By Water & Blood

Book 1, Chapter 5: Present Words and Ancient Authority

Then Avienus, looking at Servius, said: "Curius and Fabricius and Coruncanius, most ancient men, or even those Horatii triplets more ancient than these, spoke plainly and clearly with their own, and not in the words of the Aurunci or Sicani or Pelasgi, who are said first to have inhabited Italy, but in the words of their own age. But you, just as if you were now speaking with Evander's mother, wish to recall for us words already obliterated through many centuries, to the heap of which you have also spurred outstanding men whose memory continuous use of reading instructs. But you boast that antiquity pleases you because it is honorable and sober and modest: let us therefore live by the manners of the past, speak with the words of the present. For I always keep in memory and in my breast what C. Caesar, a man of excellent talent and prudence, wrote in the first book of Analogy, that 'I will flee an infrequent and unusual word as I would a rock.' There are finally a thousand such words which, though they were often in the mouth of pristine authority, yet have been discharged and repudiated by the following age. Of these I could now bring forth abundance, did not the time of night already approaching warn us of a necessary departure."

"Good words, I pray," Praetextatus interposed with his customary moral gravity, "and let us not insolently beat the reverence of antiquity, the parent of the arts—whose love you also, while you dissemble it, more betray. For when you say 'mille verborum est' ('there is a thousand of words'), what else does your speech smell of but antiquity itself? For although M. Cicero in the oration which he composed for Milo left it thus written, 'before Clodius's estate, on which estate because of those mad substructions easily a thousand of strong men was turning about'—not 'were turning about,' which is accustomed to be found in less carefully written books—and in the sixth against Antony, 'Who was ever found in that Janus who entered a thousand of sesterces as paid out to Antony?'; although Varro also, a man of the same age, in the seventeenth of Human Affairs said 'it is more than a thousand and a hundred of years,' yet they took confidence of so composing only from the authority of those who went before. For Quadrigarius in the third of the Annals wrote thus: 'there a thousand of men is killed'; and Lucilius in the third of the Satires: 'a thousand from gate to gate, thence six to Salernum.' Elsewhere indeed he also pursued the declension of this noun: for in the fifteenth book he says thus, 'this one who has conquered a thousand of paces and two, no Campanian horse as under-runner will follow in a greater space and will seem to go a different way'; likewise in the ninth book: 'you can seek a hundred with one thousand of sesterces.' He said 'milli passum' for 'mille passibus' and 'milli nummum' for 'mille nummis,' and openly showed that 'mille' is both a noun and is said in the singular number and even takes the ablative case, and that its plural is 'milia.' For 'mille' is not put from that which in Greek is called chilia (χίλια) but from that which is chiliás (χιλιάς), and just as one chiliás and two chiliádes (χιλιάδες), so the ancients said 'unum mille' and 'duo milia' by a sure and direct reason. And hey you—do you wish to take away from these so learned men, of whom M. Cicero and Varro boast themselves imitators, the right of voting in the assemblies of words, and as if sexagenarians throw them from the bridge? We should discuss more of this, did not the hour compel you unwilling to depart from me unwilling.

"But do you wish that the following day, which nearly all wear away with the abacus and the game of soldiers (latrunculi), we spend with these sober talks from the first of light to dinner time, and the dinner itself not drowned in cups, not wantoning with courses, but chaste with learned questions and spent in mutual relations from the couch? For thus we shall feel the holidays fertile of advantage above every business, not—as it is said—'remitting' the mind—for 'to remit the mind,' says Musonius, 'is as it were to lose it'—but stroking it a little and relaxing it with the pleasant and honorable allurements of conversations. Which if you so decree, you will do a most welcome thing to my household gods by assembling here."

Then Symmachus: "No one who indeed remembers himself worthy of this gathering will reject this fellowship or the king of the gathering himself; but lest anything be wanting to the perfection of the company, I move that there be invited to the same congress and banquet Flavianus—who has asserted how much more outstanding he is than his admirable father Venustus, no less by the adornment of his manners and the gravity of his life than by the abundance of profound learning—and at the same time Postumianus, who ennobles the forum by the dignity of his defenses, and Eustathius, who is so great in every kind of philosophy that he alone represents for us the talents of the three philosophers of whom our antiquity boasted—I mean those whom the Athenians once sent as envoys to the Senate to obtain that it remit the fine which it had made against their city because of the devastation of Oropus. That fine had been about five hundred talents. Those philosophers were Carneades from the Academy, Diogenes the Stoic, Critolaus the Peripatetic, who are said each separately for the sake of display to have discoursed through the most crowded places of the city with a great gathering of men. The eloquence of Carneades, as related, was violent and rapid; that of Critolaus keen and polished; that of Diogenes modest and sober; but introduced into the Senate they used as interpreter the senator Caelius. But this man of ours, though he has followed all the sects yet followed the more probable, and alone among the Greeks fills all these kinds of speaking, yet among us is so rich an interpreter of himself that you know not in which tongue he more easily or more ornately fulfills the work of discoursing."

All approved the judgment of Q. Aurelius, by which he chose well-tried comrades; and with these things thus established, first departing together from Praetextatus, then from himself, they each returned to his own house.