Therefore the poor client of Catullus (xxiii. 26) beseeches the gods to help him to this fortune.
11. In the "Descensus ad Inferos" of Laberius all sorts of people come forward, who have seen wonders and signs; to one there appeared a husband with two wives, whereupon a neighbour is of opinion that this is still worse than the vision, recently seen by a soothsayer in a dream, of six aediles. Caesar forsooth desired-- according to the talk of the time--to introduce polygamy in Rome (Suetonius, Caes. 82) and he nominated in reality six aediles instead of four. One sees from this that aberius understood how to exercise the fool's privilege and Caesar how to permit the fool's freedom.
12. V. VIII. Attempts Of The Regents To Check It
13. V. XI. The Poor
14. IV. XIII. Dramatic Arrangements
15. He obtained from the state for every day on which he acted 1000 -denarii- (40 pounds) and besides this the pay for his company. In later years he declined the honorarium for himself.
16. Such an individual apparent exception as Panchaea the land of incense (ii. 417) is to be explained from the circumstance that this had passed from the romance of the Travels of Euhemerus already perhaps into the poetry of Ennius, at any rate into the poems of Lucius Manlius (iv. 242; Plin. H. N. x. a, 4) and thence was well known to the public for which Lucretius wrote.
17. III. XIV. Moral Effect Of Tragedy
18. This naively appears in the descriptions of war, in which the seastorms that destroy armies, and the hosts of elephants that trample down those who are on their own side--pictures, that is, from the Punic wars--appear as if they belong to the immediate present. Comp. ii. 41; v. 1226, 1303, 1339.
19. "No doubt," says Cicero (Tusc. iii. 19, 45) in reference to Ennius, "the glorious poet is despised by our reciters of Euphorion." "I have safely arrived," he writes to Atticus (vii. 2 init.), "as a most favourable north wind blew for us across from Epirus. This spondaic line you may, if you choose, sell to one of the new-fashioned poets as your own" (-ita belle nobis flavit ab Epiro lenissumus Onchesmites. Hunc- --spondeiazonta-- -si cui voles --ton neoteron-- pro tuo vendito-).
20. V. VIII. Literature Of The Opposition
21. "For me when a boy," he somewhere says, "there sufficed a single rough coat and a single under-garment, shoes without stockings, a horse without a saddle; I had no daily warm bath, and but seldom a river-bath." On account of his personal valour he obtained in the Piratic war, where he commanded a division of the fleet, the naval crown.
22. V. X. The Pompeians In Spain
23. There is hardly anything more childish than Varro's scheme of all the philosophies, which in the first place summarily declares all systems that do not propose the happiness of man as their ultimate aim to be nonexistent, and then reckons the number of philosophies conceivable under this supposition as two hundred and eighty-eight. The vigorous man was unfortunately too much a scholar to confess that he neither could nor would be a philosopher, and accordingly as such throughout life he performed a blind dance- not altogether becoming--between the Stoa, Pythagoreanism, and Diogenism.
24. On one occasion he writes, "-Quintiforis Clodii foria ac poemata ejus gargaridians dices; O fortuna, O fors fortuna-!" And elsewhere, "-Cum Quintipor Clodius tot comoedias sine ulla fecerit Musa, ego unum libellum non 'edolem' ut ait Ennius?-" This not otherwise known Clodius must have been in all probability a wretched imitator of Terence, as those words sarcastically laid at his door "O fortuna, O fors fortuna!" are found occurring in a Terentian comedy.
The following description of himself by a poet in Varro's --Onos Louras--,
-Pacuvi discipulus dicor, porro is fuit Enni, Ennius Musarum; Pompilius clueor-
might aptly parody the introduction of Lucretius (p. 474), to whom Varro as a declared enemy of the Epicurean system cannot have been well disposed, and whom he never quotes.
25. He himself once aptly says, that he had no special fondness for antiquated words, but frequently used them, and that he was very fond of poetical words, but did not use them.
26. The following description is taken from the -Marcipor- ("Slave of Marcus"):--
-Repente noctis circiter meridie Cum pictus aer fervidis late ignibus Caeli chorean astricen ostenderet, Nubes aquali, frigido velo leves Caeli cavernas aureas subduxerant, Aquam vomentes inferam mortalibus. Ventique frigido se ab axe eruperant, Phrenetici septentrionum filii, Secum ferentes tegulas, ramos, syrus. At nos caduci, naufragi, ut ciconiae Quarum bipennis fulminis plumas vapor Perussit, alte maesti in terram cecidimus-.
In the --'Anthropopolis-- we find the lines:
-Non fit thesauris, non auro pectu' solutum; Non demunt animis curas ac relligiones Persarum montes, non atria diviti' Crassi-.
But the poet was successful also in a lighter vein. In the -Est Modus Matulae- there stood the following elegant commendation of wine:--
-Vino nihil iucundius quisquam bibit. Hoc aegritudinem ad medendam invenerunt, Hoc hilaritatis dulce seminarium. Hoc continet coagulum convivia-.
And in the --Kosmotonounei-- the wanderer returning home thus concludes his address to the sailors:
-Delis habenas animae leni, Dum nos ventus flamine sudo Suavem ad patriam perducit-.
27. The sketches of Varro have so uncommon historical and even poetical significance, and are yet, in consequence of the fragmentary shape in which information regarding them has reached us, known to so few and so irksome to study, that we may be allowed to give in this place a resume of some of them with the few restorations indispensable for making them readable.
The satire Manius (Early Up!) describes the management of a rural household. "Manius summons his people to rise with the sun, and in person conducts them to the scene of their work. The youths make their own bed, which labour renders soft to them, and supply themselves with water-jar and lamp.