Noctes Atticae

The patience with which Socrates endured his wife's shrewish disposition; and in that connection what Marcus Varro says in one of his satires about the duty of a husband.

XANTHIPPE, the wife of the philosopher Socrates, is said to have been ill-tempered and quarrelsome to a degree, with a constant flood of feminine tantrums and annoyances day and night. Alcibiades, amazed at this outrageous conduct of hers towards her husband, asked Socrates what earthly reason he had for not showing so shrewish a woman the door.

Because,

replied Socrates,

it is by enduring such a person at home that I accustom and train myself to bear more easily away from home the impudence and injustice of other persons.

In the same vein Varro also said in the Menippean Satire [*](Varro's Menippean Satires, in 150 books, based to some extent on the Speudoge/loion of Menippus, a Cynic philosopher of the third century B.C., treated in a mixture of prose and verse a great variety of moral and serious topics in a playful and sometimes jocose manner. For other titles see Index under (M.) Terentius Varro, and for the fragments, Bücheler's Petronius, 3d. ed., Berlin, 1882, pp. 161 ff.) which he entitled On the Duty of a Husband: [*](Fr 83, Bücheler.)

A wife's faults must be either put down or put up with. He who puts down her faults, makes his wife more agreeable; he who puts up with them, improves himself.

Varro contrasted the two words tollere and ferre very cleverly, [*](For a similar play on two meanings of tollere, cf. Suet. Aug. xii.) to be sure, but he obviously uses tollere in the sense of

correct.

It is evident too that Varro thought that if a fault of that kind in a wife cannot be corrected, it should be tolerated, in so far of course as a man may endure it honourably; for faults are less serious than crimes.

How Marcus Varro, in the fourteenth book of his Antiquities of Man, [*](Fr. 99, Agahd. In the lemma, or chapter heading, Varro's statement is wrongly reffered to the Antiquities of Man, the other division of his great work Antiquitatum Libri XLI, treating the political and religious institutions of the Romans. Only scanty fragments have survived.) criticizes his master Lucius Aelius for a false etymology; and how Varro in his turn, in the same book, gives a false origin for fur.

IN the fourteenth book of his Divine Antiquities[*](Fr. 99, Agahd. In the lemma, or chapter heading, Varro's statement is wrongly referred to the Antiquities of Man, the other division of his great work Antiquitatum Libri XLI, treating the political and religious institutions of the Romans. Only scanty fragments have survived.) Marcus Varro shows that Lucius Aelius, the most learned Roman of his time, went astray and followed a false etymological principle in separating an old Greek word which had been taken over into the Roman language into two Latin words, just as if it were of Latin origin.

I quote Varro's own words on the subject:

In this regard our countryman Lucius Aelius, the most gifted man of letters within my memory, was sometimes misled. For he gave false derivations of several early Greek words, under the impression that they were native to our tongue. We do not use the word lepus ('hare') because the animal is levipes ('light-footed'), as he asserts, but because it is an old Greek word. Many of the early words of that people are unfamiliar, because to-day the Greeks use other words in their place; and it may not be generally known that among these are Graecus, for which they now use (/Ellhn, puteus ('well') which

v1.p.89

they call fre/ar, and lepus, which they call lagwo/s. But as to this, far from disparaging Aelius' ability, I commend his diligence; for it is good fortune that brings success, endeavour that deserves praise.

Tis is what Varro wrote in the first part of his book, with great skill in the explanation of words, with wide knowledge of the usage of both languages, and marked kindliness towards Aelius himself. But in the latter part of the same book he says that fur is so called because the early Romans used furvus for ater (

black

), and thieves steal most easily in the night, which is black. Is it not clear that Varro made the same mistake about fur that Aelius did about lepus. For what the Greeks now call kle/pths, or

thief,

in the earlier Greek language was called fw/r. Hence, owing to the similarity in sound, he who in Greek is fw/r, in Latin is fur. But whether that fact escaped Varro's memory at the time, or on the other hand he thought that fur was more appropriately and consistently named from furvus, that is,

black,

as to that question it is not for me to pass judgment on a man of such surpassing learning.

The story of king Tarquin the Proud and the Sibylline Books.

IN ancient annals we find this tradition about the Sibylline Books. An old woman, a perfect stranger, came to king Tarquin the Proud, bringing nine books; she declared that they were oracles of the gods and that she wished to sell them. Tarquin inquired the price; the woman demanded an

immense and exorbitant sum: the king laughed her to scorn, believing her to be in her dotage. Then she placed a lighted brazier before him, burned three of the books to ashes, and asked whether he would buy the remaining six at the same price. But at this Tarquin laughed all the more and said that there was now no doubt that the old woman was crazy. Upon that the woman at once burned up three more books and again calmly made the same request, that he would buy the remaining three at the original figure. Tarquin now became serious and more thoughtful, and realising that such persistence and confidence were not to be treated lightly, he bought the three books that were left at as high a price as had been asked for all nine. Now it is a fact that after then leaving Tarquin, that woman was never seen again anywhere. The three books were deposited in a shrine [*](In the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol. Augustus transferred them to the temple of Apollo on the Palatine; see Suet. Aug. xxxi. 1.) and called

Sibylline

; [*](Because the old woman was regarded as a Sibyl. Although the books came to Tarquin by way of Cumae, the origin of the Sibylline books was probably Asia Minor. There were several Sibyls (Varro enumerates ten), of whom the Erythraean, from whom the books apparently came, was the most important; see Marquardt, Stautsverew. 1112. 350 ff.) to them the Fifteen [*](See note 4, page 61.) resort whenever tile immortal gods are to be consulted as to the welfare of the State.

On what the geometers call e)pi/pedos, stereo/s, ku/bos and grammh/, with the Latin equivalents for all these terms.

OF the figures which the geometers call sxh/mata there are two kinds,

plane

and

solid.

These the Greeks themselves call respectively e)pi/pedos and stereo/s. A

plane

figure is one that has all its lines in two dimensions only, breadth and length; for example, triangles and squares, which are drawn on a flat surface without height. We have a

solid

figure, when its several lines do not produce merely length and breadth in a plane, but are raised so as to produce height also; such are in general the triangular columns which they call

pyramids,

or those which are bounded on all sides by squares, such as the Greeks call ku/boi, [*](See Euclid, Elementa I, Definitions, 20, cubs autem est aequaliter aequalis aequaliter, sive qui tribus aequalibus numeris comprehenditur.) and we quadrantalia. For the ku/bos is a figure which is square on all its sides,

like the dice,

says Marcus Varro, [*](Fr. p. 350, Bipont.)

with which we play on a gaming-board, for which reason the dice themselves are called ku/boi

Similarly in numbers too the term ku/bos is used, when every factor [*](Euclid, l. c., 17, "ubi autem tres numeri inter se multiplicantes numerum aliquem efficiunt, numerus inde ortus soliduss" (= ku/bos) est, latera autem eius numeri inter se multiplicantes.) consisting of the same number is equally resolved into the cube number itself, [*](That is, is an equal factor in the cube number.) as is the case when three is taken three times and the resulting number itself is then trebled.

Pythagoras declared that the cube of the number three controls the course of the moon, since the moon passes through its orbit in twenty-seven days, and the ternio, or

triad,

which the Greeks call tria/s, when cubed makes twenty-seven.

Furthermore, our geometers apply the term linea, or

line,

to what the Greeks call grammh/. This is defined by Marcus Varro as follows: [*](Fr. p. 337, Bipont.)

A line,

says he,

is length without breadth or height.

But Euclid says more tersely, omitting

height

: [*](l.c. 2, grammh\ de\ mh=kos a)plate/s.)

A line is mh=kos a)plate/s, or 'breadthless length.'

)Aplate/s cannot be expressed in Latin by a single word, unless you should venture to coin the term inlatabile.