10. With the possession of this sum, which constituted the qualification for the first voting-class and subjected the inheritance to the Voconian law, the boundary line was crossed which separated the men of slender means (tenuiores) from respectable people. Therefore the poor client of Catullus (xxiii. 26) beseeches the gods to help him to this fortune.
11. In the "Descensus ad Infero", 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 ow", (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
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 Marcu"):
In the 'Anthropopolis we find the lines:
But the poet was successful also in a lighter vein. In the Est Modus Matulae there stood the following elegant commendation of wine:
And in the Kosmotonounei the wanderer returning home thus concludes his address to the sailors:
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. Their drink is the clear fresh spring, their fare bread, and onions as relish. Everything prospers in house and field. The house is no work of art; but an architect might learn symmetry from it. Care is taken of the field, that it shall not be left disorderly and waste, or go to ruin through slovenliness and neglect; in return the grateful Ceres wards off damage from the produce, that the high-piled sheaves may gladden the heart of the husbandman. Here hospitality still holds good; every one who has but imbibed mother's milk is welcome. the bread-pantry and wine-vat and the store of sausages on the rafters, lock and key are at the service of the traveller, and piles of food are set before him; contented sits the sated guest, looking neither before nor behind, dozing by the hearth in the kitchen. the warmest double-wool sheepskin is spread as a couch for him. "Here people still as good burgesses obey the righteous law, which neither out of envy injures the innocent, nor out of favour pardons the guilty. Here they speak no evil against their neighbours. Here they trespass not with their feet on the sacred hearth, but honour the gods with devotion and with sacrifices, throw for the house-spirit his little bit of flesh into his appointed little dish, and when the master of the household dies, accompany the bier with the same prayer with which those of his father and of his grandfather were borne forth".