story: 'When his work was finished, he would expose it in the porch to the view of passers-by, hiding behind the picture to listen to their comments on its faults, because he thought the public a more strict critic than himself; and they say that he was criticized by a cobbler for painting one loop too few on the inner side of a pair of sandals. Next day, finding his criticism had been attended to, the man went proudly on to criticize the drawing of a leg; and Apelles looked out indignantly and told him when passing judgment to stick to his last. These words became proverbial.' So much for Pliny. There is a similar story in Athenaeus:2 Stratonicus the lyre-player said to a smith who was arguing with him about music 'Can't you see that you're not sticking to your hammer?' His nephew's3 remark in his Letters points the same way, that no one can judge a work of art properly unless he too is an artist. And Aristotle's4 saying in the first book of the Ethics that everyone is a proper judge of the things he knows about. Also what he wrote in the second book of the Physics of a blind man disputing about colours - words which have become proverbial among academics of our own day for disputing on subjects of which a man knows nothing. To the same opinion we may refer what Fabius Pictor5 says in Quintilian, that the arts would be fortunate if none but artists were their critics.

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17 Dii facientes adiuvant The gods help those who help themselves Varro1 in his Agriculture, book i: 'And since, as they say, the gods help those who help themselves, I will invoke the gods first.' He indicates that divine help is commonly available, not to the idle, but to industrious men who try as hard as they can. To this I think we should refer those lines in Homer2 which have already become proverbial: 'Some things, Telemachus, will you devise / In your own heart; some too will heaven suggest.' Cicero3 used this in book 9 of his Letters to Atticus: 'You have to do everything unprepared. But nevertheless "some you'll devise, some too will heaven suggest/" 18 Cum Minerva manum quoque move Invoke Minerva, but use your own strength too Let Minerva help you, but Close to this is make a start meanwhile yourself. The adage warns us not to relax our efforts in reliance on divine assistance. It is specially appropriate to women: their woolwork has Minerva as its patron, and they ask her aid, but press on with no less energy all the time. Some think it arose from a carter1 whose ass stuck fast in the mud, and when he ought to have helped it out, he did nothing and appealed to Hercules. The god replied, as the story goes, that he should set his hand meanwhile to help his donkey in distress, and that heaven would help him then, but not before. Others produce another tale: when a man was to enter a contest, he asked Minerva whether he would emerge victorious, and the answer was yes. However, when he entered the ring and stood there with folded arms, his opponent knocked him out, and he lost. To this adage belongs that most elegant line cited from a tragedy by Agathon2 in Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics, book 5: 'Art fond of fortune, fortune fond of art.' The following iambic line is quoted by Suidas3 to the same effect: 'First take your coat off, and then say your prayers.' 19 Nostro Marte By our own prowess Whenever we bring something to a conclusion with no outside help, by our own wits and such strength as we possess, we are said to do it by our own prowess or on our own merits; also when something is done at our own risk. Cicero1 in his De officiis, book 3: This gap then I propose to fill, with no outside help but, as they say, by my own prowess.' Again in his second

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Philippic, speaking of Deiotarus: Tor the king himself on his own initiative and with no support from Caesar's memoranda, as soon as the news of Caesar's death reached him, recovered his property by his own prowess.' In the second book of the Code,2 in the title Ne liceat potentioribus, chapter i: 'It was an inspired provision of his late imperial majesty that most sapient emperor Claudius our kinsman, that all such persons should be cast in their suit as might have secured the assistance of powerful patrons, in order that with this threat in prospect, questions at issue in the courts should be decided on their own merits, in preference to reliance on the resources of powerful persons in high place.' And again in book 3, title De iudiciis, chapter 11: This rule being observed beyond a peradventure, that neither of the parties engaged in a suit and none of the judges may so act, that the case does not proceed on its own merits; but absolute freedom must be left to the judge by counsel on either side.' A metaphor, it would seem, from supreme commanders, who fight a campaign on their own initiative and with their own forces; for Plautus3 too has 'With my own forces' instead of 'By my own prowess.' Other phrases have a proverbial ring, such as vario Marte, dubio Marie, iniquo Marte, when Mars, representing the fortunes of war, is said to be changeable or doubtful or unfair. This adage is almost the opposite of one I have recorded elsewhere:4 OVK O.VEV ©Tjcrew?, Not without Theseus. 20 Nequicquam sapit, qui sibi non sapit He's wise in vain that's not wise for himself It is an old saw in very frequent use even in our own day, that a man's wisdom is useless who is wise only for others. Plato1 in the Hippias major says: 'And many agree that the wise man should be wise above all for his own benefit.' Cicero2 too uses it in a letter to Trebatius, showing that it comes from a tragedy on the subject of Medea: 'And since I have begun to play Medea's part, always remember that line "He whose wisdom nought avails him, all in vain is counted wise."' It is a trochaic verse. Again in his Letters to Friends, book 13, writing to Caesar the emperor: 'And so I betake me from Homer's grand style to the true precepts of Euripides: "Wisdom I hate that's not wise for itself," a line most highly praised by the elder Praecilius.' Again, in the first book of the On Divination he quotes against soothsayers the lines of Ennius: They whose wisdom tells them nothing yet show other men the way; 'Riches shall be yours' they promise, yet themselves must beg their bread.

Lucian3 in his Apology quotes 'Wisdom I hate that's not wise for itself.'

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Alexander4 turned the same line against Callisthenes because, he said, he did not adapt himself to the characters of those he lived with, but made it clear that he disapproved of everything that went on. And this freedom of speech cost the excellent man his life, while that contemptible toady the philosopher Anaxarchus was held in high esteem. This principle5 is so precisely observed by our contemporaries, that one would be thought unworthy to be called a human being who could not find some means of promoting his own advantage. In this class falls that thing in Suetonius:6 'Observe a second Sulla, fortunate / Not for Rome's benefit but for his own/ 21 Cantherium in fossa Donkey in a ditch Donkey in a ditch: a country proverb, but it has a military origin. Can be used whenever someone is obliged to do what he is quite incapable of, or when something will be extremely complex or dangerous. The story comes in Livy, * book 3 of the third decade. He tells how, when Fabius had laid siege to Capua in the second Punic war, Jubellius Taurea, the most renowned of the Campanian knights, challenged the first comer in the Roman army to single combat, and one Claudius Asellius dared to step forward. When they had dodged each other for a long time in open ground, the Campanian called to his opponent to come down into a hollow way, since otherwise it would be a contest between the horses instead of their riders. The Roman, whose courage ran to deeds not words, came down at once; whereupon Taurea again got the better of him with a remark which has passed into a country proverb. 'Don't you know' he said 'how little a donkey can do in a ditch?' Although from Livy's words the sense of the adage is far from clear, we can easily guess what it means. It conflicts with one of which I shall speak elsewhere:2 Equum in planiciem, The horse to the plain. A horse is of the greatest value on an open plain, and is very little use in a ditch. 22 Tantali talenta The talents of Tantalus TaXavTo. lavraXov, The talents of Tantalus. Used of immense wealth. Tantalus was a Phrygian who became a byword for his enormous riches, so that he is supposed to endure even in the nether regions the sort of frustration that these grasping rich men feel in the midst of their piled-up wealth. Horace,1 when he says of Tantalus: In vain he grasps the cup he fain would quaff At you this story points: how dare you laugh?

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shows that the lesson of this myth is aimed at those who are at the same time both rich and mean. Plato2 uses the adage in the Euthyphro. Suidas3 says it occurs in Epicharmus and in Anacreon. It also takes another form,4 with an elegant play on words: Tantali talenta talentizat, meaning He weighs and hoards as much as Tantalus. That Tantalus moreover was a man of great wealth is shown by, among other things, that line from a tragedy quoted by Plutarch5 in his essay 'On Exile': The fields I sow are twelve days' journey long/ In another passage6 he calls immense riches Tantalic wealth.' Antiphanes, cited by Athenaeus,7 book 6: Such once was Thribon's, who was gently stripped Of all the fabled wealth of Tantalus.

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Pelopis talenta The talents of Pelops Theocritus1 uses a similar expression in idyll 8, when he writes of the 'talents of Pelops': Not Pelops' land nor Pelops' wealth I crave, Talents of gold, nor to outrun the winds.

In Attica moreover a talent was the largest sum of money they knew. The lesser2 talent weighed sixty pounds, the greater talent weighed eighty. Hence these lines in the Phormio:3 Geta If anyone would give him a great talent... Demipho Great talent? Rather give him a great thrashing.

And Aristophanes:4 'What? Turn Opuntian? / Not I! Not for a talent of pure gold!' which means, I would not sacrifice the sight of one eye, however much you gave me. 24 Midae divitiae The riches of Midas As rich as The riches of Midas, and Midas, have passed into a proverb on account of the great wealth of a king of that name, which gave rise also to numerous stories. Statius1 in his poem on Pollius' villa at Sorrento: 'Richer than Midas' wealth and Lydian gold/ This Midas was a tyrant of Phrygia who, if we believe the fables of the poets,2 in

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return for his hospitality to Bacchus was permitted by the gods to wish for anything he liked, and it would be given him. He prayed that whatever he touched might instantly be turned into gold. The historians3 tell us that, when he was a child, ants piled grains of wheat on his lips as he lay asleep; the soothsayers said this meant that he would be the richest of all mortal men, and so it turned out. Pliny4 gives him first place in his list of outstandingly rich men, in book 33. 25 Non omnino temere est, quod vulgo dictitant What is in every man's mouth is not spoken wholly without cause Aristotle1 uses as a proverb - and it has long ago passed into a proverb among educated men - that famous saying in Hesiod, 'which all men repeat' as Aristides2 says in his defence of Pericles, to the effect that whatever is spread by popular rumour is rarely devoid of all foundation. It comes in the second volume of his poems,3 which has the title Works and Days: And shun the fearful rumour of mankind. Rumour's an evil thing, so lightly raised, Grievous to bear and hard to put away; Rumour dies hard that many folk have uttered; Rumour herself's a sort of deity.

The statement can be taken in two ways, either that a thing which is in every man's mouth and accepted by popular opinion does not seem wholly false, or that a rumour, false though it may be, once it has already spread in public cannot be wholly suppressed. And so it warns us to take great care that we may never have the misfortune to become a byword even unjustifiably through some rash act. In calling Rumour a deity, he agrees with Homer,4 who in several passages introduces a character called Ossa; for this is his name for Rumour regarded as a goddess. And Virgil5 imitates him in the fourth book of the Aeneid: 'This the foul goddess o'er the lips of men / Spread broadcast.' 26 Domum cum facis, ne relinquas impolitam When you make your house, leave it not unplaned Although there is no saying of Hesiod's that has not become proverbial, I myself prefer to list those which, being wrapped up in riddles, come closer to proverbs in form. An example of this may be found in these lines from the book I have just quoted:

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Building thy house, leave not the roof unplaned, Lest clamorous crows upon it perch and croak.

Proculus1 the commentator tells us that this passage is taken in two ways. Some think the poet is warning us that every man should see that the building of his house is finished before the winter, for fear that he may then have no means of keeping out the cold; for the crow, he says, is a symbol of winter, as being a winter bird. Moreover, while it is true always, it is most true in the winter months that There's no place like home/ as the proverb2 runs. Others think it means that a building once begun ought not to be left half finished, for fear you become a public laughing-stock, and the passers-by speak against you, and criticize your infirmity of purpose in not finishing what you have started. For this custom of criticizing others is a speciality of common people, as the Gospel parables indicate. It was this habit of persistent denigration that the poet meant to indicate by his crow; for the crow is a noisy and obstreperous bird, so that it has given rise to the proverbial use3 of the verb 'to croak/ But Proculus for his part prefers to take the expression in a general sense: every piece of business to which we have once set our hands ought to be brought to its proper conclusion, so that nothing at all is lacking, and everywhere we ought to strive for completeness. The further removed this can be from its literal use, the more elegant it will appear, and the more like a true proverb: for example, if one were to urge a man not to abandon humane studies, but to put the finishing touches to what has been so admirably started, for fear he many become an object of general derision by giving up something well begun, and bring against him Hesiod's words: Building thy house, leave not the roof unplaned, Lest clamorous crows upon it perch and croak.

27 Ne a chytropode cibum nondum sacrificatum rapias Snatch not food as yet unblest out of the dish There is another puzzle in that passage, in the lines that immediately follow: Nor from unhallowed vessels take thou aught To eat nor wash.

Cicero1 too suggests that it was irreligious to eat food out of the dish, for he writes as follows in book 2 of his Definibus: 'And yet we shall find profligates

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who in the first place are so devoid of scruples that they eat out of the dish, and then so far from the fear of death that they have ever on their lips that verse from the Hymnis: "Six bare months of life suffice me; Death is welcome to the rest/" It is a trochaic line. Suetonius2 in his life of Vitellius relates that 'his greed was not only so great but so ill-timed, that even at a sacrifice or on a journey he never controlled himself, but when at the altar would snatch fat and spelt-grains almost out of the fire and eat them there and then, and the hot food in a wayside eating-house, even if it was two days old and half-eaten/ As far as the plain sense goes, it tells us not to fall greedily upon our food like brute beasts, but to wait until we have first offered the first-fruits to heaven. For in ancient times, as Plutarch3 tells us in his Table-talk/ even daily food was included among things sacred; and so, when they were about to eat, they used to consecrate the first-fruits to the gods, and then they would proceed to their repast with no indecent haste but with a certain solemnity, with hands duly washed, as they might to some sacred meal. This custom4 survives to our own day among well-conducted Christians. But it will be more like a proverb, if we understand it to mean that we must not rob our underlings and servants or strip them heartlessly of what is theirs, but must leave them in possession of some portion of their money, for them to live on. It will perhaps5 be found suitable for those men too who are greedy, and therefore in a hurry, and are eager to snatch an advantage before the right moment comes, and reap their harvest, as it were, before the crop is ripe; for example, the man who demands on the spot something bequeathed or promised to him, when it would be more courteous to say nothing for some days, or he who has lately come into a position of power and begins at once to despoil the people with his exactions, or who, when betrothed to a girl, does not wait for her to be of full age, does not wait for the marriage ceremony, but beds her forthwith. It is taken from the liturgy of sacrifices, which in old days included a meal. With this belongs a phrase I have reported elsewhere6 from Athenaeus, book 9: 'ATTO Trjyavov, A patella, Straight from the pan. In book 6 he quotes from Pherecrates7 the iambic line 'Said he ate whitebait straight out of the pan.' Some used the form teganon for a pan, the Ionic eganon; hence the compound verb apoteganizein, to eat from the pan. Thus Phrynichus,8 quoted by Athenaeus book 6, uses it: 'Sweet indeed, this eating from the pan, and no scot paid/ meaning, if there is nothing to pay and you are allowed to do it free. Again, in another passage, he quotes from Archestratus9 'Snatching it from the spit'; said of a woman who was described as eating the sacrificial meat before it had been offered. The same author in his sixth book quotes from Anaxandrides:10

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Let 'em gape as they will at the painter's great skill, As it hangs in its frame very nice: Here's art, if they can, that they snatch from the pan, And it's gone from the pot in a trice.

In general it will be possible to adapt this to anyone who embarks on something heedlessly and, as the saying goes,11 with unwashed feet. 28 Haec potior This is sovereign Plutarch1 in his 'Greek Questions' records a proverb in the following fashion: 'Whence came the proverbial saying: This is sovereign? Dinon of Tarentum, when he was general, being a soldier of long experience, put forward a proposal which was voted down by the citizens; and when the herald announced the result, he held up his right hand and cried "No! This is stronger." So the story is told by Theophrastus. Apollodorus in his Rhytinus adds that when the herald said "There are more votes on the other side," he retorted "But these are better," and ratified the opinion of the minority.' From this we may infer that the phrase was commonly used to convey that some proposal was better or more profitable, although the majority thought otherwise, or when those who were fewer in number commanded greater resources. In this class would fall, to illustrate what I mean by examples, the following. 'Most men measure felicity by happiness and wealth, and very few are devoted to virtue; but do not be moved by the majority, for this is sovereign.' Again: There is almost no one in the prince's entire household who does not wish you well; but one man is against you, and he is so universally powerful that he can lord it almost over the prince himself. And so, if all depended on a vote, success is already yours; but this is sovereign/ Porphyrion2 touches lightly on the proverb, as it were with a finger-tip, in his note on that passage in Horace's Epodes: Let us bind our citizens all with a solemn oath: It is time to be gone, for those at the least Who stand out from the ignorant throng.

Although the reading of many copies is, is, I think, corrupt. It will be more correct, if I am not mistaken, to write Kappovtov viKa - not The worse counsel wins' but 'Victory is with the better party.' For the ode is a rhetorical piece, and urges a unanimous vote in favour of emigration. If however it is impossible for the best policy to commend itself to the

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multitude, at least let the soundest opinion win the day, even if supported by fewer votes. Plato3 writes to the same effect in the first book of the Laws, that it is the most admirable sort of victory when the crowd give way before their betters, and in decisions the weight of votes gets more attention than their number. His words, in the book I mentioned, run as follows: Tor wheresoever the better citizens do overcome the multitude and the worser sort, that city would rightly be said to surpass itself, and such a victory would most justly redound to its credit; and the converse, where the converse happens.' Pliny4 had the same point in mind when he complains in his Letters that votes are counted and not weighed. Here belongs also that remark in Livy:5 The larger party defeated the better/ Homer6 points the same way in the first book of the Iliad: 'Since the worse counsel wins/ Nor should one pass over in this context a story told by Diogenes Laertius7 of the philosopher Zeno. When Zeno saw that Theophrastus was made much of and highly praised because he attracted a larger audience, his answer was: 'His choir is larger, but mine sings more in tune/ There will therefore be scope for this adage, when we declare that the quality of those who think well of us is more important than the quantity; or when we propose that we should follow not the opinion of the majority but the best course, even if it has very few votes; or when we say that the support of two or three people eminent for wealth or popularity or influence is worth more than the goodwill of the multitude, who are superior in numbers but inferior in all else. In the same way, a character in Plautus8 says that he thinks nothing of those lesser gods, provided he may enjoy the favour of Jove alone. And it will not be absurd to bring this in, whenever one force is greater than all the rest; one might say, for instance, 'This course has more public support, has more reasons in its favour, is based on justice, is enjoined by the law; but the other is the winner. For "such9 is my will and pleasure/" For inevitably everything must give place whenever the king utters an oracle like those words of Agamemnon in Homer:10 'If he says no, I'll take her for myself/ In the same way Lucian11 speaks in his Captive of those 'who think might is right/ Pyrrhus, when asked by one of his children, who was still very young, to whom he proposed to bequeath his kingdom, replied To whichever of you has the sharpest sword/ Plutarch12 in his life of Pyrrhus thinks this runs very close to that curse in tragedy, that brothers may divide their family inheritance 'by the sword's whetted edge/ And so, when confronted with those who use violence and, as Ennius13 puts it, 'by iron win their way,' who make might their right and for whom 'the laws are silent14 amid the clash of arms,' it will be right to give an ironic twist to the saying This wins the day' and This is sovereign/ For the Greek word kyrios means not only 'master' in the proper sense, but any person who has the

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final say. Suidas15 shows that they spoke of a 'sovereign assembly' in which magistrates were normally elected. Aristophanes16 in the Acharnians uses kyrios of an assembly in which he says, using a related verb, that they cast their sovereign votes. Sometimes it can be applied to things as well as people, as by Euripides17 in his Iphigeneia in Aulis: 'My words, not his, deserve to win the day/ For the slave's point is, that, for all that he is of lower standing than Menelaus, he has the advantage over him of a more just cause. Not far from this are Cicero's18 words in the In Pisonem: 'But I will say nothing of the way in which each of us was elected. By all means let Fortune be mistress of the hustings.' 29 Delius natator A Delian diver A Delian diver. Commonly used in old days of an expert swimmer who could swim on the surface1 of the water. The adage took its rise, or at least won greater currency, from a remark of Socrates. When Euripides once showed him a book by Heracleitus, who was nicknamed 'the prince of darkness' for the deliberate obscurity of what he wrote, and asked him what he thought of it, the story goes that he replied: 'Splendid, where I could understand it and, I daresay, where I could not; but you need to be a Delian diver if you are not to drown in his depths.' Socrates2 referred at the same time both to the proverb and to the excessive profundity of Heracleitus' abstruse opinions, which were such that without the help of a really powerful swimmer there was some danger that the reader of his book would sink without trace. Laertius3 in his life of Heracleitus attributes this dictum to a certain Crates, who was the first, he says, to introduce Heracleitus' book on nature to the Greek public, and paid it this tribute. 30 Dicendo dicere discunt By speaking men learn how to speak By speaking we learn how to speak. Syrianus, the commentator on Hermogenes, criticizes the sophist Evagoras for holding that fluency in speaking is a matter merely of practice and not theory, and that we achieve readiness of speech by speaking, 'supposing' he says, 'as the vulgar proverb has it, that by speaking one learns how to speak.' Cicero2 also used it in the first book of his De oratore: 'In this' he says 'they are misled by what they have been told, that men normally contrive to become good speakers by speaking. There is truth also in the opposite saying, that a bad style is most easily acquired by speaking badly.' Pliny3 in the sixth book of his Letters: T observe that many men of small talent and no 1

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education have become good advocates by practice in advocacy/ The adage also has a wider application, to skill in any field, which is most appropriately acquired by practice, the best teacher of any subject. Hence all statements will have a proverbial flavour which are of the form 'You will learn building as you build, music as you play, tactics on the field of battle, writing as you ply your pen/ 31 Multi bonique Many good men and true Many good men and true, was used in old days as a proverb. Derived from a sacrificial rite in which the celebrant, when about to offer sacrifice, used to ask who was present. The assembled company then replied 'Many good men and true/ This they did partly to secure a good omen, for it was important at a sacrifice to avoid all unlucky words, in Greek euphemein; partly to give anyone with a crime on his conscience a chance to leave the sacred mysteries. Plutarch1 in his Table-talk': 'Since many good men and true are here to support Plato/ But I have referred to this before.2 Aristides3 too alluded to this in his Pericles: 'But he gave evidence in his favour ungrudgingly and unequivocally, as one would expect of a good man and true/ Homer's4 phrase 'great and good' is also current as a proverb, and is found here and there even in Aristophanes.5 The proverb therefore will be in place whenever we wish to convey, of witnesses or judges or colleagues, that they are well-chosen and by no means to be rejected. 32 Heroum filii noxae Great men have trouble from their children Great men have trouble from their children. The Ancients observed that in character the sons of distinguished men fall far short of their forbears. Hence Demosthenes'1 remark that 'good men, as though by a kind of destiny, produce bad sons/ This opinion of his is reported by Aristides in the Cimon. The scholiast, whoever he was - and he was neither idle nor ignorant - quotes on this passage the proverb I have just recorded. Even today it remains current as a humorous saying, that the wisest fathers have most fools as their children. Euripides2 in the Heracleidae applies this opinion widely to mortals in general: 'One among many haply you may find / No worse man than his sire/ Homer3 says the same in several passages, especially in Odyssey book 2: Few sons indeed are equal to their fathers; Most men are worse, few better than their sires.

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Aelius Spartianus4 holds forth on this theme in his life of the Emperor Severus, showing with many examples how it often happens that men who are distinguished for courage or literary gifts or the favours of fortune either have no children at all, or leave offspring of such a kind that it would be better for humanity if they died childless. 33 Nunquam ex malo patre bonus filius Never good son from bad father Euripides1 is evidence for the currency as a proverb of the maxim that a bad father does not beget good children: Alas, how true that ancient saying runs: An evil father ne'er begat good sons!

This dictum finds support in the proverb2 Mali corvi malum ovum, An ill crow lays an ill egg. Also in that line of Theognis:3 'For ne'er on squills do roses grow/ and others of the kind, which shall be recorded in their places. 34 Alio relinquente fluctu alius excepit One wave left me and another caught me up Aristides in his Themistocles: 'But for Themistocles the sequel was always greater than what went before, and he felt the force of the proverb "one wave left me and another caught me up," until at length he emerged victorious from the third great wave.' There seems to have been a proverbial verse, which Aristides has distorted somewhat to fit his sentence; it will read properly like this: The image is taken from men on a dangerous voyage, who after one wave has hit them always expect another, as squall follows squall. And sailors in peril actually count the onset of the waves; for they have a special fear of every tenth wave, which the Ancients called a 'tenner,' a decumana.lrThe Greek name for those very heavy squalls was trikumia, the 'great third wave.' This can be neatly adapted to the onset of misfortunes when, as often happens, one calamity succeeds another, according to that proverbial verse2 'Fortune is ne'er content to strike but once.' 35 Duobus pedibus fugere To put your best foot first To make for shelter with both feet, putting your best foot first. Aristides in his Panathenaic Oration: 'And this first point

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alone, that all who needed help made for shelter in Athens just as though they were really putting their best foot first, with never a glance at any of the other cities, is clear and weighty evidence, better than any inscription on a monument, that she was pre-eminent from the start.' The man who equipped this author with explanatory notes, which are by no means to be despised, tells us that the proverb is derived from men in a hurry running, so that it Take both hands to it,1 which we use seems to resemble to express care and speed in the finishing of a task; or from sailors, as one might say 'with two helms.'2 For the rudder or steering-oar of a ship they call its foot, because as the ship is turned by it this way and that, she may be thought to take as it were a step forward by means of it. Thus it would come close to the proverb we have treated of elsewhere,3 To lie at two anchors. And so we can take either of two meanings, that their custom was to seek refuge in the city eagerly and as fast as they could, or that they found there the safest refuge of all. Though Aristophanes4 in the Birds used it to convey the idea of speed, when he wrote 'We flew up from our country, best foot first/ The commentator points out that this is taken from ships that run with the wind, so that the sense is 'with very great energy and effort/ 36 Quis aberret a janua? Who could miss the gate? Who could miss the gate? Commonly used when someone entirely misses the truth and comes to quite the wrong conclusions. Aristotle1 uses it in the Metaphysics, book 2, right at the beginning; and in all the copies which I have been able to consult, I find the word spelt thuras, gate, with a u. Besides which, Argyropylus renders it by janua, a gate, and he is a competent translator and a philosopher no one can despise. Then again Averroes,2 who is now the greatest authority in our schools of philosophy, makes it quite clear in his exposition of the passage that he is thinking of a gate. Again, in the commentary of Alexander3 of Aphrodisias I find in the same way thuras, gate. If it were at all permissible to dissent from so many copies and such great authorities, I myself would think the text more likely to be right if we read theras, the target, with an e in place of the u. That thuras should have crept in is not surprising, in the first place because the mistake was a very easy one, the corruption of a single letter, and probably quite accidental, especially as there is almost no difference in the sound. And then the point of the metaphor could be made more obvious and easier to grasp, so that it deceived even practised philosophers, who were not of course as familiar with the underlying story as they were with the hackneyed image of the house-door typifying the first steps in cognition. Last but not

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least, that the manuscripts should agree among themselves will not seem remarkable to anyone who is even moderately experienced in the evaluation and comparison of codices; for it often happens that the error of one archetype, provided it displays some semblance of the truth, is propagated thereafter into all the copies which are, so to speak, its progeny, *be they its children's children, and all that ensue thereafter/41 say this with no desire for a fight to the death, should someone perchance disagree with me, partly because this would be against my principles, partly because I am well aware what a slippery slope it is and a perilous business, to make any change in these eminent authors. All I will do is to put forward conjectures that appeal to me. If anyone thinks they fit, he will subscribe to my opinion; if not, he will hold to his old view all the more readily because, even when challenged, it has won the day. In the first place, then, considerable doubts were raised in my mind by a very old and also very accurate manuscript of the speeches of Aristides5 the rhetorician, in which I find not only theras, target, in the text, but also a reference to a very ancient story, and with it to an author from whom this proverb of Aristotle's might, if I am not mistaken, have gained currency. What Aristides says, then, in the speech entitled Pericles runs as follows: 'And so, before you have shot any of your opponents, you hit and bring home one of your friends; you have the same experience as Peleus in Pindar, who missed the target he was aiming at and instead killed Eurytion, who was very dear to him.' I am supported here by the extant scholia on that author, which bear no definite title, it is true, but are evidently the work of a disciplined intelligence by no means ill-informed. Consequently I shall append his remarks without hesitation, in case anyone should be interested to see them: 'Pindar recounts' he says 'in his Hymns how Eurytion, son of Irus whose father was Actor, and who was one of the Argonauts, was accidentally killed by Peleus when they were hunting together. He calls him dear because they were kinsmen; for Peleus' first wife, before his marriage to Thetis, had been Actor's daughter Polymelos, and Actor was the father of Irus, whose son Eurytion was.' And so it seems not unlikely that the adage started with Pindar, and was used by Aristotle as usual without giving the name of his authority; so that we are to understand that he misses his target who not only fails to hit the animal in the place he intended, but misses his quarry entirely and does not even touch what he was aiming at. Now I would not expect anyone to accept this, unless it is seen to agree by the rule,6 as they say, with what Aristotle is saying. For in this passage the philosopher is discussing our knowledge of the natural world, which is at the same time, he says, both easy and difficult. In favour of its being easy, he points out that everyone achieves it to some extent; in favour of its difficulty,

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that no man's knowledge is exact. The proposition that no man ever existed who achieved no truth at all in his cognition of the natural world is reinforced, as it were, with a proverb; for who, he says, could miss the target? As though to possess an exact knowledge of the details was just like aiming at some selected point and hitting your mark without fail; while conversely, to fall short entirely would be like missing your quarry completely, and deflecting your cognition like a missile upon something quite different. But to satisfy my reader, however captious and hard to persuade he may be, let me add Aristotle's actual words from the book to which I referred: 'Enquiry respecting the truth is in one way difficult and in one way easy. Witness the fact that no one can attain to it as it deserves, nor wholly fail to do so; but while every individual makes some statements about nature, by himself he contributes little or nothing of importance to our knowledge; but when all this is put together, it amounts to something substantial. So that if it seems to hold good, as we say in the proverb, Who could miss the gate?, from one point of view the enquiry would be easy; but the fact of grasping the whole and being unable to grasp the part shows how difficult it is/ In what Aristotle says, I see no place for a gate; but the familiar resemblance between beginning something and finding the gate or way into it provided, if I am not mistaken, a handle for the error. No: Aristotle means that a man misses his target, if he fails entirely to achieve his object, which he goes on to call 'grasping the whole,' as it were to possess it in a confused way and in general terms; the contrary of which he calls 'grasping the part,' meaning to possess something exactly, and not merely to hit your quarry no matter how, but to pierce some definite part of the beast which you have specially chosen. Although on this passage the commentator adduces so many possible meanings, that he seems to have found no one meaning satisfactory. He also observes that there is a difference of opinion on the text; and whenever that happens, I immediately suspect that there is some underlying corruption. Otherwise, 'simple is e'er the language of the truth,' as Euripides7 so truly puts it. There is still in reserve my most powerful weapon - Alexander8 of Aphrodisias, who, apart from the fact that all he says openly supports my view, informs us specifically that the image in the proverb is taken from archers, none of whom as a rule fails to hit a large target, something like a whole animal, though they may sometimes miss a small one. But it will be best to transcribe what he says too, so far as it contributes to the elucidation of the proverb: 'In my view, the fact that so many men attempt to express an opinion on the subject, and that none of them is wholly off the point, shows that the treatment of the subject is by nature within our scope; but the fact that no one has treated of it as it deserves is evidence that it is important and

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difficult, and that we ought not to make the study of it merely a sideline. We ought on the contrary to get a firm grasp of it, because it is in accordance with our nature, but in no careless spirit, because of its difficulty. And he encourages us by what he says, neither to despise it as something quite easy, nor again to abandon it because it is all so difficult. So that if it seems to hold good, as we say in the proverb, Who could miss the gate?, the fact that all those who say anything on the subject say something sensible, would be an indication that it is easy; and this he demonstrates by adding the proverb, Who could miss the gate?, which is used of easy things with nothing difficult about them, and is derived from archers who shoot at a mark. For if the target set before them is narrow, they do not find it easy to hit; but if it is a wide target, to hit it is not difficult, but they all do so easily/ Down to this point I have been quoting Alexander; and this makes it, I think, abundantly clear that we should read theras, target or quarry, and not thuras, gate. Though I leave this whole question, for what it is worth, to the judgment of the learned. If anyone is specially attached to 'gate/ he will have material with which to defend his choice without being at all absurd. For I think it quite possible that a practice which we see in some places today was followed no less in Antiquity -1 mean, that the bank of earth which supports the target is protected on each flank, and behind it as well, by walls with an overhanging roof, so that the open side, from which the target is accessible, may have somewhat the shape of a doorway. Consequently, a man must needs be extremely incompetent who not merely fails to hit the target, or its supporting bank, but even misses the way in to it, which it would be hard for anyone not to achieve. To me however it seems nearer the truth to refer the adage to the story in Pindar. But on this, as I have said, the learned must pronounce. I am satisfied to have done my duty as a commentator by putting forward for consideration what I have found in the authorities and what I think myself. Close to this proverb, perhaps, is a phrase we find in Plato's9 Phaedrus: 'Lysias has missed the whole point/ Lucian10 alludes to this humorously in his Timon, when he says that Jove's thunderbolt, which he had hurled at the philosopher Anaxagoras, missed its target through lack of skill and hit the temple of Castor and Pollux by mistake. The form of the expression recalls Toto aberrare coelo, To be the whole sky wide of the mark, and Tola aberrare via, To be entirely on the wrong road, which I have recorded elsewhere.11 37 Salsuginosa vicinia A brackish neighbourhood A briny neighbourhood, said of a barren, countrified, and boorish part of the world. Aristides in his Themistodes: 'Be it a briny

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neighbourhood, as the saying goes/ The commentator adds that the adage is taken from Alcman1 the lyric poet. Plato2 in book 4 of the Laws: 'In reality not a very briny and bitter neighbourhood/ Can be applied either to a piece of business that is very toilsome but unrepaying, or to tiresome neighbours. Drawn from farmland close to the sea, which is often unsuited to cultivation; thus Virgil3 too condemns salty ground as the least fertile of all. Besides4 which, we observe that people likewise who live near the sea are more inhospitable than other men, as though they acquired some unpitying quality from that most pitiless element. 38 Ad fractam canis You sing to a broken string You sing to a break (we must understand either a broken string or a broken lyre). Suidas shows that it is used habitually of those who labour in vain. It was an ancient practice to accompany yourself as you sang on the lyre; and if it had a broken string, you would try in vain to sing in tune, because it would not answer. The fable of the grasshopper that took the place of a broken string has already been told elsewhere. Though it will not be without point if adapted when someone's kind actions evoke no response, or when one tries to persuade a man deaf to persuasion or asks forgiveness of the unforgiving. 39 Utre territas You terrify with a wineskin flca, To terrify, or be terrified, with a wineskin. Used normally when someone either feels a baseless fear or inspires it. Taken from those who frighten children or nervous people by making a noise with empty containers; more likely perhaps of those who use the noise of such vessels to scare away birds, as Aristophanes1 indicates in the Birds. It is preserved by Diogenianus,2 who regards it as related to atr/co) avXi£e«>, to rout with a wineskin. Hesychius3 gives this as one word, do-Ko^Xavpt^ei^, of baseless fear. He thinks the same sense is conveyed by TT) a-KLa jjiopfjivo-crr), You terrify with a shadow. 40 Leonem larva terres You terrify a lion with a mask You terrify the lion with a mask. Recorded in the same source. Will be applicable to empty threats and bugbears that are merely laughable. Although, as Pliny1 says, 'this great and

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savage animal is terrified by turning wheels and empty chariots, even more by the crests and the crowing of cocks, but most of all by fire/ If memory serves, I have found in some author or other that the lion does take fright even at scarecrows and at those who wear masks. The adage is used by Seneca,2 book 2. 41 Principatus Scyrius Sovereignty in Scyros To rule in Scyros. Of a tedious and trifling sovereignty. The island of Scyros, once the home of Pelasgians and1 Carians, is rocky and infertile and produces nothing worth having. Suidas2 adds that some authorities refer the proverb to Theseus who, having invaded the kingdom of Lycomedes and made adulterous overtures to his wife, was thrown over a cliff; whence it appears that a ruthless government was called 'a Scyrian regime/ We read also of the Scyronian rocks; but whether this has any connection with our proverb I do not know. If we follow the first interpretation, the adage will apply elegantly enough to any office that, apart from an empty title and tedious administrative duties, brings no advantage with it. Zenodotus is the authority. 42 Post Lesbium cantorem But second fiddle to a Lesbian But second fiddle to a Lesbian. This adage they used to indicate that someone came in not first but second. It is close to Nihil ad Parmenonis suem, Nothing like Parmeno's pig.1 A Spartan proverb, which arose on the following occasion, described by Suidas. Sparta was rent by faction, and the Spartans consulted an oracle, which told them to send for a musician from Lesbos. So Terpander, who was a native of Lesbos (in fact, of Antissa), was sent for, and dispatched to Sparta. His playing calmed their passions with such success that he put an end to all the strife and reconciled the citizens. As a result, the Spartans held Lesbian musicians in the highest esteem, and after hearing a performance by anyone else, they would say at once 'But second fiddle to a Lesbian/ Zenodotus cites this proverb from a play by Cratinus, Chiron by name. This adage is recorded by Plutarch2 in his essay 'On the Delays of the Divine Vengeance' - though to me at least the style does not read like Plutarch's. Nothing however will be found to prevent our diverting this proverb from persons to things; for instance, a man asserting that education is desirable, but only if one has made money first, might say 'But second fiddle to a Lesbian/

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Callipides Callipides Callipides was an old proverbial name for someone who, with business to be got under way, threatened great activity and got nothing finished or, as Terence1 puts it, 'though constantly in motion never moved/ Cicero,2 in book 13 of his Letters to Atticus: 'As for what you say about Varro, you know that in the old days I wrote speeches or something of a kind that made it impossible to bring Varro in. After I started on these more academic subjects, Varro had announced that he would make some grand and important dedication to me. Two years went by, and that old Callippides though he never stopped running was not a foot further forward/ Cicero uses these words to emphasize how slow Marcus Varro was, holding out great hopes and in fact never finishing anything. Suetonius3 Tranquillus in his life of Tiberius: 'Eventually he allowed prayers to be offered for his safe voyage and return, so that it was a current jest to call him Callipides, from the man in the Greek proverb who was always running and never progressed so much as a foot/ Thus Suetonius; but it is not quite clear whether the whole point of the proverb lies in the name Callipides, which is derived from fine horses, or whether there was some other proverbial saying at Callipides' expense, as it seems one can conjecture from what Suetonius says. And then who this Callipides was, whose speed without progress is criticized in the adage, is far from obvious, except that it seems not unlikely that we should understand it of Callipedes the tragic actor, of whom Plutarch4 speaks in his 'Sayings of Spartans' in a passage that runs somewhat as follows: 'Of the objects of popular enthusiasm he seemed to be perfectly unaware. It happened one day that Callippides, a tragic actor who enjoyed a great reputation in Greece and was universally admired, first put himself in his way and greeted him, and then thrust himself pompously and prominently among his entourage, expecting the king to open a friendly conversation. At length he broke out: "Does your majesty not recognize me? Have you not been told who I am?" Whereupon Agesilaus looked him up and down, and said "Why, are you not Callippides the busker?" - deikelictas, which is a Spartan word for an entertainer/ So Plutarch. Deikelon5 in Greek means an image, and so an imitation or representation; Eudemus is the authority. Hence the Spartans seem to have got their word for an actor of mimes - a word which itself we derive from mimesis, the Greek for imitation. We may suppose therefore that this Callipides, or whoever was the man in question, used gesture in such a way as to give an impression of remarkable agility, while remaining in the same spot. This name is also recorded by Aristophanes6 in the Clouds, and he indicates that it is derived from hippos, the Greek for horse.

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44 Balneator A bathman Bathman, One who takes money in the baths. Commonly applied as a term of abuse to someone who is too inquisitive, because men of this sort living in idleness and having no business of their own to occupy them, have a habit of minding other people's; like Horace's1 Damasippus who 'minds others' business, having lost his own.' The same is true of barbers - Horace2 again: A tale, I guess, to every barber known And every blear-eyed lounger in the town.

Plato3 in book i of the Republic seems to use it of garrulous people. Not but what inquisitiveness and garrulity are closely related faults, as Horace4 for one will show: 'Shun him who questions asks: he's sure to blab.' The adage is recorded by Diogenianus. 45 Bacchae more Like a Bacchant Like a Bacchant. Used habitually of sullen silent people, from their resemblance to the Maenads we hear so much of, when inspired by Bacchic frenzy. Here too Diogenianus is the authority. Juvenal however referred it to a life of intemperance: 'Who look like Curius, live like Bacchanals.' 46 A lasso rixa quaeritur Weariness loves a wrangle Seneca in the third book of his On Anger records a proverb of the form Weariness loves a wrangle, or It is the weary man who picks a quarrel. The sense in which this was used in Antiquity is not entirely clear. If conjecture is permitted, the object seems to be certain bad-tempered people who are over-ready for a quarrel, not because they suffer an affront but because they are depressed for some other reason, just as those who suffer misfortune are awkward and irascible. But I will subjoin Seneca's own words, from which I think it will be possible to infer that this is the sense of the proverb: 'And so men whose digestion is not above suspicion, when about to embark on important business, should control by eating the bile of which fatigue is a principal cause; either because lack of food concentrates the vital heat and impairs the blood, checking its course through the veins, which are bound to

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suffer, or because the body when reduced and weakened becomes a burden on the mind. It is surely the same cause that makes men lose their tempers more easily when they are tired through ill-health or old age. Hunger and thirst likewise should be avoided for the same reasons, for they exasperate and inflame the spirits. There is an old saying that a weary man loves a wrangle; and this is equally true of a man who is hungry and thirsty and of everyone who has something on his mind. Like a sore place, which hurts at a light touch to begin with, and afterwards at the mere suspicion of a touch, a mind thus situated takes offence at trifles, so much so that some people are aroused to pick a quarrel by the way they are greeted, and written or spoken to, and asked a question. Sore places can never be touched without protest/ So much for Seneca. Also to the point is Pliny's1 observation, book 22 chapter 24: 'In the same way to be more inclined to anger when tired and thirsty/ 47 Gladiator in arena consilium capit A gladiator plans his fight in the ring A gladiator plans his fight in the ring. This points out that we should sometimes change our plans to suit changing circumstances and, as the phrase goes, take our cue from events.1 This too is recorded by Annaeus Seneca in book 3 of his Letters to Lucilius. 'You understand by now' he says 'that you must extricate yourself from these outwardly attractive but unhealthy preoccupations. You ask how you are to achieve this. Some things can be demonstrated only by a man on the spot. A physician cannot prescribe the right moment for meals or baths by letter; he must feel the pulse. There is an old proverb, A gladiator plans his fight in the ring. The look in his opponent's eye, the movement of his hand, the very angle of his body has its message for him as he watches. What is commonly done, what ought to be done, can be conveyed in general both in speech and writing. Such advice can be given not only to those at a distance but even to posterity. But when it should be done, or how, no one will teach you convincingly from a distance. You must make up your mind on the facts/ Thus far Seneca.2 Caesar3 in book 5 of his Gallic War: 'As commonly happens to those who are obliged to form their plans right in the thick of the affair/ We speak also of basing our plans on circumstances as they arise. 48 Inelegantior Libethriis As rude as any Libethrian As ignorant as any Libethrian. A proverbial exaggeration appropriate to a thoroughly uneducated man, completely

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innocent of any commerce with the Muses. The proverb is derived from the rustic ignorance of the tribe of that name. They say that the Libethrians were very stupid, and despised music and poetry and, in short, all elegant subjects, so much so that some authorities suppose it was among them that Orpheus met his death. Of this persuasion is Zenodotus, who writes that the Libethrians were a tribe in Persia. Servius1 believed there was a Libethrian spring, from which Virgil in his Meliboeus took the name Libethrides for the Muses. Pliny2 in his fourth book mentions a spring called Libethra, placed by him in Magnesia which is adjacent to Thessaly. Solinus3 calls it Libethrus, the masculine form. Strabo4 too in book 9 of his Geography mentions Libethrus. 'In this place' he says 'there is a temple sacred to the Muses, a spring called the Horse Fountain, and a cavern sacred to the Libethrid Nymphs. From which one may suspect that those who consecrated Helicon and Pieria and Libethrus and Pimpleia all to the Muses, were Thracians. They were called Pierians; but they died out, and the Macedonians possess these places now/ 49 Domesticum thesaurum calumniari To speak ill of one's own good things Tov OLKOL Orjcravpov SiaySdAAei?, You speak ill of, or traduce, the treasure you have at home, which means that you criticize and tear to bits your own advantages. Very like the phrase from Horace which I have recorded elsewhere:1 To ply the axe on one's own vines.' Aristides the rhetorician in his Pericles: 'We shall be speaking ill of the treasure we have at home, if we object to this.' No man in his right mind misrepresents and vilifies what he holds stored up at home; everyone prefers what he has, and looks askance at what belongs to others. This will2 be applicable to those people also who cannot keep their own secrets. 50 Qualis vir, talis oratio As the man is, so is his talk Annaeus Seneca1 in his Letters to Lucilius, letter 114, says: The Greeks have a proverb to the effect that as men's life is, so is their talk.' The Greek proverb is to be found in Aristides,2 in his second defence of rhetoric against Plato: 'And the proverb is not at variance with this which says that as a man's way of life is, so is his talk, and equally the reverse,' as a man's talk is, so is his character. This view is confirmed by a remark which Diogenes Laertius3 records among the sayings of Solon, that 'Speech is the image of action.'

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Persius4 in his fifth satire concealed the same opinion in a metaphor, when he said: Skilled by a tap to tell what solid rung, What was mere plaster of a varnished tongue,

indicating of course that a man's mind can be gauged from what he says, just as jars are tested by the noise they return when struck with the knuckles. And again in the third: Strike the flawed jar: cracked sounds its rifts betray, And doubtful rings its green and ill-baked clay.

And this retains its value as a proverb, not only when a man's talk proves him to be of bad or good character, but when we gauge a man's gifts from his style and form a view of his whole habit of mind simply from the way he expresses himself. A pompous man will have a bombastic style, a humble man a style that is mean and lifeless; a rough man will have a crude style, a bitter man a style that is acrimonious and offensive, the foppish and the self-indulgent one that is flowery and slipshod. In a word, a complete image of a man's way of life and the whole force of his character is reflected in his style as in a mirror, and the very secrets of his bosom can be detected from clues, as it were, that lie beneath the surface. Thus Seneca5 says that the luxuriant and pleasure-loving nature of Maecenas can be inferred even from the way he writes. With this belongs what Socrates in Plato6 says to Charmides: 'Speak, that I may see you/ knowing no doubt that he will form a judgment on him from what he says. Again in the Gorgias he says that he does not know Perdiccas' son Archileus, because he has never had a conversation with him. But in common parlance people say that they know someone they have merely set eyes on, though a person's mind cannot be truly seen except through what he says. 51 The girl who stammers doesn't b-b-believe The girl who stammers doesn't b-b-believe. A proverbial jest, used of someone who tries to conceal his shortcomings, though he makes them more obvious even while he does so; if a man, for instance, were to deny that he has a lisp, and could not deny it without

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I, since those lisping in the process. For is put instead of T with a defect of speech most often have difficulties with two letters, s and r. This comes in Suidas. The lisp of Alcibiades is famous: he pronounced r as /, not, I imagine, from some defect but more as an affectation. In the Wasps of Aristophanes1 one character says Theolos for Theoros and kolakos for korakos: 'You thee? Theoluth hath a toady'th head,' and the other replies 'So Alcibiades lisping spoke the truth.'

52 Nostris ipsorum alls capimur We are shot with our own feathers We are shot with our own feathers. Aristophanes1 in the Birds: 'And this we guessed, as Aeschylus would say, / Not taught by others, but with our own feathers.' Aeschylus, as the commentator tells us, in his play The Myrmidons, calls this a Libyan proverb, because it derives from a fable2 located in Libya. The story runs as follows. An eagle was struck by an arrow, and when it saw that the shaft was made to resemble and imitate feathers, it said Thus not by others, but with our own feathers / Are we undone/ Athenaeus3 uses this in book 11: 'And thus not by others but with your own feathers are you undone, as that wonderful poet Aeschylus puts it/ Appropriate to those who provide the occasion for their own misfortunes, like Chremes in Terence's4 Heautontimorumenos, when he urges his slave to aim some trick at Menedemus, and shortly afterwards is himself a victim of Menedemus' wiles. 53 Bonae fortunae, or Boni genii Here's to good luck, or A blessing on it! A blessing on it! or Here's luck! These are the words of a man who hopes for good fortune as he starts some undertaking, like that remark too in Persius:1 'May it be for the best!' It will therefore be more amusing if turned into a joke against a man who enters upon something trivial in itself with as much pother as if it were of the greatest importance; for instance, if some miserly man were to steel himself to broach a cask of wine or put some ancient cheese on the table, saying 'Well, here's luck!' Zenodotus, and equally the scholiast on Aristophanes,2 make it clear that the proverb arose from the old custom at the end of dinner, when the table was cleared, of bringing on neat wine; this dram was called a health to the agathos daimon, the good spirit or spirit of luck. As the authority for this invention the scholiast on Aristophanes' Wasps cites Theopompus; nor does it differ from what he adduces from Apollodorus. And this opinion seems to have the

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support of Aristophanes3 in the Knights: 'Heavens, no! but a neat dram to bring good luck/ Again, in the Wasps: 'Never may I drink a dram of unmixed fees to bring good luck/ and in the same play 'And drink a health to good luck/ Rather different in the Peace: 'Now the time has come to snatch a hasty dram to bring us luck/ Though Athenaeus4 in his Doctors at Dinner, book 11, shows clearly that after washing their hands, which was the practice at the end of dinner, they used to bring in a loving-cup which took its name from Good Fortune - a habit which, to be sure, still persists in Germany. This cup was called, as he makes clear, the rinse-cup, because it was brought on after they had washed their hands, a custom scrupulously observed to this day in England. Antiphanes5 in his Lampas: 'Toss off a rinse-cup to the god of luck/ and the same author elsewhere: 'But yet a rinse-cup to the god of luck/ Any man who had taken this cup in hand invited someone else to drink after him, as the same authority makes clear. Now there was a custom among the Ancients that those who drank wine with someone, or were about to drink themselves, first uttered in order to secure a good omen the name of someone, whether god or mortal, and put this name in the genitive case; as for instance in Lucian,6 in his Lapiihs, the Cynic philosopher Alcidamas toasts the bride in the name of Hercules. It is the same in Horace:7 'Quick! Here's to the new moon, here's to midnight, here's to our new augur! Fill, boy, fill!' Others prefer to think the proverb derived from an ancient custom of making the first cup a health to the Good Spirit, and by these words securing a favourable omen, with reference to Bacchus as a native and domestic deity. Furthermore, the second day of each month was called in Antiquity the day of the Good Spirit. It is said also that there was a shrine of the Good Spirit in Thebes;8 and there is even an island of that name in the Indian Ocean, as Stephanus9 assures us. Plutarch,10 in the third decade of his Postprandial Problems, makes it clear that in Antiquity it was the custom not to start drinking wine without first pouring a libation to some deity, that the draught might do them no harm, but rather good, as though it were a medicine. In Athens too on the eleventh of the month they used to offer the first-fruits of their wine, and called that day the pithoenia. The Boeotians on the other hand, on the seventh day of the opening month, after doing sacrifice to the Good Spirit, used to sample their wine after the west wind had sprung up, because that wind especially rouses and changes wine, so that what has survived it now seems likely to keep; the month is called prostaterios. Aristides11 in his Themistocles seems to have alluded to this proverb when he says 'But among the Greeks he took the place of a Good Spirit'; though this more properly belongs with Bonus genius and Mains genius, of which I have treated elsewhere.12

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54 Ad aqyan naky A rascal at the water

A rascal at the water, was said in the old days of men of the lowest class, employed in the meanest occupations; the reason being that in Antiquity those who habitually supplied litigants with their allocation of water were regarded as disreputable, and as far the most contemptible members of society. For, as I have pointed out elsewhere,1 the Ancients used to measure the length of speeches in a law-court against a clepsydra or water-clock. Competitors too were given a ration of water put into the clepsydra. This water was poured in, and the outflow measured, by poverty-stricken and worthless individuals. So those who performed this task were regarded at Athens as outcasts, devoid alike of property and of esteem, just as in Roman law2 a stigma attaches to actors and certain servants employed in other forms of public competition. There is another3 which resembles this: Off with you to the water, ie to perdition. 55 Phocensium exsecratio Phocaean imprecations Phocaean imprecations. Of an oath enforced by many sanctions. In olden time when they ratified a treaty they employed to protect it from violation not merely exchange of promises and clasping of right hands and sacrifice but imprecations too, to hang over the head of anyone who might not abide by the agreement. This it was possible to infer from Euripides,1 who has the following lines in his Iphigeneia Aulidensis: Suitor with suitor make a covenant, With oaths exchanged and pledge of clasped right hands, Burnt sacrifice, libations duly poured, Calling down imprecations on his head.

The proverb, to return to our subject, took its rise from an incident such as the following. Once on a time the Phocaeans, a people of Ionia, by common consent abandoned their native soil, having bound themselves with curses and imprecations never again to think of returning to their own country. So, in accordance with an oracle of Diana, and led by Aristarchas, they made for Narbonese Gaul, and there founded the most flourishing city of Massilia. The story is touched on by Herodotus2 in his first book, and by Strabo3 in his fourth; and it is alluded to also by Horace4 in his Epodes: 'Maybe, in common council or the better part at least, you seek some expedient whereby to live

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without these eils and these toils. No better plan could be than this, as Phocaea's citizens deserted under oath ancestral field and hearth, and left their temples to be lairs for wild boars and ravening wolves ...' And then he explains what sort of thing this rite of imprecation was: 'But let us swear an oath to this effect: when the time comes that rocks rise from the sea-bed and float, then it shall be no sin to return, nor need we hesitate to set sail for home, when once the Po's waters wash the top of Mattinata, once lofty Appennine pushes out into the sea, once a strange passion makes monstrous unions of unheard-of lust, tigress submitting gladly to be trodden by stag, pigeon and kite in adulterous union, while trustful herds have no more fear of tawny lions and goats with slippery scales love the salt sea. This let us swear, and all that can cut us off from the sweet pleasure of returning home; and under these imprecations with all our fellow-citizens let us be off.' Stephanus5 makes Phocaea a city of Ionia, of which an inhabitant is Phocaeeus, as in Herodotus,6 or Phocaeus, and has another of the same name in Mycala which is part of Caria. There is also Phocis, a part of Boeotia near Mount Parnassus, the people of which are Phoceis and Phocicoi. I thought it well to mention this, because some fall into mistakes through the resemblance of the names. For it is from the Phocaeans or Phocaeensians of Ionia that this proverb is derived, while from the Phocici of Boeotia comes Phocensium or Phocidensium desperatio, which I shall report elsewhere.7 The proverb is recorded by Zenodotus.8 56 Sybaritica oratio The language of Sybaris The language of Sybaris (or Tales from Sybaris). Hesychius tells of a man called Acopus, presumably a native of Sybaris, who worked so hard to secure a suitable rich and luxuriant prose style that he gave rise to a humorous proverbial saying: an exquisite and highly polished style was called 'the language of Sybaris.' The luxury of dinner-parties in Sybaris has been touched on in the proverb1 Sybaritica mensa. Similarly an Asiatic style2 of writing became proverbial; for there is much truth in the remark3 that as man's life is, so is his language. This will be suitable also for an arrogant and bombastic style, for the Sybarites were criticized for their pride; see Sybaritae per plateas.4 57 A linea incipere To start from scratch To start from scratch, is used of those who begin at

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the very beginning of something. Aristides 1 the sophist in this themistocles: This was the first crucial test which Themistocles underwent; begin here to watch the man at work, and start from scratch.' The person who provided this author with scholia thinks this proverb is related to A lare exorsus, Beginning at home.2 To me it seems more closely related to those of which I have spoken elsewhere, A capite, From the head downwards, and A carceribus, From the pens. For so they called the place from which the horses were dispatched at the start of a race, for which another name was oppidum (Festus3 is our authority). The image is taken from competitors in a race in the stadium; for one special line is laid down for them, on which they must stand level until they get the starting signal, as the commentator on Aristophanes4 shows in the passage I shall shortly quote. Tertullian5 in his Adversus Marcionem, book i: 'Back you go then to scratch again! Back on your marks!' When he says 'to scratch/ he means 'Right back to the beginning.' 58 A carceribus From the start , From the starting-rope or starting-pens, means the same as the adage we have just given. Aristophanes1 in the Wasps: 'Yes, right from the starting-rope I'll tell you how it all began,' that is, beginning at the beginning. The scholiast makes it clear, as I have just said, that the image is borrowed from the race-course, at which the carceres were a kind of pen or enclosure from which the race started, called in Greek balbides or apheteriae. Close to these a line was drawn, on which the competitors took up their positions. Hence those phrases, which are common in Latin authors too, A carceribus ad metam and A meta ad carceres, From starting-point to finish and vice versa, of which I have cited examples elsewhere.2 59 Nova hirundo The first swallow The first swallow. Suidas cites this adage from the Birds of Aristophanes, by a slip of memory I suppose, for it occurs in that poet in his Knights in the following lines: I played those cooks a pretty trick. I said to them, I said: Look, boys! Spring's come. You see, there's the first swallow overhead. Then while they gaped I helped myself to a nice piece of meat.

The scholiast tells us this is a proverbial image, which means the same as 'the

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beginning of spring/ because that is the season when the bird appears. So in Horace:1 'When Zephyrs blow and swallows first appear/ Suidas says it was in current use when a trick was played on someone. This is taken from a children's game. One party elaborately pretends to see the first swallow, and shows it to the rest; then, while the others are absorbed in looking for it, they help themselves to what they want. Theognis in the eighth book of Athenaeus2 states that it was a regular custom in Rhodes to issue a public invitation to the swallow every year at the beginning of spring, which they called chelidonizein, summoning it with the formula The swallow is here, is here, bringing lovely seasons, bringing lovely years/ So it will fit those who deceive and do harm by inspiring false hopes. 60 Jovis et regis cerebrum Jove's brain and the king's Jove's brain, and B The king's brain. Used of exceptionally succulent and delicious food, or of people who live a soft luxurious life. Clearchus,1 cited by Zenodotus, writes that in Persia rich dinners are called Jove's brain and the king's. Athenaeus,2 book 12, tells us that Sardanapalus rewarded the inventors of some new pleasure with a dish of 'Jove's brain and the king's/ something very delicious I suppose. And again in book 14 he lists 'Jove's brains' among the great delicacies of the second course. In Apuleius,3 in his first Apologia, Ennius is quoted as saying: 'Why pass over the wrasse, great Jove's brains, or very near it? / Off old Nestor's home they catch very big, very good ones/ Ephippus in Athenaeus4 mentions 'Jove's brain' among the luxuries of the second course. He also5 calls dishes he prefers 'the flower of nectar/ and tells us in another passage6 that wine was called by Aristophanes 'Venus' milk/ Again7 in another place he indicates that delicious dishes were called 'Food for Helen.' 61 Non movenda moves You move what should not be moved You move what should not be moved, will fit those who either attempt something impossible, or violate sacred things, or change a solemn agreement, or launch scandalous attacks on people whose authority entitles them to respect. Zenodotus thinks it arose from the solemn prohibition on moving altars or tombs or shrines, which are rightly the objects of some sort of respect and reverence. Plutarch1 in his essay 'On the Divine Sign of Socrates' writes that a man who was trying to raise the ghost of a dead friend heard the words 'Move not what should not be moved.' He

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uses it again in the 'Eroticus' of a man who was thought to be undermining the accepted view of the gods. Plato2 records it in the Laws, book 8, where he brings forward a law which he calls the statute of Jove god of boundaries, forbidding any alteration of a neighbour's bounds, be he fellow-citizen or stranger, and any removal of the frontiers of a city or region, and ordaining that everyone should rather move an immense rock than a small stone, if the stone is fixed by treaty and on oath, thinking, as he says, that this really is to move what should not be moved.' Again3 in the Laws, book 11: 'For that saying which holds good in many contexts, that one ought not to move what should not be moved.' He mentions it also in book 3 of the same work. And in a certain epigram4 are the words 'Not Death himself grasps what may not be moved.' Sophocles5 in the Antigone: 'You'll make me utter what should not be moved.' And again in the Oedipus Coloneus: 'Words that may not be moved 'tis pain to speak.' Plutarch6 in his essay 'On Listening' speaks of 'desire moving strings not to be moved/ and again in his 'On Garrulity': 'Moving the heart-strings that should not be moved.' There is an elegant allusion to this in an oracle to be found in Herodotus'7 Erato: 'Delos I'll move, though moved she may not be/ For with the same words he glanced at the fable, or fact if you prefer, of Delos floating freely at first, and then being anchored fast to please Apollo. Whence Virgil's8 'Granted to stand unmoved and spurn the winds/ 62 Neque mel neque apes No bees, no honey No bees, no honey. Used commonly of those who refuse to tolerate a drawback which is tied up with something advantageous; for example, if a man could not endure bees because they have stings, and therefore will be unable equally to enjoy honey, which he is very fond of. For heaven has so blended the affairs of mortals that gains are always accompanied by loss. Tryphon1 the writer on grammar gives this among the figures of speech as an example of the proverb, and illustrates it from Sappho the poetess of Lesbos: 'For me no honey and no bee/ There is a well-known maxim2 to the same effect: 'Bear now what hurts, and reap the benefit/ Here too belongs that thing in Plautus:3 'Take the rough like a man, and the smooth is yours hereafter.' Homer4 points to the same thing, I suppose, more indirectly but elegantly all the same, in his plant the moly, when he gives it a black root and a milk-white flower. The black root he means for a symbol of the toil and trouble by which one arrives at that peace of mind which is the reward of virtue perfected.

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63 Tussis pro crepitu A cough for a fart A cough for a fart. Used in practice when someone in a state of confusion pretends one thing to conceal another; for instance, if a man caught in the house of an unfaithful wife were to maintain that he was there to buy or sell something. A metaphor from those who, when they break wind, conceal the fact with a resounding cough - a class of men who are quite often detected even today, and cause considerable mirth. 64 Cornicibus vivacior As long-lived as the crows As long-lived as the crows. A proverbial exaggeration for persons of very great age, taken from that bird's prodigious life-span, of which Plutarch1 writes as follows in the essay entitled 'On the Obsolescence of Oracles,' citing Hesiod who 'in the person of a Naiad' thus puts together the different life-span of various living creatures: Nine generations of men the crow with her chatter outliveth; Four crows yield to the stag and three stags yield to the raven. Nine long ravens' lives will not see the end of the phoenix; We the Nymphs can live ten times as long as a phoenix, We the long-haired daughters of Jove who is lord of the aegis.

What seems to be a version of these lines of Hesiod was produced by someone, I know not who,2 and is to be found with the other pieces in the Appendix to Virgil; it goes something like this: Four score and sixteen years runs the full span Of men; nine times as far the noisy crow; And the crow's age four times outlives the stag; Thrice the swift stag yields to the raven's years, Nine times the phoenix, that its life renews, Outlives the raven, and ten times do we, The Hamadryads, longest-lived of Nymphs, Surpass the phoenix. Such the span of life That living creatures bounds; but all the rest God only knows, time's secret who controls.

It was equally a pleasure to add these lines, because I hope thereby to secure

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forgiveness for myself when I translate so often extempore, as I shall be compelled to do, if I seem sometimes not to have rendered everything quite precisely; for these lines will have shown how much latitude the ancients allowed themselves when translating poetry. The same view is repeated from Hesiod with great point and brevity by Pliny:3 'Hesiod' he says 'allots to the crow nine times our span of life; four times that amount to the stag; and three times more to the raven/ Though some authorities regard all this as fabulous; among them Aristotle,4 who thinks that no living creature lives longer than man except only the elephant. Martial:5 'And outlived every crow' of a woman who lived to an inordinate old age. Horace6 too in the Odes: 'But Lyce meant to keep to match the years / Of some old crow/ It was to the same effect that that great philosopher on his deathbed envied the crows that length of days, which nature had denied to man. Synesius7 in one of his letters: 'It is right that the most just man should govern us for a crow's span of years/ 65 Tithoni senecta The old age of Tithonus TiBtovov yfjpas, The old age of Tithonus. The myth tells how Aurora fell in love with Tithonus, and how he was taken up into heaven and bathed with some heavenly elixir, as a result of which he lived to such an immense age that at length he prayed to be turned into a grasshopper. Lucian1 has in one of his dialogues 'And the old man was living longer than Tithonus/ This same character of Tithonus is introduced as a marvel of longevity by Ariston of Chios in his book on old age; so Cicero2 tells us in his Cato. Suidas3 records the adage in the form 'May you sink deeper into old age than Tithonus!' 66 Nestorea senecta As old as Nestor In the same way, in Latin at any rate, the great age of Nestor became proverbial; for Homer1 in book 3 of the Odyssey says he lived for three generations: Thrice has he ruled, they say, over a whole generation of men,' and he asserts this likewise in the first book of the Iliad. So too Juvenal:2 'Now starts to count his years on his right hand,' meaning that he has outlived three generations. In a word, any expression drawn from creatures3 which are exceptionally long-lived will have the air of a proverb; for example, 'as old as a phoenix,' which lives (as we are told by Hesiod) nine times as long as a raven, and 'as old as a stag' or 'as a raven/ and 'as old as Tiresias/ who is said in the tragedy to have outlived six generations of men,

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and 'as old as a Chinaman/ for the Greek historians tell us that the Chinese live for three hundred years. Anyone who needs examples of this sort of thing should read Lucian's4 Marcrobioi, which means Men of great age, and Pliny,5 book 7 chapter 48. 67 Ultra pensum vivit He outlives his allotted span Lucian has a neat remark in his Philopseud.es, Tor he is already outliving his spindle/ meaning that he has already reached his allotted span. This is an allusion to the spindle with which, if we may believe the poets, the Fates are supposed to draw out the thread of the lives of mortals. Theologians also speak of the fated bourn of life, when they mean the period allotted to a man, which none may outlive. 68 Facile/ cum valemus, recta consilia aegrotis damus Good counsel to the sick is cheap enough, when we ourselves are well In the Andria of Terence a young man, not particularly intelligent himself, makes a most intelligent and apt remark: Good counsel to the sick is cheap enough, When we ourselves are well; but in my place You would think different.

This seems to derive from an oracular saying of the philosopher Thales. According to Laertius,1 when asked what is the most difficult thing to do, and what is the easiest, he replied, The hardest is to know yourself, and the easiest to give another person good advice'; and in the comedy the author has added elegance by his metaphor. Euripides2 in the Alcestis: 'Grieve not o'ermuch, but bear it like a man/ This is Hercules consoling Admetus on the death of his wife; and his response 'To advise is easy; to bear wrongs is hard/ Close to this is the proverbial saying:3 To counsel others, all men have a mind, But when we err ourselves, then are we blind.

This observation is drawn from human nature. Everyone gives invalids good advice on what to avoid and what to do, and often they take them up for not doing what they are told in order to get well. When they fall ill themselves, those fine precepts are no help at all, and they need advice and criticism from

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others too. In fact, all inordinate desire is a sickness of the mind, by which it is virtually blinded, so that it either cannot see what it needs for its own well-being or, if it sees, cannot pursue it. Thus Phaedria in Terence4 puts his hand into the fire 'well knowing what he does' and 'goes to his doom with his eyes open.' Horace5 too pursues what he ought to avoid, and 'shuns what he believes will do him good.' An avaricious man sometimes sees clearly what a monstrous thing ambition is. Conversely the ambitious man is well aware of the disease from which the miser suffers. Each of them prescribes admirably for a complaint from which he himself is free, and neither knows how to treat his own. 69 Quae supra nos, nihil ad nos The things that are above us are nothing to us The things that are above us are nothing to us. A remark of Socrates which discourages us from restless enquiry into heavenly things and the secrets of nature. It is referred to as a proverb by Lactantius,1 book 3 chapter 20, 'Of these' he says 'I will choose one which enjoys universal approval and is well known, and was regarded by Socrates as a proverb: That which is above us is nothing to us/ It can be diverted also for use against those who talk loosely about the business of princes or the mysteries of theology. It will further be possible to turn it upside down: The things that are beneath us are nothing to us - when we refer to trivial affairs, the importance of which is too small to demand care on our part. 70 Notum lippis ac tonsoribus Known to blear-eyed men and barbers What has already become common gossip is said to be 'known to all the barbers and blear-eyed men,' because in the old days it was in the gatherings at the barbers' shops that rumour flourished. Aristophanes1 suggests this in the Plutus: And yet 'twas often said, by Hercules, While men were sitting in the barber-shops, That he had suddenly waxed very rich.

And Antipho in Terence2 gets news of his girl in the barber's. Horace3 too says of the barber's: 'There with shaven poll / Sailors safe home long-winded perils tell.' And again4 in his Satires:

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A tale, I guess, to every barber known And every blear-eyed lounger in the town,

where by his reference to something widely known he made the sense of the proverb clear; for blear-eyed men sit doing nothing in the barbers' shops in search of some treatment for their eyes. On the talkative habits of hairdressers Plutarch5 has many interesting things to say in his essay 'On Pointless Garrulity/ one of which I shall give myself the pleasure of repeating. 'When there was talk once/ he says, 'in a barber's shop about Dionysius, and they said his tyranny was like adamant and unbreakable, the barber remarked with a laugh "What a way to speak about Dionysius, when I constantly have my razor at his throat." As soon as Dionysius heard what the man had said, he crucified his barber/ and thus, as Pliny6 puts it, his words cut his own throat. That barbers as a class should talk so much he attributes to the tendency of all very talkative men to congregate in their shops and sit there doing nothing, and he thinks that constant exposure to their chatter has infected the barbers themselves with the same complaint of garrulity. This is why Theophrastus,7 as Plutarch also tells us, called barbers' shops 'teetotal drinking parties/ thinking that the endless talk in them made men virtually intoxicated. Bath-attendants8 suffer from a bad reputation of the same kind, because public baths likewise are places where men sit idle, uttering any gossip that comes into their heads. It was for some such reasons that the Ancients called smithies leschai, talking-places, as Joannes Grammaticus9 makes clear, because on cold days in the winter a crowd of humble folk used to gather there to keep warm, and there they sat doing nothing and passed the time in idle talk. Such places seem designed for lazy men, and Hesiod10 warns the husbandman to avoid them: 'Pass by the smithy in the winter-time, / Its warmth and gossip.' 71 Optat ephippia bos, piger optat arare caballus The ox would wear the trappings and the lazy nag would plough There is great elegance in that phrase in Horace The ox would wear the trappings and the lazy nag would plough/ which expresses an inborn fault in human nature, men's constant envy of another person's lot and contempt and dislike for their own, their wish for things they have never tried and rejection of what they know. For 'trappings'1 means what we normally call riding-saddles, added with the object of giving the rider a more comfortable seat. The Ancients ploughed with oxen, not with horses. The allegory looks as though it was taken from a fable of some sort. The sense without the metaphor is given in Terence's2 'We are dissatisfied with what is ours.'

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72 Fertilior seges est alieno in arvo The crop is heavier in another man's field Ovid1 changed the metaphor while expressing the same meaning: Another's crops are heavier still than thine And heavier udders grace thy neighbour's kine.

Persius2 in his sixth satire: 'What care I if that cantle of my neighbour's / Is better land than mine?' Then there is a well-known moral maxim to the same effect, one of those, I fancy, by Publius3 which are quoted by Aulus Gellius: 'Other men's goods we like, and they like ours.' And Horace:4 How is't, Maecenas, no one likes the lot That reason chose, or chance cast in his way, But envies those who follow other paths?

73 Fecem bibat, qui vinum bibit He must drink the dregs that drank the wine There was no doubt an element of proverb in it when Aristophanes said in the Plutus that the same man who has already finished the wine must drink up the dregs as well; the man, that is, who has prospered in everything must not complain if his luck turns: 'But yet, if you saw fit to drink the wine / You must drink up the dregs.' The words are spoken by Chremylus about a woman who had once been popular in the springtime and flower of her youth, and now was old and was spurned by a young man. 74 Croeso, Crasso ditior As rich as Croesus or Crassus In Greece the riches of Croesus king of Lydia were a byword, to which Solon's1 remark gave special currency. So it was in Rome with the wealth of Marcus Crassus,2 who was even given the extra name of Dives, the Rich. He refused to call a man wealthy unless he could support a legion out of his yearly income. His estates amounted to two billion sesterces. Several other men are recorded in Pliny,3 book 33 chapter 10, and also in chapter 3, as possessed of inordinate wealth; and among them is Aristotle, the sainted philosopher4 and virtually the god of theologians in our own day, whose heirs are said to have produced seventy dishes for sale by auction. But they did not pass in the same way into common speech, and so there is no call to

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mention them here. There will be more wit in the adage as a figure of speech if we also change the number, as St Jerome5 does: 'You may give yourself the airs of Croesuses and Dariuses, but a full pate and a full purse are not inseparable.' Horace6 used 'the treasures of Arabia' for piled-up wealth, with a proverbial air, just as he used 'Persian splendours' for over-elaborate and expensive decorations. 75 Pactoli opes The wealth of Pactolus The riches of Pactolus, is a phrase used somewhere by Philostratus1 to express very great wealth. The Pactolus is a river in Lydia that rises under Mount Tmolus and abounds in gold-bearing sand, whence it gets the epithet in poetry2 chrysoroas, streaming with gold. The same story is told of the Tagus in Spain, the Ganges in India and the Hebrus in Thrace. To these Pliny3 adds the Po in Italy, and says that no gold is of higher purity than what is found in rivers, as being rendered very fine by friction due to the current. Horace4 in the Epodes: Rich you may be in flocks and lands, For you Pactolus roll his sands.

Juvenal:5 No prize is worth it, not the golden sand That shady Tagus rolls into the sea.

Exaggerations like this can be adapted to various ends. One might say, for instance, This enormous expense is more than anyone could support, even if he had the Pactolus flowing through his garden.' This man's greed is more than the Tagus itself could satisfy/ 'He had no ordinary ambitions, but in his mental picture it was to be all Pactoluses and Taguses.' Or 'He promised one Pactolus after another/ riches pressed down and running over. 76 Iro, Codro pauperior As poor as Iras or Codrus On the other hand, with Irus and Codrus their poverty provided material for a proverb. Ovid:1 'Irus he straight will be, who late was Croesus/ Codrus2 comes in Juvenal: 'All Codrus' furniture packed in one cart/ Irus3 is mentioned by Homer in Odyssey, book 18, where he is said to have been a

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common beggar in Ithaca, a great big man to look at, whose name from birth was Arnaeus, but the young men called him Irus because he would carry a message wherever one was needed. It was he who was matched against Ulysses, who was then thought to be a beggar too, and Ulysses threw him out. Hecale4 too is celebrated for her poverty, and is mentioned by Plautus in the Cistellaria: 'If all answers my hopes, you'll ne'er be Hecale.' Ovid5 too speaks of her: 'Hecale no husband, Irus had no wife; / And why? He was a beggar, she was poor/ In how many different ways these phrases can be used has been shown at sufficient length in the introduction6 to this book. 77 Mysorum postremus Lowest of the Mysians Farthest of the Mysians. Strabo1 in his Geography, book 12, records that the people of Mysia were so much despised as to give rise to a proverb. This is used by Cicero2 in his speech Pro Flacco: 'Is there any phrase in Greek so commonplace and familiar as to call a man "the lowest of the Mysians," if you despise him?' And again, in a letter to his brother Quintus: 'Unless perhaps you think I am moved by the complaints of one Paconius of whom I know nothing and who is not even a Greek but a Mysian or, more likely, a Phrygian,' in which of course he shows his contempt for the race. Great contempt therefore, and very lowly station, can be expressed with this adage. 78 Mysorum ultimus navigat The last of the Mysians on a voyage To be the last of the Mysians on a voyage, used to be said in a humorous and proverbial way of a man who laboured in vain. The origin of the proverb, as generally happens, is given in more than one fashion. Some say that once, when the Greeks were suffering from a pestilence, they received a reply from the oracle that they should sail to the last of the Mysians. At first they wondered what the oracle meant. At length, after wandering around for a long time, they found that Aeolis was situated on the edge of Mysian territory, and that was where the god had told them to move to. Others write that Telephus after killing his uncles enquired of the Pythian oracle where he should move to (for it was the custom in Antiquity for those who had killed anyone to go to another country); and the reply was that he should migrate to the farthest region of the Mysians. So he went to Teuthrania, which is on the edge of Mysia, and became the prince of the country. Some give as the reason for his flight not the murder of his uncles

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bu t the search for his mother, whom he found eventually in Teuthrania. The proverb was used when anyone was ordered to do something hard and difficult. 79 Tangere ulcus To touch on a sore place To rouse or touch on a sore place, is to arouse pain, and to mention something which may hurt us very much. Terence:1 'Was anything less necessary than to touch on this sore place?' Donatus in his note on the passage tells us there is an underlying proverb. The Emperor Augustus (so Suetonius2 tells us) felt the shameful behaviour of his two daughters called Julia and his grand-daughter of the same name as something worse than death, and was accustomed not to refer to them except as his three boils or three malignant ulcers, because it gave him great pain even to think of them. The same metaphor was used with the greatest elegance by Cicero3 in an attack on Clodius who, when the common people were already exasperated by famine, was goading them still further into fury with his incendiary speeches: 'So you were like the finger that scratched this sore spot.' Plutarch4 'On Flattery': 'When he had scratched the sore of secret talk.' 80 Refricare cicatricem To rub up a sore When grief or resentment which has softened with the passage of time is roused afresh, this is called 'rubbing up old sores.' The source of the metaphor is familiar; it is taken of course from a physical wound which has now closed up and is covered with a scar, but can be opened afresh by rubbing, so that the original pain of the wound returns in force. Cicero,1 writing to Atticus: 'I don't scratch the sores that Appius has left behind him.' Again, in his attack on Rullus: 'For I would not be thought to be rubbing up old sores inflicted on the body politic,' and he speaks of 're-opening wounds' in his De oratore, book 2. We speak also of rubbing up the memory, or jogging the memory, which means administering a mild reminder, but nearly always with intent to annoy. 81 Odorari, et similes aliquot metaphorae Scenting out, and sundry metaphors of this kind Metaphors derived from the bodily senses, being more or less ready to hand

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and taken as it were from what is very close to us, are nearly all proverbial, as I have pointed out at the beginning1 of this work. To scent out/ for instance, in the sense of to discover, and to establish some fact by intelligent detective work. 'A whiff of something for suspicion and rumour. Cicero2 has There's a certain whiff of dictatorship/ To nose out' in Terence's3 Adelphoe for to detect. To smell' (Terence again) for to be suspected. To stink' for being offensive or under suspicion. Hence too people are said to have 'a keen nose' and to be 'keen-scented/4 with its converse 'thick in the head.' In fact the nose by itself became proverbial for critical judgment; Horace's5 'Not that no nose was theirs/ And things which we do not like 'have a bad smell/ Here belong phrases like 'It smacks of falsehood/ They are redolent of Atticism/ They smell of the lamp/6 We often use 'a taste of something' as though it meant our first acquaintance with it, as if we sipped a thing or tasted some kind of sample. Cicero7 writing to Atticus: 'Get a taste of the man/ and again That Latin Atticism of yours must be savoured again after an interval/ And thus we use 'that first flavour'8 to express that first experience of a thing which we acquire in childhood more or less from our nurses. And a thing we like is said to 'please the palate/ And we say 'swallow something' when we accept some normally unpleasant experience as though we did not feel it, taking the metaphor from those who drink nasty medicines as though against the protests of their sense of taste. Hence we find several times in Cicero and Quintilian 'to swallow the tedium'9 or 'to digest the inconvenience' of something. Related phrases are They smack of arrogance/ They have a whiff of adolescence/ Also 'to stomach' for to overcome something unwelcome. 'Sickening' of something insupportable to listen to. To vomit out/ to utter what passion did not allow us to repress. And 'to spit out that trouble from one's heart/ 'to bespatter' a man with abuse as one might with spittle, 'to spit upon'10 as expressing contempt. 'His gorge rises' for 'he is indignant/ The sense of sight also provides many metaphors, as 'to bear someone in one's eyes'11 for to love him dearly and be concerned for him; 'to be in someone's eyes/ 'to have someone's eyes upon one' to express memory and being remembered and thought of. 'Look out for/ be concerned about something and take thought for it; 'look forward/ plan for the future; 'look down on' of contempt; 'look up to' of admiration; 'to wink at' for to ignore deliberately; 'to be blind' for to be deluded and make errors of judgment. But to pursue this to greater lengths is not my present intention and would be a boundless task. And so, although materials of this kind have some family relationship to proverbs, to collect them in greater detail and more precisely is not now my purpose, especially since this department has already been taken in hand by a native of Britain, Richard Pace,12 whom I often think of,

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and always with pleasure; a young man (to say nothing for the moment of his character, which is fully worthy of his abilities) expert alike in Greek and Latin literature, and possessed of unusual experience in the reading of authors in every subject. Then he is very keen-sighted in picking up things which the common run of readers pass over, as the saying13 goes, with unwashed feet; and last but not least, his judgment is by no means that of a young man, but refined and scrupulous. With the Muses' blessing, he has formed, as I say, and I believe is now engaged on, a project which (unless I am much mistaken) will be of great value to all who wish to make progress in polite literature; he intends to collect all the notable metaphors to be found in classical authors in both tongues, with all the pointed and elegant phrases and other jewels and ornaments of style, and arrange them in a single volume. 82 Mihi istic nee seritur nee metitur The sowing and reaping there are none of mine Plautus in the Epidicus used a proverbial phrase of great elegance when he wrote The sowing and reaping there are none of mine/ meaning The business you speak of is nothing to do with me, for neither risk nor profit is to my account/ The metaphor is very familiar. The man who sows a field does so at his own expense and risk; the man who reaps takes the proceeds and is in the clear. This is the opposite of what Plautus has in the Mercator: 'Yours is the ploughing and the hoeing yours, / Yours is the seed, yours too the harvesting/ 83 Ab ipso lare Begin at home Start from your own hearthstone, begin at home; make a beginning, that is, with your own family and household. This will rightly be addressed to magistrates and to critics of the lives of other people, whose first duty is to correct the faults of their own dependants and the way they live. For hestia in Greek means hearth, what in Latin we call Lar and Vesta. Aristophanes1 in the Wasps: 'No, no: / To crush my man I must begin at home/ Taken from the ancient custom at sacrifices of offering the first-fruits to the Lares, the household gods. Aristocritus, cited by the scholiast, tells the following story. When Jupiter had defeated the Titans and achieved supreme power, he offered Vesta the choice of anything in the various parts of his kingdom that she might select. First she asked for virginity, and then for the first-fruits of all sacrifices offered to the gods by men. Hence, he says,

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it became the custom to assign the first share in every sacrifice to the Lar or household god. Plato2 uses this adage in the Euthyphro: 'So I could wish, Socrates, but I fear things may turn out differently. For the man who tries to do you wrong seems to me to be simply set on injuring the city at its very hearthstone/ Plutarch3 in his essay 'On Having Many Friends': 'First of all, beginning at the very hearthstone, as it were.' He uses almost the same words in his treatise 'On the Delays of the Divine Vengeance/ He also makes use of them in the essay he wrote 'Against Herodotus/ Aristides4 in his Pericles: 'But it was his choice, beginning at his own hearthstone, to pursue equality rather than to excel other men/ The scholiast points out that the phrase is normally used of those who are either good or bad from the very outset. It is like saying 'From the cradle/ because the Lar welcomes infants at the moment of birth. 84 Propria vineta caedere To cut down one's own vineyards There is a phrase in Horace related to this, 'If I on my own vines the axe may ply/ which means to begin with myself and tear poets to pieces although I myself am one. It may be supposed a metaphor from those who cut down a vineyard or who damage newly planted vines out of spite. Horace in his Epistles: 'A poet's oft his own worst enemy, / If I on my own vines the axe may ply/ 85 Aedibus in nostris quae prava aut recta geruntur The good or ill that's wrought in our own halls Aulus Gellius1 says that this Homeric line, which comes from the fourth book of the Odyssey, was always current as a proverb: ' OTTI rot ev /u,eydpoio-i The good or ill that's wrought in our own halls. Others attribute this to Socrates; Diocles ascribed it to Diogenes, as Laertius2 tells us. Socrates used this saying to discourage the study of nature and the supernatural and also of the whole field of mathematics, and to recall people to the pursuit of moral philosophy, on the ground that it alone deals with things in which we are really concerned. Plutarch3 employs it like a proverb in his essay 'On the Maintenance of Good Health': 'If he thinks it more becoming to him to be seen taking some interest in geometry, dialectic, and music than in enquiring into and trying to find out "the good or ill that's wrought in our own halls/" The lesson of this line is that we should attend as far as we can to the things that concern our own selves and not enquire into outside things which are no business of ours. Martial4 has a witty attack

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on a man called Ollus who suffered from this fault, being a most painstaking observer and most keen critic of misconduct in others, while he himself had an unfaithful wife and a daughter ready for a husband and on top of that an unpaid tailor's bill. Diogenes the Cynic5 philosopher, who, as I said just now, was constantly quoting this line, used to say that schoolmasters made great fools of themselves with their passionate researches into the misfortunes of Ulysses while ignoring their own. To this we may also refer that line in Homer6 which is almost hackneyed, for it comes in the sixth book of the Iliad and books i, 8, and 21 of the Odyssey, 'Go home now, and attend to your own tasks.' Plutarch7 defines inquisitiveness as 'a love of hearing about other people's misfortunes,' and says that inquisitive people are like vampires, who put their eyes away for safe keeping while they are at home and replace them when they go out, with the result that at home they can see nothing and are very clear-sighted out of doors. Those who make such an inverted use of their sight are a fair target for that line in Sophocles8 about old men: Tar-sighted they, but blind as bats at home,' for old men suffer from a difficulty in seeing things close to them and can see clearly what is at some distance; a fact for which Plutarch supplies an explanation in the first decade of his Table-talk/ 86 In se descendere To venture down into oneself To venture down into oneself is for a man to contemplate his own faults. The image is taken from undercrofts or cellars, into which people descend and can then see what is kept there in store. But the reference is to those cavernous recesses of the human heart, which Momus thought should have been supplied with windows. Persius: None, none dare venture down into themselves. They watch the wallet hanging on the back Of him that walks before.

87 Tecum habita Be your own lodger Homer's line seems to have a very near neighbour in another place, also in Persius: 'Be your own lodger, and you'll shortly come / To learn how scant the gear you have at home/ You must live at home, this means, in order to learn how little your possessions amount to. A metaphor from those who live in princes' households and, as commonly happens, wax fat on the wealth of

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other men as though it were their own, when if they had to board at home they would scarcely have a salt-cellar to set on the table. 'Be your own lodger' therefore means 'Measure yourself by the scale of your own possessions and rate yourself by the advantages and disadvantages that are really yours/1 suspect that we should place here those words of Cicero in his Cato major: 'Live in his own house, as the saying goes/ 88 Messe tenus propria vive Live up to your own harvest The same idea was expressed in a different image by Persius in his sixth satire: 'Let your own harvest your expense dictate/ spend, that is, only so much as you can really afford. A metaphor from the husbandman, who measures what he can spend by the produce of his land year by year; for, as Plautus1 says, no man can keep going if his expenses outrun his income. A man who makes a great pretence of wealth was described by Alexis, according to Athenaeus,2 book 6, by the elegant word ptochalazon, a 'beggar-bully/ for this clearly conveys the combination of pomp and penury. Nowadays the world is full of men of this class, who unite the swagger of a tyrannical bully with the vow of poverty. 89 Tuo te pede metire Measure yourself by your own foot To the same line of thought belongs that verse in Horace:1 Tis right each man should measure his own strength / On his own scale and by his own foot's length/ Lucian,2 in the essay entitled On Behalf of the Images, has 'But you should judge between the two and measure each on his own scale/ the phrase being of course just what Horace used, except that he added 'by his own foot' as if to explain what he had said. Pindar3 too: 'But one should ever observe the limit in all things, each man according to his own condition/ And Aristophanes4 in the Birds: 'Now measure yourself off to somewhere else/ The message of the adage is that no man should inflate himself beyond his own condition, and he should gauge his own worth not by the praise of those who flatter him or by public opinion or by the favours of fortune but by his own genuine gifts and by his powers of mind. A metaphor from those who gauge the dimensions of the human body as a multiple of the length of the foot. In fact, the exact stature of every individual is seven times that length, if painters and sculptors are to be trusted. Here too belongs that line in Martial:5 'For he who weighs his load can bear the weight/

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90 Non videmus manticae quod in tergo est We see not what is in the wallet behind Catullus1 (it is an iambic line): 'We look not in the wallet on our backs/ which means that we do not see our own faults, while watching with sharp eyes the faults of others. The proverb took its rise from one of Aesop's2 fables, which is told as follows by Stobaeus: Aesop said that each of us carries two wallets, one in front and the other behind hanging from our shoulders; and in the front one we put what other men do wrong and our own failings into the back one. Persius:3 None, none dare venture down into themselves. They watch the wallet hanging on the back Of him that walks before.

Horace:4 'Will learn to look / At what hangs on the back he never sees/ St Jerome:5 'But this is a real reason for friends to correct one another, if we cannot see what we do ourselves and concentrate, as Persius says, on the wallet of other men/ 91 Festucam ex alterius oculo ejicere To cast a mote out of another man's eye This blind self-love, so characteristic of human nature, has been pilloried not only in the poets but in the Gospels1 too (for they will have no objection to being appealed to in this context), when they say that there are some men who can see a mote in their brother's eye and cannot see a beam in their own, meaning that they take offence at the smallest faults in others and flatter their own however great. For so it runs in Matthew: 'Why do you see the mote in your brother's eye, and take no note of the beam in your own eye? Or how will you say to your brother, Let me cast the mote out of your eye? - and look at the beam in your own eye!' Such is the literal sense of the Greek. St Jerome2 has: 'Who through the beam in his own eye would try to extract the mote from another man's/ Men of this class are pointedly criticized by Horace:3 Blear-eyed with salves, you scarce discern your faults, Yet in your friends' shortcomings there's no eagle, No Epidaurian serpent sees so clear.

And again elsewhere: 'Who his friend's pardon for his boils demands, / 'Tis

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fair that his friend's warts he should forgive/ This in itself has all the look of a proverb. The boils of which he speaks are a much greater disfigurement than the warts, which elsewhere he calls wens. 92 Intra tuam pelliculam te contine Keep inside your own skin Porphyrion1 points out that this is a proverb, which tells us not to forget our condition and attempt what is beyond our powers; and he thinks it derives from the fact that in the old days generals who were 'under canvas' slept in tents made of skins. To me it seems more likely to be connected with the famous ass at Cumae,2 who dressed himself, according to the fables, in a lion's skin and thus passed for some time as a lion. But this did him very little good when he was detected and became a universal laughing-stock, and then was stripped of the hide that was not his and beaten to death with cudgels. Nor would it be absurd to refer this to Cleon3 the Athenian who, after starting life as a leather-seller or cordwainer, was made general in command of an army and by the favour of fortune won a victory and captured Pylos; then robbed and despoiled his native city and thus became excessively rich; then at length was overthrown by another man and roughly handled, and paid the penalty, all because he had not stayed quietly among the skins where he belonged. Cleon is a character in the Knights of Aristophanes, and is criticized from time to time by the same poet in other places. It is of him, in fact, that Plautus4 seems to have been thinking when he makes his braggart and swaggering soldier 'clad in an elephant's hide and not his own,' either to show that he was a blockhead or because he used to tell of feats beyond his powers. Horace:5 'Aye, and rightly too, / Because I had not stayed within my skin.' Martial6 addresses a shoemaker who, like Cleon, had risen to great riches and hoisted his sails to catch the favouring winds; but was then reduced again by his extravagance to his original poverty, so that for the future he could be nothing but a cobbler. 'You've had your fun/ he says, 'but mark my words: begin, My cobbler friend, to stay within your skin/

Seneca7 too in his letters: They banish the wise man from everything and compel him to stay inside his own skin/ Ovid8 brings out the point without using the metaphor, in this way: Take my advice: he who lives hid, lives best. / Let each man with his lot contented rest/ Lucian9 too alluded to it in his Images: They remain no longer within their proper sphere,' said of people who have been promoted by strokes of good fortune and are not

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sufficiently mindful of where they belong. In conclusion, it would not, I think, be unreasonable to refer our proverb to the story of the flaying of Marsyas,10 who did not sufficiently remember who he was and challenged Apollo to a contest, in return for which he was stripped of his skin. 93 Pennas nido maj ores extendere To spread wings greater than the nest In Horace's Epistles we find a metaphor which is no doubt proverbial, To spread wings greater than the nest, in the sense of enhancing your estate and position in society, which were small and modest when you inherited them from your forebears. If this is achieved by honourable conduct, it is greatly to a man's credit, so far am I from thinking it should be reckoned a fault. 'A freedman's son/ he says, 'with modest fortune blest, Tell how I spread wings greater than the nest; Add to my virtues and demean my birth.'

The image is derived from fledgling birds which grow so big, as their plumage sprouts, that the maternal nest cannot hold them. 94 In tuum ipsius sinum inspue Spit into your own bosom In our own day this adage is current in many parts of the world. They tell a man who criticizes other people's faults to spit into his own bosom, as though warning him to remember his own private errors and desist from arrogant attacks on the way other men live. That the Ancients did the same can be inferred from the words of Pliny,1 who in book 28 chapter 4 writes as follows: 'We also ask for forgiveness from the gods for expressing some unduly optimistic hope by spitting in our bosoms.' In the same chapter he also says on the authority of Salpa that the stiffness in any numbed limb can be eased by spitting into the bosom. Neither of these practices is very far from our current proverb; for the man who criticizes others offends by a kind of self-centred optimism, as though he hoped that no one would ever be able to blame him for anything of the kind, whereas nobody exists who is not the victim of some fault or other, and the man who is unconscious of his own mistakes (which is a kind of insensibility) is the victim of a sort of numbness. Seneca2 in book 7 of the De beneficiis: 'It may be that if you examine yourself carefully, you will find the fault of which you complain in your own bosom.'

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Lucian3 in his defence of the essay On Salaried Posts in Great Houses: 'And that you did not spit in your own bosom before you began your accusations/ and again in his Wishes: 'You are above yourself from over-eating, Adimantus, and you don't spit in your bosom nor remember who you are, though you may be a ship-owner/ which is a joking attack on a friend, who seems to have forgotten himself and imagines he is immensely rich, and did not spit in his bosom to remind himself who he really was. Theocritus4 makes the same point in his sixth eclogue. Polyphemus, after speaking rather boastfully about his own good looks, says: 'But to avert the evil eye I spat thrice in my bosom as the hag Cotyttaris taught me.' The scholiast adds that in his own day the custom still survived for women to spit into their bosoms to avoid the evil eye. He also quotes a line from Callimachus: 'O fortune, why do women spit in their bosoms?' Here perhaps belongs a phrase from Lucian's5 Necyomantia: 'When he had spat three times in my face.' Nor is it irrelevant that Persius6 in his second satire tells how the maternal aunt protects the baby's brow and dribbling lips, 'with magic finger and purifying spittle.' An ancient practice referred to by Athenaeus7 in his first book, of wiping the face three times to drive away misfortune, took its rise from the same superstition. He quotes the following line from a poet of Cyrene: To men with face thrice wiped god gives good luck.' 95 Nosce teipsum Know thyself To the same line of thought belong those three sayings which are easily the most famous of all the utterances of wise men, so much so that, as Plato1 bears witness in the Charmides, they could be seen inscribed by the Amphictyons in front of the doors of the temple at Delphi as maxims worthy of the god. The first of these is Tv&Bi creavrov, Know thyself, which recommends moderation and the middle state, and bids us not to pursue objects either too great for us or beneath us. For here we have a source of all life's troubles: every man flatters himself, and blinded by self-love2 takes to himself without deserving it all the merit that he wrongly denies to others. Cicero3 in the third book of letters to his brother Quintus: 'As for that famous Know thyself, you must not think it was uttered merely to reduce our self-conceit; we should also recognize our own blessings.' There is also a line preserved among the proverbial maxims:4 That Know thyself is useful everywhere.' Nonius Marcellus quotes a satire by Varro,5 the title of which was Know Thyself. Ovid6 in his Art of Love: Those world-famous words, / That every man should to himself be known/ Juvenal:7 'And Know Thyself descended from the sky.' Ovid gives Pythagoras as the author of this rule; Socrates in

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Plato8 thinks it started with Apollo. Plato in the Phaedrus: 'I cannot yet achieve the self-knowledge of the Delphian inscription.' Some think9 that this too was taken from that ocean we call Homer; for Hector in Homer,10 while attacking everyone else, fought shy of Ajax whom he knew to be stronger than himself. As the poet says, 'he shunned an encounter with Ajax son of Telamon.' Diogenes11 ascribes it to Thales, but cites Antisthenes as giving it to Phemonoe, though he says that Chilon appropriated it. Thales when asked 'What is difficult?' replied 'To know oneself.' Asked 'What is easy?' he said To give another man good advice.' Macrobius12 in the first book of his Commentary on the Dream of Scipio records that when someone asked the Delphic oracle by what road he could arrive at happiness, the answer was: 'If you have learnt to know yourself.' The same reply was given by the oracle to Croesus, as we learn from Xenophon13 in his Cyropaedeia. The Greek proverb-collections cite this line from Antiphanes:14 'Friend, if you're mortal, think as mortals should.' The same principle is expressed by Pindar15 in the words 'Mortal desires are fit for mortal men.' Demonax,16 asked when he had begun to be a philosopher, replied 'As soon as I began to know myself.' Socrates,17 when judged by the oracle of Apollo to be the only philosopher in Greece, though Greece was full of them, explained this by saying that the others professed to know what they knew not, and that he defeated them because he knew that he knew nothing, and that was the only thing he professed to know. But Socrates was outdone in modesty on this point by Anaxarchus,l8 who used to maintain that he did not even know that he knew nothing. Menander19 the writer of comedies has one of his characters correct this universally accepted dictum: This Know thyself in many ways is wrong; / Far better were it, other men to know.' 96 Ne quid nimis Nothing to excess The second embodies almost the same principle in different words: Mrjdev ayav, Nothing to excess. Terence1 in the Andria puts it in the mouth of one of his characters, Sosia the freedman, as though it were widely known. Diogenes Laertius2 ascribes it to Pythagoras. Aristotle3 in book 3 of the Rhetoric gives Bias as the source, where he is treating of the ungoverned passions of the young who, he says, go wrong in every field through enthusiasm; for they love to excess and hate to excess too, while the aged are different, for (to borrow Aristotle's own words) 'they follow the advice of Bias, loving as though they might one day hate and hating as though they might one day love.' Some attribute it to Thales, some to Solon, according to Laertius.4 Plato5 cites it in one place from Euripides. And there is no lack of

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people who trace it back to Homer6 as the fountain-head, who has the following lines in Odyssey 15: That host I like not who beyond the mean / Both loves and hates; reason is always best.' Again in Iliad book 10: 'O son of Tydeus, praise me not too much / Nor too much blame me/ Personally I should prefer to trace it back to Hesiod,7 who has in his Works and Days the line 'Observe the mean; due time is best in all.' So Euripides8 in several places and especially in the Hippolytus: 'So what there is too much of I like less / Than the old rule of nothing to excess.' Pindar,9 cited by Plutarch: The wise have ever praised exceedingly this saying Nothing to excess.' Sophocles10 in the Electra: 'Be not over-angry with those whom you hate, but let not your enemies slip out of mind.' Plautus" in the Poenulus: 'Moderation, sister, in all things is best.' Here too belongs that Homeric tag,12 in book 13 of the Iliad: 'But in all things there comes satiety, / In sleep and love, sweet song and gracious dance.' Pindar13 seems to have imitated this in the Nemeans: 'In honey lies satiety, and in the delightful flowers of love.' Pliny14 in his eleventh book: 'Most destructive, even in every walk of life, is that which is carried to excess.' Horace:15 'All things are ruled by reason, have fixed bounds, / Within which only can the right hold firm.' And again: 'Virtue's a mean 'twixt vices either side/ Phocylides:16 'Measure's the best of all things/ And Alpheus17 in an epigram: This Nothing to excess I like excessively/ Quintilian18 writes that moderation is sovereign in delivery, as in everything else. Finally Plutarch19 in his life of Camillus tells us that piety is halfway between contempt of the gods and superstition, and that 'piety and the principle of nothing to excess are best/ And there is nothing in the whole world in which one cannot go wrong by excess, except the love of God, as Aristotle20 too admits in different words, putting wisdom in the place of God. Here belongs a quotation from some poet, given by Athenaeus21 in his first book, on the virtues of wine: 'All human cares it drives from out the heart / With reason drunk, but to excess, 'tis worse/ 97 Sponde, noxa praesto est Stand surety, and ruin is at hand Stand surety, and ruin is at hand. All three of these are thought by Socrates in Plato1 to belong to the same line of thought. For he who gives a guarantee for another man makes a promise regarding something which it is not in his power to guarantee, the honesty of someone else. But he attributes the first of them to Apollo and thinks the other two were added by mortals. Pliny,2 book 7 chapter 32, ascribes them all equally to Chilon, qualified by their being treated as oracles; 'again' he say 'mortals have admitted Chilon the Lacedaemonian to a partnership in the oracle by

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writing up his three precepts at Delphi in letters of gold, viz that everyone should know himself, that he should desire nothing to excess, and that misery is the bedfellow of debt and litigation/ Pliny has explained the meaning of 'stand surety.' We give a guarantee on behalf of a man when he is borrowing money, and it often happens that the guarantor is obliged to repay the lender in cash. We also give a guarantee to the judges that we will produce the accused, and if he lets them down it is those who have gone bail for him who are punished. This saying too is traced back to an origin in Homer,3 who has a line in the eighth book of the Odyssey: 'Worthless the pledges given by worthless men/ Chersias in Plutarch's4 'Symposium of Plato' refers this to the story in Homer about the goddess of Mischief who, because she had been present when Jupiter stood surety for the birth of Hercules, was hurled by him down to earth. These three sayings are cited with approval by Plutarch5 in his essay 'On Pointless Garrulity/ 98 Novit quid album, quid nigrum He knows white from black He knows what white is and what black. This can be taken in two different ways, either He knows the difference between right and wrong, or He knows something known to the veriest ignoramus; for the difference between white and black is too obvious to be lost on anyone. Aristophanes in the Knights says that 'Not a soul but knows Arignotus, of those who know what white is and what high stirring music/ The scholiast points out and expounds the proverb. This seems to be taken from men in very early days, who could distinguish two colours in nature only, white and black, as Pompeius1 records. 99 Albus an ater sis/ nescio I know not whether you are dark or fair Said commonly of a man entirely unknown. Cicero1 in the second Philippic: 'No one save friends ever left me anything, so that a touch of regret might be sweetened by the windfall, if such it was. But you! A man you had never set eyes on, Lucius Rubrius of Cassinum, left you his heir. How that man must have loved you! He knew not whether you were dark or fair, and passed over his own brother's son/ Quintilian,2 in book 11 of his Principles of Rhetoric, says: 'one of the poets maintains that he does not care greatly whether Caesar is dark or fair,' putting his finger no doubt on Catullus, among whose surviving poems is one addressed to Caesar: 'Caesar, to flatter you I don't much care, / Nor yet to know if you be dark or fair/ Apuleius3 in

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his defence against a charge of witchcraft: 'Up till quite lately I was perfectly content not to know whether you were fair or dark, and I do not really know you even now/ St Jerome4 attacking Helvidius: 'Who pray knew of you before this blasphemous outburst? Who thought you worth twopence? You have got what you wanted, and your crimes have made your reputation. Even I, who write against you and live in the same city as yourself (how you stammer and change colour!), do not know, as the saying goes, whether you are fair or dark/ Horace5 in the last of his Epistles: 'Whose features change; now fair he is, now dark/ where Porphyrion points out that 'fair and dark' is a proverbial expression for good and bad, and that Horace 'has related fair to generous or prosperous and dark to mean or miserable/ Matron6 makes a pretty use of this, as quoted in the fourth book of Athenaeus, when speaking of the cuttlefish: he says that though only a fish, it alone knows the difference between black and white, because the cuttlefish itself is white, but has a black juice which it spreads when afraid of being caught. 100 Non novit natos He does not know that they exist An idiom very like this is 'I do not know that he exists/ when you mean you are utterly and completely ignorant of a man. Cicero1 in the ninth book of his Letters to Friends, writing to Papyrius: 'I am aware that before now I have had letters from kings at the ends of the earth, thanking me for having proposed that they should be given the title of kings, when not only was I ignorant that they had the royal title, I simply was not aware that they existed/ Very like this is a phrase in the Wasps of Aristophanes:2 'He would not even have known that I existed/ meaning that he would have paid no attention to me whatever. Theocritus3 too in his Sorceress: 'And knows not whether I am dead or alive/ Plautus4 uses it with the same sense in the mouth of Euclio: 'You'd take no more heed / Than if I never had been born at all/ i

Odi memorem compotorem I hate a pot-companion with a good memory 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. Lucian1 in his Lapiths quotes it from some unknown poet. Martial2 has No pot-companion welcome here With memory so crystal-clear: Procillus, kindly note.

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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. Plutarch3 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,4 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 Juvenal5 for one can show: 'My hand like theirs has flinched beneath the cane.' Plutarch6 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.' Horace7 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 line8 '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 Plutarch9 testifies

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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. 2 Duabus sedere sellis To sit on two stools 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. Homer1 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 indiscriminately that the official fourteen rows of seats would not hold them all.' Thus Macrobius; and it is generally agreed2 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. 3 Duos parietes de eadem dealbare fidelia To whitewash two walls out of the same bucket 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: 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.'

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4 Unica filia duos parare generos To make two sons-in-law of one daughter 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. 5 Nescis quid serus vesper vehat Who knows what evening in the end will bring? Who knows what evening in the end will bring? Cited as the title of one of Varro's Menippean Satires both by Aulus Gellius1 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: Tt is not bedtime yet/ when people mean that things can still turn out very differently. It is clear that Virgil2 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 Wait till connected with Solon's3 famous warning you see the end of a long life. Livy4 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 Philip5 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.' 6 Multi thyrsigeri, pauci bacchi Many bear the wand, few feel the god 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 Christians1 who play a Christian's part in outward observance. Not all of noble birth who wear collars of gold. Not all virgins

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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 Plutarch2 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. Plato3 uses it in his dialogue called Phaedo. There is an elegant allusion to it in Plutarch's4 '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 Atticus5 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/ 7 Non omnes qui habent citharam sunt citharoedi Not all that hold the lyre can play it 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. 8 Plures thriobolos, paucos est cernere vates Many the casters of lots, but few can you find that are prophets 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

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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. 9 Multi qui boves stimulent, pauci aratores Few men can plough, though many ply the goad The same sense is given by another line: 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. 10 Simla in purpura An ape in purple 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!1 It will be2 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. Augustine3 somewhere calls such men rather neatly 'cloak-deep philosophers/ And Ammianus,4 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 already5 spoken.

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i vii ii / LB n 265A 11 Simla simia est, etiamsi aurea gestet insignia An ape is an ape, though clad in gold

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. Lucian1 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 story2 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. 12 Asinus apud Cumanos An ass at Cumae 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. Demosthenes1 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:2 'A fool's prosperity is hard to bear/ I have told elsewhere3 the story of the runaway ass which posed among the good people of Cumae as a lion. 13 Ira omnium tardissime senescit Resentment is the last thing to grow old Resentment grows old last of all. The opposite

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of this is a remark of Aristotle1 who, according to Laertius, when asked what grows old faster than anything else, replied 'a kind action.' The two are put together by Cicero:2 '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,3 who says in the Oedipus Coloneus Resentment knows no age, save only death, For there's no feeling that can touch the dead.

Homer4 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 invention5 of Homer's is thought by some people to be close to the Christian belief that Lucifer was hurled down from Heaven.

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14 Si vultur es, cadaver exspecta If you're a vulture/ wait for your carcase 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,1 such foresight that it flies two or three days beforehand to the place where there will be corpses, and so is accustomed, as Basil2 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 Plutarch3 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.' Seneca4 in letter 96: 'If you're a vulture, wait for your carcase.' Martial5 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.

Diogenianus6 records this adage in his collections, but in another form: 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. 15 Corvum delusit hiantem He's tricked the gaping crow 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

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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-inlaw 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 A wolf with open mouth, so that one or A crow might say equally well He's tricked the gaping wolf, with open mouth. 16 Cornicari To croak Greek also uses o 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. Persius1 in his fifth satire: 'Croaking mysterious nonsense to yourself.' St Jerome2 too uses it in his letter to Rusticus the monk. 17 In vino veritas Wine speaks the truth 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 Scripture1 forbids wine to be given to kings, because where strong drink reigns there are no secrets. Pliny,2 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,3 that torture is unnecessary to get at the truth; wine is much more effective. Horace4 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.

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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 Athenaeus5 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's6 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:7 'What is in the heart of the sober man is in the mouth of the drunkard.' Theognis:8 'Silver and gold by fire the craftsman tries; / Tis wine displays the mind before our eyes.' Athenaeus9 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 Anacharsis10 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, 'I 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 Theocritus11 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:12 '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:13 'A slip of the tongue is wont to tell the truth.' For what a man lets fall unawares is

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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: Tor "Neoptolemus" I thoughtless cry / "Orestes" - sign that better days are nigh/14 Cicero15 finally in his Topica lists among those whose remarks carry conviction children, sleepers, persons caught off their guard and drunkards. 18 Bos in lingua An ox on the tongue Bov? em yXtorr^?, 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,1 book 18 chapter 3. Plutarch2 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 suppose3 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,4 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 Draco5 there was mention of a ten-ox payment, which would mean ten coins; and that there were those who thought that Homer6 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 Pollux7 in another passage, where he shows that exchange of goods already existed without coins. The author of the scholia8 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 Bov? em yXOKTOTJ /Se/SrjKef, An ox treads on my tongue, pointing out that this is used when a man kept silent for money. Theognis:9 'An ox is on my tongue/ Philostratus10inhis 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

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apostle of silence. Again, in his life of the sophist Scopelianus:11 '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;12 The rest for me is silence; on my tongue / A great ox treads/ 19 Argentanginam patitur He has the silver-quinsy 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 Plutarch1 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.' Aretaeus2 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. 20 Equus me portat, alit rex A horse to carry me, a king to feed me 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. Horace1 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,2 an anapaestic dimeter.

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21 Etiam corchorus inter olera Blue pimpernel too is a vegetable 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,1 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. Theophrastus2 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. Suidas3 and Hesychius4 inform us that some thought the corchorus was a fish, much despised and of no value, like the hippurus. Aristophanes5 in the Wasps has 'And then we laid hands on the pimpernel.' Here too the scholiast has not failed to mention the proverb. 22 Graculus inter Musas A jackdaw among the Muses There is apparently some difference between that and KoXoto? ev rat? Movcmis, 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 Virgil1 in his Bucolics: 'A cackling goose amid the tuneful swans/ That swans are musical is so constantly repeated2 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. Aelian3 adds that they do not sing unless a west wind is blowing. Hence also the proverbial expression A swan-song.4 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. 23 In lente unguentum Perfume on the lentils The story on lentils; we must supply You are telling. When someone introduces the name of some contemptible and worthless

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person into a conversation concerned with men of outstanding merit. So the phrase runs in all the current texts of Aulus Gellius,1 book 13 chapter 28. But I gladly subscribe to a correction by Ermolao, who restored the text so as to , Perfume on the lentils. This is appropriate to an 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,2 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's3) of perfume on lentils/ Cicero4 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. Aristotle5 quotes the adage in his De sensu et sensili: 'For there is much truth in the gibe levelled at Euripides by Strati's, 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. Athenaeus6 also cites it in book four of his Doctors at Dinner: T 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's7 Necya: 'Here comes Odysseus, prince of Ithaca, / The perfume on our lentils! Courage, heart!' He further adduces the proverb-collector Clearchus8 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.9 I think Aristophanes10 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. Athenaeus11 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

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themselves, but none the less will not go together; so the man of taste needs to learn what goes with what. The philosopher Diodes12 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 Horace13 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 and sometimes with a circumflex and this happens so often that it can scarcely be due to ignorance or accident. Hence I conjecture14 that is derived by ? in Athenaeus. He also tells us contraction from for we find s a contracted form for that And so those who accept this derivation prefer to use those who prefer the common form have add ignored the source of it, and written 24 Anulus aureus in naribus suis A gold ring in a pig's snout 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 Menander1 is current which is much to the same effect: T hate the rogue who speaks like an honest man/ Here belongs a story told by Aulus Gellius2 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

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Athenaeus:3 'A stinking sheatfish on a silver dish/ Some think4 that this fish, the silurus, was what we commonly call the sturgeon, of all fishes by far the most highly valued. 25 In eburnea vagina plumbeus gladius A leaden sword in an ivory sheath , In an Close to this is the adage 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/

26 Omnia octo All eights 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 Stesichorus1 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 Pollux2 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 Corinthians3 together to form one city divided the whole body of citizens into eight tribes, and hence the phrase in common use. And some writers4 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 too5 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

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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 Heliogabalus; for Aelius Lampridius6 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. 27 Omnia idem pulvis All is the same dust 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.' 28 Plaustrum bovem trahit The cart before the horse 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. 29 Ab equis ad asinos From horses to asses 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.'

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30 Ab asinis ad boves transcendere To rise from asses to oxen 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. 3iA Ab asino delapsus Fallen off the donkey Fallen off the donkey. Said of those who do something unadvisedly or unskilfully, or who lose their present advantages because they are too ignorant to know how to use them. The Greek contains an elegant pun on an expression which is closely related but has a different accent, duo vov, Off his head, in the sense of being lunatic or demented. Plato1 uses this adage in book three of the Laws: 'It seems to me that at all points one ought to keep a tight rein on the argument, as though it were a horse, and not let it be carried away as though it had the bit between its teeth until, as the proverb puts it, it falls off the donkey/ Plutarch2 too uses it in his 'Gryllus/ Aristophanes3 again in the Clouds: 'So you were in a real bad way, I take it. Driving my horses, I fell off my car. Why rave, as though you'd fallen off your donkey?'

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The first line is spoken by Strepsiades in ridicule of the money-lender, because he demands repayment of the loan made to his son; the second line by the usurer, who blames the young man by inference for having wasted the money in question by his passion for keeping horses; the third by Strepsiades, who says he must be raving, exactly as though he had fallen, not from his horses but from his donkey, and were now airo vov, off his head. Latin too4 uses a verb of collapsing of those who are off their heads or out of their minds. Suetonius in his life of Augustus: 'He used also to appoint a guardian for those who were under age or had collapsed mentally.' For this proverb, like the last, some people invent a fable to serve as a basis. Two men had found a donkey by accident in a lonely place, and a fierce argument set in, which of them should take it home as his own property, because chance seemed to have offered it equally to both of them. While they were thus disputing, the ass made off, and neither of them got it. Hence, they say, the proverb. It seems to me more likely that the point of the adage was the pun of which I spoke, especially as I observe that scholars have always had a passion for attaching some fable or anecdote however spurious to every adage. Suetonius' phrase 'mental collapse' finds a parallel in Ulpian,5 who in the title De magistratibus conveniendis speaks of the 'financial collapse' of persons reduced to poverty. 316 Telluris onus A burden on the earth rf)s /36v ye Tracra yala eKTpeei. Among the Greek maxims4 there is a line of the same sort, which is not very different from our proverb: Ai^i/ arvxias ecrriv av6pd)TTOL