Institutio Oratoria

Let us go a little further and we shall find that stella is believed to be still luminis

a drop of light,

a derivation whose author is so famous in literature that it would be unkind to mention his name in connexion with a point where he comes in for censure.

But those who collected such derivations in book form, put their names on the title page; and Gavius thought himself a perfect genius when he identified caelibes,

bachelors,

with caelites,

gods,

on the ground that they are free from a heavy load of care, and supported this opinion by a Greek analogy: for he asserted that ἠΐθεοι

young men,

had a precisely similar origin. Modestus is not his inferior in inventive power: for he asserts that caelibes, that is to say unmarried men, are so called because Saturn cut off the genital organs of Caelus. Aelius asserts that pituita,

phlegm,

is so called quia petat uitam, because it attacks life.