Noctes Atticae

A passage taken from the Annals of Lucius Piso, highly diverting in content and graceful in style.

BECAUSE the action of Gnaeus Flavius, [*](He was the secretary of the censor Appius Claudius Caecus and became curule aedile in 303 B.C.) the curule aedile, son of Annius, which Lucius Piso described in the third book of his Annals, seemed worthy of record, and because the story is told by Piso in a very pure and charming style, I have quoted the entire passage from Piso's Annals: [*](Fr. 27, Peter2.)

Gnaeus Flavius, the son of a freedman,

he says, "was a scribe by profession and was in the service of a curule aedile at the time of the election of the succeeding aediles. The assembly of the tribes [*](The expression pro tribu is difficult, but appears in Livy ix, 46. 2 in the same connection, cum fieri se pro tribu aedilem videret. Gronovius believed that it referred to the tribus praerogativa. which voted first in order.) named Flavius curule aedile, but the magistrate who presided at the election refused to accept him as an aedile, not thinking it right that one who followed the profession of scribe should be made an aedile. Gnaeus Flavius, son of Annius, is said to have laid aside his tablets and resigned his clerkship, and he was then made a curule aedile.

This same Gnaeus Flavius, son of Annius, is said to have come to call upon a sick colleague. When he arrived and entered the room, several young nobles were seated there. They treated Flavius with contempt and none of them was willing to

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rise in his presence. Gnaeus Flavius, son of Annius, the aedile, laughed at this rudeness; then he ordered his curule chair to be brought and placed it on the threshold, in order that none of them might be able to go out, and that all of them against their will might see him sitting on his chair of state.

"

A story about Euclides, the Socratic, by whose example the philosopher Taurus used to urge his pupils to be diligent in the pursuit of philosophy.

THE philosopher Taurus, a celebrated Platonist of my time, used to urge the study of philosophy by many other good and wholesome examples and in particular stimulated the minds of the young by what he said that Euclides the Socratic used to do.

The Athenians,

said he,

had provided in one of their decrees that any citizen of Megara who should be found to have set foot in Athens should for that suffer death; so great,

says he,

was the hatred of the neighbouring men of Megara with which the Athenians were inflamed. Then Euclides, who was from that very town of Megara and before the passage of that decree had been accustomed both to come to Athens and to listen to Socrates, after the enactment of that measure, at nightfall, as darkness was coming on, clad in a woman's long tunic, wrapped in a parti-coloured mantle, and with veiled head, used to walk from his home in Megara to Athens, to visit Socrates, in order that he might at least for some part of the night share in the master's teaching and discourse. And just before dawn he went back again, a distance of somewhat over twenty miles,

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disguised in that same garb. But nowadays,

said Taurus,

we may see the philosophers themselves running to the doors of rich young men, to give them instruction, and there they sit and wait until nearly noonday, for their pupils to sleep off all last night's wine.