Natural History — Book VII

Pliny the Younger & Pliny the Elder · a new plain-English translation from the Latin

1| Such, then, is the state of the world and, within it, of the lands, peoples, seas, notable [….], islands and cities. The nature of the living creatures in it is scarcely less worth contemplating than any other part, even though here too the human mind cannot follow out everything. First place will rightly be given to man, for whose sake nature seems to have brought forth everything else, though at a great and cruel price for such great gifts, so that it is hard to judge whether she has been to man a kinder parent or a harsher stepmother.

2| Before all else, of all living things man alone she clothes with resources not his own. To the rest she has given various coverings of their own: shells, crusts, hides, spines, shaggy coats, bristles, hair, down, feathers, scales, fleeces; even trunks and trees she has protected from cold and heat with bark, sometimes a double one. Man alone she flings, on his very birthday, naked upon the naked ground, straight into wailing and weeping; no other of all the animals is given to tears, and these at the very beginning of life. But laughter, by Hercules, even the earliest and quickest, is granted to none before the 40th day.

3| After this first lesson in the light come bonds that not even the wild beasts born among us receive, and fetters on all his limbs; and so, fortunately born, he lies bound hand and foot, weeping, the animal that is to rule all the rest, and he begins his life with punishment for one fault only: that he was born. Alas for the madness of those who, after such beginnings, think they were born for pride!

4| His first hope of strength, the first gift of time, makes him like a four-footed beast. When does man walk! When does he speak! When is his mouth firm enough for food! How long the crown of his head throbs, the mark of the greatest weakness among all living things! Then the diseases, and all the remedies devised against these ills, and these in turn overcome again and again by new ones! The other creatures know their own nature: some take up speed, others swift flight, others swimming; man knows nothing, nothing without teaching, not how to speak, not how to walk, not how to eat; in short, nothing at nature's prompting except to weep! And so there have been many who judged it best not to be born, or to be done away with as quickly as possible.

5| To man alone of living creatures has grief been given, to him alone luxury, and that in countless ways and in every single part of the body; to him alone ambition, to him alone avarice, to him alone a boundless craving for life, to him alone superstition, to him alone concern for burial, and even for what will come after him. No creature has a frailer life, none a greater lust for everything, none a more bewildered fear, none a fiercer rage. In short, the other animals live decently among their own kind. We see them gather together and stand firm against creatures unlike them: the savagery of lions does not fight within itself, the bite of serpents does not seek out serpents, and not even the monsters and fishes of the sea rage except against other kinds. But man, by Hercules, has most of his ills from man.

6| Of the human race as a whole we have spoken for the most part in our account of the peoples. Nor shall we now treat their rites and customs, which are countless and almost as many as there are communities of men; yet some things, I think, must not be passed over, and above all those of peoples who live farther from the sea, among which I do not doubt that some will seem portentous and incredible to many. For who believed in Ethiopians before he saw them? Or what is not a marvel when it first comes to notice? How many things are judged impossible until they have been done?

7| Indeed the power and majesty of nature lack credibility at every turn, if one takes in only its parts and not the whole of it in the mind. Not to mention the spots of peacocks, tigers and panthers and the markings of so many animals, a small thing to tell but immense to weigh: so many tongues of peoples, so many languages, such variety of speech, that to a foreigner a stranger is scarcely in the place of a man!

8| Again, though in our face and features there are ten parts or a few more, among so many thousands of men no two likenesses exist that cannot be told apart, something no art could achieve by imitation in a handful! Yet in most of these matters I shall not pledge my own credit, but shall rather refer them to the authorities, who will be cited for everything doubtful; only let no one disdain to follow the Greeks, since their diligence is so much greater, or their interest of so much older date.

9| We have shown that there are tribes of Scythians, indeed several, that fed on human bodies. This itself might seem incredible, did we not reflect that in the middle of the world [and in Sicily and Italy] there have been peoples of this monstrous kind, the Cyclopes and the Laestrygonians, and that very recently beyond the Alps it was the custom of those peoples to sacrifice a human being, which is not far from eating one.

10| But next to those who face the north, not far from the very rising of the north wind and the cave said to be its home, a place they call Ges clithron, the Arimaspi are reported to live, whom we have mentioned, marked out by a single eye in the middle of the forehead. Many write, but most notably Herodotus and Aristeas of Proconnesus, that they wage constant war around the mines with the griffins, a winged kind of wild beast, such as is commonly described, which digs gold out of tunnels, the beasts guarding it and the Arimaspi seizing it, each with a marvelous greed.

11| Beyond other Scythians, the Anthropophagi, in a great valley of Mount Imavus, is a region called Abarimon, in which live men of the woods with their feet turned backward behind their legs, of exceptional speed, who roam everywhere with the wild beasts. Baeton, the surveyor of Alexander the Great's marches, reported that these men cannot breathe under another sky, and that for this reason they are not brought to the neighboring kings and none were brought to Alexander.

12| that the earlier Anthropophagi, whom we have said to be toward the north, ten days' journey above the river Borysthenes, drink from the bones of human heads and use scalps with the hair on them as napkins before their breasts, according to Isigonus of Nicaea. The same writer says that in Albania some are born with a gray-blue keenness of eye, gray-haired from childhood at once, who see more by night than by day. The same, that the Sauromatae, 13 days' journey above the Borysthenes, take food always on the third day.

13| Crates of Pergamum says that in the Hellespont around Parium there existed a kind of men that he names Ophiogenes, who were accustomed to relieve the stings of serpents by touch and to draw the poison out of the body by laying on a hand. Varro says that there are still a few there, whose saliva cures the stings of serpents.

14| There was a similar people in Africa, the Psylli, as Agatharchides writes, named from King Psyllus, whose tomb is in a part of the Greater Syrtes. In their bodies was an inborn poison deadly to serpents, with whose smell they put them to sleep; and it was their custom to expose newborn children at once to the fiercest of them and thus to test the chastity of their wives, the serpents not fleeing from those born of adulterous blood. This people itself was almost destroyed by the Nasamones, who now hold those seats. A kind of men from them, however, who had fled or had been absent when the fighting took place, remains today in small numbers.

15| A similar kind still lasts in Italy, the Marsi, who are said to descend from the son of Circe, and for that reason that natural power is in them. And yet in all men there is a poison against serpents: they say that serpents struck with saliva flee as at the touch of boiling water; that if it has penetrated their throats, they even die, and most of all from the fasting mouth of a human. Calliphanes reports that above the Nasamones and those bordering them the Machlyes are androgynes, of both natures, having intercourse with each other in turns. Aristotle adds that in them the right breast is male, the left female.

16| In the same Africa, Isigonus and Nymphodorus say, there are certain families of bewitchers, by whose praise things approved perish, trees wither, infants die. Isigonus adds that there are some of the same kind among the Triballi and Illyrians, who bewitch and kill with the eye as well those they look at too long, especially with angry eyes, and that adults feel their harm more easily; more remarkable is that they have two pupils in each eye.

17| Women of this kind also in Scythia, who are called Bitiae, are reported by Apollonides. Phylarchus reports in Pontus a kind of Thibii, and many others of the same nature, whose marks, he says, are a double pupil in one eye, in the other the image of a horse; that they, moreover, cannot be drowned, not even when weighed down with clothing. A kind not unlike them, the Pharmaci in Aethiopia, Damon reports, whose sweat brings wasting to the bodies it touches.

18| That all women everywhere harm by their look who have double pupils, Cicero also, among us, is an authority. So much did nature, having produced in man the custom of wild beasts of feeding on human flesh, choose also to produce poisons in the whole body and in the eyes of some, so that there should be no evil anywhere that was not in man.

19| Not far from the city Rome, in the land of the Falisci, there are a few families called Hirpi. At the annual sacrifice, which is made to Apollo on Mount Soracte, they walk over a heap of burning wood without being burned, and on this account have by a perpetual decree of the senate exemption from military service and all other duties.

20| In the bodies of some, parts are born that are wonderful for some purpose, as in King Pyrrhus the great toe on his right foot, by whose touch he cured those suffering in the spleen. They report that it could not be burned with the rest of the body and was laid in a casket in a temple.

21| India and the tract of the Aethiopians especially abound in marvels. The greatest animals are produced in India. Dogs larger than the rest are the proof. Trees indeed are reported of such height that arrows cannot be shot over them—and the fertility of the soil, the temperateness of the climate and the abundance of waters bring it about, if one is willing to believe, that troops of horsemen are hidden under a single fig tree—, and reeds of such height that single joints, as a navigable boat, sometimes carry three men each.

22| It is agreed that many there exceed five cubits in height, that they do not spit, that they are afflicted by no pain of the head or teeth or eyes, and rarely of other parts of the body: so hardened are they by the moderate heat of the sun. Their philosophers, whom they call gymnosophists, stand from sunrise to sunset gazing at the sun with unmoving eyes, and all day long stand on hot sands on one foot and then the other. On a mountain whose name is Nulo, Megasthenes states, there are men with feet turned backward, having eight toes on each;

23| in many mountains, moreover, a kind of men with dogs' heads, clothed in the skins of wild animals, utter barking instead of speech, and, armed with claws, live by hunting and fowling; Ctesias writes that there were more than a hundred and twenty thousand of these, according to his report, and that in a certain people of India the women bear once in their lives, and the children turn gray at once. The same writer reports a kind of men called Monocoli, with a single leg each, of wonderful agility in leaping; the same are called Sciapodes, because in the greater heat they lie on the ground on their backs and shade themselves with the shadow of their feet. They are not far from the Troglodytae, and again west of them are some without necks, having eyes on their shoulders.

24| There are also satyrs in the eastern mountains of the Indians (the region is said to be that of the Catarcludi), a very swift animal, now going on four feet, now running upright in human form; on account of their speed they are not caught unless old or sick. Tauron calls a people of the Choromandae wild, without speech, of a horrible screech, with hairy bodies, gray-blue eyes and dogs' teeth. Eudoxus says that in southern India the men have feet a cubit long, the women so small that they are called Struthopodes.

25| Megasthenes says that among the Nomad Indians there is a people called the Sciratae, having only holes in place of nostrils, limp-footed in the manner of snakes. At the farthest bounds of India on the east, around the source of the Ganges, he places the people of the Astomi, without a mouth, whose whole body is hairy and clothed in the down of leaves, living only on breath and the smell which they draw in through their nostrils. They have no food and no drink, only the various scents of roots and flowers and wild apples, which they carry with them on a longer journey, so that the sense of smell may not fail; by a somewhat heavier odor they are killed without difficulty.

26| Above these, in the farthest part of the mountains, the Trispithami and Pygmies are described, not exceeding three spans in length, that is, three dodrantes, with a healthy climate and always in spring, the mountains being set against the north wind, and who, Homer too has reported, are harassed by cranes. The story is that, sitting on the backs of rams and goats, armed with arrows, they come down in spring in a whole column to the sea and destroy the eggs and young of those birds; that the expedition is completed in three months; that otherwise the coming flocks could not be resisted. Their huts are built of mud, feathers and eggshells.

27| Aristotle reports that the Pygmies live in caves, the rest about them as the others. Isigonus thinks that the Cyrni, a kind of Indians, live a hundred and forty years, and likewise the Macrobian Aethiopians and the Seres, and those who inhabit Mount Athos, the latter because they are fed on the flesh of vipers; and so neither on their heads nor in their clothing are there animals harmful to the body.

28| Onesicritus says that in those places of India where there are no shadows, men's bodies reach five cubits and two palms, and that they live 130 years and do not grow old, but die as in middle life. Crates of Pergamum calls the Indians who exceed a hundred years Gymnetae, not a few Macrobii. Ctesias says that a people of these, called the Pandae, situated in the valleys, live two hundred years, with white hair in youth,

29| which turns black in old age, while others, joined to the Macrobii, do not exceed forty years, and their women bear only once. Agatharchides reports this too, and adds that they are fed on locusts and are swift. Clitarchus gave them the name Mandi, and Megasthenes counts as many as three hundred villages of them. He says the women bear in the seventh year of life, and old age comes at the fortieth.

30| Artemidorus says that on the island of Taprobane a very long life is passed without any weakness of the body. Duris says that some of the Indians have intercourse with wild beasts, and that the offspring are mixed and half-wild. Among the Calingi, a people of the same India, women conceive at five years old and do not pass the eighth year of life. And elsewhere men are born with a hairy tail, of exceptional swiftness, others entirely covered by their ears. The river Arabis divides the Oritae from the Indians. These know no other food than fish, which they cut up with their nails, dry in the sun, and so make bread from them, as Clitarchus relates.

31| Crates of Pergamum says that the Troglodytae above Aethiopia are swifter than horses, and likewise that the Aethiopians exceed eight cubits in height; that this people is called Syrbotae. The people of the Nomad Aethiopians along the river Astragus, inclining to the north, called the Menismini, is twenty days' journey distant from the ocean. It lives on the milk of the animals which we call cynocephali, whose herds it pastures, the males being killed except for the sake of offspring.

32| In the wastes of Africa the shapes of men meet one from time to time and vanish in a moment. These and such like mockeries from the race of men nature has made for her own sport, for us marvels of her ingenuity. Of the single things, however, that she makes day by day and almost hour by hour, who could count them? To uncover her power it will be enough to have set these peoples among the prodigies. From here to the few admitted facts about man.

33| It is certain that triplets are born, by the example of the Horatii and Curiatii. More than that is counted among portents, except in Egypt, where the river Nile is fruitful by its drink. Just before the end of the deified Augustus, a woman Fausta, of the common people at Ostia, bore two boys and as many girls, a portent undoubtedly of the famine which followed. It is also found in the Peloponnese that a woman bore five at a birth four times, and that the greater part of her whole offspring lived. And in Egypt, Trogus states, seven are begotten at once in one womb.

34| There are also born those of both sexes whom we call hermaphrodites, once called androgynes and counted among prodigies, but now held as delights. Pompey the Great placed among the adornments of his theater figures famed as wonders, worked, for this reason, more carefully by the talents of great artists; among them one reads of Eutychis of Tralles, carried to the funeral pyre by 20 children, having borne 30 births, and Alcippe, who bore an elephant. This, however, is among the portents. For at the beginning of the Marsic war a slave woman bore a serpent, and offspring of many forms are brought forth in several ways among the monstrous births.

35| Claudius Caesar writes that a hippocentaur was born in Thessaly and died the same day, and in his principate we saw one brought to him from Egypt in honey. Among the examples is a child that returned at once to the womb, at Saguntum, in the year in which it was destroyed by Hannibal.

36| That women are changed into men is not fabulous. We find from the annals that, when Publius Licinius Crassus and Gaius Cassius Longinus were consuls, a girl at Casinum, while living with her parents, became a boy, and by order of the haruspices was taken away to a desert island. Licinius Mucianus has reported that he saw at Argos Arescon, whose name had been Arescusa, who had even been married, then grew a beard and manhood and took a wife; and that he saw a boy at Smyrna of the same lot. I myself saw in Africa, on the day of his wedding, Lucius Consitius, a citizen of Thysdrus, changed into a man, and he was alive when I set these things down.

37| [….] when twins are born, life is rare for the woman in childbed or for the offspring, except for one of the two; but if twins of both sexes are born, the safety of each is rarer still. Females are begotten more quickly than males, just as they age more quickly. Males move more often in the womb and are generally carried on the right side, females on the left.

38| For other living creatures there is a fixed time both for giving birth and for carrying the young; man is born throughout the year and after an uncertain space, one in the seventh month, another in the eighth, and up to the beginning of the eleventh. Before the seventh month none is ever viable. In the seventh, only those conceived on the day before or after the full moon, or at the interlunium, are born.

39| It is handed down in Egypt that birth also occurs in the eighth, and now even in Italy such births are viable, contrary to the opinions of the ancients. These things vary in many ways. Vistilia, wife first of Glitius and afterwards of Pomponius and Orfitus, most distinguished citizens, bore four children by them, always in the seventh month; she bore Suillius Rufus in the eleventh, Corbulo in the seventh, both of them consuls, and afterwards Caesonia, wife of the emperor Gaius, in the eighth.

40| In this number of months, for those born, the greatest danger is within the fortieth day, but for pregnant women in the fourth and eighth month, and miscarriages in them are fatal. Masurius states that Lucius Papirius, as praetor, when a second heir was bringing a suit, granted possession of the goods against him, although the mother said that she had carried the offspring for thirteen months, since no fixed time of giving birth seemed to be established.

41| From the tenth day after conception, pains in the head, dizziness and darkness of the eyes, loathing of foods, and overflow of the stomach are signs of a human being begun. The color is better for one carrying a male and the delivery easier, with movement in the womb on the fortieth day. All is the reverse in the other sex: an unbearable burden, a slight swelling of the legs and groin,

42| and the first movement on the 90th day. But there is most languor in both sexes when the offspring is sprouting hair, and at the full moon, a time which is especially hostile even to infants already born. Indeed the manner of walking and everything that can be mentioned matters in a pregnant woman, so that those who have eaten rather salty foods bring forth offspring lacking nails, and, if they have taken breath, are delivered with greater difficulty. A yawn in labor is fatal, just as a sneeze after intercourse causes miscarriage.

43| It moves to pity and even to shame to reckon how trivial is the origin of the proudest of animals, when for most women the cause of miscarriage is the smell from the extinguishing of lamps. From such beginnings tyrants are born, from such a hangman's spirit! You who trust in the strength of your body, you who embrace the gifts of fortune and do not think yourself even her foster child,

44| but her offspring, you whose mind is that of a commander, you who believe yourself a god, swelling at some success, you could have perished at so small a price! And even today you can perish for less: by how small a bite of a serpent's tooth, or, like the poet Anacreon, by the pip of a raisin, or like the praetor Fabius Senator, strangled by a single hair in a swallow of milk. He, in the end, will weigh life on an even scale who has always remembered human frailty.

45| For a child to come out feet first at birth is against nature, and from this circumstance they have called such children Agrippae, as born with difficulty, in which way Marcus Agrippa too is said to have been born, almost the one example of good fortune among all those born in this manner. Yet he too had poor health of the feet, a wretched youth, a life harassed amid arms and deaths and harmful to approach, a stock unlucky for the world in every line, but most of all through both Agrippinas, who bore the emperors Gaius and Domitius Nero, as many torches for the human race,

46| and besides, by shortness of life, being snatched away in his fifty-first year in the torments of the adulteries of his wife and the heavy slavery of his father-in-law, he is thought to have paid for the omen of his reversed birth. Nero also, who was emperor a little while ago and throughout his principate an enemy of the human race, was born feet first, as his mother Agrippina writes. The rule of nature is for man to be born head first; the custom is for him to be carried out feet first.

47| Those born with the mother cut open are born under better auspices, as the elder Scipio Africanus was born, and the first of the Caesars, named from the cut womb of his mother, for which reason they were also called Caesones. Manilius, who entered Carthage with an army, was born in the same way. They used to call Vopisci those of twins who, retained in the womb, were born when the other was destroyed by miscarriage. For the greatest marvels, though rare, appear around this.

48| Besides woman, few animals know intercourse when pregnant; only one or two superfetate. It stands in the records both of physicians and of those who took pains to follow such things that twelve births were expelled in one miscarriage. But where a little time has intervened between two conceptions,

49| both are carried through, as appeared in Hercules and his brother Iphicles, and in the woman who in a twin birth bore one like her husband and the other like her adulterer, likewise in the slave woman of Proconnesus, who by intercourse on the same day bore one like her master and the other like his steward, and in another, who in a regular delivery of five months produced one child, and again in another, who after delivering a seven-month child bore twins in the months that followed.

50| Those things are now common knowledge: that maimed children are variously born of sound parents, and sound of maimed; that the maimed appear in the same part, that certain marks and birthmarks and even scars are reproduced, and that in a fourth birth the mark of Dacian origin on the arm reappeared

51| (in the family of the Lepidi we have learned that three, with the order interrupted, were born with a membrane drawn over the eye); that some are like their grandfather, and of twins too, one like the father, the other like the mother, and that one born a year after the elder was as like him as a twin; that some women always bear children like themselves, some like the husband, some like neither, some a daughter like the father and a son like themselves. An undoubted example is Nicaeus, a famous boxer born at Byzantium, whose mother, born of an adultery with an Aethiopian, differed not at all in color from other women, while he himself reproduced his Aethiopian grandfather.

52| The reckoning of resemblances is immense, and in it many chance things are believed to have power: sight, hearing, memory, and images drawn in at the very moment of conception. A thought also, flying suddenly through the mind of either parent, is thought to fashion or mix a likeness, and for that reason there are more differences in man than in all other animals, since the speed of thoughts, the quickness of the mind and the variety of talent imprint manifold marks, while in other living creatures

53| the minds are unmoving and alike in all individuals, each in its own kind. A commoner named Artemon was so like Antiochus, king of Syria, that Laodice, the king's wife, when Antiochus was already dead, played through him a mime of his recommendation and of the succession to the kingdom. A certain Vibius, of the common people, and Publicius, a freedman, were like Pompey the Great in a look almost indistinguishable, reproducing that honest countenance and the very dignity of his distinguished brow.

54| A cause of this kind gave his father also the cognomen of his cook Menogenes, when he already had that of Strabo from the look of his eyes, since a slave likewise imitated his defect; the cheap slave of a pork dealer had given Scipio the name Serapio. The mime Salvitto gave the name to a Scipio of the same family after him, as Spinther, an actor of second parts, and Pamphilus, an actor of third parts, did to the colleagues Lentulus and Metellus as consuls, in which it was an exceedingly untimely coincidence also that the images of two consuls at the same time were seen on the stage.

55| On the other hand, the orator Lucius Plancus gave the actor Rubrius a cognomen, and again Burbuleius to Curio the father, and likewise Menogenes to Messalla the censor, actors in the same way. A fisherman in Sicily reproduced even the gaping mouth in speaking of the proconsul Sura, and the drawing back of his tongue and the tumult of his speech, not merely his appearance. A likeness to Armentarius the murmillo was cast in the teeth of Cassius Severus, the famous orator. [Recently, in the house of Junia, a man could not tell Gallio from his freedman Castellanus, nor the senator Agrippinus from the mime Sannio, surnamed Paris.]

56| Toranius, a slave dealer, sold to Antony, already a triumvir, two boys of exceptional beauty, one born in Asia, the other beyond the Alps, as twins: so great was the sameness. When afterward the fraud was detected by the boys' speech and he was reproached by an enraged Antony, who complained among other things of the size of the price (for he had bought them for two hundred thousand sesterces), the slave dealer, of a shrewd mind, replied that he had sold them at that very price because there was nothing wonderful in the likeness of any born from the same womb; but to find those born of different nations with so harmonious a figure was beyond all valuation; and he brought in so timely an admiration that that proscribing spirit, a moment before furious and with insult, reckoned nothing else in his estate as more the gift of his fortune.

57| There is a certain private incompatibility of bodies, and persons who are sterile with each other beget when they have joined with others, as Augustus and Livia. Likewise some men and some women beget only females or only males, and often alternate, like the mother of the Gracchi twelve times and Agrippina the wife of Germanicus nine times. For some, youth is barren; to some it is given to beget once in life.

58| Some women do not carry through their pregnancies, and those, if ever medicine and care have prevailed, generally bear a daughter. The deified Augustus, amid the rarity of other examples, saw his granddaughter's grandson, Marcus Silanus, born in the year in which he died, who, when he held Asia after his consulship, at the accession of the emperor Nero, was killed by his poison.

59| Quintus Metellus Macedonicus, though he left six children, left 11 grandsons, and the daughters-in-law, the sons-in-law and all who greeted him by the title of father, 27.

60| In the daily record of the age of the deified Augustus it is found that in his twelfth consulship, when Lucius Sulla was his fellow consul, on the third day before the April Ides, Gaius Crispinius Hilarus, of free-born common stock of Faesulae, with 8 children, among which number were two daughters, 27 grandsons, 18 great-grandsons and 8 granddaughters, a procession being carried before them all, sacrificed on the Capitol.

61| A woman does not bear after the fiftieth year, and the greater part stop the genital flow at 40. For among men, it is well known that King Masinissa begot a son after his 86th year, whom he named Methimannus, and Cato the Censor, with his eightieth year completed, begot one by the daughter of Salo, his client.

62| for which reason the offspring of his other children were surnamed Liciniani, these Saloniani, and of the latter was the man of Utica. Recently too, when Lucius Volusius Saturninus died in the prefecture of the city, it was known that Volusius Saturninus, who was consul, was born to him by Cornelia of the family of the Scipios after his 62nd year. And up to 75 the begetting of children is found common among obscure persons.

63| Woman is the only animal that menstruates; hence in the womb of one only arise what they have called moles. This is a shapeless, lifeless flesh, repelling the blow and edge of iron. It moves, and it stops the monthly courses like a pregnancy, sometimes fatal, sometimes growing old with the woman, sometimes dropping out by a quicker motion of the bowels. A similar thing is formed in the belly of men too, which they call scirron, as in Oppius Capito, a man of praetorian rank.

64| But nothing is easily found more monstrous than the flow of women. Must turns sour at its approach, crops touched by it become barren, grafts die, the shoots of gardens are burned up, the fruits of trees under which they have sat fall off, the brightness of mirrors is dulled by the mere look, the edge of iron is blunted, as is the sheen of ivory, the hives of bees die, bronze and iron are at once seized by rust and a dire smell the air, dogs that have tasted it are driven mad, and the bite is infected with an incurable poison.

65| Indeed, the nature of bitumen, otherwise clinging and tenacious, in the lake of Judaea called Asphaltites, floating on the surface at a certain time of the year, cannot be torn from itself, but sticks to every contact, except to thread [….] which such a poison has infected. They say that even ants, the smallest of animals, have a sense of it, and that grain they have tasted is thrown away and not sought again afterward.

66| And this evil, of such kind and so great, arises in woman every thirty days, and more copiously at a three-month interval, in some women more often in a month, as in some never. But such women do not bear, since this is the material for generating a human, the seed from males gathering it into itself like a curd, and then at the proper time it is animated and given a body. Therefore, when it has flowed in pregnant women, weak or non-viable offspring are produced, or diseased, as Nigidius states; —

67| (the same writer thinks that a woman's milk is not spoiled for the child she is nursing if she conceives again by the same man) — conceptions are reported to be easiest when this state is beginning or ending. We have received as an advance sign of fertility in women that, when the eyes are smeared with a medicament, the saliva is tinged.

68| For the rest, it is not doubtful that in those born the front teeth appear in the seventh month, and first generally in the upper part, that the same fall out in the seventh year and others take their place; that some are even born with teeth, as Manius Curius, who for that reason was surnamed Dentatus, and Gnaeus Papirius Carbo, distinguished men. In females this was a case of ill omen in the times of the kings. When Valeria had been so born,

69| the response of the haruspices prophesying that she would be the ruin of the community to which she was carried, she was taken away to Suessa Pometia, at that time most flourishing, and a truthful outcome followed. — (Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, is evidence that some are born with the genital parts grown together, with an unlucky omen) — some are born with a continuous bone in place of teeth, as the son of Prusias, king of the Bithynians, in the upper part of the mouth.

70| Teeth, moreover, are so unconquered by fires that they are not burned with the rest of the body, yet the same, unsubdued by flames, are hollowed by the corruption of phlegm. They take their whiteness from a certain medicament. They are worn down by use and in some fail much earlier. Nor are they necessary only for food and nourishment, for the front teeth hold the governance of voice and speech, receiving the stroke of the tongue in a kind of harmony, and by the order of their arrangement and their size cutting short or softening or dulling words, and, when they are lacking, taking away all clearness.

71| Indeed an omen too is believed to lie in this part. Thirty-two are allotted to men, except in the nation of the Turduli: those who have had more are thought to be promised longer spans of life. Women have a smaller number: those who have twin teeth above on the right side, named from the dogs, promise the favors of fortune, as in Agrippina, the mother of Domitius Nero; the opposite on the left.

72| — (It is not the custom of peoples to cremate a human being before a tooth has been born) — but more soon about this, when the account runs through the body limb by limb. We have been told that Zoroaster alone of men laughed on the day on which he was born; that his brain throbbed so as to push back a hand laid on it, a presage of the knowledge to come.

73| It is certain that in the third year each has half the measure he will have. In general, however, it is nearly observed that the whole race of mortals is becoming smaller day by day, and that few are taller than their fathers, the fertility of seeds being consumed by the conflagration toward whose turns the age is now inclining. In Crete, when a mountain was rent by an earthquake, a body was found standing, of 46 cubits, which some say is Orion's, others Otus's.

74| The body of Orestes, dug up at the command of an oracle, is believed from the records to have been of 7 cubits. Indeed, nearly a thousand years ago the prophet Homer did not cease to lament that the bodies of mortals were smaller than those of old. The annals do not give the size of Naevius Pollio, but since he was almost killed by the concourse of the people, he was held a kind of prodigy. The tallest of men our age saw, in the principate of the deified Claudius, one named Gabbara, brought from Arabia, nine feet and as many inches in height.

75| Under the deified Augustus there were two, with half a foot added, whose bodies were kept as a marvel in the repository of the gardens of Sallust; their names were Pusio and Secundilla. In the same emperor's time the smallest man, Conopas by name, two feet and a palm in height, was a pet of his granddaughter Julia, and there was a woman, Andromeda, a freedwoman of Julia Augusta. Marcus Varro records that the Roman knights Manius Maximus and Marcus Tullius were two cubits tall, and we ourselves have seen them preserved in coffins. It is well known that children of a foot and a half are born, and some even taller, and that they complete the course of their life in their third year.

76| We find in the records that at Salamis the son of Euthymenes grew to three cubits in three years, slow in his gait, dull in his senses, though he even reached puberty and had a strong voice, and that he was carried off by a sudden contraction of his limbs when the three years had come round. Not long ago we ourselves saw almost all the same things, apart from puberty, in the son of Cornelius Tacitus, a Roman knight who administers the finances of Belgic Gaul. The Greeks call such people ektrapeloi; in Latium they have no name.

77| It has been observed that the distance a man has from his sole to the top of his head is the same as that between the longest fingertips when his hands are spread out; so too the strength is greater in the right side, in some equal in both, and in a few outstanding in the left hand, but never so in women. Males are the heavier, and so are the dead bodies of all living creatures compared with the living, and sleeping ones compared with the waking; the corpses of men float face upward, those of women face downward, as though nature were sparing the modesty of the dead.

78| We have learned that some people live with their bones knit together and without marrow. The sign of them is that they feel no thirst and give off no sweat, although we know that thirst too has been overcome by will, and that the Roman knight Julius Viator, of the allied Vocontian people, in his years as a ward was forbidden fluid by the doctors on account of a disease in which water spreads beneath the skin; habit became his nature, and in old age he went without drink. Others too have in many ways mastered themselves.

79| They say that Crassus, the grandfather of the Crassus killed among the Parthians, never laughed, and for that reason was called Agelastus, just as many have never wept. Socrates, famous for wisdom, was always seen with the same expression, neither more cheerful nor more disturbed. This steadiness of mind sometimes passes into a certain rigidity and a harsh, hard and unbending savagery of nature, and takes away human feelings, the people the Greeks call apatheis, of whom many have been found, and, strange to say, chiefly among the authorities on wisdom,

80| Diogenes the Cynic, Pyrrho, Heraclitus, Timon, who indeed was carried to the point of hatred of the whole human race. But these small distinguishing marks of nature are known in many people in various forms, as with Antonia, Drusus's wife, who never spat, and in Pomponius, the poet of consular rank, who never belched. (Those in whom nature has made the bones solid, who are very rare, are called horny.)

81| Varro is the authority that Tritanus, famous in a gladiators' school for fighting in Samnite armour, small in body but of exceptional strength, and his son, a soldier of Pompey the Great, had sinews running both straight and across in a lattice over the whole body, even in the arms and hands, and he tells a marvellous account of their strength, and also of how an enemy who challenged him, as he fought with his right hand unarmed, [….]

82| was overcome and finally seized [….] with a single finger [….] and carried into the camp. But Vinnius Valens served as a centurion in the praetorian guard of the deified Augustus; he used to hold up wagons loaded with wine-skins until they were emptied, and to stop carts by gripping them with one hand while the beasts strained against him, and to do other wonderful things, which can be seen carved on his monument.

83| The same Marcus Varro says: Rusticelius, called Hercules, used to lift his mule; Fufius Salvius carried up ladders two weights of a hundred pounds on his feet, the same on his hands, and two of two hundred on his shoulders. We too have seen a man named Athanatus, a prodigy of display, walk across the stage wearing a leaden breastplate of five hundred pounds and shod with buskins of five hundred pounds' weight. When the athlete Milo had taken his stand, no one could move him from his footprint, and when he held an apple no one could straighten out even one finger.

84| To have run 1,140 stadia from Athens to Lacedaemon in two days was a great feat for Philippides, until Anystis, a Lacedaemonian runner, and Philonides, who ran for Alexander the Great, covered the distance from Sicyon to Elis, 1,305, in a single day. Nowadays indeed we know that some in the circus endure 160,000 paces, and recently, in the consulship of Fonteius and Vipstanus, a boy 8 years old ran from noon to evening 75,000 paces. The wonder of this achievement will only be fully grasped if one considers the longest journey made in vehicles by night and day, that of Tiberius Nero hurrying into Germany to his sick brother Drusus. That was 200,000 paces.

85| Keenness of the eyes has furnished examples that most surpass belief. Cicero relates that the Iliad of Homer, a poem written on parchment, was enclosed in a nut. He says too that there was a man who could see 135,000 paces. Marcus Varro even gives him a name: he was called Strabo, and in the Punic war, from the promontory of Lilybaeum in Sicily, when the fleet was leaving the harbour of Carthage, he used to tell even the number of the ships. Callicrates made ants out of ivory, and other animals so small that their parts could not be distinguished by anyone else. Myrmecides too became famous in the same line for a four-horse chariot made of the same material, which a fly covered with its wings, and a ship that a little bee hid with its wings.

86| Hearing has one example that is marvellous: the battle in which Sybaris was destroyed was heard of at Olympia on the very day on which it was fought. For the report of the Cimbrian victory, and the Castors who announced to Rome the Persian victory on the very day it happened, were both visions and presages of divine powers.

87| Endurance of the body, since the lot of calamities is frequent, has produced countless proofs: the most famous among women is that of Leaena the courtesan, who under torture did not betray the tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogiton; among men, that of Anaxarchus, who, being tortured for a similar reason, spat into the tyrant's face his tongue, bitten through by his teeth, which was the only hope of information.

88| Who has had the greatest memory, a good most necessary to life, is not easy to say, so many having won renown for it. King Cyrus could give back their names to all the soldiers in his army; Lucius Scipio to the Roman people; Cineas, the envoy of King Pyrrhus, to the senate and the equestrian order at Rome on the day after he had arrived. Mithridates, king of twenty-two nations, administered justice in as many languages, addressing each nation in turn before the assembly without an interpreter.

89| Charmadas indeed in Greece reproduced any volumes in the libraries that anyone demanded, as if he were reading them. Finally this skill was formed and devised by Simonides, the lyric poet, then brought to completion by Metrodorus of Scepsis, so that nothing that had been heard was not repeated in the very same words.

90| Nor is there anything else so fragile in man: it feels the injuries of diseases and accident, and even of fear, sometimes in part, sometimes entirely. One man, struck by a stone, forgot only his letters; another, who fell from a very high roof, lost the memory of his mother and relatives and kinsfolk; another, when ill, that of his slaves, and even of his own name, the orator Messala Corvinus. And so it often tries to fail and rehearses doing so, even when the body is at rest and sound. In sleep too it is cut off, as it creeps on, so that the empty mind asks where it is.

91| In vigour of mind I judge the most outstanding man ever born to have been Caesar the dictator, and I do not now recall his courage and steadiness, nor his loftiness capable of grasping everything contained in the heavens, but his own particular vigour and swiftness, winged by a kind of fire. We have been told that he was accustomed to write or read, and simultaneously to dictate and listen, and to dictate letters, on affairs of such importance, four at once [to secretaries, or, if he were doing nothing else, seven].

92| The same man fought in pitched battles fifty-two times, the only man to surpass Marcus Marcellus, who fought thirty-nine times. For apart from his victories in the civil wars, the eleven hundred thousand and ninety-two thousand men killed in battle by him I would not myself count as part of his glory, since this is even a great injury forced upon the human race, which he himself admitted to be so by not publishing the slaughter of the civil wars.

93| Let it more justly be credited to Pompey the Great that he took 846 ships from the pirates; to Caesar let there be assigned as his own and particular, besides what is said above, the distinction of clemency, in which he surpassed everyone to the point of regret. The same man gave an example of greatness of spirit with which no other can be compared.

94| For to list in this connection the spectacles he gave, the riches he poured out, or the magnificence of his works would favour extravagance: what was the true and incomparable loftiness of an unconquered spirit was this, that when Pompey the Great's cases of letters were captured at Pharsalus, and again Scipio's at Thapsus, he burned them in the best of faith and did not read them.

95| But it belongs to the glory of the Roman empire, and not only to that of one man, that all the titles of Pompey the Great's victories and triumphs be proclaimed in this place, equalling not only the splendour of the deeds of Alexander the Great but nearly even those of Hercules and Father Liber.

96| So, when Sicily had been recovered, where as a Sullan, first rising up in the cause of the republic, he took his first auspices, and when the whole of Africa had been subdued and brought under his sway, and from it the name of Great taken as spoil, a Roman knight, which no one before had been, he was carried back in a triumphal chariot, and at once crossed over to the setting of the sun, and after raising trophies on the Pyrenees he credited to his victory 876 towns brought under his sway from the Alps to the borders of Further Spain, and with greater spirit kept silent about Sertorius; and when the civil war, which stirred up every foreign war, was extinguished, a second time as a Roman knight he brought in triumphal chariots, having been commander-in-chief so many times before he was a soldier.

97| Afterwards he was sent to all the seas and then to the rising of the sun, and he brought back these titles to his country, in the manner of those who win in the sacred contests (for they are not themselves crowned but crown their native lands); these honours, then, he gave to the city in the shrine of Minerva which he was dedicating out of the spoils: GNAEUS POMPEIUS THE GREAT, COMMANDER, HAVING ENDED A WAR OF 30 YEARS, HAVING ROUTED, PUT TO FLIGHT, SLAIN, OR RECEIVED IN SURRENDER ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-ONE HUNDRED-THOUSANDS AND 83,000 MEN, HAVING SUNK OR CAPTURED 846 SHIPS, HAVING RECEIVED INTO ALLEGIANCE 1,538 TOWNS AND FORTS, HAVING SUBDUED THE LANDS FROM LAKE MAEOTIS TO THE RED SEA, PAYS A VOW DESERVEDLY TO MINERVA.

98| This is the summary of his deeds in the East. But of the triumph which he celebrated on the third day before the Kalends of October, in the consulship of Marcus Piso and Marcus Messala, this was the preface: WHEN HE HAD FREED THE SEA COAST FROM PIRATES AND RESTORED THE COMMAND OF THE SEA TO THE ROMAN PEOPLE, HE TRIUMPHED OVER ASIA, PONTUS, ARMENIA, PAPHLAGONIA, CAPPADOCIA, CILICIA, SYRIA, THE SCYTHIANS, THE JEWS, THE ALBANIANS, HIBERIA, THE ISLAND OF CRETE, THE BASTERNAE, AND IN ADDITION TO THESE OVER KING MITHRIDATES AND TIGRANES.

99| The sum of sums in that glory was (as he himself said in the assembly, when he was speaking of his own deeds) that he had received Asia as the farthest of the provinces and had returned it as the middle of his country. If anyone, on the other hand, wished in the same manner to review the deeds of Caesar, who appeared greater than he, he would certainly have to enumerate the whole circle of the earth, which will be agreed to be endless.

100| In the other kinds of virtue many people have been outstanding in various ways. Cato, the first of the Porcian family, is thought to have excelled in three supreme things in a man, being the best orator, the best general and the best senator; all of which seem to me, even if not earlier, yet more brilliantly to have shone in Scipio Aemilianus, and besides he lacked the hatred of very many which Cato suffered from. So let it be Cato's own that he pleaded his cause forty-four times, and that no one was more often prosecuted and always acquitted.

101| In whom courage has been most conspicuous is a question without bounds, above all if poetic fable is admitted. Quintus Ennius, admiring Titus Caecilius Teucer and his brother especially, added a sixteenth book of his Annals on their account. Lucius Siccius Dentatus, who was tribune of the plebs in the consulship of Spurius Tarpeius and Aulus Aternius, not long after the kings had been driven out, has indeed the most numerous votes: he fought in a hundred and twenty battles, was victor in eight single combats on challenge, and was marked by forty-five scars on the front of his body and none on his back.

102| The same man took 34 sets of spoils, was presented with eighteen plain spears, twenty-five trappings, eighty-three torques, 160 armlets, 26 crowns, among them 14 civic, eight golden, three mural and one siege-crown, a purse of bronze, and 10 prisoners and twenty oxen at once; he followed nine commanders celebrating triumphs chiefly through his own efforts, and besides (what I reckon the best of his achievements) he convicted before the people one of the generals, Titus Romilius, after his consulship, of bad conduct of a military command.

103| The distinctions of Capitolinus would be no less, if he had not lost them at the end of his life. Seventeen years before, he had taken two sets of spoils. First of all men as a knight he had received the mural crown; he had received six civic crowns, 37 gifts, 23 scars on the front of his body, he had saved Publius Servilius, master of the horse, being himself wounded in the shoulder and thigh. Above all he alone had saved the Capitol and in it the supreme interest of the state from the Gauls, if only he had not saved it for his own kingship.

104| But in these there are indeed great works of courage, but greater ones of fortune. To Marcus Sergius, as I at least judge, no one would rightly have preferred any man, though his great-grandson Catiline detracts from the favour due the name. He lost his right hand in his second campaign; in two campaigns he was wounded twenty-three times, and because of this he was useful with neither hand and neither foot, sound in one respect only, and a soldier disabled in very many campaigns afterwards. Twice he was captured by Hannibal (for it was not with any enemy whatever that he had to deal), twice he escaped from his chains, and for twenty months not a day passed when he was not guarded in chains or fetters.

105| With his left hand alone he fought four times, one day having two horses stabbed under him as he sat on them. He made himself a right hand of iron, and with it strapped on he fought, relieved Cremona from siege, defended Placentia, and took twelve camps of the enemy in Gaul, all of which appears from his own speech, delivered when in his praetorship he was barred from the sacred rites by his colleagues as disabled; what heaps of crowns he would have piled up had the enemy been different!

106| For it matters greatly into what times each man's courage has fallen. What civic crowns did the Trebia or the Ticinus or Trasimene give? What crown was earned at Cannae, where to have fled was the supreme work of courage? The rest, certainly, were victors over men; Sergius conquered even fortune.

107| Who could make a choice of the glory of talents through so many kinds of learning and so great a variety of subjects and works, unless perhaps it is agreed that no one has been more fortunate than Homer, the Greek bard, whether judged by the form of his work or by its matter?

108| And so Alexander the Great (for by distinguished judgements this lofty verdict will be best delivered, and without envy), among the spoils of Darius king of the Persians, a case of perfumes having been taken, which was costly with gold, pearls and gems, and his friends pointing out its various uses, since the warrior, soiled by the camp, was tired of perfume, said: No, by Hercules, let it be given to guard the books of Homer, so that the human mind's most precious product might be kept in the richest product of craft.

109| The same man ordered the household and hearth-gods of the poet Pindar to be spared when he was plundering Thebes; he counted the homeland of the philosopher Aristotle as his own, and mingled so kindly a testimony with the brilliance of so great a career. The killers of the poet Archilochus were exposed by Apollo at Delphi. Father Liber ordered the burial of Sophocles, prince of the tragic buskin, when he died, while the Lacedaemonians were besieging the walls and their king Lysander was repeatedly warned in a dream to allow his delight to be buried. The king inquired who had died at Athens, and without difficulty understood which of them the god had indicated, and gave peace to the funeral.

110| To Plato, the high priest of wisdom, the tyrant Dionysius, otherwise born to savagery and pride, sent a ship hung with fillets to meet him, and himself received him as he landed on the shore, in a four-horse chariot of white horses. Isocrates sold a single speech for twenty talents. Aeschines of Athens, the greatest orator, when he had read at Rhodes the accusation he had used, read also the defence of Demosthenes, by which he had been driven into that exile, and said, to those who were amazed, that they would have been more amazed still if they had heard the man himself pleading, having become by his misfortune a mighty witness for his enemy.

111| The Athenians drove Thucydides into exile as a general, and recalled him as the founder of history, admiring the eloquence of the man whose valour they had condemned. A great testimony also fell to Menander in the comic sock, from the kings of Egypt and Macedonia, who sought him with a fleet and through ambassadors, but a greater one from himself, when he preferred a conscious sense of letters to royal fortune.

112| Roman leaders too have borne witness even to foreigners. Gnaeus Pompey, when the Mithridatic war was finished, as he was about to enter the house of Posidonius, famous for his profession of wisdom, forbade his lictor to strike the door, as custom required, and the man to whom East and West had bowed lowered the fasces to the doorway of learning. Cato the censor, in that famous embassy of three leaders of wisdom from Athens, having heard Carneades, judged that the envoys should be dismissed as soon as possible, since with that man arguing it could not easily be discerned what was true.

113| What a change of manners! The former always held, besides, that all the Greeks should be driven out of Italy, but his great-grandson Cato of Utica brought home one philosopher from his military tribunate, and another from his mission to Cyprus; and it is memorable that of the two Catos the one drove that tongue away, the other brought it in.

114| But let us also review the glory of our own people. The elder Africanus ordered a statue of Quintus Ennius to be placed on his tomb, and that famous name, or rather spoil seized from a third part of the world, to be read in his last ashes with the title of the poet. The deified Augustus forbade the poems of Virgil to be burned, against the modest wish of his will, and so a greater testimony befell the bard than if he himself had approved his own work.

115| In the library which was the first in the world to be made public, at Rome, by Asinius Pollio out of the spoils of war, the likeness of Marcus Varro was set up, the only one of a living man, with no less glory, as I at least think, since the foremost orator and citizen, out of that multitude of talents which then existed, gave this crown to one man alone, than when Pompey the Great gave the same man the naval crown from the war against the pirates.

116| Roman examples are then countless, if one cares to pursue them, since a single nation has produced more eminent men in every kind than the other lands. But with what expiation, Marcus Tullius, could I pass you over in silence, or with what distinction should I proclaim you as most outstanding? With what rather than the testimony of that whole people, the most ample of nations, when from your entire life only the works of your consulship were chosen?

117| With you speaking, the tribes gave up the agrarian law, that is, their own livelihood; with you urging, they pardoned Roscius, the author of the theatre law, and bore with equanimity the stigma of the distinction of seats; with you pleading, the children of the proscribed were ashamed to seek office; your genius Catiline fled; you proscribed Marcus Antony. Hail, you first of all called father of your country, first to earn a triumph in the toga and the laurel of the tongue, and parent of eloquence and of Latin letters, who earned (as the dictator Caesar, once your enemy, wrote of you) a laurel greater than that of all triumphs, by as much as it is more to have advanced the bounds of the Roman mind so far than those of the empire.

118| In the remaining goods of the mind they surpassed other mortals: in wisdom, those who for that reason were surnamed Catus and Corculum among the Romans, and among the Greeks Socrates, preferred above all by the oracle of Pythian Apollo.

119| Again, mortals gave a partnership with the oracles to Chilon the Lacedaemonian, by consecrating at Delphi his three precepts in golden letters, which are these: that each should know himself, and desire nothing too much, and that misery is the companion of debt and of lawsuit. Moreover his funeral, when he had died at Olympia with joy at his son's victory, all Greece escorted. Divinity and a certain fellowship with the heavenly ones was most distinguished among women in the Sibyl, among men in Melampus among the Greeks, and in Marcius among the Romans.

120| Scipio Nasica was judged the best man once, from the foundation of the world, by the senate under oath, and the same man in the white toga, twice rejected, was branded by the people. In sum, he was not allowed to die in his own country, no more, by Hercules, than Socrates, adjudged the wisest by Apollo, was allowed to be outside chains. The most chaste woman was judged once, by the verdict of the matrons: Sulpicia, daughter of Paterculus, wife of Fulvius Flaccus, chosen from the hundred who had been appointed to dedicate the image of Venus according to the Sibylline books; and a second time by the test of religion: Claudia, when she brought the mother of the gods into Rome.

121| Examples of piety have appeared in endless number throughout the world, but at Rome there is one with which all the rest could not be compared. A woman of low rank among the plebeians, and therefore obscure, who had just given birth, obtained admission to her mother, who had been shut up in prison for punishment, though the doorkeeper had always searched her beforehand so that she should bring in no food; she was caught nourishing her mother from her own breasts. For this marvel the mother's life was given as a gift to piety, and both were granted perpetual maintenance, and that place was consecrated to the same goddess, a temple of Piety being built on the site of that prison, in the consulship of Gaius Quinctius and Manius Acilius, where now the theatre of Marcellus stands.

122| The father of the Gracchi, having caught snakes in his house, when it was answered that he himself would live if the one of the other sex were killed, said: No, kill mine; for Cornelia is young and can still bear children. This was to spare his wife and to consult the interests of the state; and it soon followed. Marcus Lepidus died, after a divorce, of love for his wife Appuleia. Publius Rutilius, hindered by a slight illness, died on the spot when told that his brother had been rejected in his candidacy for the consulship. Publius Catienus Philotimus loved his patron so much that, appointed heir to the whole estate, he threw himself on his funeral pyre.

123| Countless people have been distinguished for knowledge of various arts, yet it is fitting that only some be touched upon by those who pluck the flower of mankind: in astrology Berosus, to whom for his divine predictions the Athenians publicly set up a statue in the gymnasium with a gilded tongue; in grammar Apollodorus, whom the Amphictyons of Greece honoured; in medicine Hippocrates, who foretold the plague coming from the Illyrians and sent his pupils round the cities to help, for which service Greece decreed him the honours it decreed to Hercules. The same science in Cleombrotus of Ceos King Ptolemy rewarded at the Megalensian rites with a hundred talents, after King Antiochus had been saved.

124| Great also was the fame of Critobulus, for drawing an arrow out of King Philip's eye and treating the loss of sight without disfigurement of the face; but the greatest was that of Asclepiades of Prusa, who founded a new school, scorning the envoys and promises of King Mithridates, and discovered the method by which wine cures the sick; he brought a man back from his funeral and preserved him, but above all he made a wager with fortune that he should not be thought a doctor if he himself were ever in any way unwell. And he won, dying in extreme old age from a fall down a staircase.

125| A great testimony to Archimedes for his knowledge of geometry and machines fell to him from Marcus Marcellus, who forbade, when Syracuse was taken, that this one man be harmed, unless the thoughtlessness of a soldier should defeat the order. Chersiphron of Cnossus was also praised for building the admirable temple of Diana at Ephesus, Philon for the arsenal of 400 ships at Athens, Ctesibius for discovering the pneumatic principle and hydraulic organs, Dinochares for laying out Alexandria for Alexander when he founded it in Egypt. This same commander issued an edict that no one else than Apelles should paint him, none other than Pyrgoteles carve him, none other than Lysippus cast him in bronze. These arts have been made famous by many more examples.

126| King Attalus bid a hundred talents for a single panel by Aristides the Theban painter; Caesar the dictator bought two by Timomachus, the Medea and the Ajax, for eighty, meaning to dedicate them in the shrine of Venus Genetrix. King Candaules paid back in gold for the picture by Bularchus of the destruction of the Magnesians, a work of no moderate size. King Demetrius, surnamed the Besieger, did not burn Rhodes, so as not to burn a panel by Protogenes placed in that part of the wall.

127| Praxiteles was made famous by his marble, and especially by the Cnidian Venus, remarkable for the mad love of a certain young man, and by the valuation of King Nicomedes, who tried to exchange it for the great public debt of the Cnidians. The Olympian Jupiter of Phidias bears witness every day, and for Mentor the Capitoline one and the Ephesian Diana, to which his vessels of art were consecrated.

128| The highest price of a human being born in slavery up to this day, so far as I have found, was paid for one skilled in grammar, when Daphnis was sold by Attius of Pisaurum and Marcus Scaurus, the leading man of the state, bid IIID̅C̅C̅. In our own time actors have exceeded this, and not by little, but these bought their own freedom,

129| since already among our ancestors the actor Roscius is reported to have earned II D a year, unless anyone in this place looks for the steward of the Armenian war waged a little while ago on account of Tiridates, whom Nero freed for III |C̅X̅X̅X̅|. But that was the price of a war, not of a man, by Hercules as much as of lust, not of beauty, as was the price paid for Paezon, one of the eunuchs of Sejanus, III |D|, when Clutorius Priscus was the buyer. That insult indeed he turned to profit, having bought him amid the mourning of the state, since no one had leisure to accuse.

130| Of the peoples of the whole world, the one most outstanding of all in virtue has without doubt been the Roman. Which man has had the greatest happiness is not for human judgement, since each person defines prosperity itself in a different way and by his own character. If we wish to make a true judgement and to decide with every show of fortune rejected, no mortal is happy. Fortune deals more than abundantly and settles with generous indulgence with him who can rightly be called not unhappy. For even if there were nothing else, there is certainly the fear that fortune may grow weary, and once that has been admitted, happiness is not solid.

131| What of the fact that no mortal is wise at every hour? And would that as many people as possible judged this false, and not as if spoken by a prophet! Vain mortality, ingenious at deceiving itself, reckons after the custom of the people of Thrace, who put pebbles distinguished by colour into an urn as a test of each day, and on the last day separate and count them, and so pronounce on each person.

132| What of the fact that this day, praised by the brightness of its pebble, has been the origin of evil? How many have been ruined by the power they received! How many have been destroyed by good things and plunged into the extremes of punishment, those good things, of course, while that hour was one of joy! So it truly is: one day judges another, and only the last judges of all, and therefore no one is to be trusted. What of the fact that good things are not equal to bad even in equal number, and no joy is to be weighed against the least grief? Ah, vain and imprudent diligence! The number of days is compared, where weight is sought!

133| Only one woman in all time is found, Lampido of Lacedaemon, who was a king's daughter, a king's wife, a king's mother; only one, Berenice, who was daughter, sister and mother of Olympic victors; one family, the Curios, in which three orators arose in unbroken succession, and one of the Fabii, in which there were three consecutive leaders of the senate: Marcus Fabius Ambustus, then Fabius Rullianus his son, then Quintus Fabius Gurges, who was the grandson.

134| The other examples of changing fortune are countless. For what great joys does she produce except from evils, or what immense evils except from vast joys? She preserved the senator Marcus Fidustius, proscribed by Sulla, for 36 years, only to proscribe him a second time. He outlived Sulla, but only as far as Antony, and it is agreed that Antony proscribed him for no other reason than that he had been proscribed before.

135| She wished Publius Ventidius alone to triumph over the Parthians, but the same man she had led as a boy in the triumph of Gnaeus Pompey over Asculum, although Masurius is the authority that he was led in triumph twice; Cicero says he had been a muleteer in the army's bakery, and very many that he endured a needy youth in the soldier's boot.

136| There was also Balbus Cornelius the elder, consul, but he had been accused, and the jury had been sent out to decide whether the rods could lawfully be used on him; he was the first of foreigners, and even of those born on the ocean, to enjoy that honour, which our ancestors had denied even to Latium. There is also Lucius Fulvius among the notable examples, consul of the rebelling Tusculans, and when he had crossed over, at once adorned with the same honour by the Roman people; he alone triumphed at Rome in the very year in which he had been an enemy, over those of whom he had been consul.

137| One man up to this age has claimed for himself the surname of Fortunate, Lucius Sulla, adopted of course by civil blood and by assault on his country. And by what proofs of good fortune was he led to it? Because he had been able to proscribe and butcher so many thousands of citizens? O perverse interpretation, and unlucky for the time to come! Were those who then perished, whom we pity today, of no better lot, when everyone hates Sulla?

138| Come, was not the end of his life crueller than the calamity of all those proscribed by him, with his body eating itself away and breeding punishments for him? Even if he concealed this, and we believe that in his last dream, in which he in a way died, envy was conquered by glory in him alone, yet he confessed that this was lacking to his good fortune, that he had not dedicated the Capitol.

139| Quintus Metellus, in the speech which he delivered in the final praises of his father Lucius Metellus, pontiff, consul twice, dictator, master of the horse, a member of the Fifteen for distributing lands, who led in triumph the largest number of elephants from the First Punic War, left it written that he had accomplished ten greatest and best things, in seeking which wise men spend their lives:

140| for he had wished to be a foremost warrior, the best orator, the bravest general, to have the greatest affairs conducted under his own auspices, to enjoy the highest office, to be in the highest wisdom, to be held the first senator, to acquire great wealth in an honest way, to leave many children, and to be the most distinguished man in the state; these had befallen him and no one else since the foundation of Rome.

141| It is long to refute it and superfluous, when one single misfortune refutes it abundantly, since this Metellus passed an old age bereft of sight, having lost it in a fire when he rescued the Palladium from the temple of Vesta, for a memorable cause but with a wretched result. Hence it comes that he ought not to be called unhappy, yet cannot be called happy. The Roman people granted him what it had granted to no other since the foundation of time, that whenever he went to the senate he should be carried to the senate house in a chariot: a great and lofty gift to him, but given in place of his eyes.

142| The son too of this Quintus Metellus, who said those things of his father, is counted among the rare examples of human happiness: for besides the most ample honours and the surname of Macedonicus, he was borne to his pyre by four sons, one of praetorian rank, three of consular rank, two of whom had triumphed and one been censor, each of which few have attained even singly.

143| Yet in the very flower of his standing, he was seized by Gaius Atinius Labeo, whose surname was Macerio, a tribune of the plebs whom as censor he had expelled from the senate, as he was returning from the Campus at midday, when the forum and the Capitol were empty, and dragged to the Tarpeian rock to be thrown down; that numerous band indeed, which called him father, came running, but, as was necessary in a sudden event, slowly and as if to a funeral, since there was no right of resisting, or of driving off one who was sacrosanct, and he was about to perish through the works of his own virtue and censorship, when with difficulty a tribune was found to intervene, and from the very threshold of death he was called back by another's favour and lived afterwards,

144| the goods also being then consecrated by the man he had condemned, as if it were too little that the penalty of the throat twisted with a rope, and of blood forced out through the ears, had been exacted. For my part, I would count it among his calamities too that he was an enemy of the later Africanus, by the testimony of Macedonicus himself, who said: Go, my sons, celebrate my funeral; you will never see the funeral of a greater citizen. And he was saying this when there were already a Balearicus and a Diadematus, and he himself was already Macedonicus.

145| But if only that injury is to be estimated, who could rightly call him happy, who was in danger of perishing at the lust of an enemy, and not even an enemy such as Africanus? What was it worth to have conquered enemies? Or what honours and chariots did that violence of fortune not drive back, with the censor dragged through the midst of the city (for this had been the only way of delaying him), dragged to the Capitol, the very place into which he had himself, triumphing, not dragged even captives in such a manner, with the spoils of the gods?

146| This crime was made greater by the good fortune that followed, since Macedonicus was in danger of losing even a funeral so great [such], in which he was carried to his pyre by sons who had triumphed, as though triumphing even in his funeral. There is certainly no solid happiness which any insult has broken in life, much less so great a one. For the rest, I do not know whether it adds to the glory of the character or to the pain of indignation that among so many Metelli the so wicked audacity of Gaius Atinius was always unavenged.

147| In the deified Augustus too, whom all mortality in this judgement may name, if everything is carefully weighed, great volumes of human fortune would be found: the rejection in the mastership of the horse under his great-uncle, and Lepidus preferred against his candidacy; the odium of the proscription, through partnership in the triumvirate with the worst of citizens, and not even in an equal share,

148| but with Antony the heavier; the battle of Philippi, his illness, his flight and three days sick in a marsh, and (as Agrippa and Maecenas admit) swollen with water spread beneath the skin, in his hiding place; the shipwrecks in Sicily and again a hiding in a cave there; then in the flight by sea, with the enemy's band pressing, his prayers to Proculeius to bring him death; the anxiety of the Perusine strife, the worry of the war at Actium,

149| in the Pannonian wars a fall from a tower, so many mutinies of soldiers, so many dangerous illnesses of the body, the suspected hopes of Marcellus, the shameful sending away of Agrippa, his life so often sought by plots, the blame laid for the deaths of his children, and griefs sad not only through bereavement, the adultery of his daughter and the plans of parricide made public, the insulting withdrawal of his stepson Nero, another adultery in his granddaughter; then so many evils joined: lack of pay for the troops, the rebellion of Illyricum, the levy of slaves for want of young men, plague in the city, famine in Italy, the decision to die and a four-day fast, the greater part of death taken into the body;

150| next to these the disaster of Varus and the foul bruising of his majesty, the disowning of Postumus Agrippa after adopting him, the longing for him after his banishment, then the suspicion against Fabius and the betrayal of secrets, and from this the designs of his wife and Tiberius, his last care. In sum, that god, and whether he gained heaven or earned it I do not know, departed leaving as his heir the son of his enemy.

151| In this reckoning there come to mind the Delphic oracles, sent out by the god as if to rebuke the vanity of men. They are these two: that Pedius was the most fortunate, who had lately died for his country; and again, when consulted by Gyges, then the most powerful of the lands, that Aglaus of Psophis was the happier. This was an old man who in the narrowest corner of Arcadia farmed a small estate, yet one amply sufficing for a year's food, never leaving it, and, as is clear from his manner of life, with the least desire experiencing the least ill in life.

152| Euthymus the boxer, always victor at Olympia and defeated once, was consecrated while living and conscious, on the order of the same oracle and with the assent of Jupiter, greatest of the gods. His native place was Locri in Italy; I find that Callimachus marvelled as at nothing else that his statue there and another at Olympia were touched by lightning on that same day, and that the god ordered sacrifice to him, which was done both while he lived and after his death; and that there is nothing wonderful about him except this, that it pleased the gods.

153| Concerning the span and length of human life, not only the situation of places but the times, and the lot of each at birth, have made it uncertain. Hesiod, who first reported anything on this, fabulously, as I think, setting much above the age of men, attributed to the crow nine of our lifetimes, four times that to stags, three times that again to ravens, and the rest more fabulously still to the phoenix and the Nymphs.

154| The poet Anacreon assigns 150 years to Arganthonius, king of the Tartesians, and ten years more to Cinyras of the Cypriots, 200 to Aegimius; Theopompus gives 157 to Epimenides of Cnossus; Hellanicus says that some in Aetolia of the tribe of the Epii complete two hundred apiece, and Damastes supports him, recording that Pictoreus, outstanding among them in body and strength, lived even 300; Ephorus gives the kings of the Arcadians thirty years each;

155| Alexander Cornelius says that a certain Dando in Illyricum lived 500, Xenophon in his voyage round the coast that the king of the island of the Lutmii lived 600 and, lying sparingly, that his son lived 800. All this has come about through ignorance of the times. For some defined a year by summer, and another by winter; others by four divided seasons, like the Arcadians, whose years were of three months; some by the waning of the moon, like the Egyptians. And so among them it is reported that men have lived even single thousands of years.

156| But to pass to what is admitted: it is almost certain that Arganthonius of Gades reigned 80 years; they think he began at forty. It is beyond doubt that Masinissa reigned 60 years, and that Gorgias of Sicily lived 108. Quintus Fabius Maximus was augur for 63 years. Marcus Perpenna, and lately Lucius Volusius Saturninus, outlived all whom they had asked their opinion when they were consuls. Perpenna left seven of those whom he had chosen as censor; he lived 98 years.

157| In this matter it occurs to me to note also that there was just one five-year period in which no senator died, when the censors Flaccus and Albinus closed the lustrum, until the next censors, from the year of the city 579. Marcus Valerius Corvinus completed a hundred years, and between his first and sixth consulships there were 46 years. The same man sat in the curule chair twenty-one times, as often as no other. The pontiff Metellus equalled the span of his life.

158| And among women Livia, wife of Rutilius, passed 97 years; Statilia, in the reign of the emperor Claudius, of a noble house, 99; Terentia, Cicero's wife, 103; Clodia, wife of Ofilius, 115, who also gave birth fifteen times. The mime Lucceia performed on the stage for 100 years. Galeria Copiola, an interlude dancer, was brought back to the stage in the consulship of Gaius Poppaeus and Quintus Sulpicius, at the games vowed for the safety of the deified Augustus, in her 104th year; she had been brought on for her first appearance by the plebeian aedile Marcus Pomponius, in the consulship of Gaius Marius and Gnaeus Carbo, 91 years before, and by Pompey the Great, at the dedication of the great theatre, was brought back as an old woman, as a wonder.

159| Pedianus Asconius is the authority that Sammulla too lived 110 years. I wonder less at Stephanio, who first began to dance in the toga, dancing at both secular games, those of the deified Augustus and those which Claudius Caesar held in his fourth consulship, between which there were no more than 63 years, although he lived long afterwards too. On the summit of Mount Tmolus, which they call Tempsis, Mucianus is the authority that people live to 150; and in the censorship of Claudius Caesar the census recorded Titus Fullonius of Bononia as having the same number of years, and this, when compared with the censuses he had returned earlier, and with proofs of his life (for it was the emperor's concern), proved true.

160| The place itself seems to demand an opinion from the knowledge of the stars. Epigenes denied that 112 years could be completed, Berosus that 116 could be exceeded. There survives also the system which Petosiris and Necepsos handed down (they call it tetartemorion, from a portion of three signs), by which it appears that 124 years of life can fall to a man in the region of Italy. They denied that anyone passes the rising measure of 90 parts (what they call anaphoras), and that even these are cut short by the meeting of evil stars or by their rays and those of the sun. Again, the school of Aesculapius, which says that fixed spans of life are received from the stars, how much it assigns at most is uncertain.

161| They say, however, that longer times are rare, since at the notable moments of the hours of the moon's days, such as the 7th and 15th, which are observed by night and day, an enormous crowd is born under a stepped law of years that sets, which they call climacterics, those so born not generally passing their 54th year.

162| In the first place, then, the inconsistency of the art itself shows how uncertain the matter is. There are besides the evidences of the most recent census, which the Emperors Caesar Vespasian, father and son, as censors held within four years. Nor must all the registers be turned out; I shall give examples only from the middle region between the Apennines and the Po:

163| At Parma three people recorded 120 years, at Brixellum one, at Parma two 125, at Placentia one 130, at Faventia one woman, at Bononia Lucius Terentius, son of Marcus, 135; at Ariminum Marcus Aponius 140, and Tertulla 137. This side of Placentia, in the hills, is the town of the Veleiates, in which six reported 110 years, four a hundred and twenty, one 140, Marcus Mucius, son of Marcus, of the tribe Galeria, Felix.

164| And, not to dwell longer on an acknowledged matter, in the eighth region of Italy there were recorded as of a hundred years 54 people, of a hundred and ten 14, of a hundred and twenty-five two, of a hundred and thirty four, of a hundred and thirty-five or thirty-seven the same number, of a hundred and forty three.

165| Another inconsistency of mortality: Homer reported Hector and Polydamas born on the same night, men of such different lot. In the consulship of Gaius Marius and of Gnaeus Carbo for the 3rd time, on the fifth day before the Kalends of June, Marcus Caelius Rufus and Gaius Licinius Calvus were born on one and the same day, both orators indeed, but with such unequal outcome. This also happens every day in the whole world to those born at the same hours, and masters and slaves are born alike, kings and the destitute.

166| Publius Cornelius Rufus, who was consul with Manius Curius, lost the sight of his eyes while asleep, when he was dreaming that this was happening to him. On the other hand, Jason of Pherae, given up by the doctors for the disease of an abscess, when he sought death in battle, found a cure from the enemy with a wound in the chest. Quintus Fabius Maximus, consul, when battle was joined by the river Isara against the peoples of the Allobroges and Arverni on the sixth day before the August Ides, with 130,000 of the enemy slain, was freed from a quartan fever on the field.

167| Uncertain and fragile, clearly, is this gift of nature, whatever is given us, and grudging and brief even in those to whom it has come most generously, at least to those who look at the whole time of life. What of the fact that, by reckoning the night's rest, each man lives only half the span of his life, an equal part being spent like death or as a punishment unless rest has come? Nor are the years of infancy counted, which lack sense, nor those of old age that lives on to its punishment, dangers of so many kinds, so many diseases, so many fears, so many cares, death so often invoked, that no prayer is more frequent.

168| Nature, indeed, has granted men nothing better than the shortness of life. The senses grow dull, the limbs numb, sight dies before the rest, and hearing, and walking, even the teeth and the instruments of food, and yet this time is reckoned in the span of life. Therefore it is found as a wonder, and as a solitary example, that Xenophilus the musician lived a hundred and five years without any bodily trouble.

169| But, by Hercules, in all the rest, in the several parts of the limbs, as in no other animals, a pestilential heat or chill returns at fixed hours, and not only hours, but on three or four days and nights, even for a whole year. And there is moreover a disease by which wisdom for a while dies.

170| For nature has set certain laws even for diseases: that the fever of the four-day cycle never begins at midwinter, never in the winter months, and that some do not come after the sixtieth year of life; that others are laid aside at puberty, especially in women; that old men feel pestilence least. For diseases fall upon whole peoples, and by classes, sometimes the slaves, sometimes the order of leading men, and through other ranks. In this matter it has been observed that pestilence always goes from the southern parts toward the setting of the sun, and almost never otherwise, not in winter, and not so as to exceed three months.

171| Now the deadly signs: in the disease of madness, laughter; in the sickness of wisdom, care for fringes and the folds of the coverlet, neglect of those who rouse one from sleep, the discharge from the body of an unmentionable fluid; in the look of the eyes and nostrils the most unmistakable signs, and also continual lying on the back, an irregular or crawling beat of the veins, and whatever else has been observed by Hippocrates, prince of medicine. And though the signs of death are countless, there are none of health and security, since Cato the censor handed down to his son, as if from some oracle, an observation even about the healthy: that a youth with an old man's ways is a sign of early death.

172| The multitude of diseases is so endless that Pherecydes of Syros expired with a mass of serpents bursting out of his body. In some there is a perpetual fever, as in Gaius Maecenas; the same man in his last three years had no sleep at any moment of an hour. The poet Antipater of Sidon was seized by fever on one day only each year, his birthday, and was consumed by it after a fairly long old age.

173| Aviola, a man of consular rank, came back to life on the pyre, and since help could not be brought because the flame prevailed, was burned alive. A similar cause is reported in Lucius Lamia, a man of praetorian rank. For Gaius Aelius Tubero, who had held the praetorship, was brought back from the pyre, as Messala Rufus and most writers report. This is the condition of mortals. To these and such chances of fortune we are born, so that concerning man not even death ought to be trusted.

174| We find among the examples that the soul of Hermotimus of Clazomenae was accustomed to leave the body and wander, and from afar report many things that could be known only by one present, while the body was meanwhile half alive, until, when it was burned by his enemies, who were called Cantharidae, they took away from the returning soul, as it were, its sheath; and that the soul of Aristeas too was seen flying out of his mouth at Proconnesus in the form of a raven, with great fabulousness following this.

175| This I take in a similar way in the case of Epimenides of Cnossus, a boy tired by heat and journey, who slept in a cave fifty-seven years, and woke as if on the next day, marvelling at the face and change of things, and from then, as old age pressed on him in the same number of days, nevertheless lasted to the hundred and fifty-seventh year of his life. The female sex seems especially exposed to this ill by the turning of the womb, which if it is set right, breath is restored; to this belongs the famous volume among the Greeks by Heraclides, about a woman lifeless who was called back to life after seven days.

176| Varro too is the authority that, when he was dividing lands at Capua as one of the board of Twenty, a certain man who was being carried out through the forum returned home on foot. The same happened at Aquinum. At Rome also Corfidius, the husband of his maternal aunt, came back to life after the funeral had been contracted for, and that he carried out the undertaker of his own funeral to burial.

177| He adds marvels which it is fitting to relate in full: of the two brothers Corfidius, of equestrian rank, it happened to the elder that he seemed to have died, and when the will was opened and read, the younger, who was named heir, was attending to the funeral; meanwhile he who seemed extinct summoned the attendants by clapping, and related that he had come from his brother, that a daughter had been entrusted to him by him, that it was shown besides in what place he had buried gold with nobody knowing, and that he had asked to be carried out with the funeral equipment which he had provided. While he was telling this, the brother's household servants hurriedly announced that he was dead, and the gold was found where he had said.

178| Life is moreover full of such predictions, but they are not to be compared, since more often they are false, as we shall show by a great example. In the Sicilian war Gabienus, bravest of Caesar's fleet commanders, captured by Sextus Pompey, with his neck cut through by his order and scarcely holding together, lay on the shore all day. Then, when evening had come, with a crowd gathered by his groaning and prayers, he asked that Pompey come to him or send one of his confidants; for he had been sent back from the dead and had something to report.

179| Pompey sent a number of his friends, and Gabienus told them that Pompey's cause and his loyal party pleased the gods below; therefore the outcome would be what he desired; this he had been ordered to report; the proof of the truth would be that, when the commission was carried out, he would at once expire. And so it happened. There are examples also of things seen after burial, except that we pursue the works of nature, not prodigies.

180| But among marvels, and of the greatest frequency, are sudden deaths, which are the highest happiness of life, and which we shall show to be natural. Verrius has recorded very many; I shall keep a measure with selection. Besides Chilon, of whom we have spoken, Sophocles and Dionysius tyrant of Sicily died of joy, each on receiving news of a tragic victory, and that mother who at Cannae saw her son safe after a false report; of shame, Diodorus, professor of dialectic wisdom, when he could not at once resolve a playful question put to him by Stilpo.

181| Without evident causes there died, while putting on their shoes in the morning, the two Caesars, a praetor and the father of Caesar the dictator, who had held the praetorship (the one expired at Pisa, the other at Rome); Quintus Fabius Maximus in his consulship on the day before the Kalends of January, in whose place Gaius Rebilus sought a consulship of very few hours; likewise Gaius Volcatius Gurges, senator; all so healthy and in season that they were thinking of going forward; Quintus Aemilius Lepidus, already going out, striking his toe on the threshold of his bedchamber; Gaius Aufustius, after he had gone out, when he struck his foot in the comitium on his way to the senate.

182| An envoy also, who had argued the case of the Rhodians in the senate with great admiration, expired at once on the threshold of the senate house as he wished to go forward; so did Gnaeus Baebius Tamphilus, who had himself held the praetorship, after asking a boy the hour; Aulus Pompeius on the Capitol, after saluting the gods; Manius Juventius Thalna, consul, while sacrificing; Gaius Servilius Pansa, while standing in the forum at a shop in the second hour of the day, leaning on his brother Publius; the judge Baebius, while ordering an adjournment of bail; Marcus Terentius Corax, while writing tablets in the forum.

183| And in the year just past too, while speaking into the ear of one of consular rank, a Roman knight before the ivory Apollo which is in the forum of Augustus; above all, the physician Gaius Julius, while applying ointment, drawing a probe through the eye; Aulus Manlius Torquatus, of consular rank, as he reached for a cake at dinner; the physician Lucius Tuccius Valla, while draining a drink of mead; Appius Saufeius, who after returning from the bath had drunk mead and was sipping an egg; Publius Quintius Scapula, while dining at the house of Aquilius Gallus; Decimus Saufeius, a clerk, while lunching at his own home.

184| Cornelius Gallus, of praetorian rank, and Titus Hetereius, a Roman knight, died in the act of love, and, whom our own age has noted, two of the equestrian order with the same pantomime actor Mysticus, who was then of surpassing beauty. Yet the most elaborate tranquillity in death is reported by the ancients in the case of Marcus Ofilius Hilarus.

185| He was an actor of comedies, and when he had pleased the people very much on his birthday and was holding a banquet, after the dinner was served he asked for a hot drink in a porridge dish, and at the same time, taking the mask of that day and gazing at it, he transferred the garland from his own head to it, and stayed rigid in that posture with no one noticing, until the nearest of the guests reminded him that the drink was growing lukewarm.

186| These are fortunate examples, but on the other side those of miseries are countless: Lucius Domitius, of a most famous family, defeated at Massilia and captured at Corfinium by the same Caesar, drank poison from weariness of life, and after he had drunk it, strove by every means to live. It is found in the records that, when Felix, a driver of the red faction, was carried out, one of his supporters threw himself on his pyre, a trifling thing to say, so that this might not be credited to the glory of the artist, those of the opposing parties alleging that he had been overcome by the abundance of perfumes. When not long before, Marcus Lepidus of a most noble stock, whom we have said died of anguish over a divorce, was thrown from the pyre by the force of the flame and could not be put back because of the heat, he was burned naked beside it with other brushwood.

187| Cremation itself was not an ancient custom among the Romans: they were buried in the earth. But after they learned that men buried in distant wars were dug up, then it was instituted; and yet many families kept the ancient rites, as in the Cornelian family no one is reported to have been cremated before the dictator Sulla, and he is said to have wished it, fearing retaliation after the corpse of Gaius Marius was dug up. [Sepultus is understood to mean buried in whatever manner; humatus means covered with earth.]

188| After burial come the empty winding paths of the spirits of the dead. For all, from the last day, it is the same as before the first, and there is no more sensation after death, either for body or for soul, than before birth. For the same vanity extends itself into the future too, and invents for itself a life even for the times of death, sometimes by granting immortality to the soul, sometimes transformation, sometimes sensation to those below, and by worshipping the spirits and making a god of one who has already ceased even to be a man, as if in any way the manner of breathing differed from that of the other animals, or as if many creatures were not found longer-lived, for whom no one divines a like immortality. But what body has the soul by itself?

189| What substance? Where is its thought? How does it see, hear, or what does it touch? What use is there in these, or what good without them? Then what abode, or how great a multitude, is there of souls over so many ages, like shadows? These are the fictions of childish consolations and of a mortality greedy never to cease. Of the same kind is the vanity of Democritus about preserving the bodies of men and the promise of coming to life again, who did not come to life himself.

190| What madness, curse it, is this, that life should be repeated by death? Or what rest is there ever for the born, if in the heights the sensation of the soul remains, and among the dead the shades? That sweetness and credulity certainly destroy the chief good of nature, death, and double the grief of one about to die by the estimate of what is to come even after. For if living is sweet, to whom can it be sweet to have lived? But how much easier and surer for each person to trust himself, and to take a proof of security from the experience before birth!

191| It seems fitting, before we part from the nature of man, to indicate the discoveries made by each. Mercury instituted buying and selling, Father Liber the vintage; the same invented the diadem, the royal badge, and the triumph; Ceres the grains of corn, when before that they fed on acorn, and also grinding and making them in Attica, as some say, and in Sicily, for which she was judged a goddess. She also first gave laws, or, as others have thought, Rhadamanthus did.

192| I always judge that letters were Assyrian, but some wish them found among the Egyptians by Mercury, as Gellius says, others among the Syrians, and both say that Cadmus brought sixteen in number into Greece from Phoenicia, to which in the Trojan war Palamedes added four of this shape ζυφχ, and after him Simonides the lyric poet the same number ψξωθ, the force of all of which is recognized in our letters. Aristotle prefers that there were eighteen ancient ones and that two were added, χζ, by Epicharmus rather than by Palamedes.

193| Anticlides reports that a certain man named Menes invented them in Egypt, 15,000 years before Phoroneus, the most ancient king of Greece, and he tries to prove it from monuments. On the other side Epigenes, a weighty authority in the first rank, teaches that among the Babylonians observations of the stars for 720 years were inscribed on baked bricks; those who say the least, Berosus and Critodemus, 490,000. From this it appears that the use of letters is eternal. The Pelasgi brought them into Latium.

194| Brickyards and houses were first established by the brothers Euryalus and Hyperbius at Athens; before that, caves served for houses. Gellius is pleased to say that Toxius, son of Caelus, was the inventor of building in clay, taking the example from the nests of swallows. Cecrops named a town after himself, Cecropia, which is now the citadel at Athens. Some wish that Argos was founded earlier by King Phoroneus, some also Sicyon, but the Egyptians that Diospolis was founded among themselves much earlier.

195| Roof tiles were invented by Cinyras, son of Agriopa, and copper mines, both on the island of Cyprus, likewise the tongs, hammer, lever and anvil; wells by Danaus, brought from Egypt into Greece, where it was called Argos Dipsion; stone quarries by Cadmus at Thebes or, as Theophrastus says, in Phoenicia; walls by Thrason; towers, as Aristotle says, by the Cyclopes, by the Tirynthians, as Theophrastus says;

196| textiles by the Egyptians, the dyeing of wool at Sardis by the Lydians, spindles in wool-working by Closter, son of Arachne, linen and nets by Arachne, the fuller's art by Nicias of Megara, the cobbler's by Tychius of Boeotia. Medicine the Egyptians wish to have been found among themselves, others through Arabus, son of Babylon and Apollo; herb-lore and the preparing of drugs through Chiron, son of Saturn and Philyra.

197| To smelt and temper bronze, Aristotle says Scythes the Lydian showed, Theophrastus thinks Delas the Phrygian; the bronze-founder's workshop some ascribe to the Chalybes, others to the Cyclopes; iron, Hesiod says, in Crete those who were called the Dactyli of Ida. Silver was discovered by Erichthonius of Athens or, as others say, Aeacus; the mines of gold and the blowing of it by Cadmus the Phoenician at Mount Pangaeus, or, as others say, Thoas or Aeacus in Panchaia, or Sol, son of Oceanus, to whom Gellius assigns also the discovery of medicine from metals. Lead was first brought from the island Cassiteris by Midacritus. The blacksmith's workshop was invented by the Cyclopes,

198| pottery by Coroebus of Athens, in it the wheel by Anacharsis the Scythian or, as others say, Hyperbius of Corinth. The carpenter's workshop by Daedalus, and in it the saw, the axe, the plumb line, the drill, glue, fish-glue; but the square, the level, the lathe and the key by Theodorus of Samos, measures and weights by Phidon of Argos or Palamedes, as Gellius preferred; fire from flint by Pyrodes, son of Cilix, and to keep it in a fennel stalk by Prometheus;

199| the four-wheeled vehicle by the Phrygians, trade by the Phoenicians, the cultivation of vines and trees by Eumolpus of Athens, the mixing of wine with water by Staphylus, son of Silenus, oil and olive presses by Aristaeus of Athens, who also found honey; the ox and the plough by Buzyges of Athens or, as others say, Triptolemus;

200| the kingly state by the Egyptians, popular government by the Athenians after Theseus. The first tyrant was Phalaris of Agrigentum. Slavery was invented by the Lacedaemonians. Trial for a capital charge was first held on the Areopagus. Battle was first waged by the Africans against the Egyptians with the clubs they call phalanges. Shields were invented by Proetus and Acrisius when fighting each other, or by Chalcus, son of Athamas; the breastplate by Midias of Messene; the helmet, sword and spear by the Lacedaemonians; greaves and crests by the Carians.

201| The bow and arrow they say were invented by Scythes, son of Jupiter, others say arrows by Perses, son of Perseus; lances by the Aetolians; the javelin with thong by Aetolus, son of Mars; light skirmishers' spears by Tyrrhenus, who also invented the pilum; the axe by the Amazon Penthesilea; hunting spears by Pisaeus, and among artillery the scorpion, the catapult by the Cretans, the ballista and sling by the Syrophoenicians; the bronze trumpet by Pisaeus, son of Tyrrhenus; siege sheds by Artemon of Clazomenae;

202| the horse (which is now called the ram) among wall-breaking engines by Epius at Troy; riding on a horse by Bellerophon, bridles and horse-trappings by Pelethronius; fighting from horseback by the Thessalians, who were called Centaurs, living along Mount Pelion. The pair of horses was first yoked by the nation of the Phrygians, the four-horse team by Erichthonius. The order of an army, the giving of the signal, watchwords and watches Palamedes invented in the Trojan war, the signalling of watch-towers Sinon in the same, truces Lycaon, treaties Theseus.

203| Auguries from birds were invented by Car, from whom Caria is named; Orpheus added those from other animals; the examination of entrails by Delphus; divination by fire by Amphiaraus; the inspection of the entrails of birds by Tiresias of Thebes; the interpretation of portents and dreams by Amphictyon. Astrology by Atlas, son of Libya, or, as others say, by the Egyptians, or, as others say, by the Assyrians; the sphere in it by Anaximander of Miletus; the reckoning of the winds by Aeolus, son of Hellen.

204| Music by Amphion, the pipe and the single pipe by Pan, son of Mercury, the slanting flute by Midas in Phrygia, the double flutes by Marsyas in the same nation; the Lydian measures by Amphion, the Dorian by Thamyras the Thracian, the Phrygian by Marsyas the Phrygian; the lyre by Amphion, or, as others say, Orpheus, or, as others say, Linus. Terpander first sang on seven strings, 3 being added to the first 4; Simonides added an eighth, Timotheus a ninth. Thamyris first played the lyre without voice, Amphion, or as others say Linus, with song. Terpander composed songs for the lyre-singer. To sing to the flutes with the voice was begun by Ardalus of Troezen. The armed dance the Curetes taught, the pyrrhic Pyrrhus, both in Crete. The heroic verse we owe to the Pythian oracle.

205| Concerning the origin of poems there is great question; they are shown to have existed before the Trojan war. To compose prose speech was begun by Pherecydes of Syros in the time of King Cyrus, history by Cadmus of Miletus; gymnastic games in Arcadia by Lycaon, funeral games by Acastus at Iolcus, after him by Theseus on the Isthmus, by Hercules at Olympia; athletics by Pittheus, the ball for play by Gyges the Lydian; painting by the Egyptians, and in Greece by Euchir, a relative of Daedalus, as Aristotle holds, or, as Theophrastus holds, Polygnotus of Athens.

206| Danaus was the first to come by ship to Greece from Egypt; before that, men sailed on rafts, invented by King Erythras for use among the islands of the Red Sea. Some are found who think that the Mysians and Trojans devised them earlier, on the Hellespont, when they crossed against the Thracians. Even now in the British ocean boats are made of wickerwork with hide sewn round them, and on the Nile of papyrus, rushes and reeds.

207| Philostephanus is our authority that Jason was the first to sail in a long ship, Hegesias that it was Parhalus, Ctesias Semiramis, Archemachus Aegaeon; Damastes says the Erythraeans built the bireme, Thucydides that Aminocles of Corinth built the trireme,

208| Aristotle that the Carthaginians built the quadrireme, Mnesigiton that the Salaminians built the quinquereme, Xenagoras that the Syracusans built the ship of six banks; from that up to the ship of ten, Mnesigiton says Alexander the Great; up to twelve banks, Philostephanus says Ptolemy Soter; up to fifteen, Demetrius son of Antigonus; up to 30, Ptolemy Philadelphus; up to 40, Ptolemy Philopator, who was surnamed Tryphon. Hippus of Tyre invented the merchant ship, the Cyrenians the lembus, the Phoenicians the cumba, the Rhodians the celes, the Cyprians the cercyrus.

209| The Phoenicians invented the observation of the stars in sailing, the Copae the oar, the Plataeans its broad blade, Icarus sails, Daedalus the mast and yard, the Samians or Pericles of Athens the horse-transport, the Thasians decked long ships; before that, fighting was done only from the prow and the stern. Pisaeus the Tyrrhenian added the beaks, Eupalamus the anchor, Anacharsis the two-pronged anchor, Pericles of Athens grappling-irons and iron hands, Tiphys the gear for steering. Minos was the first to fight a battle with a fleet. Hyperbius son of Mars was the first to kill an animal, Prometheus an ox.

210| The first tacit agreement of all the nations was the consent to use the letters of the Ionians. That the old Greek letters were almost the same as the Latin ones are now will be shown by a Delphic table of ancient bronze, which is today on the Palatine, a gift of the emperors, dedicated to Minerva [in the library], with this inscription: "Nausicrates dedicated the tithe to the daughter of Zeus [….]"

211| The next agreement of the nations concerned barbers, but it came later to the Romans. They came into Italy from Sicily in the 454th year after the founding of Rome, brought by Publius Titinius Mena, as Varro is our authority; before that men went unshaven. The first of all to have himself shaved every day was the later Africanus. The deified Augustus always used razors.

212| The third agreement was in the observation of the hours, a matter now coming under reason; when and by whom it was discovered in Greece we have stated in the second book. This too came about later at Rome. In the Twelve Tables only sunrise and sunset are named; some years later midday was added as well, the consuls' attendant announcing it when, from the senate-house, he had sighted the sun between the Rostra and the Graecostasis; when the sun had sloped from the Maenian Column to the prison, he announced the last hour, but this only on clear days, until the First Punic War.

213| Fabius Vestalis reports that the first to set up a sundial was Lucius Papirius Cursor, 12 years before the war was fought with Pyrrhus, at the temple of Quirinus, when he dedicated it after his father had vowed it. But he indicates neither the principle of the dial that was made nor its maker, nor where it was brought from, nor in whose writings he found this.

214| Marcus Varro records that the first one set up in public was placed on a column beside the Rostra in the First Punic War by Marcus Valerius Messala the consul, after the capture of Catina in Sicily, and brought from there 30 years after the date recorded for the sundial of Papirius, in the year of the city 490. Its lines did not agree with the hours, yet people followed it for ninety-nine years, until Quintus Marcius Philippus, who was censor with Lucius Paulus, set up a more carefully arranged one beside it; and that gift was received as among the most welcome of the censors' works.

215| Even then, however, the hours were uncertain in cloudy weather until the next lustrum. Then Scipio Nasica, the colleague of Laenas, was first to divide by water the hours of nights and days alike, and he dedicated this clock under a roof in the year of the city 595. For so long had the daylight been undivided for the Roman people. Now we shall turn to the remaining animals, and first to those of the land.

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