Noctes Atticae
Gellius, Aulus
Gellius, Aulus. The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius. Rolfe, John C., translator. Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press; William Heinemann, 1927 (printing).
A passage from a speech of Quintus Metellus Numidicus, which it was my pleasure to recall, since it draws attention to the obligation of self-respect and dignity in the conduct of life.
ONE should not vie in abusive language with the basest of men or wrangle with foul words with the shameless and wicked, since you become like them and their exact mate so long as you say things which match and are exactly like what you hear. This truth may be learned no less from an address of Quintus Metellus Numidicus, a man of wisdom, than from the books and the teachings of the philosophers. These are the words of Metellus from his speech Against Gaius Manlius, Tribune of the Commons,[*](O.R.F. p. 274, Meyer2.) by whom he had been assailed and taunted in spiteful terms in a speech delivered before the people:
Now, fellow citizens, so far as Manlius is concerned, since he thinks that he will appear a greater man, if he keeps calling me his enemy, who neither count him as my friend nor take account of him as an enemy, I do not propose to say another word. For I consider him not only wholly unworthy to be well spoken of by good men, but unfit even to be reproached by the upright. For if you name an insignificant fellow of his kind at a time when you cannot punish him, you confer honour upon him rather than ignominy.
That neither testamentum, as Servius Sulpicius thought, nor sacellum, as Gaius Trebatus believed, is a compound, but the former is an extended form of testatio, the latter a diminutive of sacrum.
I DO not understand what reason led Servius Sulpicius the jurist, the most learned man of his time, to write in the second book of his work On the Annulling of Sacred Rites[*](Fr. 3, Huschke; i, p. 225, Bremer.) that testamentum is a compound word; for he declared that it was made up of mentis contestatio, or
an attesting of the mind.What then are we to say about calciamentum (shoe), paludamentum (cloak), pavimentum (pavement), vestimentum (clothing), and thousands of other words that have been extended by a suffix of that kind? Are we to call all these also compounds? As a matter of fact, Servius, or whoever it was who first made the statement, was evidently misled by a notion of the presence of mens in testamentum, an idea that is to be sure false, but neither inappropriate nor unattractive, just as indeed Gaius Trebatius too was misled into a similar attractive combination. For he says in the second book of his work On Religions: [*](Fr 4, Huschke; 5, Bremer (i, p. 405).)
A sacellum, or 'shrine,' is a small place consecrated to a god and containing an altar.Then he adds these words:
Sacellum, I think, is made up of the two words sacer and cella, as if it were sacra cella, or 'a sacred clamber.'This indeed is what Trebatius wrote, but who does not know both that sacellum is not a compound, and that it is not made up of sacer and cella, but is the diminutive of sacrum?