Noctes Atticae

About the horse of king Alexander, called Bucephalas.

THE horse of king Alexander was called Bucephalas because of the shape of his head. [*](Bucephalas in Greek means ox-headed.) Chares wrote [*](Fr. 14, p. 117, Müller.) that he was bought for thirteen talents and given to king Philip; that amount in Roman money is three hundred and twelve thousand sesterces. It seemed a noteworthy characteristic of this horse that when he was armed and equipped for battle, he would never allow himself to be mounted by any other than the king. [*](Cf. Suet. Jul. lxi.) It is also related that Alexander in the war against India, mounted upon that horse and doing

valorous deeds, had driven him, with disregard of his own safety, too far into the enemies' ranks. The horse had suffered deep wounds in his neck and side from the weapons hurled from every hand at Alexander, but though dying and almost exhausted from loss of blood, he yet in swiftest course bore the king from the midst of the foe; but when he had taken him out of range of the weapons, the horse at once fell, and satisfied with having saved his master breathed his last, with indications of relief that were almost human. Then king Alexander, after winning the victory in that war, founded a city in that region and in honour of his horse called it Bucephalon.

The reason and the occasion which are said to have introduced Protagoras to the study of philosophical literature.

THEY say that Protagoras, a man eminent in the pursuit of learning, whose name Plato gave to that famous dialogue of his, in his youth earned his living as a hired labourer and often carried heavy burdens on his back, being one of that class of men which the Greeks call a)xqofo/roi and we Latins baiuli, or porters. He was once carrying a great number of blocks of wood, bound together with a short rope, from the neighbouring countryside into his native town of Abdera. It chanced at the time that Democritus, a citizen of that same city, a man esteemed before all others for his fine character and his knowledge of philosophy, as he was going out of the city, saw Protagoras walking along easily and rapidly with that burden, of a kind so awkward and so difficult to hold together. Democritus drew near, and

noticing with what skill and judgment the wood was arranged and tied, asked the man to stop and rest awhile. When Protagoras did as he was asked, and Democritus again observed that the almost circular heap of blocks was bound with a short rope, and was balanced and held together with all but geometrical accuracy, lie asked who had put the wood together in that way. When Protagoras replied that he had done it himself, Democritus asked him to untie the bundle and arrange it again in the same way. But after he had done so, then Democritus, astonished at the keen intellect and cleverness of this uneducated man, said:

My dear young man, since you have a talent for doing things well, there are greater and better employments which you can follow with me

; and he at once took him away, kept him at his own house, supplied him with money, taught him philosophy, and made him the great man that he afterwards became.

Yet this Protagoras was not a true philosopher, but the cleverest of sophists; for in consideration of the payment of a huge annual fee, he used to promise his pupils that he would teach them by what verbal dexterity the weaker cause could be made the stronger, a process which he called in Greek: to\n h(/ttw lo/gon krei/ttw poiei=n, or

making the worse appear the better reason.

On the word duovicesimus, which is unknown to the general public, but occurs frequently in the writings of the learned.

I CHANCED to be sitting in a bookshop in the Sigillaria [*](See note 2, p. 128.) with the poet Julius Paulus, the most

learned man within my memory; and there was on sale there the Annals of Fabius [*](Quintus Fabius Pictor, who was sent as an envoy to Delphi after the battle of Cannae (216 B. C.), wrote a history of Rome from the coming of Aeneas to his own time. He wrote in Greek, but a Latin version is mentioned also by Quintilian (i. 6. 12) and was used by Varro and by Cicero.) in a copy of good and undoubted age, which the dealer maintained was without errors. But one of the better known grammarians, who had been called in by a purchaser to inspect the book, said that he had found in it one error; but the bookseller for his part offered to wager any amount whatever that there was not a mistake even in a single letter. The grammarian pointed out the following passage in the fourth book: [*](Fr. 6, Peter.)

Therefore it was then that for the first time one of the two consuls was chosen from the plebeians, in the twenty-second (duovicesimo) year after the Gauls captured Rome.

It ought,

said lie,

to read, not duovicesimo, but duodevicesimo or twenty-second; for what is the meaning of duovicesimo?

. . . Varro [*](There is a lacuna in the text which might be filled by This question might be answered by.) in the sixteenth book of his Antiquities of Man; there he wrote as follows: [*](Fr. 1, Mirsch.)

He died in the twenty-second year [*](Of his reign.) (duovicesimo); he was king for twenty-one years.

. . .

How the Carthaginian Hannibal jested at the expense of king Antiochus.

IN collections of old tales it is recorded that Hannibal the Carthaginian made a highly witty jest when at the court of king Antiochus. The jest was

this: Antiochus was displaying to him on the plain the gigantic forces which he had mustered to make war on the Roman people, and was manœuvring his army glittering with gold and silver ornaments. He also brought up chariots with scythes, elephants with turrets, and horsemen with brilliant bridles, saddlecloths, neck-chains and trappings. And then the king, filled with vainglory at the sight of an army so great and so well-equipped, turned to Hannibal and said:

Do you think that all this can be equalled and that it is enough for the Romans?

Then the Carthaginian, deriding the worthlessness and inefficiency of the king's troops in their costly armour, replied:

I think all this will be enough, yes, quite enough, for the Romans, even though they are most avaricious.

Absolutely nothing could equal this remark for wit and sarcasm; the king had inquired about the size of his army and asked for a comparative estimate; Hannibal in his reply referred to it as booty.

On military crowns, with a description of the triumphal, siege, civic, mural, camp, naval, ovation, and olive crowns.

MILITARY crowns are many and varied. Of these the most highly esteemed I find to be in general the following: the

triumphal, siege, civic, mural, camp and naval crowns.

There is besides the so-called

ovation

crown, and lastly also the

olive

crown, which is regularly worn by those who have not taken part in a battle, but nevertheless are awarded a triumph.

Triumphal

crowns are of gold and are presented to a commander in recognition of the honour of a triumph. This in common parlance is

gold for a crown.

This crown in ancient times was of laurel, but later they began to make them of gold.

The

siege

crown is the one which those who have been delivered from a state of siege present to the general who delivered them. That crown is of grass, and custom requires that it be made of grass which grew in the place within which the besieged were confined. This crown of grass the Roman senate and people presented to Quintus Fabius Maximus in the second Punic war, because he had freed the city of Rome from siege by the enemy.

The crown is called

civic

which one citizen gives to another who has saved his life in battle, in recognition of the preservation of his life and safety. It is made of the leaves of the esculent oak, because the earliest food and means of supporting life were furnished by that oak; it was formerly made also from the holm oak, because that is the species which is most nearly related to the esculent; this we learn from a comedy of Caecilius, who says: [*](v. 269, Ribbeck3.)

1. They pass with cloaks and crowns of holm; ye Gods!

But Masurius Sabinus, [*](Fr. 17, Huschke; 8, Bremer.) in the eleventh book of his Memoirs, says that it was the custom to award the civic crown only when the man who had saved the life of a fellow citizen had at the same time slain the enemy who threatened him, and had not given ground in that battle; under other conditions he says that the honour of the civic crown was not granted. He adds, however, that Tiberius Caesar was once asked to decide whether a soldier might receive the civic crown who had saved a citizen in battle and killed two of the enemy, yet had not held the position in which he was fighting, but the enemy had occupied it. The emperor ruled that the soldier seemed to be among those who deserved the civic crown, since it was clear that he had rescued a fellow citizen from a place so perilous that it could not be held even by valiant warriors. It was this civic crown that Lucius Gellius, an ex-censor, proposed in the senate that his country should award to Cicero in his consulship, because it was through his efforts that the frightful conspiracy of Catiline had been detected and punished.

The

mural

crown is that which is awarded by a commander to the man who is first to mount the wall and force his way into an enemy's town; therefore it is ornamented with representations of the battlements of a wall. A

camp

crown is presented by a general to the soldier who is first to fight his way into a hostile camp; that crown represents a palisade. The

naval

crown is commonly awarded to the armed man who has been the first to board an enemy ship in a sea-fight; it is decorated with representations of the beaks of ships. Now the

mural,

camp,

and

naval

crowns are regularly made of gold.

The

ovation

crown is of myrtle; it was worn by generals who entered the city in an ovation.

The occasion for awarding an ovation, and not a triumph, is that wars have not been declared in due form and so have not been waged with a legitimate enemy, or that the adversaries' character is low or unworthy, as in the case of slaves or pirates, or that,

because of a quick surrender, a victory was won which was

dustless,

as the saying is, [*]()Akoniti/ (dustless ) was proverbial in Greek for without an effort, as in Thuc. iv. 73; Xen. Ages. 6. 3. Cf. Hor. Epist. i. 1. 54, cui sit condicio dulcis sine pulvere palma.) and bloodless. For such an easy victory they believed that the leaves sacred to Venus were appropriate, on the ground that it was a triumph, not of Mars, but as it were of Venus. And Marcus Crassus, when he returned after ending the Servile war and entered the city in an ovation, disdainfully rejected the myrtle crown and used his influence to have a decree passed by the senate, that he should be crowned with laurel, not with myrtle.

Marcus Cato charges Marcus Fulvius Nobilior [*](Nobilior was consul in 189 B. C. Cicero, Tusc. Disp. i. 2. 3, says that Cato criticized him also for taking Ennius with him to his province of Aetolia.) with having awarded crowns to his soldiers for the most trifling reasons possible, for the sake of popularity. On that subject I give you Cato's own words: [*](xiv. 1, Jordan.)

Now to begin with, who ever saw anyone presented with a crown, when a town had not been taken or an enemy's camp burned?

But Fulvius, against whom Cato brought that charge, had bestowed crowns on his soldiers for industry in building a rampart or in digging a well.

I must not pass over a point relating to ovations, about which I learn that the ancient writers disagreed. For some of them have stated that the man who celebrated an ovation was accustomed to enter the city on horseback: but Masurius Sabinus says [*](Fr. 26, Huschke; memory. 15, Bremer.) that they entered on foot, followed, not by their soldiers, but by the senate in a body.

How cleverly Gavius Bassus explained the word persons, and what he said to be the origin of that word.

CLEVERLY, by Heaven! and wittily, in my opinion, does Gavius Bassus explain the derivation of the word persona, in the work that he composed On the Origin of Words; for he suggests that that word is formed from personae.

For,

he says, [*](Frag. 8, Fun.)

the head and the face are shut in on all sides by the covering of the persona, or mask, and only one passage is left for the issue of the voice; and since this opening is neither free nor broad, but sends forth the voice after it has been concentrated and forced into one single means of egress, it makes the sound clearer and more resonant. Since then that covering of the face gives clearness and resonance to the voice, it is for that reason called persona, the o being lengthened because of the formation of the word.