Book 4

[Nonius, 500M] And the mind itself, which sees the things to come, remembers the things past.

. . . favour. How fitly the orders are distinguished—the ages, the classes, the cavalry, in which the votes of the senate too are included—now that too many men foolishly desire this advantage to be done away, who seek some new largess by way of returning the horses through a plebiscite.

[Servius, on Aeneid 5.546] . . . that guardians were wont to be given to those going out to military service, by whom in the first year they should be governed.

. . . a grown youth to be stripped. So deeply have the foundations, as it were, of modesty been laid. But the training of youth—how absurd it is in the gymnasia! how trifling that soldiery of the ephebes! how loose and unrestrained their handlings and loves! I pass over the Eleans and the Thebans, among whom in the love of free-born youths lust has even a licence permitted and unrestrained; the Lacedaemonians themselves, though they concede everything in the love of young men save defilement, fence off by a thin wall indeed that which they except; for they permit embraces and lying together, with cloaks set between. Here Laelius: "I understand clearly, Scipio, that in those Greek disciplines which you blame, you prefer to wrestle with the most noble peoples rather than with your own Plato, whom you do not even touch upon, especially since . . .

[Nonius, 362M] And our Plato even more than Lycurgus, who bids absolutely all things to be common, lest any citizen be able to call any thing his own or proper to himself.

[Nonius, 24M] The judgment of the censor brings to the condemned man scarcely anything but a blush. And so, since all that adjudication turns only upon his name, that animadversion has been called ignominy.

[Nonius, 24M] For I do not wish the same people to be the ruler and the toll-gatherer of the world. And the best revenue, both in private households and in the commonwealth, I reckon to be thrift. For good faith—fides—seems to me to have its very name from the fact that what is said is done—fit.

[Nonius, 430Msq.] I admire the elegance not only of the matter, but also of the words. "If they wrangle," he says. The contention of well-wishers, not the strife of enemies, is called wrangling . . . The law, then, holds that neighbours wrangle with one another, not litigate.

[Augustine, City of God, 2.14] To these, when there is added the shout and approval of the people, as of some great and wise master, what darkness do they spread, what fears do they bring in, what cravings do they inflame!

[Augustine, City of God, 2.13] Since they reckoned the player's art and the whole stage a disgrace, they willed that this kind of men should not only lack the honour of the rest of the citizens, but even be removed from their tribe by the censor's mark.

[Augustine, City of God, 2.9] Never could the comedies, unless the practice of life had suffered it, have made their disgraceful things approved in the theatres. . . . Whom did that art not touch—nay rather, whom did it not harry? whom did it spare? Granted, it injured popular men, wicked, seditious in the commonwealth—Cleon, Cleophon, Hyperbolus. Let us bear it, although it is better that such citizens be branded by a censor than by a poet; but that Pericles, when now with the highest authority he had for very many years presided over his state in peace and in war, should be assailed in verses, and that these should be acted on the stage, was no more becoming than if our own Plautus or Naevius had wished to revile Publius and Gnaeus Scipio, or Caecilius to revile Marcus Cato . . .

Our Twelve Tables, on the contrary, though they had made very few things punishable by death, thought this too should be made so among them: if anyone had sung or composed a song which brought infamy or disgrace upon another. Splendidly; for our life ought to be exposed to the judgments of magistrates and to lawful arbitration, not to the wits of poets; nor ought we to hear reproach save under that law by which it is permitted to answer and to defend oneself in court. . . . that it displeased the ancient Romans either that any living man be praised on the stage, or that he be reviled.

[Augustine, City of God, 2.11] Aeschines the Athenian, a most eloquent man, when as a young man he had acted tragedies, took up public affairs; and Aristodemus too, likewise a tragic actor, the Athenians often sent as ambassador to Philip on the greatest matters of peace and war.