praxis grammatica - California State University, Sacramento

PRAXIS GRAMMATICA 

A New Edition 

John Harmer 1623

PRAXIS GRAMMATICA 

A New Edition 

John Harmar, 1623 

Edited by 

Mark T. Riley & Giles Laurén 

SOPHRON 2012

Copyright © 2012 

by Giles Laurén & Mark Riley 

John Harmar (c.1594-1670) 

ISBN: 978-0985081126 

0 98508 1120 

Design by Sophron.

PREFACE 

Can anyone in good faith tell us of a schoolboy 

who was beholden to his McGuffy Reader or his 

Kennedy’s Latin Grammar? I think not, and so it is 

that the schoolbooks of former times are in such 

scarce supply today. Used by the ultimate young 

scholar they were with youthful exuberance tossed 

into the blaze of the communal hearth. Thus it is 

our destiny to possess but two copies of a Praxis 

Grammatica printed in 1623 [STC 12792]; one at the 

British Library and another at the Bodelian, 

although the book may have undergone the 

sufferance of many scholars in an age when a 

knowledge of Latin possessed all of the cachets of 

the modern MBA. It would be interesting to know 

how many copies of our current multiplex of textbook 

editions on economics and investment theory 

will survive half a millennia and of even more 

interest to know how they will be judged in future. 

Our present acquaintance with the Praxis 

derives from a fortuitous decision by the Scolar 

Press to print a facsimile edition of the Praxis 

Grammatica in 1969 and from N. S. Gill’s use of it 

o n h e r e x c e l l e n t w e b s i t e : 

ancienthistory.about.com. This website further 

offers a Praxis weekly newsletter and aids to

Praxis translation. The book is also posted online 

by St. Louis University in their Paedagogica 

Latina section along with an English translation. 

The translation used herein is mainly the work of 

the St. Louis scholars. 

From the Scolar edition: 

John Harmar (ca. 1594-1670) was professor of 

Greek at Oxford for ten years (1650-1660), a post 

held by his uncle John Harmar from 1585-1588, 

and published among other works an important 

revision of Joannes Scapula's great Lexicon 

Graeco-Latinum (1637, and subsequently 

reprinted many times), a revised edition of 

William Bathe's popular Janua linguarum in 

1626, while he was headmaster of St. Albans 

School, and a translation of Daniel Heinsius's In 

cruentum Christi sacrificium (1613) as The 

Mirrour of Humilitie (1618). The Praxis 

Grammatica, published anonymously, but 

undoubtedly by Harmar, was written for the use 

of Magdalen College School (he was a Magdalen 

scholar himself) and was designed to teach the 

rudiments of Latin grammar inductively, a 

method rarely found in English school-books. 

Although an interesting survival of a linguistic 

method extensively used by the early sixteenthcentury 

grammarians (e.g. Erasmus and Valla), 

the work was not apparently a success, no 

subsequent edition seems to have been called for, 

and the work to our knowledge was never 

reprinted. 

In Harmer’s time the Magdalen College School 

was a grammar school attached to the College to

educate the College’s choir boys and gifted local 

children. 

The present volume intends to make the Praxis 

available at low cost in an effort to make known 

and demonstrate the ongoing value of John 

Harmer’s slender work as a rational, well founded 

contribution to the education of an earlier 

pedagogical tradition and to that of today. Many of 

the exercises have been translated many times; their 

delight lies in the difficulty of improving upon the 

previous translations and will offer challenge and 

amusement to any latinist.

CONTENTS 

INTRODUCTION 9 

PRAXIS GRAMMATICA. 3 

Exercises! 3 

Sententiæ.! 29 

Facetiae & argutè dicta.! 45 

TRANSLATION 65 

Exercises! 67 

Maxims.! 88 

Witticisms and striking utterances! 102

INTRODUCTION 

The Church kept Latin and classical learning 

alive through the Dark and early Medieval Ages; 

the only universal European language and unifying 

force. With the opening of the universities in the 

twelfth century it was only natural that all 

instruction was given in Latin; to this day there is a 

section in Paris called the Quartier Latin where 

students from all over Europe came to study 

together. 

By the introduction of the printing press in the 

late fifteenth century a network of Humanist 

scholars was already in place across Europe. 

Imagine Erasmus, who claimed to have forgotten 

how to speak Dutch, corresponding in Latin with 

every corner of Europe. The importance of printing 

was unequalled until the recent introduction of the 

internet. 

It was rare for anything to be written in anything 

other than Latin before Petrarch so it is not 

surprising that there is a large body of Latin 

writing, usually called neo-Latin, from about 1300, 

the time of Dante and Petrarch, down to our own 

time. This category includes an immense number of 

works, especially from the fifteenth, sixteenth, and

x PRAXIS GRAMMATICA 

seventeenth centuries, ranging from verse to fiction 

to science. Even as late as 1741 Ludvig Holberg 

could write a long Latin novel about Nicholas 

Klimt’s underground journey, the ancestor of Jules 

Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, and a 

better novel. Certainly from the fifteenth and 

sixteenth centuries there is far more Latin literature 

extant than the Romans ever thought about writing. 

So how did the language maintain itself, despite the 

fact that, by that time, it was no one’s mother 

tongue? The answer is simple; the schools did it 

using materials such as Harmar’s Praxis 

Grammatica. 

We know a lot about what we would call 

elementary and secondary education during the 

period in question; the best modern description of 

Elizabethan schools is Thomas Baldwin’s William 

Shakespere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greek, an 

exhaustive treatment (in 2 volumes) of grammar 

school education in England. Baldwin translates or 

quotes in English detailed surviving lesson plans 

and syllabi from Eton, Winchester, St. Paul’s, and 

other schools, giving us an exact knowledge of 

what happened – or was supposed to happen – in 

these schools. 

At about the age of five a child could enter a 

“petty” school attached to a grammar school. In the 

petty school he (or she, girls attended these 

schools) mastered the alphabet and learned to read

INTRODUCTION xi 

and write in English. In England and throughout 

Europe he would learn by heart the Paternoster, the 

Creed, and the Ten Commandments. At the age of 

seven or eight the child would enter the grammar 

school proper, where he stayed for about seven 

years. The grammar school’s function was clearly 

defined and understood by everyone: it was to 

teach Latin. The student memorised grammar, 

memorised texts, analysed texts, composed in Latin 

every day, copied texts into his commonplace book, 

and so on. No one had any doubt that Latin was the 

necessary language to learn, the medium of 

traditional and contemporary scholarship, theology, 

law, medicine, international relations, and so on. In 

fact in international relations at the time Latin was 

the universal language. 

Perhaps needless to say, teaching the boys to 

read, write, and speak this inflected language took 

much time and effort. Pupils were in school for 8 to 

10 hours, six days per week, usually starting at 6:00 

or 7:00 am. Here is the schedule for Eton in 1560: 

at 6:00 pupils were taught about parts of speech and 

forms of verbs. At 7:00 they were quizzed orally on 

the previous hour’s work. At 8:00 they were 

assigned a passage to be translated or to be rewritten 

or versified, depending on the grade they 

were in. At 9:00 they wrote a prose composition on 

a set theme or else studied Latin authors, Terence or 

Caesar in the lower grades, Cicero, Ovid, or Vergil 

in the upper. From these authors they had to excerpt

xii PRAXIS GRAMMATICA 

proverbs, phrases, moral maxims, fables, and so on. 

Prayers at 10:00 were followed by lunch. From 

12:00 to 2:00 the boys were examined on what they 

had read. At 4:00 they translated prepared passages 

from other authors and repeated their memorised 

precepts. At 6:00 they translated from English into 

Latin. At 8:00 they went to bed. On the weekends 

they studied religious texts. 

In the first three years, the student memorised 

one of the Latin grammars in common use. 

Exercises included translating into Latin words or 

phrases set by the teacher. Students were expected, 

or required, to speak only Latin in the school. Here 

books like Harmar’s Praxis would come into use, 

phrase books to help students attain a good 

speaking knowledge, By the end of the third year 

the pupil had read Aesop and the Distichs of Cato. 

He could diagram sentences, recognize all the 

grammatical forms, vary and rephrase sentences, 

and recognize the Latin poetic meters. Readings 

came from the Bible and from dialogues of 

Erasmus and Vives. 

John Harmar’s work was intended for these 

students in their first three years. He supplies useful 

phrases for classroom conversation, helpfully 

graded according to grammatical usage. For 

example, numbers 1-33 practice the indicative 

tenses of the verb esse; 34-38 the imperatives of 

esse; then come the subjunctive forms of esse; then

INTRODUCTION xiii 

many examples of esse in the various subjunctive 

clauses with ut and cum. Numbers 86- 170 practice 

all the possible grammatical forms of the first 

conjugation verb amo, amare, including the supine 

and the future participle. Numbers 171-222 practice 

the second conjugation verb doceo, docêre; 

numbers 223-262 the third conjugation verb lego, 

legere; and numbers 263-300 the fourth 

conjugation verb audio, audire. The following 

sentences practice various noun forms. The whole 

is well planned to supply ready reference material 

for any grammatical difficulty encountered in class. 

The student may puzzle over the pairs of sentences 

which have the same translation, such as numbers: 

76-77, 78-79, 80-81, 83-84, 124-125, 127-128, and 

others. We see here a survival of medieval Latin 

syntax, in which quod plus subjunctive is used for 

indirect statement rather than the more classical 

accusative and infinitive. This medieval usage, 

commonly used in the Vulgate Bible and far more 

natural to an English speaker than the classical 

construction, must have been heard in the spoken 

Latin of many seventeenth century teachers and 

students. Hence Harmar felt the need to practice it. 

The Sententiae (408ff.) supply maxims for the 

students’ moral and physical health (don’t eat too 

much, wash regularly), while the Facetiae, “witty 

stories,” supply enlightening, often humorous, 

incidents from ancient literature. We have 

identified the source for most of these stories, but

xiv PRAXIS GRAMMATICA 

in fact Harmar probably got most of them from 

Erasmus’s Adagia or some other collection. 

In the fourth year students read the comedies of 

Terence, partly for their utility in developing verbal 

fluency in Latin. They also read Ovid and Vergil. 

Every day a pupil memorised a few verses of 

whatever author was being studied, parsed every 

word, listed all the rhetorical figures (syllepsis, 

metonymy, synecdoche, and so on). Then the 

student would translate the passage into English, 

and finally, with his English translation in front of 

him, retranslate the passage back into Latin. His 

version could then be compared with the original. 

In the fifth, sixth, and seventh years the readings 

became more difficult. Using anthologies, students 

compiled their own commonplace books of apt 

quotations. Harmar’s Praxis supplies much 

material for such commonplace books. Students 

read Vergil, especially the Eclogues and Georgics, 

which perhaps accounts for the popularity of 

pastoral as a genre in Neo-Latin. They also read 

Horace, Lucan, Martial, and Seneca. In all classes 

they continued composing in Latin in the style of 

the author being studied, in the better schools using 

the “double translation” method just mentioned: 

translating from Latin into English then back into 

Latin. They also wrote letters using Cicero as a 

model and gave orations and performed plays, all in 

Latin. Hundreds of academic dramas survive from

INTRODUCTION xv 

the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. These 

plays were produced for the parents and local 

dignitaries to show that the students were actually 

learning something, the something being Latin. 

These productions of course continued into the 

university years, for the few who attended 

university. During Queen Elizabeth’s visits to 

Oxford or Cambridge several Latin plays were 

produced for her entertainment. 

Perhaps we have given too much detail about 

sixteenth and seventeenth century education in 

England. But we want to emphasise the point that 

the language training provided by the grammar 

schools far exceeded any university graduate 

program anywhere today. Any reasonably diligent 

grammar school pupil had far better speaking and 

writing skills in Latin than virtually any modern 

Latin professor. In addition what we have described 

was the totality of elementary and secondary 

education. Any science, history, or philosophy 

which students might learn in grammar school 

came from the Latin texts, and most of what they 

learned subsequently at university also came from 

Latin texts. Hence the constant references to 

Roman history and politics. There are far more 

references to Caesar and Pompey in English 

literature of the period than to individual English 

kings, far more references to the noble Cato than to 

the noble Sir Thomas More. Moreover, since there 

were no alternative schools, most practical learning

xvi PRAXIS GRAMMATICA 

was learned through apprenticeship. One 

investigator has found that there was one grammar 

school for every 5600 persons in England; by 

contrast official figures give one such school for 

every 24000 persons in 1864. Grammar schools, 

i.e. Latin schools, were not rare in Tudor and Stuart 

times when education meant training in Latin. 

Why was there such an emphasis on Latin? The 

reasons are not hard to discern. First, English was 

known only to its native speakers, perhaps four to 

five million people in 1600 - that is even if we 

could define “English language” as one entity at 

that time. (Even now accents and dialect 

differences can make understanding difficult, as 

Americans who watch the film Trainspotting or the 

“Little Britain” TV show from the BBC can attest. 

The situation in 1600 would have been far worse.) 

Latin was certainly the only way for a writer to 

gain an audience outside his native land. For 

example, much of Milton’s work for the 

Commonwealth consisted of Latin defences and 

diplomatic letters addressed to a European 

audience. Writing such addresses in English would 

have been a waste of time. The same was true in 

most of Europe at the time. Many writers state that 

they are writing in Latin to ensure the propagation 

of their work: Latin was an eternal language 

exempt from the mutations of time and capable of 

immortalising the writer’s efforts. Works in Latin

INTRODUCTION xvii 

had at least the possibility of becoming a 

monumentum aere perennius. 

A second reason why men wrote in Latin is 

perhaps not so obvious. At the time, Latin was a 

more developed language than was English, with 

an ability to express concepts and ideas that the 

Elizabethan language lacked. Complaints about the 

insufficiency of English were not rare: the language 

was rude and barbarous, and it did not have the 

technical vocabulary required in specialised areas 

of language use, like theology or medicine. John 

David Rhys, the author of the first grammar of 

Welsh, Cambrobrytannicae cymraecaeve linguae 

institutiones (London 1592) wrote it in Latin both 

for an international audience and because it was 

easier to explain Welsh in Latin than in English. 

In 1532 Robert Estienne published the 

Thesaurus linguae latinae and yet Lord 

Chesterfield, was still lamenting in 1754, ... that it 

is "a sort of disgrace to our nation, that hitherto we 

have had no… standard of our language...” 

Fortunately, Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the 

English Language was published the following 

year (1755) and a reliable English dictionary was at 

last available. 

An inspection of the OED shows that much of 

our modern English is post-Elizabethan and how 

recent many words in current use are. Here are 

some words which were introduced into English

xviii PRAXIS GRAMMATICA 

since 1600: surface, premium, equilibrium, 

specimen, formula, impetus, antenna, stimulus, 

complex and many more. 

In short, Latin had a ready-made vocabulary at 

hand, it had a long series of authoritative texts 

concerning history, theology, philosophy, politics, 

and other topics of international interest, and it 

gave its speakers access to the outside world. Who 

would not have chosen Latin? (A present-day 

analogy might be India, where English is the 

language of advancement.) Of course as the 

vernacular languages developed the vocabulary to 

discuss almost anything, these languages began to 

replace Latin. This happened first in Italy, then in 

France during the sixteenth century, in Germany 

and England during the seventeenth century, and 

finally in Scandinavia, where the last long original 

work of fiction in Latin, Holberg’s Iter 

Subterraneum, previously mentioned, was 

published in 1741. In the sciences, publication in 

Latin continued for a much longer period. 

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-philosophicus and 

Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica 

were twentieth century publications. 

Sacramento, 2012 

Mark Riley

Praxis Grammatica: 

VERUM ET GENUINUM 

DECLINATIONUM 

& 

Conjugationum usum liquidò indicans, 

ad solidam & expeditam Etymologiæ 

Grammaticæ cognitionem assequendam 

concinnata. 

Cui tum Sententiarum, tum Facetiarum selectiorum 

cumulus accessit, 

In usum Schol. Magdal. Oxon. 

Maxima pendent ex minimi.

2 PRAXIS GRAMMATICA 

Lectori benevolo. 

Ego tecum (amice Lector) planè sentio. Probè 

conjectas. Prorsus indigna sunt haec leviuscula 

quae in lucem emittantur (de Praxi hac tantùm 

loquor.) Ita certè se res habet, nec inficias eo, si 

materiam spectes. Sin vero finem perpendas, aliter 

existimes. Praxis ista, de qua superiùs, ad captum, 

in usum, puerorum adhuc balbutientium 

attemperata est potissimùm, qui è grammaticis 

cunis primulùm erepserunt. Quibus utique hanc non 

minùs utilem & commodam, quàm accommodam 

futuram arbitror. Huic, uti vides, Sententias 

quasdam elegantiores argutioresque cum delectu 

perquisitas in quibus inest haud inculta oratio, 

consultò adjeci. Quin immò, Sententiis hisce 

apophthegmata aliquammulta ex Macrobio, 

Plutarcho, nec non ex amplissimo illo Des. Eras. 

penu deprompta, quà festiva, qua seria adjunxi, 

quae molestias istas praeceptoribus obrepere solitas 

subinde leniant, atque condiant. Quin cesso: ne 

longiorem justo praefationem minutijs hisce, ac 

!"#"!$%µ&%' praefixisse videar. Vale.

PRAXIS GRAMMATICA. 

Exercises 

1. Ego sum hodie apud te pransurus. 

2. Tu es liberalis convivator. 

3. Ille est librorum helluo. 

4. Haec cantilena est suavissima. 

5. Haec avis est implumis. 

6. Hic paries est latericius. 

7. Hoc templum est ornatum. 

8. Hic puer est comes iucundissimus. 

9. Fratres tui sunt doctissimi viri. 

10. Vos estis victores, nos victi. 

11. Unus vir est quasi nullus vir. 

12. Non eram in schola hodie. 

13. Heri tu non eras in templo. 

14. Frater tuus non erat in pomario nostro, nec 

quis alius. 

15. Nos eramus domi vestrae. 

16. Vos eratis domi nostrae. 

17. Vestri parentes hodie erant domi meae.


18. Hodie non fui in schola, nec tu fuisti in ea. 

19. Tu idem es qui olim fuisti. 

20. Hic puer semper fuit melior fratre suo. 

21. Hesterno die fuimus in horto vestro. 

22. Vos fuistis in templo Maria Magdalenæ. 

23. Hîc fuerunt toti modii cerasorum & 

pomorum. 

24. Nemo fuerat heri in atrio, qu(d sciam. 

25. Superiore hebdomade fueras in ambulacris 

nostris. 

26. Frater tuus fuerat apud me nudiustertius. 

27. Meae sorores pridie non fuerant in triclinio. 

28. Ero posthac diligentior. 

29. Cras manè eris apud me. 

30. Hic puer erit aliquando vir doctus. 

31. Posthac (annuente Deo) diligentiores erimus. 

32. Vos eritis mihi multò gratissimi. 

33. Amici qui ex animo diligunt, erunt mihi longè 

carissimi. 

34. Esto pius & studiosus. 

35. Quilibet scholaris esto ad prælectionem 

attentus. 

36. Estote fideles, & eritis felices.

37. Omnes pueri cras sub diluculo sunto in 

schola. 

38. Hæc ita sunto. 

39. Frater tuus me rogat ut sim studiosus. 

40. Rogo te ut sis bonarum literarum avidus. 

41. Sit hæc nox tibi tranquilla & faustissima. 

42. Præceptores rogant nos discipulos ut simus 

diligentiores anno sequente quam fuimus 

præterito. 

43. Vos hortor ut sitis amicis intimis fidissimi. 

44. Hortare condiscipulos tuos ut sint ad scholam 

maturè. 

45. Rogabam fratrem tuum, ut esset meus 

amicus, sicut antea semper fuit. 

46. Rogabas nos ut essemus amici tui. 

47. Pater tuus rogabat me, ut essem socius tuus in 

studiis. 

48. Mater mea rogavit præceptorem meum, ut 

esset mihi aliquanto mitior. 

49. Præceptores sæpius hortati sunt discipulos 

suos, ut essent valde studiosi. 

50. Sæpenumero rogavi vos ut essetis mei 

memores. 

51. Sis bonus & felixque tuis. 

52. Si sim bonus, beatus ero. 

LATIN TEXT 5


53. Si quis sit egenus, laboret. 

54. Si sitis pii, Deus vos amabit unicè. 

55. Si non simus cauti, præceptor nos opprimet 

hic ludentes tesseris. 

56. Utinam hic puer meus esset sodalis. 

57. Nescio an hæ pennæ & fistulæ sint meæ. 

58. Non dubito quin sis honestus puer. 

59. Si fuissem in templo, audivissem concionem. 

60. Si tu fuisses domi nostræ, edisses poma & 

nuces. 

61. Si frater tuus fuisset eruditus, accepisset a me 

pennam inauratam. 

62. Si fuissemus in horto Regis, vidissemus rosas 

& violas suavissimas. 

63. Si fuisset in schola, præceptor dedisset tibi 

cerasa quattuor & tria pira. 

64. Si Petrus, & Gulielmus, & Georgius, & filius 

præceptoris natu maximus fuissent unà 

mecum in foro, coemissem singulis illorum 

complures sagittas. 

65. Si fuero apud te aliquantisper, docebo te 

aliquas Grammaticæ regulas. 

66. Nescio an heri fueris in silva. 

67. Nescit pater ubi vos iam sitis. 

68. Nescio ego quis sit hic peregrinus.

69. Audio quod tui fratres sint boni adolescentes. 

70. Cum heri essem in schola, dixeram te pœnas 

daturum fore ob negligentiam. 

71. Cum fuissem nudiusquartus apud matrem 

tuam, illa me iussit ire adversum tibi. 

72. Cum essetis Parisiis, reliquistis me in cunis 

vagientem. 

73. Audio quod tu sis puer bonus. 

74. Audio te esse bonum puerum. 

75. Audio canes vestros venaticos esse voraces. 

76. Credo te fuisse facundum oratorem. 

77. Credo quod fueris facundus orator. 

78. Credo hæc pira non fuisse tibi grata. 

79. Credo quod hæc pira non fuerint tibi grata. 

80. Spero me futurum esse tuum convivam. 

81. Spero quod ego cras sim futurus tuus 

conviva. 

82. Credo sororem tuam futuram esse bonam 

feminam. 

83. Spero nos futuros esse doctos. 

LATIN TEXT 7 

84. Spero quod futuri simus docti. 

85. Spero hanc herbam esse salubrem. 

86. Amo Deum Patrem cœlestem, qui creavit me.


87. Nihil aequè amas ac Iesum Christum 

Salvatorem tuum. 

88. Me perinde amat ac si essem frater eius. 

89. Nos vicissim te amamus. 

90. Vos amatis lautas cenas. 

91. Illos ego felices duco, qui probitatem amant. 

92. Antehàc amabam te cum esses studiosus. 

93. Amabas, memini, bonas artes. Cur non 

amplius illas amas? 

94. Amabat me cum essem puer. 

95. Amabamus sorores tuas cum essent apud nos. 

96. Amabatis pira cùm essetis adolescentes. 

97. Nostri præceptores amabant fratres tuos cùm 

essent studiosi. 

98. Amavi te à puero. 

99. Amavisti me vicissim. 

100. Frater tuus semper amavit arcum & calamos. 

101. Semper amavimus eos, qui sunt nobis 

similes. 

102. Amavistis me propterea quod amavi vos. 

103. Qui recte faciunt lucem amant. 

104. Amaveram te, sed tu non amaveras me 

vicissim. 

105. Si amabis me, ego vicissim te amabo.

106. Boni bonos amabunt. 

107. Vale, & me ama. 

108. Amate pietatem & liberales artes. 

109. Rogo te ut ames parentes tuos. 

110. Rogas me ut amem fratrem tuum. 

111. Hortabor illum ut amet libros bonos. 

112. Ego sæpiusculè rogavi te, ut amares 

Nicolaum condiscipulum tuum. 

113. Pietatem ames, & eris beatus. 

LATIN TEXT 9 

114. Omnis puer præceptorem suum veneretur & 

amet. 

115. Amemus Deum & proximum nostrum. 

116. Nescio an ametis me, sicut ego vos amo. 

117. Amarem te, si talis esses, qualis videris. 

118. Si amarent me, ego illos vicissim amarem. 

119. Si amavissem fratrem tuum, ille quoque 

amavisset me. 

120. Amavissemus sorores tuas si fuissent bonæ. 

121. Si me amaveris, pergratum mihi feceris. 

122. Utinam semper amavissem pietatem. 

123. Utinam homines semper amarent Deum. 

124. Audivisti me amare tuos amicos. 

125. Audivisti quod amem tuos amicos.


126. Scis me amavisse Petrum fratrem tuum. 

127. Audio has mulieres semper amavisse viros 

suos. 

128. Audio quod hæ mulieres semper amaverint 

viros suos. 

129. Spero me amaturum esse libros bonos. 

130. Spero quod amaturus sim libros bonos. 

131. Spes est vos me amaturos esse. 

132. Spes est quod me sitis amaturi. 

133. Amandum est mihi. 

134. Amando & laudando puerum, efficies eum 

valde studiosum. 

135. Frater meus habet propositum amandi bona 

studia. 

136. Venio ad amandum sororem tuam. 

137. Venio ut amem sororem tuam. 

138. Propero ardentius amatum eos, quos tu 

laudas. 

139. Venio laudatum pennas tuas. 

140. Venio laudare pennas tuas. 

141. Venio ut laudem pennas tuas. 

142. Frater tuus dignus est amatu. 

143. Hæc res est facilis amatu. 

144. Pueri amantes pietatem sunt chari Deo.

LATIN TEXT 11 

145. Deus dat omnia bona amantibus illum. 

146. Qui se vere amaturus est, Deum prius amet. 

147. Venimus laudaturi Scholam vestram. 

148. Amor à meo patre quando sum bonus & 

diligens. 

149. Nostrates amantur a vestratibus. 

150. Homo pius amatur a Deo & sanctis angelis. 

151. Amabar a præceptore cum essem in schola 

vestra. 

152. Amatus sum a patre tuo, quia ego te etiam 

amavi. 

153. Boni libri & utiles semper amati sunt a bonis 

viris. 

154. Bonæ pennæ semper amatae erant ab hoc 

puero. 

155. Amaberis a Deo & hominibus si fueris pius & 

bonus. 

156. Ama tuos condiscipulos, ut vicissim ameris 

ab iis. 

157. Amaremur a tuis fratribus, si quotidie 

daremus eis pira & poma & cerasa. 

158. Si amatus esses a nobis, proculdubio amati 

essemus a te vicissim. 

159. Nescio an amer a te & patre tuo.


160. Ego puto doctrinam & virtutem amari ab 

omnibus hominibus. 

161. Video me valde amatum esse a tuis 

parentibus. 

162. Video quod valde amatus sim a tuis 

parentibus. 

163. Spero me amatum iri a vobis. 

164. Spero fore ut amer a vobis. 

165. Credo hanc thecam scriptoriam amatum iri a 

te. 

166. Credo fore ut hanc theca scriptoria ametur a 

te. 

167. Puto hæc poma amatum iri a condiscipulis 

meis. 

168. Puto fore ut hæc pira amentur a condiscipulis 

meis. 

169. Boni libri amandi sunt nobis, aut a nobis. 

170. Præcepta Dei amanda sunt a nobis. 

171. Libenter doceo bonos pueros. 

172. Quare non doces fratrem tuum? 

173. Heri docebam fratrem tuum primam 

declinationem. 

174. Ego sæpe docui te litteras. 

175. Docueram fratrem tuum multa vocabula 

Latina, sed ille oblitus est omnium.

176. Ego te idem docebo quod pater meus me 

docuit. 

177. Docete, quæso, me ea quæ nescio. 

178. Qui doctior est aliis, ille doceto reliquos. 

179. Valde rogor a fratre tuo ut doceam eum 

Latinas declinationes. 

180. Petebam a tuo fratre ut doceret me linguam 

Latinam. 

181. Nescio quis iam doceat fratrem tuum litteras. 

182. Haud scio cur amplius doceas pueros otiosos 

& contumaces. 

183. Nescis an recte docueris me artem sagittandi. 

184. Cum doceas me, docebo te vicissim. 

185. Cum præceptor noster heri nos doceret in 

schola, mater tua petebat ab eo ludendi 

veniam. 

186. Utinam pater tuus, qui vir doctus est, 

docuisset me Grammaticam Latinam. 

187. Cum Lucilius docuisset fratrem meum tres 

menses, statim rus abibat. 

188. Si docuero te prælectionem tuam, tu mihi 

dabis quattuor vel tria vel saltem duo poma. 

189. Vides me docere te fideliter. 

LATIN TEXT 13 

190. Vides quod doceam te fideliter.


191. Valde miror te non docuisse Petrum, filium 

tuum Orationem Dominicam. 

192. Credo me fideliter docturum esse tuos fratres. 

193. Crede quod fideliter docturus sim tuos fratres. 

194. Eo doctum septem puerorum classes. 

195. Hæc res est doctu difficilis. 

196. Docendum est mihi complures peregrinos 

gratis, quippe quod pauperes sint. 

197. Audio docendum esse tibi adolescentes 

quosdam viros nobiles. 

198. Audio quod docendum sit tibi adolescentes 

quosdam viros nobiles. 

199. Ibo ad docendum sororem tuam musicam. 

200. Venio causa docendi te Artem supputandi. 

201. Alios docendo te ipsum docebis. 

202. Nudiusquartus, aut saltem nudiusquintus vidi 

sororem tuam docentem ambas sorores meas. 

203. Iniucundum est opus docentis & anxietate 

plenum. 

204. Ille qui docturus est alium, prius seipsum 

doceat. 

205. Docemur a vobis linguam Latinam. 

206. Docebar artem scribendi in iuventute mea, 

sed sine aliquo fructu.

207. Nos adhuc pueri docebamur multa vocabula 

Latina. 

208. Vos docti estis epistolam perscribere ad 

patrem vestrum. 

209. Hæc puella docta est saltare. 

LATIN TEXT 15 

210. Meæ sorores doctæ erant nere & tenere lanam 

ac telam. 

211. Iam fortassis ab hoc viro docebor ea, quæ 

hactenus a nemine doctus sum. 

212. Si docearis a me linguam Latinam, tu mihi 

amplissimam dabis mercedem. 

213. Si docerer a te artem piscatoriam, darem tibi 

centum poma matura. 

214. Intellegis me doceri linguam Græcam. 

215. Intellegis quod linguam Græcam docear. 

216. Audiebam vos doceri linguas peregrinas. 

217. Audivi fratres tuos nondum doctos esse 

linguam Gallicam. 

218. Audivi quod fratres tui nondum docti sint 

linguam Gallicam. 

219. Spero me doctum iri linguam Græcam. 

220. Spero fore ut docear linguam Græcam. 

221. Spero sorores tuas doctum iri artem 

Textoriam.


222. Spero fore, ut sorores tuæ doceantur artem 

Textoriam. 

223. Libenter lego litteras tuas, quas ad me scribis. 

224. Legebam fratri tuo unas litteras, quas ad eum 

ipse pridie perferebam. 

225. Libentissime legimus litteras, quas heri ad 

nos tam amice miseras. 

226. Quamprimum legeram hesternas litteras, 

statim ad te rescripsi. 

227. Cras legam litteras, quas accepi a quodam, 

qui in hac vicinia habitat. 

228. Lege Ciceronem summum oratorem, aut si 

mavis, Terentium politissimum autorem. 

229. Sæpiuscule a me contendis ut legam 

Cæsarem purissimum historiæ scriptorem. 

230. Rogabas me ut legerem Plautum festivum 

comicum. 

231. Non ignoras me libenter legere Erasmi 

Colloquia, & Corderii Dialogos eleganter 

Latine scriptos. [Mathurin Cordier, 1479-1564.] 

232. Audio te legisse Politiani Epistolas quas 

Lipsius tantopere laudat. [Angelo Ambrogini 

‘Politian’, 1454-94.] [Justus Lipsius, 1547-1606.] 

233. Spero vos lecturos Ovidium & Virgilium 

Latinorum Poetarum principes. 

234. Veni huc lectum epistolam patris tui.

235. Hic liber est lectu iucundissimus; non memini 

me unquam iucundiorem vidisse. 

236. Haec linea est admodum difficilis lectu. 

237. Legendum est tibi epistolas elegantiusculas. 

238. Valde cupidus sum legendi hunc librum. 

239. Veni huc legendi causa. 

LATIN TEXT 17 

240. Legendo multum, non multa, quotidie 

proficies. 

241. Pueri sæpe legentes lectiones facile illarum 

meminerint. 

242. Spero te lecturum concionem tuam. 

243. Spero quod lecturus sis concionem tuam. 

244. In schola saepe legor in catalogo nugantium. 

245. Epistola bene scripta iucunde legitur. 

246. Hic liber legebatur nudiustertius a matre tua. 

247. Tu sæpe lectus es in schedulis absentium. 

248. Hic litterarum fasciculus nondum lectus est a 

praeceptore meo. 

249. Epistola tua satis mature lecta erat a fratre 

meo. 

250. Non legar hodie in schedulis absentium, quia 

hac septimana semper affui in schola. 

251. Circa meridiem epistola tua legetur.


252. Nescio an meae litterae libenter legantur ab 

amicis meis. 

253. Si ego tam sæpe legerer in catalogo 

absentium quam tu & fratres tui, proculdubio 

verberarer a praeceptore. 

254. Audio multas epistolas a te legi. 

255. Audio quod multae epistolae a te legantur. 

256. Audio libellum tuum nuper excusum lectum 

esse a Principe. 

257. Audio quod libellus nuper excusus lectus sit a 

Principe. 

258. Hodie vidi litteras complures, Oxonia vel 

Londino allatas ad patrem tuum, diligenter 

lectas esse. 

259. Liber hic legendus est nobis omnibus, vel a 

nobis omnibus. 

260. Legendo Ciceronem fies quotidie doctior. 

261. Legendis epistolis Plinii & Politiani, 

plurimum acues ingenium, & orationem tuam 

reddes politiorem. 

262. Audio nihil libentius legi quam verbum Dei. 

263. Valde inviti audimus ea quae non placent. 

264. Audiebam heri vestra poma satis esse matura. 

265. Audivi condiscipulos meos legentes lectiones 

suas.

LATIN TEXT 19 

266. Sorores tuae magna cum molestia audiverant 

clamores vestros cum essetis in horto. 

267. Audiam te libenter si quid habeas quod mihi 

narres. 

268. Audiemus excusationem tuam si quam potes 

afferre iustam & idoneam. 

269. Audi me prius, posterius audiam te. 

270. Libenter audite sacras conciones. 

271. Loquere clarius ut audiam te melius. 

272. Libentissime te audirem, si tantillum otii mihi 

superesset a re mea. 

273. Libentissime audiremus orationem tuam, 

siquam haberes ornatam sententiis. 

274. Si audivero te esse studiosum & diligentem, 

accipies a me dono quinque cerasa & uvas 

passas decem. 

275. Cum fabulam audivissem, mirari coepi & 

increpare mendacem puerum. 

276. Credo te non audivisse hodie buccinam 

meam suaviter sonantem. 

277. Credo quod non audiveris buccinam meam 

suaviter sonantem. 

278. Ego arbitror nos hinc ad diem octavum 

audituros fratrem tuum recitantem carmina 

sua.


279. Eo, immo propero auditum sacram 

concionem quæ habetur in templo Sancti 

Petri hora decima. 

280. Id profecto quod mihi narras admodum 

iucundum est auditu. 

281. Attente audiendum est mihi quid pater tuus 

dicat. 

282. Tempus audiendi concionem prope iam instat. 

283. Veni ad scholam audiendi & discendi causa. 

284. Boni pueri sunt cupidi audiendi præceptorem 

suum. 

285. Audiendo verbum Dei recte pernosces 

rationem perveniendi ad salutem aeternam. 

286. Spero me auditurum Latinam comoediam in 

aula vestra. 

287. Soror mea sub diluculo surrexit, preces 

auditura lectas in triclinio. 

288. Non audior ab omnibus qui iam adsunt. 

289. Verbum Dei attente audiendum est ab iis qui 

salutem per Christum adipisci volunt. 

290. Non audiebar a praeceptore quando narrare 

volui fabulam de gallo gallinaceo. 

291. Frater tuus auditus est a patre meo cum 

narraret quot pisces lacu nostro exceperat.

292. Nunquam recte audiemur ab iis qui inviti 

audiunt. 

293. Si audirer a vobis, vos vicissim a nobis 

audiremini. 

294. Existimo facundum & festivum oratorem 

magna cum voluptate audiri a studiosis 

adolescentibus. 

295. Credo summos oratores aegre auditos esse ab 

iis, qui eloquentiam despiciunt, artesque 

omnes nihil pensi habent. 

296. Spero me diligenter auditum iri a praeceptore, 

cum ad scholam venero. 

297. Credo matrem tuam non auditum iri a patre 

meo. 

298. Auditus a Iudice, domum redii. 

299. Verbum Dei attente & reverenter audiendum 

est. 

300. Studium tuum audiendæ concionis sacræ 

mihi perplacet. 

301. Antidotum vitæ, Patientia est. 

302. Sal vitæ, Amicitia. 

303. Sol vitæ, Sapientia. 

LATIN TEXT 21 

304. Maxima quæque vitæ oblectamenta insulsa 

sunt & insuavia. 

305. Multi nimium habent, nemo satis.


306. Præferendus est dies unus sapientis 

longissimæ æternitati stultorum. 

307. Non est pauper qui caret, sed qui eget, qui 

desiderat. 

308. Risus nec multus sit, nec ob multa, ex 

Epictetus. 

309. Sis tu alienis lacrimis cautior, alieno risu 

laetior. 

310. Magnes amoris amor est. 

311. Nihil est quod sic eliciat amorem ut amor. 

Hinc illud Martialis: ut ameris ama. 

312. Est naturalis quædam in rebus coniunctio & 

harmonia, ut nemo illum oderit, a quo 

diligitur. 

313. Decet eum qui dat, non meminisse beneficii; 

eum vero, qui accipit, intueri non tam munus, 

quam dantis animum. Idcirco fingunt tres 

esse Gratias, duas nunquam retrospicere, 

tertiam semper priores intueri. 

314. Bonus bonus est & bonis & malis. 

315. Malus nec malis nec bonis. 

316. Priusquam incipias, consulto & ubi 

consulueris, mature facto opus est. 

317. Dei auspiciis atque ductui te totum in hac 

vitae militia permittas & imperiis obtemperes 

& exemplum aemuleris.

318. Ne feceris, quod factum nolis. 

319. Modica deambulatio corpusculum reficit, 

immodica conficit. 

320. Quod commodavit fortuna, tollet. 

321. Quod mutuavit natura, repetet. 

322. Quod paraverit virtus, retinebis. 

323. Non refert quam diu vixeris, sed quam bene. 

Vita illa quae bona est, longa est. 

324. Despicere oportet, quod possis deperdere. 

325. Populo cede, non pare. Non est enim cum 

multitudine pugnandum bellua multicipiti sed 

nec eius opinionibus assentiendum. 

326. Non refert qua, sed quo. 

327. In omni loco, in omni fortuna licet recte 

agere, & illo pervenire quo intendimus. 

328. Voluptas est ut apis, mella cum fudit, fugit. 

329. Ebrietas nec madida nec sicca te opprimat. 

330. Carum est quod precibus emitur. 

331. Emere malo, quam rogare. Claudian. T. Riley 

Dictionary. 

332. Magnum pretium sunt preces. 

LATIN TEXT 23 

333. Calumniae morsui nullum est remedium. 

334. Fortuna prospera gubernanda arte, consilio, 

prudentia, ingenio; irata retundenda magno


robore, & invicto animo superanda & 

calcanda. 

335. Sis tu bonorum rector, malorum victor. 

336. Studia nostra non tam intermittenda sunt, 

quam remittenda. 

337. Christus vitae nostrae scopus est: ipse est 

initium, ipse finis, ab ipso proficisciuntur 

omnia, in ipsum tendunt. Huic oportet nos 

affigamus, si volumus beati esse, non alio 

clavo quam mente ipsa. 

338. Posse nocere & nolle, nobile. 

339. Eiusdem est artis recte tacere & recte loqui. 

340. Quanto plus liceat, tanto minus libeat, 

341. Ignoscas aliis multa, nihil tibi. Ausonius. Stone. 

Latin Quotations. 

342. Nolo minor me timeat, despiciatque maior. 

343. Vive memor mortis, memor ut sis salutis. 

344. Tristia cuncta exuperes, aut Animo, aut 

Amico. 

345. Amicum laudato palam, sed errantem occulte 

corripe. 

346. Crux est, si metuas, vincere quod nequeas. 

Ausonius. Stone. Latin Quotations. 

347. Animus vereri qui scit, scit tuto aggredi. 

Publilius Syrus. 3.

348. Ames parentem, si aequus est; sin aliter, 

feras. Publilius Syrus. 8. 

349. Amici vitia si feras, facis tua. Publilius Syrus. 10. 

350. Absentem laedit, qui cum ebrio litigat. 

Publilius Syrus. 12. 

351. Summum malum optat avaro qui vitam illi 

optat diutinam. 

352. Amicos res secundæ parant, adversae 

probant. Publilius Syrus. T. Riley. Dictionary. 

353. Aleator quanto in arte peritior est, tanto 

nequior. Publilius Syrus. 33. 

354. Habere satius est quam avere. 

LATIN TEXT 25 

355. Bis gratum est, quod opus est, ultro si offeras. 

356. Beneficium dare qui nescit, iniuste petit. 


357. Beneficium accipere, est libertatem vendere. 


358. Bis peccas, cum peccanti obsequium 

accommodas. Publilius Syrus. 65. 

359. Beneficium dando accepit, qui digno dedit. 

360. Beneficium qui se dedisse dicit, petit. Publilius 

Syrus. 71. 

361. Coniunctio animi maxima est cognatio. 

362. Arctius alligat mutua benevolentia quam 

affinitas sanguinis.


363. Beneficium qui saepe dat, docet reddere. 


364. Bis vincit, qui se vincit in victoria: primum 

hostem, deinde animum. Publilius Syrus. Stone. 

Latin Quotations. 

365. Bene cogitata si excidunt, non occidunt. 


366. Bonis nocet, quisquis pepercerit malis. 

Publilius Syrus. Stone. Latin Quotations. 

367. Cuivis dolori remedium est patientia. Publilius 

Syrus. T. Riley. Dictionary. 

368. Comes facundus in via pro vehiculo est. 


369. Cui plus licet quam par est, plus vult quam 

licet. Publilius Syrus. 145. 

370. Stultum est maledicere: nam si amicus est cui 

maledicis, iniquè facis; sin inimicus, magis 

illum irritas. 

371. Tutissimum est, esse lentas consultationes, 

nam praecipitata consilia fere inauspicata 

sunt. 

372. Difficilem oportet aurem habere ad crimina. 


373. Lucrum cum iactura famæ, damnum est, non 

lucrum. 

374. Ex vitio alterius, sapiens emendat suum. 

Publilius Syrus. T. Riley. Dictionary. 

375. Etiam pilus unus habet umbram suam.

LATIN TEXT 27 

376. Fortunam citius reperias, quam retineas. 


377. Formosa facies muta commendatio est. 


378. Dolus est accipere beneficium a quoquam, 

cui non possis tantundem reddere. Publilius 

Syrus. 202. 

379. Quoties fortuna favet improbis, hoc fit 

calamitate & malo optimorum. 

380. Feras, non culpes, quod vitari non potest. 


381. Magnæ felicitatis comites sunt Stultitia & 

Arrogantia. 

382. Fidem qui perdidit, nil ultra potest perdere. 


383. Durum est laedi, vel ab amico, vel a potente: 

quod queri de altero non est honestum; de 

altero non est tutum. 

384. Prioris diei discipulus est posterior. 

385. In nullum avarus bonus est, in se pessimus. 


386. Nihil tam dulce est, quod non pariat 

satietatem, nisi varietate condiatur. 

387. Quod superiores peccant, id recidit in malum 

plebis. 

388. Luxuriae multa desunt, avaritiæ omnia. 

Publilius Syrus. T. Riley. Dictionary.


389. Invidiam ferre, aut fortis aut fortunatus 

potest. Publilius Syrus. 285. 

390. Invidiam enim fortunatus neglegit, fortis 

contemnit. 

391. Ira statim subsidit, odium diuturnum est. 

392. Sapientis non est contemnere hostem, 

quantumvis humilem: potest enim oblata 

occasione nocere. 

393. Iudex damnatur, cum nocens absolvitur. 


394. Quisquis admittit scelus, illico sibi damnatus 

est iudice conscientiâ, etiamsi iudex nemo 

pronuntiet. 

395. Loco ignominiae est apud indignum dignitas. 

396. Legem nocens veretur, fortunam innocens. 

397. Molesta est mora in omni re, tamen ea nos 

reddit sapientes, ne quid agamus temere aut 

inconsulto. 

398. Male vivunt qui semper se victuros putant. 


399. Minus decipitur, cui negatur celeriter. Publilius 

Syrus. 374. 

400. Multos timere debet, quem multi timent. 


401. Negandi causa avaro nusquam deficit. Publilius 

Syrus. 431. 

402. Quotidie damnatur qui semper timet.

LATIN TEXT 29 

403. Semper aetas vergit in peius, & mores 

hominum in dies magis ac magis degenerant. 

404. Stultum est timere, quod vitari non potest. 


405. Tam deest avaro quod habet, quam quod non 

habet. Publilius Syrus. 694. 

406. Avarus & suis & alienis ex aequo caret. 

Sententiæ. 

408. Magnus erroris magister, populus. 

409. Assuescat unusquisque iam tum a puero veras 

habere de rebus opiniones, quae simul cum 

ætate adolescent. 

410. Eligenda est optima vitæ ratio, hanc 

consuetudo iucundissimam reddet. 

411. Homo ex corpore constat & animo. 

412. Corpus habemus ex terra & his elementis quæ 

cernimus ac tangimus, corporibus bestiarum 

simile. 

413. [Habemus] Animum divinitus datum, Angelis 

& Deo similem, unde censetur homo, & qui 

solus merito esset homo appellandus, ut 

maximis viris placuit. Animus enim cuiusque 

is est quisque. 

414. Regina & princeps rerum omnium 

præstantissima est Virtus, cui reliqua omnia si 

suo velint officio defungi, ancillari oportet.


415. Divitiae non sunt gemmæ aut metalla, non 

magnifica ædificia vel supellex instructa, sed 

non iis carere quæ sunt ad tuendam vitam 

necessaria. 

416. Corpus ipsum nihil aliud est, quam 

tegumentum vel mancipium animi, cui & 

natura & ratio & Deus iubent subiectum esse, 

ut brutum sentienti, mortale immortali ac 

divino. 

417. Quid aliud est vita quam peregrinatio 

quædam, tot undique casibus obiecta & 

petita, cui nulla hora non imminet finis, qui 

potest levissimis de causis accidere? 

418. Quemadmodum in via, sic & in vita, quo quis 

expeditior & paucioribus sarcinis implicitus, 

hoc levius & iucundius iter facit. 

419. Divitiæ & possessiones & vestimenta in 

usum tantum parantur. Non adiuvant 

quenquam immensæ opes, sed opprimunt, ut 

navem ingentia onera. 

420. Aurum nisi utare, parum differt a caeno, nisi 

quod magis angit eius custodia, & efficit ut 

dum uni studes, ea neglegas quæ sunt homini 

maxime salutaria. 

421. Divitiarum maxima pars, ædificia, supellex 

numerosa & opulenta, gemmæ, aurum, 

argentum, ornamentorum omne genus,

LATIN TEXT 31 

spectantium oculis & comparantur & 

exponuntur, non possidentium usibus. 

422. Quid aliud est nobilitas, quam nascendi sors 

& opinio a populi stultitia inducta? Ut quæ 

sæpenumero latrociniis quæritur. 

423. Vera & solida nobilitas a virtute nascitur, 

stultumque est gloriari te parentem habuisse 

bonum, cum sis ipse malus; & turpitudine tua 

dedecori sis pulchritudini generis. 

424. Ignobilitatem contemnere, est Deum nascendi 

authorem tacite reprehendere. 

425. Potentia quid est aliud quam speciosa 

molestia? in qua si quis sciret, quæ 

sollicitudines, quæ anxietates insint, quantum 

malorum mare, nemo est tam ambitiosus qui 

non eam fugeret, ut gravem miseriam. 

426. Quantum est odium si regas malos, quanto 

maius si malus ipse. 

427. Quid in somno, quid in solitudine inter 

summum regem interest & infimum servum? 

428. In corpore ipso quid est forma? nempe 

articula bene colorata. Si intraria cerni 

possent, quanta vel in corpore speciosissimo 

cerneretur fœditas? 

429. Lineamenta & corporis decor quid iuvant, si 

turpis sit animus? & (sicut Græcus ille dixit) 

In hospitio pulchro hospes deformis?


430. Forma, vires, agilitas, & ceteræ corporis 

dotes, ut flosculi celeriter marcescunt, exiguis 

casibus diffugiunt. Vel una febricula 

validissimum quandoque hominem concutit, 

& summum decorem tollit. 

431. Nemo potest externa, iure sua dicere, quæ 

tam facile ad alios transeunt, nec corporea, 

quae tam cito avolant. 

432. Quid quod hæc quae multi admirantur, 

magnorum vitiorum sint causae, velut 

insolentiæ, arrogantiæ, socordiæ, ferocitatis, 

livoris, aemulationis, simultatum, rixarum, 

bellorum, cædis, stragis, cladis? 

433. Ex luxu & intemperantia, morbi plerique ad 

corpus redundant, & ad rem familiarem 

permagna damna, tum ad animum certa 

pœnitentia, & hebetudo ingenii, quod deliciis 

corporis extenuatur, ac frangitur. 

434. Maximum malum putato, non paupertatem 

aut ignobilitatem aut carcerem aut nuditatem, 

ignominiam, deformitatem corporis, morbos, 

imbecillitatem, sed vitia & his proxima, 

inscitiam, stuporem, dementiam. 

435. Magnum bonum credito horum contraria, 

virtutem & quæ huic sunt finitima, peritiam, 

acumen ingenii, sanitatem mentis. 

436. Si externa bona habeas, proderunt tibi ad 

virtutem relata; oberunt, ad vitia. Si non

LATIN TEXT 33 

habeas, cave ne quæras vel cum minimo 

virtutis dispendio. 

437. Quo curatius est corpus, hoc animus 

neglectior. 

438. Quo mollius habetur corpus, hoc acrius menti 

reluctatur; & ut equus delicate pastus 

sessorem excutit. 

439. Gravis sarcina corporis animum elidit, 

acumen ingenii saginâ corporis, aut 

indulgentiâ retunditur. 

440. Cibi, somni, exercitationes, tota corporis 

curatio ad sanitatem referenda est, non ad 

voluptatem, ut animo prompte inserviat. 

441. Nihil est quod æque & vigorem mentis 

debilitet & robur ac nervos corporis infringat, 

ut voluptas: quippe vires omnes & corporis & 

mentis opere ac labore vegetantur; otio ac 

mollitie voluptatis languescunt. 

442. Mundities corporis & victus citra delicias aut 

morositatem, ad valetudinem & ingenium 

confert. 

443. Ablues subinde manus & faciem frigida, 

detergesque mundo linteolo. 

444. Arceatur frigus cum ab aliis partibus, tum vel 

maxime a cervice. 

445. Ne statim edas a quiete nec ante prandium, 

nisi tenuiter.


446. I e n t a c u l u m s e d a n d o s t o m a c h o a u t 

refocillando datur corpori, non satietati. 

447. Tres aut quattuor panis bucceæ sufficiunt sine 

potione, aut certe exigua, atque ea tenui: 

salutare hoc non minus ingenio quam corpori. 

448. In prandio & cena assuesce non vesci, nisi ex 

uno obsonii genere, eodem simplicissimo &, 

quantum per facultates licebit, saluberrimo, 

quamvis multa mensæ inferantur. 

449. Varietas ciborum homini pestilens, 

pestilentior condimentorum. 

450. Natura necessaria docuit, quæ sunt pauca & 

parabilia. Stultitia superflua excogitavit, quae 

sunt infinita, & difficilia. 

451. Naturæ si des necessaria, delectatur & 

roboratur tanquam propriis; sin superflua, 

debilitatur & affligitur tanquam alienis. 

452. Stultitiam necessaria non explent: superflua 

cum obruant, non satiant. 

453. A cena ne bibe, aut si id admonet sitis, sume; 

humidum aliquid & frigidiusculum aut 

perpusillum tenuis potiunculæ. 

454. Inter eam potionem & quietem interpone, 

cum minimum, horæ dimidium. 

455. Exercitationes corporis non erunt immodicæ, 

caeterum aptandae rationi valetudinis.

LATIN TEXT 35 

456. Somnus sumendus est tanquam medicina 

quædam curando corpori, tantummodo 

quantus sufficit. Immodicus enim reddit 

corpora redundantia noxiis humoribus, 

segnia, pigra, lenta, & celeritatem mentis 

tardat. 

457. Non est existimandum vitæ id tempus, quod 

somno impenditur: vita enim vigilia est. 

458. Non attingendi sunt authores spurci, ne quid 

sordium animo ex contagie adhæreat. 

459. Tribus velut instrumentis fabricamur 

eruditionem: ingenio, memoriâ, curâ. 

460. Ingenium exercitatione acuitur. Memoria 

excolendo augetur. Utrumque enervant 

deliciae, bona valetudo confirmat. 

461. Scito te operam & tempus perdere, si quæ 

legis vel audis non attendas. 

462. Quæ ignoras, ne pudeat quaerere. Ne 

erubesce a quovis doceri, quod maximi viri 

non erubuerunt; erubesce potius ignorare aut 

nolle discere. 

463. Si videri vis doctus, da operam ut sis; nulla 

est compendiosior via. Quemadmodum non 

alia ratione facilius consequeris, ut 

existimeris bonus, quam si sis talis. 

464. Quicquid videri cupis, fac ut sis: aliter frustra 

cupis.


465. Falsa tempus infirmat, vera confirmat. 

466. Cuiusvis hominis est errare: nullius nisi 

insipientis in errore perseverare. 

467. Ne labores quam multa respondeas, sed quam 

apte & in tempore. 

468. Prandio tuo & cenæ illos adhibe, qui te 

possint instituere, quique suavi ac docta 

collocutione pariter & exhilarent te & 

peritiorem reddant. 

469. Ex sapientibus disces, quo fias melior. Ex 

stultis, quo fias cautior. 

470. Annitere, ne sola verba authoris quem legis 

intellegas, sed præcipue sensa. 

471. Quo plura memoriæ commendabis, hoc 

custodiet omnia fidelius; quo pauciora, 

infidelius. 

472. Studio sapientiae nullus in vita terminus 

statuendus est, cum vitâ est finiendum. 

Semper illa tria sunt homini, quamdiu vivit, 

meditanda: quomodo bene sapiat, quomodo 

bene dicat, quomodo bene agat. 

473. Ab studiis arrogantia omnis arcenda est. Nam 

ea quæ vel doctissimus mortalium novit, non 

sunt minutissimum eorum quæ ignorat. 

Exiguum quiddam & obscurum & incertum 

est quicquid homines sciunt, mentesque 

nostrae in hoc corporeo carcere devinctæ

LATIN TEXT 37 

magnâ ignoratione & altissimis tenebris 

premuntur, aciemque adeo retusam habemus, 

ut nec summas penetremus rerum facies. 

474. Profectui studiorum plurimum nocet 

arrogantia. Multi enim potuissent ad 

sapientiam pervenire, ni iam putassent se 

pervenisse. 

475. Vitanda contentio, æmulatio invida, 

obtrectatio, inanis gloriæ cupido; cum in hoc 

sequamur studia, ut illa fugiamus. 

476. Studia res lætas condiunt, tristes leniunt, 

temerarios impetus iuventæ cohibent, 

senectutis molestam tarditatem levant. Domi, 

foris, in publico, in privato, in solitudine, in 

frequentia, in otio, in negotio comitantur, 

adsunt, immo præsunt, opitulantur, iuvant. 

477. Non est despondendus animus aut 

contrahendus reflante fortuna, quippe 

adversis matutinis, interdum succedunt 

prospera vespertina. 

478. Nihil aliud est haec vita quam peregrinatio, 

qua in alteram sempiternam tendimus, 

p a u c i s s i m i s q u e r e b u s a d h o c i t e r 

conficiendum egemus. 

479. Fortunæ muneribus expleri: quid aliud est 

quam peditem multis sarcinis impediri ac 

obrui.


480. Nemo est tam stupide amens, qui non se illi 

civitati ad quam tendit & ubi morari destinat, 

potius quam itineri adornet componatque. 

481. Per Religionem Deus cognoscitur; cognitus, 

fieri nequit aliter quin ametur. 

482. Mundus hic est velut domus quædam Dei, vel 

potius templum. Ipse ex nihilo in hanc 

faciem, atque ornatum protulit. 

483. Angeli, dæmones, homines, animantia, 

stirpes, lapides, caeli & elementa, cuncta 

denique Deo curæ sunt ac parent. 

484. Nihil videmus fieri, nihil moveri, nihil 

contingere, ac ne stipulam quidem attolli 

ullam, aut floccum volitare extra Dei 

præscripta & iussa. 

485. Humana omnis sapientia, si cum religione 

Christiana conferatur, caenum est & mera 

stultitia. 

486. Hanc nosse, perfecta est sapientia; iuxta hanc 

vivere, perfecta virtus; sed nemo vere novit, 

qui non pie vivit. 

487. Bonitas Christi amorem elicit; maiestas eius, 

cultum; sapientia, fidem. 

488. Corporalia opera fatua sunt ante Deum, nisi 

conditura ex animo addatur. 

489. In occultissimis recessibus & procul ab 

omnium oculis atque adeo in corde ipso atque

LATIN TEXT 39 

in animo tuo scito te habere Deum arbitrum, 

testem, iudicem omnium, etiam cogitationum 

tuarum, ut illius præsentiam reveritus, nihil 

non modo facias, sed nec in animum admittas 

nefarium aut turpe. 

490. Impium est in res sacras iocari aut dicta 

sanctarum Scripturarum ad lusus, ineptias, 

aniles fabulas, scommata convertere; ceu quis 

medicinam ad salutem paratam caeno 

aspergat. 

491. Sacris intersis attente ac pie, non ignarus 

quæcunque seu vides seu audis esse 

purissima & sacrosancta, spectareque ad 

immensam illa Dei maiestatem; quam adorare 

facile est, comprehendere impossibile. 

492. Cum Deum, Dominum appellas, fac illi 

servias; cum Patrem, fac ames; & dignum te 

præstes tanto Patre filium. 

493. In citharœdo turpe est aliud ipsum ore, aliud 

fides eius sonare. Multo est turpius, cum Deo 

psallimus, aliud linguam dicere, aliud 

animum cogitare. 

494. Deus omnibus animantibus variam quotidie 

alimoniam sufficit, conservat omnia, & 

vindicat ab interitu, quo nutu suo tendunt. 

495. Nihil verius datur Christo, quam quod egenis 

datur.


496. Ubi lectum ingrederis, fac cogites 

unumquemque diem imaginem esse humanae 

vitæ, cui succedit nox, & somnus simulacrum 

mortis expressissimum. 

497. Sapientissimus vitæ nostræ magister, nempe 

& author, unicum dedit ad vivendum 

documentum, ut Amemus. 

498. Nemo invidet ei, quem amat: nec quisquam 

malis amici gaudet, nec bonis indolet. Amor 

enim omnia reddit communia, suaque esse 

existimat, quæ sunt eius quem amat. 

499. Longissimæ & obscurissimæ sunt in humano 

corde latebræ. Quæ humana acies in tantam 

caliginem penetrabit? 

500. Hominem tibi a Deo commendatum, si 

dignus est, ama, quia dignus est, quem ames; 

sin indignus, ama, quia Deus dignus, cui 

pareas. 

501. Pacem & amorem & concordiam invexit 

Deus. Partes & factiones & privatas utilitates 

cum alienis damnis, sicut etiam dissidia, 

rixas, contentiones, bella, Diabolus 

peritissimus horum artifex. 

502. Concordiâ etiam pusilla coalescunt; discordiâ 

maxima dissipantur. 

503. Neminem irriseris, cogitans quod uni alicui 

accidit, posse cuivis accidere. Age potius Deo

LATIN TEXT 41 

gratias quod te extra eam sortem posuerit, & 

ora, tum tibi ne quid tale accidat, tum illi sic 

afflicto saltem remedium aliquod vel æcum 

animum, & ipse subveni, si potes. 

504. Nullae sunt certiores opes quam certæ 

amicitiae. Nullum potentius satellitium quam 

amici fideles. 

505. Solem e mundo tollit, qui e vita amicitiam. 

506. Vera & solida & duratura amicitia 

tantummodo est inter bonos, inter quos facile 

amor coalescit. 

507. Mali nec inter se amici sunt, nec cum bonis. 

508. Ut ameris certissima & brevissima est per 

amorem via. Nihil enim sic amore elicit ut 

amor. 

509. Amicitiae venenum, si ames tanquam osurus, 

& amicum sic habeas, ut putes posse 

inimicum fieri. 

510. Ne in alienas vitas inquiras, neve curiosus 

scrutetis quid quisque agat; multæ hinc 

suboriuntur simultates. Praeterea stultum est 

alios probe nosse, seipsum ignorare. 

511. Convicium convicio regerere est lutum luto 

purgare. 

512. Assentatio deforme vitium: turpe illi qui dicit; 

perniciosum ei qui audit.


513. Sermone utitor modesto, civili, comi; non 

aspero, non rusticano vel imperito, sed nec 

accurato aut affectato nimis. 

514. Ne celeritatem in loquendo nimiam suscipias, 

nec cogitationem prævertant verba; nec 

respondeas, antequam qua de re plene 

intellexeris, & quid ille, cui respondes, dixerit 

senseritque. 

515. Rarissimum debet esse pervulgatum illud, 

Quicquid in buccam, ac nescio an usquam 

admittendum, cum inter amicos cavendum 

sit, ne quid dicamus, quod amicitiam dirimat 

aut laedat. 

516. In disserendo ne sis contentiosus aut pertinax. 

Si verum audias, hoc protinus silentio 

reverere, illique tanquam divinae rei 

assurgito. 

517. Sin non audias, nihilominus concede hoc vel 

amico, vel modestiæ tuae, præsertim ubi 

nullum neque probi mores detrimentum 

accipiunt, neque pietas. 

518. Quod taceri vis, prior ipse taceas; sin 

detecturus es, vide etiam atque etiam cui. 

519. Ne mendax sis nec mordax. 

520. Si mendacem te homines norint, nemo credet 

tibi, etiam si affirmes verissima.

LATIN TEXT 43 

521. Contra si veracem, maiorem habebit fidem 

nutus tuus quam aliorum sanctissimum 

iusiurandum. 

522. Miser is est qui id egit, unde extricare se non 

potest nisi per mendacium. 

523. Ne expectes dum necessitates ad te suas 

familiaris amicus deferat; tu illas odorare, & 

iis ultro subvenias. 

524. Parentes non amabis solum, sed secundum 

Deum unice venerabere. 

525. Crede te illi esse carum a quo amice 

reprehenderis. Nec unquam reprehensionem 

obesse puta vel inimici. Nam si vera obiecit, 

ostendit quod emendemus; sin falsa, quod 

vitemus; ita semper vel meliores reddit vel 

cautiores. 

526. Esto in admittendis ad familiaritatem 

cunctantior; in retinendis semel admissis 

constantior. 

527. Ex bestiis exitiabilis maxime inter feras, 

Invidia; inter mansuetas, Adulatio. 

528. Si reprehendi fers ægre, reprehendenda ne 

feceris. 

529. Natura nostra in malum fertur prona; ad 

virtutem autem acclivis est, atque ardua 

semita.


530. In minores præbe te comem; in maiores 

reverentem; in pares facilem ac tractabilem. 

531. Si virtute non excellis, cur postulas videri 

aliis potior? Si excellis, cur affectibus 

moderandis non plusquam vulgus præstas? 

532. Oculus Domini singula intuetur; ipse novit & 

facientem iniuriam & patientem. 

533. Pluris facias iudicium conscientiæ tuæ quam 

voces omnes ingentis multitudinis, quæ 

imperita & stulta est; ignota temere ut probat, 

sic & damnat. 

534. Fama nec profutura malo, nec læsura bonum. 

535. Mortuus quid plus referes de fama, quam 

pictura Apellis laudata? aut equus in Olympia 

victor? nec vivo quidem prodest, si eam 

ignorat; si novit, nihil adfert aliud, nisi ut 

sapiens contemnat, insipiens sibi magis 

placeat. 

536. Conscientia magna est huius vitae magistra. 

537. Qui numinis curam abiciunt ut audacius & 

securius peccent; ii dupliciter sunt mali, quod 

nec homines reverentur nec Deum. 

538. Conscientia ista effuse delinquit, quæ nullo 

metu coercetur. 

539. Laborem pro aeterno & caelesti praemio, quis 

nisi amens refugiat? Cum nec caduca hæc & 

fragilia citra laborem acquirantur.

LATIN TEXT 45 

540. Peccatum hominis mors est, ut iugulare 

seipsum videatur quisquis peccat. Abducit 

enim se a Deo vita nostra, & a quiete 

conscientiae suae, qua nihil est beatius. 

541. Ut unus dies humanae vitae praeferendus est 

longissimae aetati corvi aut cervi; ita dies 

unus ex religione actus, hoc est divinae vitae, 

t o t i a e t e r n i t a t i s i n e r e l i g i o n e e s t 

anteponendus. 

Facetiae & argutè dicta. 

543. Publius ubi Mutium imprimis malevolum 

solito tristiorem vidisset, Aut Mutio, inquit, 

nescio quid incommodi accessit, aut nescio 

cui aliquid boni. Macrobius. Saturnalia. 2.4. 

544. Augustus Caesar exceptus a quodam cena 

satis parca, & quasi quotidiana (nam pene 

nulli se invitanti negabat) post epulum inops 

ac sine ullo apparatu discedens, valedicenti 

hoc tantum insusurravit: Non putabam me tibi 

tam familiarem. Macrobius. Saturnalia. 2.4. 

545. Interroganti quânam horâ dici prandendum 

esset? Diviti, inquit, ubi velit, pauperi cum 

possit. Diogenes Laertius. Life of Diogenes the Cynic. 

546. Diogenes interrogatus quo vino maxime 

delectaretur, Alieno, inquit. Diogenes Laertius. 

Life of Diogenes the Cynic. 

547. Quidam rogabat unde palleret aurum? 

Diogenes respondit, Quia nusquam non


haberet insidiatores. Diogenes Laertius. Life of 

Diogenes the Cynic. 

548. Diogenes Myndum profectus, cum vidisset 

portas ingentes, urbem vero exiguam, O viri, 

inquit, Myndi, portas occludite, ne quando 

urbs vestra egrediatur. Diogenes Laertius. Life of 

Diogenes the Cynic. 

549. Prandebat in foro Diogenes: Proinde ab his 

qui astabant, canis appellatus: Vos, inquit, 

canes estis, qui me prandentem circumstatis. 

Diogenes Laertius. Life of Diogenes the Cynic. 

550. Scorti cuiusdam filio lapidem proiicienti in 

concionem: Cave, inquit, ne patrem ferias. 


551. Dionysius Syracusanus, detracta veste aurea 

Iovi Olympio, palleum ei laneum iniecit, 

atque rogatus, quid ita faceret? Quoniam, 

inquit, aestate gravis est aurea vestis; hieme 

frigidâ laneum vero indumentum utrique 

tempori multo aptius. Cicero. De Natura Deorum. 

34. 

552. Idem Dionysius cum Æsculapio barbam 

auream demi iussisset, affirmavit, Non 

convenire ut huius pater Apollo imberbis, 

ipse vero, qui filius esset, barbatus 

conspiceretur. Cicero. De Natura Deorum. 34. 

553. Fur quispiam Demosthenis lucubrationes 

eiusque scriptiones paulo petulantius 

irridebat. Cui ille, Scio, inquit, me tibi

LATIN TEXT 47 

molestum esse quod noctu lucernam accendo. 

Plutarch. Life of Demosthenes. 

554. Cum Lacon uxorem duxisset perpusillam, 

lepide dicebat, E malis, quod minimum esset, 

eligendam. Erasmus. Adagia. 1148. 

555. Cum adolescens quidam nimio luxu ad 

inopiam redactus, oleas in cena esitaret, 

Diogenes forte praeteriens, Si sic pransus, 

inquit, esses, non ita cenares. Diogenes Laertius. 

Life of Diogenes the Cynic. 

556. Medicus quidam imperitus, cum Pausaniæ 

diceret, Qui fit, O bone vir, quod nihil mali 

habeas? Quia inquit, te medico non utor. 

Plutarch. Life of Pausanias. 

557. Galba rogatus a quopiam ut utendam daret 

penulam, festive respondens, Non pluit, 

inquit, non opus est tibi; si pluat, ipse utar. 

Macrobius. Saturnalia 2.4. 

558. Cum Aristoteles iam annos natus fere 

sexaginta duos adeo laboraret, ut admodum 

tenuis vitae spes superesset, convenerunt ad 

illum discipuli rogantes, ut ex ipsis aliquem 

deligeret, qui in locum eius succederet. Inter 

auditores erant duo praecipui, Theophrastus 

Lesbius & Menedemus Rhodius. Aristoteles 

respondit se, quod petebatur, facturum ubi 

daretur opportunitas. Paulo post, cum rursus 

ad cum eadem de causa convenissent, dixit 

vinum quod biberet sibi parum esse


commodum, ac quaeri iussit Exoticum vel 

Rhodium vel Lesbium. Id simul atque 

curatum est, gustato Rhodio, dixit: Firmum 

hercle vinum & iucundum. Mox gustato 

Lesbio: Utrumque, inquit, egregie bonum, sed 

Lesbium suavius. Id ubi dixit, nulli dubium 

suit, quin lepide simul & verecunde 

successorem sibi ea voce, non vinum 

delegisset. Probavit utrumque, nec tamen 

auditoribus elegendi ius ademit.[Sed Græcus 

sermo plusculum habet civilitatis: quod ()*(+, 

id est, vinum, sit generis masculini: ut hæc 

vox, , -.%/'(+ 01$2*, possit & ad personam 

accommodari.] Aulus Gellius. Noctes Atticae. 113. 

559. Quidam e familiaribus Adriani Sophistæ 

miserat illi pisces in disco argenteo, picturato 

auro, at ille delectatus vasculo non remisit, 

tantum ei, qui miserat, respondit: Bene facis 

quod etiam pisces; quasi dictus esset dono 

missus, pisces tantum novitatis gratia additi. 

Quidam autem dicunt ioco factum, ut 

castigaret discipuli vitium, qui sordidior esse 

dicebatur. 

560. Pollio dicebat, commode agendo factum est 

ut saepe agerem: sed saepe agendo factum est 

ut minus commode; quia scilicet assiduitate 

nimia facilitas magis, quam facultas, nec 

fiducia, sed temeritas paratur. Quod accurate

LATIN TEXT 49 

factum velimus, raro faciendum est. Erasmus. 

Apophthegmata. 

561. P h i l o x e n u s q u o n d a m c e n a n s a p u d 

Dionysium, quoniam animadvertebat regi 

a p p o s i t u m p i s c e m M u l l u m i n s i g n i 

magnitudine, cum ipsi appositus esset 

perpusillus (in piscium enim genere laudantur 

adulti), pisciculum auribus admovit. Id 

factum admiranti Dionysio causamque 

percontanti: In manibus, inquit, est Galatea, 

de qua volebam ex hoc quaedam percontari. 

Verum negat se per aetatem quicquam adhuc 

scire, sed ait proavum suum istic esse in tuo 

disco, qui multa posset commemorare si 

liceat alloqui. Exhilaratus rex misit illi suum 

Mullum. Athenaeus. Deipnosophistai. 1. 

562. Cuculo minores aviculas percontanti, cur 

ipsam fugerent: Quoniam, inquiebant, 

suspicamur te aliquando futurum accipitrem. 

Coccyx enim specie non multum differt ab 

accipitre. [Cavendum ab iis, qui tyrannidis 

specimen moribus edunt.] Ex Plutarcho. 

Plutarch. Life of Aratus. 

563. Cum Antisthenes ipse salsamenta per forum 

gestaret, id quibusdam admirantibus quod 

Philosophus officio tam sordido fungeretur, 

idque in publico, ac non potius servo 

delegasset: Quid, inquit, admiramini? Hæc 

mihi porto, non aliis. Sentiens nullum esse


sordidum obsequium quod sibi quis 

impenderet; dein non esse indecorum, cum 

portare salsamenta, qui salsamentis 

vesceretur. Plutarch. Moralia. Precepts of Statecraft. 

15. 

564. Stilpo videns Cratetem hibernis mensisibus 

frigore rubentem: !"#$%&, inquit, µ"' ()$%*+ 

,($'+ -µ*./"0 #*'+"1. Lepos qui est in vocis 

ambiguo, Latine reddi non potest: 3&'*(4 

coniunctim sonat “novo”, & 3&5 *(4 

disiunctim sonat “& mente”: Discrimen 

auribus vix sentiri potest, scripto potest 

ostendi. Videris, inquit egere pallio novo, sive 

pallio & mente. Novum requirebat gelu; 

mentem, Cynici stultitia, qui vestem non 

accommodaret tempori. Diogenes Laertius. Life of 

Stilpo. 

565. Menedemus Eretriensis percontanti cuidam, 

an patrem cædere desiisset, respondit: Neque 

caecidi, neque desii. Quam alter subiecisset, 

oportere solvere ambiguitatem per 3&5 & (63, 

aut affirmando, aut negando: Ridiculum, 

inquit, est vestras sequi leges, cum liceat in 

portis occurrere. Alter captabat illum 

insidiosa percontatione: sive enim 

respondisset, desii, sive non desii, agnovisset 

crimen. Ille hoc præsentiens exclusit 

sophisticum cavillum. Diogenes Laertius. Life of 

Menedemus.

LATIN TEXT 51 

566. Bion rogatus essetne ducenda uxor: Si 

deformem, inquit, duxeris, habebis poenam; 

sin formosam, habebis communem. [In 

Græcis vocibus plusculum est iucunditatis 

acis, 7($*8* & 3('*9*. Nec minus Latinis 

inest. si hanc dicamus, suspectam: illam 

despectam.] Diogenes Laertius. Life of Bion. 

567. Epictetus Philosophiæ summam duobus 

verbis comprehendere solitus est, :*.;(< 3&5 

:7.;(


570. Cum plerique rei quos Severus Cassius 

accusabat, absolverentur, & is cui Cæsar 

forum extruendum locarat, diu traheret illum 

operis expectatione: Vellem, inquit, Cassius & 

forum meum accusasset. Macrobius. Saturnalia. 

2.4. 

571. Narrant Alexandrum Magnum astantem 

Diogeni, quæsisse ab eo, num ipsum 

metueret. At ille: Quid es? Bonum an malum? 

Alexander respondit; Bonum. Quis, inquit, 

timet bonum? [Convicit regem non esse 

metuendum, nisi se malum esse profiteretur.] 


572. Cum Diogenes in dolio, sicco mucidoque 

pane, vescens solus, audiret totam urbem 

lætitiâ perstrepentem (erat enim dies festus) 

sensit animo non nihil tædii, diuque secum de 

relinquendo vitæ instituto cogitavit. Sed cum 

tandem mures videret adrepentes panisque 

micas edere: Quid tibi displices, inquit, o 

Diogenes, sat magnificus es, ecce etiam 

parasitas alis. Diogenes Laertius. Life of Diogenes the 

Cynic. 

573. Quidam in publico gestans longam trabem, 

per imprudentiam percusserat Diogenem, 

moxque ex more dixit: Cave. At Diogenes, 

Num, inquit, me vis iterum percutere? Diogenes 

Laertius. Life of Diogenes the Cynic. 

574. Diogenes quodam tempore cum diutissime 

legens, tandem eo venisset, ut videret chartam

LATIN TEXT 53 

vacuam, Bono, inquit, animo estote viri, 

terram video. Diogenes Laertius. Life of Diogenes the 

Cynic. 

575. Antigonus Thrasyllo Cynico petenti 

drachmam, Non est, respondit, munus regium. 

Cynico subiciente: Talentum igitur da. At 

non, inquit, Cynicum tale munus accipere. 

[Utroque cornu reppulit postulatoris 

improbitatem, quem existimabat nullo 

dignum beneficio.] Plutarch. Moralia. 182E. 

576. Faustus Sullæ filius, in sororem, quæ eodem 

tempore cum duobus adulteris haberet 

consuetudinem, Fulvio Fullonis filio, & 

Pompeio cognomine Macula, facetissime 

lusit: Miror, inquit, sororem meam habere 

maculam, cum Fullonem habeat. Macrobius. 

Saturnalia. 2.2. 

577. Vespasianus reprehendenti filio Tito, quod 

etiam urinae vectigal commentus esset, 

pecuniam ex prima pensione admovit ad 

nares, sciscitans num odore offenderetur, & 

illo negante, Atqui, inquit, e lotio est. Hinc 

illud: Bonus odor lucri ex re qualibet. 

Suetonius. Vespasian. 23. 

578. Virgilius vates suspirabundus ubique 

observatus est. Unde facetum illud Augusti 

responsum, inter hunc ipsum sedentis, & 

Flaccum Horatium, qui oculorum lippitudine 

laboravit, rogatus a quodam amicorum, quid


ageret, Sedeo, inquit, inter suspiria & 

lacrimas. 

579. Diverterat aliquando quidam, peregre iter 

faciens, ad diversorium, ubi apposita est ei 

cena omni ex parte olitoria, vinum item 

dilutissimum, omnia demum administrata 

parcissime. Postquam autem cenasset, iussit 

vocari ad se medicum ad mercedem 

capiendam. Caupo respondit: Ecquid, malum, 

in viculo maxime agresti medicum requiris? 

Tum ille: Numne, o bone, tete ipsum ignoras? 

Quo merces operæ tuæ par sit, medici 

precium accipe, non cauponis, quando ut 

ægrotum me pavisti in cenula. Pontano. De 

sermone. Bk.3. 

580. Pyrrhiniculus Vasco ad hospitum quoddam 

diverterat, atque apposita mensa anaticulam 

versabat in lancibus perbelle unctam atque 

alliatam. Ingreditur derepente ad illum viator 

Hispanus, iniectisque in anaticulam oculis, 

Potes, inquit, o amice, advenientem comiter 

amicum accipere. Tum Pyrrhiniculus, quo 

nomine ipse esset exquirit. Audenter ille, ac 

i a c t a b u n d u s , Alopantius, i n q u i t , 

Ausimarchides Hibernius Alorchides. 

Pappae, tum Pyrrhiniculus, quattuorne 

avicula hæc heroibus, & quidem Hispanis? 

Absit iniuria. Ea Pyrrhiniculo satis est uni: 

minutos enim decent minuta. Ex Pontano. 

Pontano. De sermone. Bk.3.

LATIN TEXT 55 

581. Diogenes cum ridere vellet imperitum 

sagittandi hominem, scopo se admovebat; 

rogatus cur ita faceret, Ne me feriat, inquit. 


582. Puer Florentinus & argutus & perurbanus, 

adductus ante sacerdotem Cardinalem iocandi 

gratia, multa cum facete admodum nec minus 

etiam scite dixisset, sacerdosque ipse ad 

amicum qui astabat conversus, susurasset 

huiusmodi pueros consuesse ubi ad ætatem 

p e r v e n i s s e n t r o b u s t i o r e m , i n g e n i o 

subcrassescere. Nae, inquit, O bone 

Cardinalis, puerulum te oportuit scitum fuisse 

admodum. Pontano. De Sermone. 

583. Quidam canescens ab Adriano Cæsare 

quiddam petierat & repulsus est. Is cum 

aliquanto post idem peteret, sed capillitio 

nigro (nam id tinctura fecerat) Cæsar 

agnoscens faciem: Istuc, inquit, negavi patri 

tuo. Scriptores Historiae Augustae. Hadrian. 

584. Cum Minutius hostium insidiis septus in 

summo esset periculo, ne cum suis copiis 

periret, Fabius e monte movens exercitum 

venit illi auxilio, multisque trucidatis hostibus 

ipsum eripuit. Hoc facto Hannibal ad suos 

dixit: Nonne vobis sæpenumero prædixi fore, 

ut illa montana nubes nobis aliquando 

tempestatem immitteret? Plutarch. Life of Fabius 

Maximus.


585. Iulia Augusti filia cum patrem salutaret, 

senserat illius oculos licentiore cultu 

offensos, licet ille dissimularet; itaque postero 

die, mutato cultu patrem complexa est. Tum 

Cæsar, qui pridie dolorem suum continuerat, 

gaudium continere non potuit. Et quanto 

magis, inquit, iste cultus decet Augusti filiam. 

Tum illa: Nimirum hodie me patris oculis 

ornavi, heri viri. Macrobius. Saturnalia. 2.5. 

586. In spectaculo gladiatorum converterant in se 

populi oculos Livia & Iulia, comitatus 

dissimilitudine: Liviam cingebant viri graves, 

Iuliam iuvenes luxuriosi comitabantur. Pater 

Iuliam admonuit scripto, videret quantum 

inter duas principes feminas interesset. Illa 

rescripsit: Et hi mecum senes fient. Macrobius. 


587. Augustus etiamnum adolescens lepide tetigit 

Vatinium: siquidem is podagræ obnoxius 

videri studebat discussisse vitium, ac iam 

mille passus ambulare se gloriabatur. Non 

miror, inquit Cæsar, dies aliquanto sunt 

longiores. Macrobius. Saturnalia. 2.4. 

588. Quispiam Præfectura Equitum submotus, 

insuper & salarium ab Augusto postulare est 

ausus, hoc colore, ut diceret se non lucri 

causâ salarium petere, sed ut tuo, inquit, 

iudicio videar impetrasse munus, & ita 

credar non ab officio submotus, sed officium

LATIN TEXT 57 

deposuisse. Tu, inquit Augustus, apud omnes 

prædica te accepisse, ego non negabo. 

Macrobius. Saturnalia. 2.4. 

589. Domitianus Caesar initio principatus quotidie 

sibi secretum horarium sumere consuevit, nec 

interim aliud quam muscas captere, easque 

stilo præacuto configere. Ut cuidam 

interroganti essetne quis intus cum Cæsare, 

Vibius Crispus lepide responderit: Ne Musca 

quidem. Suetonius. Domitian. 3. 

590. Cum tres essent designati, qui legati 

proficiscerentur in Bithyniam, quorum unus 

podagra teneretur, alter caput haberet 

vulneribus confossum, tertius vecordia 

laborare videretur, Cato ridens dixit: Populi 

Romani legationem nec pedes habere, nec 

caput, nec cor. Plutarch. Marcus Cato. 9. 

591. Cum oeconomus Lucullo cenam modestam 

apparasset, accersitum obiurgavit; illo 

dicente: Non putabam sumptuoso apparatu 

opus esse, cum solus esses cenaturus. Quid 

ais?, inquit Lucullus. An ignorabas apud 

Lucullum hodie cenaturum Lucullum? 

Plutarch. Life of Lucullus. 

592. Idem cum Graecos quosdam per dies aliquot 

magnifice tractasset, atque illi dicerent se 

mirari, quod tantum impendiorum suâ causâ 

faceret: Nonnihil, o hospites, vestrâ causâ,


sed maxima pars Luculli gratiâ. Plutarch. Life of 

Lucullus. 

593. Scipio Nasica cum ad poetam Ennium 

venisset, eique ab ostio quaerenti Ennium 

ancilla dixisset eum domi non esse, Nasica 

sensit illam hoc domini iussu dicere, & illum 

intus esse. At tum quidem dissimulans abiit. 

At paucis post diebus cum ad Nasicam 

venisset Ennius cumque a ianua quæreret, 

exclamat ipse Nasica se domi non esse. Tum 

Ennius. Quid? Ego, inquit, non agnosco 

vocem tuam? Hic Nasica: Næ tu homo es 

impudens, ego cum te quærerem ancillae tuae 

credidi, tu mihi non credis ipsi? Cicero. De 

Oratore. 2. 

594. De Vespasiano patre narrat Suetonius, cum 

scurram multa in alios iacientem provocasset, 

ut in se quoque diceret aliquid: Dicam, inquit, 

ubi ventrem exonerare desieris; alludens ad 

formam Cæsaris, qui faciem habebat nitentis. 

Suetonius. Vespasian. 

595. Memoratur de Beda, quem Venerabilem 

dicunt, cui Romam profecto cum ostendissent 

has litteras saxo insculpas, S.P.Q.R. (quibus 

significati volunt Senatus Populusque 

Romanus) ac veluti hospes rogaretur, quid 

sibi vellent illæ litteræ, dissimulans dixit: 

Stultus Populus Quærit Romam.

LATIN TEXT 59 

596. Philoxenus Poeta interrogatus cur in 

tragœdiis induceret mulieres malas, cum 

Sophocles eas induceret bonas, argutissime 

respondit: Quoniam, inquit, Ille tales inducit 

quales esse deberent; Ego, quales sunt. 

Maximus the Confessor. 

597. Idem apud Sythonem amicum suum 

prandens, appositis oleis, cum paulo post 

inferretur patina piscium, percusso vasculo 

q u o d h a b e b a t o l e a s , H o m e r i c u m 

hemistichium dixit: µ23.'4$+ !’ 562*+, id est, 

scuticâ incitavit ut traherent. Nam de auriga 

dictum est. Sensit autem Philoxenus oleas 

quamprimum auferendas, alludens interim ad 

Graecam vocem =-&'>*, quæ sonat 

“oleatum”, & =-?&*, quod sonat “trahere 

currum”, aut aliquid simile. Athenaeus. 

Deipnosophistai. 6. 

598. Idem vocatus ad convivium, cum esset 

appositus ater panis: Cave, inquit, multos 

afferas, ne facias tenebras. Athenaeus. 

Deipnosophistai. 6. 

599. Phryne aetate florens, in convivio, cui 

complures aderant feminae, (cum iuxta 

morem ioci convivalis quod unus quispiam 

faceret, idem omnes facere cogerentur) prior 

manum bis aquae immersam admovit fronti. 

Quoniam autem omnes erant fucatae, aqua 

per lituram fucorum defluens, rugarum specie 

vultus omnium deformabat, cum ipsa interim


Phryne, quæ naturali forma pollebat, 

speciosior etiam apparebat diluta facie. 

600. Cornelia Gracchorum mater, cum Campana 

matrona illius hospitio utens, ornamenta sua 

quibus illud seculum nihil habebat pulchrius, 

ipsi ostenderet, traxit eam sermone donec 

liberi redirent e schola: Tum & hæc, inquit, 

ornamenta mea sunt, Sentiens matronæ nihil 

esse pulchrius neque preciosius quam liberos 

rectè educatos. Valerius Maximus. 4. 

601. Omnibus Dionysio Tyranno exitium 

imprecantibus, una femina anus quotidie 

diluculo deos conprecari solebat ut esset 

incolumis & superstes. Accita a rege mulier 

rogata est, unde tanta in regem bene volentia? 

Quoniam, inquit, cum puella essem, & 

gravem tyrannum haberemus, optabam 

mortem illius. Eo interfecto, deterior arcem 

occupavit. Et huius exitium optabam. Nunc 

cum te habeamus, superioribus etiam 

graviorem, vereor ne si tu pereas succedat 

etiam deterior. Valerius Maximus. 6. 

602. Demonax Cynicus interrogatus quid sentiret 

de conflictu duorum, quorum alter inepte 

proponebat, alter absurde respondebat, ait, 

sibi videri alterum mulgere hircum, alterum 

supponere cribrum. Lucian. Life of Demonax.

LATIN TEXT 61 

603. Socrates cum Xantippen diu rixantem tulisset 

in ædibus, ac tandem fessus consedisset ante 

fores, illa magis irritata quiete & lenitate viri, 

de fenestra perfudit cum lotio. Ridentibus qui 

præteribant, & ipse Socrates arridebat dicens: 

Facile divinabam, post tantum tonitru 

secuturam pluviam. Diogenes Laertius. Life of 

Socrates. 17. 

604 Socrates Alcibiadi demiranti quod Xantippen 

supra modum rixosam domi perpeteretur, 

respondit: Nonne tu, Alcibiades, domi tuae 

toleras gallinarum tuarum glocientium 

strepitum? Tolero, inquit, sed gallinæ mihi 

pariunt ova & pullos. Et mihi, ait Socrates, 

mea Xantippe parit liberos. Diogenes Laertius. 

Life of Socrates. 17. 

605. Curtius eques Romanus delitiis diffluens, 

cum apud Caesarem cenaret, macrum turdum 

sustulit e patina, cumque tenens interrogavit 

Caesarem licererne mittere; cumque is 

respondisset, Quidni liceat? Ille protinus 

avem misit per fenestram, iocum arripiens ex 

ambiguitate verbi. Nam, apud Romanos erat 

solenne cibum e convivio dono amicis 

mittere. Macrobius. Saturnalia. 2.4. 

606. Augustus salutatus a Psittaco, hunc emi iussit. 

Idem miratus in Pica & hanc mercatus est. 

H o c e x e m p l u m t e n u e m q u e n d a m 

homuncionem sortis infimæ sollicitavit, ut


Corvum institueret ad huius modi 

s a l u t a t i o n e m . Q u i c u m i m p e n d i o 

exhauriretur, subinde ad avem non 

respondentem dicere solet: Opere & impensa 

periit. Tandem pervicit assiduitate, ut Corvus 

sonaret dictatam salutationem. Ea cum 

Augustum prætereuntem salutasset: Cæsar, 

Satis, inquit, istiusmodi salutatorum habeo 

domi. Tum Corvus memor & illorum 

verborum, quæ toties audierat, subtexuit: 

Opera & impensa periit. Ad hoc arridens 

Augustus, iussit avem emi, quanti nullam 

adhuc emerat. Macrobius. Saturnalia. 2.4. 

607. Adolescens quidam provincialis Romam 

venerat, oris similitudine tam mirifice 

referens Augustum, ut in se populi totius 

oculos converteret. Caesar, hoc audito, iussit 

ad se perduci, eumque contemplatus hunc in 

modum percontatus est: Dic mihi adolescens, 

fuitne aliquando mater tua Romæ? Negavit 

ille ac sentiens iocum retorsit, adiiciens: Sed 

pater meus sæpe. Macrobius. Saturnalia. 2.4. 

608. E q u i t e R o m a n o q u o d a m d e f u n c t o , 

compertum est illum tantum habuisse æris 

alieni ut solvere nullo modo posset, idque 

dum viveret, celaverat. Cum igitur res illius 

auctioni subicerentur ut ex pecunia aliquibus 

eius creditoribus satis fieret, Augustus iussit 

sibi emi culcitram illius cubicularem. Ac

LATIN TEXT 63 

mirantibus hoc praeceptum: Habenda est, 

inquit, ad somnum mihi conciliandum illa 

culcitra, in qua ille tanto ære alieno 

obstrictus somnum capere potuit. Nam 

Augustus ob ingentes curas sæpe maximam 

noctis partem ducebat insomnem. Macrobius. 


FINIS.

64 PRAXIS GRAMMATICA

TRANSLATION 

Grammatical Practice 

Showing the true and authentic use of 

declensions and conjugations, 

nicely organized for solid and rapid acquisition 

of a knowledge of the essential grammatical 

components of meaning. 

There are also attached a substantial number of 

both famous sayings and rather well-chosen 

witticisms. 

For the use of the students of Magdalene at 

Oxford 

The very greatest depends upon the very smallest. 

London 

Printed by John Havilan 

with funding from Thomas Pavier 

1623


Kind Reader. 

I am entirely in agreement with you, my reader-friend. You 

have come to the correct conclusion. These trifles that are 

coming out are quite unworthy (I am only speaking about this 

Praxis). Yes, that is the way it is. And you wouldn't deny it if 

you take a look at the contents. But if you consider their goal, 

you would think differently. The Praxis I have spoken about is 

especially fashioned for the use of children who are still 

stammering, ones who have crept from their grammatical 

cribs for the first time. Certainly I think that for them it is 

going to be not only useful and handy, but also well-suited. As 

you see, I have decided to add to it certain rather elegant and 

witty sayings carefully researched and culled. In this material 

you will find quite a refined kind of speech. But even more, I 

have added to these sayings quite a good number of 

apophthegms from Macrobius, Plutarch, and also from that 

hugely prolific Desiderius Erasmus, both funny and serious 

items fetched out from their store. These should from time to 

time make palatable and interesting those bothersome chores 

that tend to creep in on teachers. But no, let me stop so that I 

don't seem to have made a preface longer than it ought to be 

for these piddling items and to have attached it to the front of 

mere prattle. 

Farewell. 

Yours, J.H.

GRAMMATICAL PRACTICE 

Exercises 

1. I am going to have lunch at your place today. 

2. You are a generous host. 

3. That one is a glutton for books. 

4. This tune is very charming [lit: suave?]. 

5. This bird is unfledged. 

6. This wall is brick. 

7. This church is richly adorned. 

8. This boy is a very pleasant fellow. 

9. Your brothers are highly educated men. 

10. You are the victors, we the vanquished. 

11. A single man is like no man. 

12. I was not in school today. 

13. Yesterday you were not at church. 

14. Your brother was not in our orchard, nor was anyone 

else. 

15. We were at your house. 

16. You were at our house. 

17. Your parents were at my house today. 

18. Today I was not in class, nor were you. 

19. You are the same as you ever were. 

20. This boy was always better than his brother. 

21. Yesterday we were in your garden. 


22. You were in the church of Mary Magdalene. 

23. Here were all the bushels of cherries and apples. 

24. Yesterday no one had been in the atrium, as far as I 

know.


25. The previous week you had been on our walkways. 

26. Your brother had been at my place the day before 

yesterday. 

27. My sisters had not been in the dining room the day 

before. 

28. I will be more careful in the future. 

29. Tomorrow morning you will be at my place. 

30. This boy will some day be a learned man. 

31. Hereafter (with God's help) we will be more diligent. 

32. You will be the people by far the dearest to me. 

33. Friends who love sincerely will be by far the dearest 

to me. 

34. Be devout and devoted. 

35. Every student should be attentive to the lesson! 

36. Be faithful [lit: fidel], and you will be happy. 

37. Let all the boys be in class tomorrow at dawn! 

38. Let these things be this way. 

39. Your brother is asking me to be zealous. 

40. I ask you to be hungry [lit: avid] for good reading. 

41. May this night be calm [lit: tranquil] and very lucky 

for you. 

42. The teachers are asking us students to be more 

attentive next year than we were in the last one. 

43. I urge you to be very faithful to your close friends. 

44. Encourage your classmates [lit: co-disciples] to be in 

school early. 

45. I used to ask your brother to be my friend, just as he 

always was before. 

46. You used to ask us to be your friends. 

47. Your father would ask me to be your study-partner.

48. My mother asked my teacher to be a bit nicer to me. 

49. The teachers rather often encouraged their students 

to be really studious. 

50. Time and again I have asked you to think of me [lit: 

to be mindful of me]. 

51. Be good for your own and a credit to them. [felix = 

favourable, successful, fruitful] 

52. If I am good, I will be blessed. 


53. If anyone becomes needy, that person should work. 

54. If you are reverent, God will love you in a special 

way. 

55. If we are not careful, the teacher will catch us 

playing dice here. 

56. I wish this boy were my schoolmate! 

57. I wonder whether these pens and pipes are mine. 

58. I do not doubt that you are an honourable boy. 

59. If I had been in church, I would have heard the 

sermon. 

60. If you had been at our house, you would have eaten 

fruits and nuts. 

61. If your brother had been educated, he would have 

accepted the gold-plated pen from me. 

62. If we had been in the King's garden, we would have 

seen very delightful roses and violets. 

63. If he had been at class, the teacher would have 

given you four cherries and three pears. 

64. If Peter and William and George and the teacher's 

eldest son had been together with me downtown, I 

would have bought several arrows for each of 

them. 

65. If I'm with you for a while, I will teach you some rules 

of Grammar.


66. I wonder if you were in the forest yesterday. 

67. Father does not know where you are now. 

68. I do not know who this stranger is. 

69. I hear that your brothers are good young men. 

70. When I was in class yesterday, I had said you would 

pay the penalty because of your negligence. 

71. When I had been at your mother's three days ago, 

she ordered me to move against you [lit: be 

adverse]. 

72. When you were at Paris, you left me crying in the 

cradle. 

73. I hear that you are a good boy. 

74. I hear that you are a good boy. 

75. I hear your hunting dogs are voracious. 

76. I believe you were an eloquent orator. 

77. I believe that you were an eloquent orator. 

78. I believe these pears were not to your liking. 

79. I believe that these pears were not to your liking. 

80. I hope I will be your guest. 

81. I hope that tomorrow I will be your guest. 

82. I believe your sister will be a good woman. 

83. I hope we will be educated men. 

84. I hope that we will be educated men. 

85. I hope this plant is healthful. 

86. I love God the heavenly Father who made me. 

87. You love nothing as much as Jesus Christ your 

Saviour. 

88. She loves me just as if I were his brother. 

89. We love you in turn.

90. You love elegant dinners. 

91. I consider those people happy who love integrity. 

92. I used to like you before, when you were interested. 

93. You used to love the good arts, I remember; why 

don't you love them any more? 

94. She used to like me when I was a boy. 

95. We loved your sisters when they were at our place. 

96. You liked pears when you were young. 

97. Our teachers used to like your brothers since they 

were interested in learning. 

98. I have loved you from childhood. 

99. You have loved me in return. 

100. Your brother always liked the bow and arrows. 

101. We have always loved those who are like 

ourselves. 

102. You liked me for the very reason that I liked you. 

103. Those who act rightly love the light. 

104. I had loved you, but you had not loved me back. 

105. If you will like me, I will like you back. 

106. Good people will like good people. 

107. Farewell, and keep me in your affection [lit: love 

me]. 

108. Love devotion, and the liberal arts. 

109. I ask you to love your parents. 

110. You ask me to like your brother. 


111. I will encourage him to like good books. 

112. I have asked you rather frequently to be good to 

Nicholas your classmate. 

113. Love devotion, and you will be happy.


114. Every boy should respect and have a warm regard 

for his teacher. 

115. Let us love God and our neighbour. 

116. I wonder whether you like me the same way I like 

you. 

117. I would like you, if you were such as you seem. 

118. If they liked me, I would like them back. 

119. If I had liked your brother, he would also have liked 

me. 

120. We would have loved your sisters if they had been 

good. 

121. If you like me, you will have given me a distinct 

pleasure. 

122. I wish I had always loved devotion! 

123. I wish people would always love God. 

124. You have heard I like your friends. 

125. You have heard that I like your friends. 

126. You know I liked Peter your brother. 

127. I hear these women have always loved their 

husbands. 

128. I hear that these women always have loved their 

husbands. 

129. I hope I am going to like good books. 

130. I hope that I am going to like good books. 

131. My hope is you will like me. 

132. My hope is that you will like me. 

133. I have to love. 

134. By liking and praising the boy, you will make him 

really eager to learn.

135. My brother has the intention of liking the liberal 

arts. 

136. I am coming to court your sister. 

137. I am coming to court your sister. 

138. I am making a good effort to like more intensely the 

ones that you are praising. 

139. I am coming to praise your pens. 



142. Your brother is worthy of love. 

143. This subject is easy to like. 


144. Boys who love devotion are dear to God. 

145. God gives all good things to those who love him [lit: 

to those loving him]. 

146. Whoever is really going to love himself should first 

love God. 

147. We are coming to praise your class. 

148. I am loved by my father when I am good and 

careful. 

149. Our countrymen are loved by yours. 

150. A devout person is loved by God and the holy 

angels. 

151. I was liked by the teacher when I was in your class. 

152. I was liked by your father, since I liked you also. 

153. Good and useful books have always been liked by 

good men. 

154. Good pens had always been liked by this boy. 

155. You will be loved by God and by people if you are 

devout and good.


156. Like your classmates, so that you will be liked by 

them in return. 

157. We would be liked by your brothers if we would 

give them pears and apples and cherries every 

day. 

158. If you had been liked by us, undoubtedly we would 

have been liked by you in turn. 

159. I wonder if I am liked by you and your father. 

160. I think teaching and virtue are loved by all people. 

161. I see I have been very much liked by your parents. 

162. I see that I have been very much liked by your 

parents. 

163. I hope I am going to be liked by you. 

164. I hope that I am going to be liked by you. 

165. I believe this writing case will be liked by you. 

166. I believe that this writing case will be liked by you. 

167. I think these apples are going to be liked by my 

classmates. 

168. I think that these pears are going to be liked by my 

classmates. 

169. We ought to like good books. [lit: Good books are 

to be liked by us.] 

170. We ought to love God's commands. 

171. I teach good boys willingly. 

172. Why do you not teach your brother? 

173. Yesterday I was teaching your brother the first 

declension. 

174. I have often taught you literature. 

175. I had taught your brother many Latin words, but he 

forgot all of them.

176. I will teach you the same thing that my father 

taught me. 

177. Teach me please, those things that I do not know. 

178. Whoever is more learned than the others, let him 

teach the rest. 

179. I am being strongly begged by your brother to 

teach him the Latin declensions. 

180. I was begging your brother to teach me the Latin 

language. 

181. I do not know who is now teaching your brother 

literature. 

182. I don't at all know why you are still teaching 

uncaring and stubborn boys. 

183. You do not know if you have taught me correctly 

the art of shooting arrows. 

184. Since you are teaching me, I will teach you in 

return. 

185. When our teacher was teaching us yesterday in 

class, your mother was asking him to pardon your 

playing around. 

186. I wish your father, who is an educated man, had 

taught me Latin grammar! 

187. When Lucilius had taught my brother for three 

months, he suddenly went away to the country. 

188. If I teach you your lesson, you will give me four or 

three or at least two apples. 

189. You see I teach you faithfully. 

190. You see that I teach you faithfully. 


191. I really am amazed that you have not taught your 

son Peter the Lord's Prayer. 

192. Believe I will teach your brothers faithfully. 

193. Believe that I will teach your brothers faithfully.


194. I go to teach seven classes of boys. 

195. This matter is difficult to teach. 

196. I have to teach several strangers for free, because 

of the fact that they are poor. 

197. I hear you are going to teach some young 

noblemen. 

198. I hear that you are going to teach some young 

noblemen. 

199. I will go to teach your sister music. 

200. I am coming to teach you arithmetic. 

201. By teaching others you will teach yourself. 

202. Three, or at any rate four days ago I saw your 

sister teaching both my sisters. 

203. The work of the one teaching is unpleasant and full 

of worry. 

204. Anyone who is going to teach another should first 

teach himself. 

205. We are being taught the Latin language by you. 

206. I was being taught the art of writing in my youth, 

but it bore no fruit. 

207. We boys were still being taught many Latin words. 

208. You have been taught to write out a letter to your 

father. 

209. This girl has been taught to dance. 

210. My sisters had been taught to weave and to hold 

the wool and the web. 

211. Perhaps now I will be taught these things by this 

man, which to this point I have been taught by no 

one. 

212. If you would be taught the Latin language by me, 

you will give me a large fee.


213. If I were being taught the fisherman's art by you, I 

would give you a hundred ripe apples. 

214. You understand I am being taught the Greek 

language. 

215. You understand that I am being taught the Greek 

language. 

216. I heard you were being taught foreign languages. 

217. I have heard your brothers have not yet been 

taught the French language. 

218. I have heard that your brothers have not yet been 

taught the French language. 

219. I hope I will be taught the Greek language. 

220. I hope that I will be taught the Greek language. 

221. I hope your sisters will be taught the art of weaving. 

222. I hope that your sisters will be taught the art of 

weaving. 

223. I gladly read your letter which you are writing to 

me. 

224. I was reading some letters to your brother which I 

myself was carrying to him the day before. 

225. Most gladly we read the letter which you had so 

kindly sent to us yesterday. 

226. As soon as I had ready yesterday's letter I 

immediately wrote back to you. 

227. Tomorrow I will read the letter that I got from a 

certain person who lives in this neighbourhood. 

228. Read Cicero, the supreme orator, or if you prefer, 

Terence, the most polished author. 

229. Quite frequently you beg me to read Caesar, the 

purest writer of history. 

230. You used to ask me to read Plautus, the 

lighthearted comic playwright.


231. You are not unaware I gladly read the Colloquies of 

Erasmus and the Dialogues of Corderius, written 

elegantly in Latin. 

232. I hear you have read the Letters of Politianus, 

which Lipsius praises so much. 

233. I hope you will read Ovid and Virgil, the princes of 

Latin poets. 

234. I have come here to read your father's letter. 

235. This book is most pleasant to read; I do not 

remember that I have ever seen a more pleasant 

one. 

236. This line is very difficult to read. 

237. You should read the rather elegant letters. 

238. I am quite eager to read this book. 

239. I came here to read. 

240. By reading deeply, not widely, you will make 

progress daily. 

241. Boys who often read the lessons easily remember 

them. 

242. I hope you will read your sermon. 

243. I hope that you will read your sermon. 

244. In class I am often put on the list of babblers. 

245. A well written letter is read with pleasure. 

246. This book was being read two days ago by your 

mother. 

247. You have often been put on the absentee lists. 

248. This packet of writings has not yet been read by 

my teacher. 

249. Your letter had been read early enough by my 

brother.


250. I will not be put on the list of absentees today since 

I was in class all this week. 

251. Around noon your composition will be read. 

252. I wonder whether my compositions are being read 

with pleasure by my friends. 

253. If I were as often put on the absentee list as you 

and your brothers are, no doubt I would be 

whipped by the teacher. 

254. I hear many letters are being read by you. 

255. I hear that many letters are being read by you. 

256. I hear your recently printed pamphlet has been 

read by the prince. 

257. I hear that your recently printed pamphlet has been 

read by the prince. 

258. Today I saw several compositions brought from 

Oxford or London to your father had been carefully 

read. 

259. This book should be read by us all. 

260. By reading Cicero you will become more learned 

every day. 

261. By reading the letters of Pliny and Politianus you 

will sharpen your wit considerably and you will 

make your speech more polished. 

262. Nothing more willingly do I hear read than the 

Word of God. 

263. Quite unwillingly do we hear those things that we 

do not like. 

264. Yesterday I heard your apples have ripened 

enough. 

265. I heard my fellow students reading their lessons. 

266. With great alarm your sisters had heard your 

shouts when you were in the garden.


267. I will listen to you willingly if you have anything 

which you would tell me. 

268. We will hear your excuse if you can produce any 

fair and fitting one. 

269. Listen to me first; I will hear you afterward. 

270. Gladly listen to holy sermons. 

271. Speak more clearly so that I might hear you better. 

272. I would most willingly hear you, if there were just a 

bit of leisure left over from my business. 

273. We would most willingly hear a speech of yours if 

you ever adorned one with citations. 

274. If I hear you are studious and diligent, you will get 

from me as a gift five cherries and ten raisins. 

275. Once I had heard the story, I started to wonder, 

and to scold the lying boy. 

276. I believe you have not heard my trumpet playing 

sweetly. 

277. I believe that you have not heard my trumpet 

playing sweetly. 

278. I think we are going to hear your brother reciting 

his poems for the next eight days. 

279. I go, no I hurry, to hear the holy sermon that is 

being given in Saint Peter's church at ten o'clock. 

280. Actually, what you are telling me is quite pleasant 

to hear. 

281. I must listen attentively to whatever your father 

says. 

282. The time for hearing the sermon is almost at hand. 

283. I have come to class to listen and learn. 

284. Good boys are eager to hear their teacher.


285. By listening to the Word of God you will get an 

accurate account of the way to arrive at eternal 

salvation. 

286. I hope I am going to hear a Latin comedy in your 

hall. 

287. My sister rose shortly before dawn to hear the 

prayers read in the dining room. 

288. I am not being heard by everyone who is now 

present. 

289. The Word of God should be attentively heard by 

those who want to attain salvation through Christ. 

290. The teacher heard me not when I wanted to tell the 

story about the rooster. 

291. Your brother was heard by my father when he told 

how many fish he had taken from our lake. 

292. We will never be heard attentively by those who 

listen unwillingly. 

293. If I were being heard by you, you in turn would be 

heard by us. 

294. I think an eloquent and merry speaker is heard with 

great pleasure by studious young people. 

295. I believe the best speakers were poorly heard by 

those who look down on eloquence and consider 

all arts worthless. 

296. I hope my master will attend to what I say when I 

come to class. 

297. I believe your mother will not be heard by my 

father. 

298. Heard by the judge, I returned home. 

299. The Word of God should be heard attentively and 

reverently.


300. Your eagerness to hear the holy sermon pleases 

me immensely. 

301. The antidote for life is Endurance. 

302. The salt of life is Friendship. 

303. The sun of life is Wisdom. 

304. Each of the great delights of life is insipid and 

disagreeable. 

305. Many have too much; no one enough. 

306. One day of the wise person is to be preferred to 

the longest eternity of the foolish. 

307. That person who lacks things is not poor, but the 

one who is needy or full of desire is. 

308. Do not laugh much nor at many things. 

309. Be a bit cautious at someone else's tears, a bit 

cheered at someone else's smile. 

310. The magnet of love is love. 

311. There is nothing that so draws out love as love 

does. Hence that saying of Martial: "To be loved, 

love." 

312. There is a certain natural conjunction and harmony 

in things such that no one hates the one who loves 

him. 

313. It becomes the giver not to remember the favour 

bestowed; it becomes the recipient not to look 

upon the gift so much as upon the spirit of the 

giver. 

314. For that reason they imagine the Graces are three; 

two never look back and the third always looks 

upon the first two. 

315. The good is good for the good and for the bad; the 

bad is good neither for the bad nor for the good.

316. Before you begin there is the need to deliberate, 

and when you have finished deliberating, there is 

the need to act at the right moment. 

317. Give yourself totally to the signs and leadership of 

God in this campaign of life and submit to 

commands and follow example. 

318. Do not do what you do not wish to be done. 

319. Moderate strolling restores the body, immoderate 

strolling undoes it. 

320. What fortune has supplied, it will remove. 

321. What nature has loaned, she will seek back. 

322. What your virtue has gotten, you will keep. 

323. It does not matter how long you have lived, but 

how well. The life that is good is long. 

324. You ought to despise what you can lose. 

325. Yield to the people, but do not obey them. For one 

should not fight with the crowd, a many-headed 

beast, but neither should one assent to its 

opinions. 

326. What is important is not the means but the 

purpose. 

327. In every place, in every circumstance, we ought to 

act correctly as to arrive where we are heading. 

328. Pleasure is like a bee; once it has poured forth the 

honey, it flies off. 

329. Let neither a wet nor a dry drunkenness keep you 

down. 

330. What is bought by begging is dear. 

331. I would rather buy than beg. 

332. Prayers are precious payment. 


333. There is no cure for the bite of slander.


334. Good fortune ought to be managed by art, 

planning, prudence and creative intelligence; an 

angry fortune ought to be pounded back with great 

strength and overcome and trounced with an 

unbeaten spirit. 

335. Be a manager over good things and a victor over 

bad ones. 

336. Our studies should not be interrupted so much as 

relaxed. 

337. Christ is the aim of our life; he is the beginning, he 

is the end. From him everything takes its start, 

toward him everything stretches. We should fasten 

ourselves to him if we wish to be happy, with no 

nail other than the mind itself. 

338. It is noble to have the ability to do harm and the will 

not to. 

339. Being silent in the right way and speaking in the 

right way belong to the same art. 

340. The more one is permitted to do the less one 

should want to. 

341. Pardon others many things, yourself nothing. 

342. I don't want a younger person to fear me and I 

don't want an older one to scorn me. 

343. Live mindful of death so that you might be mindful 

of salvation. 

344. Overcome all sorrows either with your spirit or with 

a friend. 

345. Praise your friend in public, but when he goes 

wrong reproach him in private. 

346. It is a terrible pain if you dread what you are unable 

to conquer. 

347. The mind that knows how to fear knows how to 

approach safely.


348. Love your father if he is fair: if not, put up with him. 

349. If you tolerate the vices of your friend you make 

them your own. 

350. If you are quarrelling with a drunken person you 

are wounding an absent party. 

351. The one who hopes for a long life for a miser is 

wishing for the worst evil for him. 

352. Good times get you friends, bad ones test them. 

353. The better the gambler is the worse he is. 

354. Having is better than longing to have. 

355. If on your own you offer what is needed the gift is 

twice as good. 

356. The one who doesn't know how to do a favour is 

wrong to look for one. 

357. To accept a favour is to sell your freedom. 

358. You sin twice when you render service to a person 

who is sinning. 

359. That person receives a favour by doing one for a 

worthy person. 

360. The one who says he has done a favour is seeking 

one. 

361. The link of the heart is the closest kinship. 

362. Mutual kindness binds tighter than blood. 

363. The one who often performs a kindness teaches 

how to return it. 

364. That one wins twice who overcomes himself in a 

victory; first one's foe, then one's spirit. 

365. When things that have been well considered get 

away they are not lost. 

366. Whoever spares the bad hurts the good. 

367. Patience is the remedy for every sorrow..


368. Having a good talker as companion while walking 

on the road is like having a vehicle. 

369. The one allowed to have more than is proper wants 

more than is allowed. 

370. Cursing is a foolish thing: if it is a friend you curse 

you harm yourself; if an enemy, you irritate him. 

371. Long deliberations are the safest thing, for hasty 

advice usually makes for failures. 

372. You ought to have an ear that is deaf to charges. 

373. Gain with the loss of reputation is a loss, not a 

gain. 

374. From the faults of another a wise man corrects his 

own. 

375. Even a single hair has its own shadow. 

376. You may find good fortune more quickly than you 

may keep it. 

3 7 7 . A n a t t r a c t i v e a p p e a r a n c e i s a s i l e n t 

recommendation. 

378. Accepting a favour from someone to whom you 

can't return it is a swindle. 

379. Whenever fortune favours the wicked it brings loss 

and trouble to the best. 

380. Bear, don't blame, what cannot be avoided. 

381. The companions of great happiness are 

foolishness and insolence. 

382. He who has lost his good faith can lose nothing 

further. 

383. Being hurt is hard, whether by a friend or by one 

who has power, but to complain about the one is 

not honourable and about the other is not safe. 

384. The next day learns from the one before.


385. Greedy persons are good to nobody, but they are 

the worst to themselves. 

386. Nothing is so sweet that it does not make one full 

unless variety spices it. 

387. A mistake that leaders make turns to trouble for the 

people. 

388. Luxury is in want of many things; avarice, of 

everything. 

389. The brave or the fortunate are able to endure envy. 

390. For a happy person ignores ill-will, a brave one 

despises it. 

391. Anger dissolves right away; hatred lasts a long 

time. 

392. It is a wise person's way not to scorn enemies, no 

matter how lowly, for they can do damage when 

the opportunity arises. 

393. The judge is condemned when the guilty is 

acquitted. 

394. Those who allow a crime condemn themselves 

then and there before the judge of their 

conscience, even though no judge renders a 

verdict. 

395. High rank constitutes a disgrace for those not 

worthy of the place. 

396. The guilty fear the law; the innocent their luck. 

397. In every matter delay is a bother, yet it makes us 

wise, so that we don't do anything rashly or 

recklessly. 

398. They live badly who always think they are going to 

win. 

399. They are less disappointed who quickly get 

refused.


400. The one whom many fear ought to fear the many. 

401. Avaricious people never lack a reason for refusing. 

402. The person who lives in fear is condemned daily. 

403. The times are always getting worse and day by day 

people's morality is deteriorating more and more. 

404. It is foolish to fear what cannot be avoided. 

405. Persons compelled by greed lack what they have 

as much as what they don't have. 

406. Misers are equally deprived of what belongs to 

them and what belongs to others. 

Maxims. 

408. The people are a great teacher of error. 

409. From childhood people get used to having the right 

ideas about things and these ideas will mature in 

keeping with the stages of their lives. 

410. Select the best plan for living and habit will make it 

the most delightful one. 

411. A person is made up of body and spirit. 

412. We are made of earth and these elements that we 

perceive and touch are like the bodies of animals. 

413. Mind given us by divine power, an intellect like the 

angels and God. On this basis one is judged a 

person, and only should such be rightly called a 

person, as the greatest men have chosen to do. 

For the spirit of each person is that individual. 

414. The best queen and leader of all endeavours is 

Virtue, which all the rest have to serve if they want 

to perform their duties. 

415. Wealth is not precious stones or metals, not 

magnificent buildings or well-made furniture, but it 

is not being deprived of that which is indispensable 

for the protection of life.


416. The body itself is nothing but a protective shell and 

a serving agency for the mind, to which nature and 

reason and God bids it to be subject; as the 

insensate is subject to what has feeling and what 

dies is subject to what is undying and godly. 

417. What is life but a kind of journey, beset and 

beleaguered by so many calamities on all sides, 

over each moment of which looms an end that can 

occur for the silliest of reasons? 

418. The way it is on the road is the same way it is in 

life: the one who has less baggage and is 

entangled with fewer burdens makes a lighter and 

more delightful journey. 

419. Riches and possessions and clothing are gotten 

only for their use. Vast wealth doesn't help anyone; 

rather it weighs everyone down, as heavy cargo 

does a ship. 

420. Gold is not very different from garbage unless you 

make use of it, except that guarding it causes more 

stress and distracts you from whatever is 

especially good for a person's health while it 

makes you put your interest into that one thing 

alone. 

421. The largest part of riches, buildings, furniture that is 

rich and abundant, precious stones, gold, silver, 

and every kind of decoration; these are both gotten 

and displayed for the eyes of the onlookers and not 

for the use of those possessing it. 

422. What is nobility but accident of birth and belief that 

has been introduced by the foolishness of the 

people? And it is quite often gotten by means of 

robberies. 

423. A real, authentic nobility arises from virtue; it is silly 

to boast that you had a good parent when you 

yourself are bad and by your disreputable


character you are a shameful stain upon the 

attractive wholesomeness of your house. 

424. To despise someone's lowly birth is to quietly 

rebuke God, the originator of birth. 

425. What is power but an alluring annoyance? No one 

is so ambitious that he, if he knew what worries, 

what concerns, and how great a sea of troubles 

are in it, would not flee it as he would flee a 

situation of serious distress. 

426. How great is the hatred if you have control over 

wicked people, and how much worse it is if you are 

wicked yourself! 

427. What difference is there in sleep or solitude 

between the greatest king and the lowest servant? 

428. What is beauty in the body itself? Certainly 

attractively coloured limbs. If the inner organs 

could be perceived, how much ugliness would be 

found to exist in even the most appealing body? 

429. What good do the handsome looks and attractive 

features of the body do, if the mind is base and like 

"an ugly guest in a beautiful lodge," as that famous 

Greek said? 

430. Beauty, strength, agility, and the other gifts of the 

body wither quickly, as little flowers disappear on 

account of trivial causes. Even a bout of fever 

sometimes shakes the most robust of men, and 

wipes out all the charm of his appearance. 

431. No one can rightly call "his" the external things that 

so easily pass to others; nor bodily things either 

which so quickly disappear. 

432. Why is it that the things that many admire are the 

causes of the worst vices, like impertinence, 

arrogance, sloth, aggressiveness, spite, rivalry,


enmity, quarrelling, wars, slaughter, massacre, 

calamity? 

433. From soft and self-indulgent living a great number 

of diseases infiltrate the body and quite extensive 

loss is sustained by one's property. Then sure 

regret comes to one's heart and dullness in the wit, 

which shrinks away by the body's fun and breaks 

down. 

434. Don't think that the worst evil is poverty or lowly 

birth or prison or bodily exposure, disgrace, bodily 

handicaps, diseases, or feebleness, but consider it 

to be the vices and what approaches them: 

ignorance, a numb insensitivity, and mad 

behaviour. 

435. Consider what great good could be the opposite of 

virtue, and what approaches it, skill, keen 

intelligence, mental health. 

436. If you possess external goods, they will profit you 

so far as they are connected with virtue; they will 

hinder you so far as they are connected with vice. 

If you do not have them, be careful not to seek 

them through even the smallest forfeit of virtue. 

437. The greater the concern for the body, the less there 

is for the spirit. 

438. The more pampered the body is, the more keenly it 

resists the mind, even as a horse when it has been 

fastidiously fed tries to unseat its rider. 

439. The heavy burden of the body overcomes the spirit 

and the lavish feeding or the indulgence of the 

body blunts the sharpness of the intellect. 

440. Food, sleep, exercises; all the care of one's health 

ought to be related to being well rather than to 

feeling good so that one's body may give quick 

service to one's mind.


441. Nothing matches pleasure for weakening the 

liveliness of the mind and crushing the strength 

and power of the body; to be sure, all strength of 

mind and body thrives on work and effort and wilts 

under leisure and tenderness. 

442. Cleanliness of the body and a way of life that does 

not go as far as luxury or fastidiousness contribute 

to one's health and wit. 

443. Wash your hands and face with cold water 

regularly and wipe them off with a clean towel. 

444. Keep the cold away from the other parts of your 

body, but especially from your neck. 

445. Do not eat right after resting or before lunch, 

except sparingly. 

446. Breakfast is for settling the stomach or for giving 

strength back to the body. It is not for feeling full. 

447. Three or four mouthfuls of bread are enough, 

without drink, or certainly just a little bit and even 

that diluted; this is as good for the mind as for the 

body. 

448. In your lunch and dinner get accustomed to taking 

only one kind of food, a very simple dish and as 

wholesome as supplies allow, however many 

things are brought to the table. 

449. The wide choice of foods is unhealthy for a person 

and that of spices is worse. 

450. Nature has taught us what things are essential; 

these are few and they are readily available. 

Foolishness has contrived the non-essentials 

which are unlimited and hard to come by. 

451. If you give nature the essentials, she's happy and 

strengthened as if by what belongs to her, but if 

you give nature what is not essential, she weakens


and is crushed as if by what belongs to something 

else. 

452. What is essential does not satisfy foolishness, so 

long as the non-essentials are overwhelming they 

are not enough for it. 

453. Don't drink right after dinner, or if your thirst nags 

you, take something moist and a little chilled or a 

very small bit of a diluted drink. 

454. Separate that drinking and your rest with at least 

half an hour. 

455. Physical exercise should not be overdone, but 

undertaken in proportion to what good health 

demands. 

456. Take sleep as if it were a kind of medicine for 

taking care of the body, only as much as is 

necessary. For excessive sleep fills bodies with 

harmful fluids and makes them sluggish, lazy, and 

slow, and it slows one's mental speed. 

457. The time given to sleep ought not to be thought to 

belong to life, for life is awareness. 

458. Don't dip into filthy authors, so that no bit of squalor 

sticks to your spirit from the contact. 

459. We fashion learning with three instruments, as it 

were: wit, memory, application. 

460. Wit is sharpened by practice; memory is extended 

by developing it. Amusements undo both; good 

health strengthens them. 

461. Realize that you are losing your time and trouble if 

you do not pay close attention to what you read or 

hear. 

462. Don't be ashamed to ask about what you do not 

know. Don't be abashed at being taught by 

anyone, because the greatest men have not been


embarrassed to learn. Rather be embarrassed 

about not knowing or about not wanting to learn. 

463. If you want to appear learned make the effort to be 

so. There is no shortcut. In the same way you will 

not find any easier way to be thought good than by 

being so. 

464. Whatever you want to seem make yourself be; 

otherwise you are desiring in vain. 

465. Time undoes what is false and it validates what is 

true. 

466. Any person can make mistakes; nobody but a fool 

continues on in his error. 

467. Don't strive as much to answer at great length as 

to answer in an appropriate and a timely way. 

468. Invite to your lunch and dinner those who can 

teach you and who can with charming and 

intelligent conversation both raise your spirits and 

make you smarter. 

469. You will learn from the wise how to be more 

careful. 

470. Strive to understand not only the words of the 

author whom you are reading, but especially his 

meanings. 

471. The more you entrust to your memory, the more 

faithfully it will keep it all; the less you entrust, the 

less faithfully will it do so. 

472. No limit must be put on the pursuit of wisdom in 

life; it should end with life. People should always 

contemplate these three things as long as they 

live: how to discern well, how to speak well, how to 

act well. 

473. All arrogance should be kept out of intellectual 

pursuits. For the things that even the most learned 

of mortals understands do not amount to the


slightest fraction of what that person fails to know. 

Whatever people know is something slender and 

unclear and unsure and our minds, shackled in this 

bodily prison, are hemmed in by extensive 

ignorance and the darkest shadows. We have so 

blunt a vision that we don't even scratch the 

surface of reality. 

474. Arrogance hurts the progress of studies to a great 

extent. For many would have been able to arrive at 

wisdom if they had not already thought that they 

had arrived. 

475. Avoid competition, jealous rivalry, detraction, and 

the vain compulsion for glory, since we pursue 

these studies precisely to escape those things. 

476. Studies spice up happy matters, they soften sad 

ones, they restrain the rash impulses of youth, they 

lighten the annoying sluggishness of old age. At 

home, abroad, in public, in private, in solitude, in a 

crowd, in leisure, in work, they companion, they 

support, no, they take the initiative, they lend 

assistance, they give aid. 

477. The spirit ought not despair or withdraw in the face 

of a buffeting fortune; indeed, a morning against 

you will sometimes give way to an evening in your 

favour. 

478. This life is nothing but a pilgrimage by which we 

press on to another one that is eternal and we are 

lacking very few things for the completion of this 

journey. 

479. Getting one's fill of fortune's favours is nothing 

different from a foot soldier being hampered with 

many burdens and overwhelmed. 

480. No one is so stupidly mindless as to get herself 

ready and dress for the journey rather than for that


city toward which she is headed and in which she 

has a mind to stay. 

481. By Religion God is known; once known, he can't 

but be loved. 

482. This world is like a kind of home for God, or rather 

a temple. He himself brought it forth from nothing 

to its present appearance and splendour. 

483. Angels, demons, people, living beings, plants, 

stones, heavens and essential matter; all these 

things are finally in God's hands and they obey 

him. 

484. We don't see anything arising or moving or 

happening and not even a straw being lifted or a 

tuft of wool floating outside of God's direction and 

command. 

485. All human wisdom, if it is compared with the 

Christian faith, is worthless and pure folly. 

486. To know it is complete wisdom, to live by it, perfect 

virtue, but no one knows it who does not live 

devoutly. 

487. The goodness of Christ elicits our love, his majesty, 

religious worship, his wisdom, faith. 

488. Works done by the body are silly in God's sight 

unless they are seasoned with feeling from the 

heart. 

489. In the most secret hiding-places, and far away from 

everyone's eyes, and even in your heart itself, and 

in your mind, know that you have God as an onlooker, 

a witness, a judge of everything, even of 

your thoughts, so that revering his presence you 

not only do, but even entertain the thought of 

nothing wicked or shameful. 

490. It is wicked to joke about holy matters or to use the 

sayings of the Sacred Scriptures for play,


foolishness, old wives' tales, or taunting. That 

would be like someone sprinkling medicine gotten 

for one's health on trash. 

491. Take part in liturgies attentively and devoutly, fully 

aware that whatever you see or hear is very pure 

and holy and that it looks to that vast majesty of 

God which is easy to worship and impossible to 

understand. 

492. When you call God Lord, make sure that you serve 

him; when you call him Father, make sure that you 

love him and show yourself to be a son worthy of 

such a Father. 

493. It is awful for a musical entertainer to sing one 

thing while playing another; it is much more awful 

in prayer to God to say one thing and to think 

another. 

494. God provides various kinds of nourishment for all 

living things every day; he keeps them safe and he 

rescues them from the death toward which they 

are heading at his command. 

495. Nothing is given to Christ in a more real way than 

what is given to the needy. 

496. When you go to bed think that each day is an 

image of a human life that night follows, and think 

that sleep is a very close representation of the 

state of death. 

497. The wisest teacher of our life, in fact even its 

originator, has given a singular example for living: 

that we should love. 

498. No one has ill-will for the one whom he loves, and 

no one is happy about the troubles of a friend or is 

hurt by his good fortunes. For Love makes 

everything common and he considers his own the 

things that belong to the one he loves.


499. Very long and very dark are the shadows in the 

human heart; what human vision will pierce 

through so deep a night? 

500. Respect a person commended to you by God if 

that person is worthy because that one is worthy of 

your respect; if not, respect that person because 

God is worthy of your obedience. 

501. God has brought in peace, love, and concord. 

Divisions and factions and personal gain at others' 

loss, just like dissension, quarrels, fights, and wars, 

these the Devil has introduced, the most expert 

craftsman of such as these. 

502. Through concord even the most trivial things come 

together; discord makes even the most important 

ones come apart. 

503. Don't laugh at anyone thinking that what has 

happened to one, cannot happen to any other. 

Rather thank God that he has spared you that 

accident and pray both that no such thing happen 

to you and that there be some help for the one that 

has been so afflicted; even a mind at peace, and 

help him yourself if you are able. 

504. There are no better resources than sure 

friendships. There are no more powerful 

companions than faithful friends. 

505. He takes the sun away from the world, who takes 

friendship from one's life. 

506. True and real and lasting friendship exists only 

among the good, among whom mutual love easily 

makes a union. 

507. Bad people are friends neither among themselves 

nor with those who are good. 

508. The surest and shortest way to be loved is by love. 

For nothing elicits love the way love does.


509. It is poison for a friendship if you love as if you are 

going to hate, and if you regard a friend in such a 

way that you think he can be an enemy. 

510. Don't investigate other people's lives and do not 

not inquisitively examine what each one is doing; 

many quarrels arise from this. Moreover, it is 

foolish to know others accurately and be ignorant 

about yourself. 

511. To direct insult at insult is to clean mud with mud. 

512. Flattery is an awful vice, shameful for the one who 

speaks it and destructive for the one who hears it. 

513. Adopt a kind of speech that is restrained, 

courteous, and gracious; not harsh, countrified or 

sloppy, but not too precise or artificial. 

514. Don't take too quick a pace in speaking or let your 

words get ahead of your thought, and don't answer 

before you have fully understood the meaning of 

any matter the one you are answering has said 

and meant. 

515. Very seldom should that famous saying be sent 

around: “Whatever in the mouth...,” and I wonder 

whether it should at every point be admissible 

when between friends there is a fear that we might 

be saying anything that might break or injure 

friendship. 

516. In disagreeing, do not be argumentative or 

stubborn. If you hear the truth, revere it in silence 

and rise before it, as if for a sacred ceremony. 

517. But if you do not hear it allow it anyway, either for 

your friend or your modesty, especially when it 

causes no loss to your good character or to your 

religious devotion.


518. What you wish kept quiet first keep quiet about 

yourself, but if you are going to reveal it, consider 

repeatedly to whom you are going to reveal it. 

519. Do not be deceptive or caustic. 

520. If people know that you are deceptive, no one will 

believe you even if you state the purest truth. 

521. On the other hand, if people know that you are 

honest, your word will command a greater 

confidence than the most sacred oath that others 

give. 

522. The one who has gotten himself into a situation 

that he can get out of only by lying is a sorry fellow. 

523. Don't wait until a close friend tells you about his 

urgent needs; when you get wind of them and help 

him on your own initiative. 

524. Do not only give love to your parent but the 

deepest respect, immediately after God. 

525. Believe that you are dear to the one from whom 

you get a kind rebuke. And never think that 

rebuking is an obstacle even when it comes from 

an enemy. For if it raises valid objections, it is 

pointing out what we should correct; but if false, 

what we should avoid. Thus it always makes us 

better or more careful. 

526. Be slow to take others into your confidence and 

steadfast about keeping those you've once 

accepted. 

527. With respect to the animals, the especially deadly 

thing among the wild ones is jealousy, among the 

tame, flattery. 

528. If you can't take criticism well, don't do things that 

deserve it. 

529. Our nature inclines down towards evil; towards 

virtue the slope rises up and the path is difficult.


530. To those younger than you be kind; to your elders, 

respectful, to your peers, approachable and easy 

to deal with. 

531. If you are not outstanding in virtue, why do you 

insist on seeming better than others? If you are 

outstanding, why don't you surpass the common 

people more in the control of your disposition? 

532. The Lord's eye is watching over each thing; he 

knows both the one doing harm and the one 

suffering it. 

533. Put more value on the judgment of your 

conscience than on all the voices of the vast crowd 

which is inexperienced and foolish; as it is afraid to 

try what is unknown, so also it condemns it. 

534. Reputation neither helps someone who is wicked 

nor hurts someone who is good. 

535. When you are dead, what more will reputation 

mean to you than a picture praised by Apelles or a 

champion horse at Olympia? It doesn't even profit 

you while you are alive if you are unaware of it. If a 

person knows it, it contributes nothing except that 

a wise person will have scorn for it and a foolish 

person will have greater self-satisfaction. 

536. Conscience is a great teacher about this life. 

537. There are those who reject concern for the divine 

power to err more boldly and freely; they are 

doubly wicked because they respect neither people 

nor God. 

538. That conscience that no fear restrains goes far 

astray. 

539. Who but a madman would shirk efforts made in 

return for an eternal heavenly reward? After all, 

you can't even get these perishable and shoddy 

things without work.


540. Sin is the death of a person, so whoever sins 

appears to be murdering himself. For our life 

detaches itself from God and from the peace of 

one's conscience of which nothing is more 

blessed. 

541. Just as a single day of human life is preferable to 

the longest life of a raven or a stag, so one day 

lived on the basis of religion, that is, one day of 

divine life, ranks above to all eternity without 

religion. 

Witticisms and striking utterances 

543. When Publius had noticed that Mutius, an 

especially grumpy person, was gloomier than 

usual, he said, "Either something bad has 

happened to Mutius, or something good to 

someone else." 

544. When a certain person received Augustus Caesar 

with a meagre enough dinner, one even 

approaching a regular everyday meal (for the 

emperor refused almost no one who invited him), 

after the skimpy banquet, as he he was leaving 

without any fanfare, he merely muttered to the host 

who was telling him good-bye, "I didn't think we 

were so close." 

545. To someone asking him at what time one ought to 

take the mid-day meal, he said: "For a somebody 

rich, whenever he wants, and for somebody poor, 

whenever he can." 

546. Diogenes, when asked what wine he liked best, 

said: "Somebody else's." 

547. Someone asked how gold came by it’s light colour. 

Diogenes answered: "Because it never has a 

moment when it has no muggers."


548. Diogenes coming to Myndum noticed that the 

gates were huge but the city small, said: 

"Mynidians, shut your gates so your city doesn't 

leave you someday." 

549. Diogenes was taking his lunch in the marketplace 

and he was called a dog by some who stood at a 

distance. "You are the dogs," he said, "since you 

are standing around watching me eat." 

550. When the son of a certain prostitute threw a stone 

into an assembly, Diogenes told him: "Be careful 

that you don't hit your father!" 

551. When Dionysius of Syracuse took the golden 

vestments from the Olympian Jupiter and dressed 

him in a woollen one, he was asked why he did 

that. He said: "Because in summertime, a golden 

outfit is heavy and in winter it is cold, but woollen 

wear goes much better in either season." 

552. This very Dionysius, when he had ordered the 

golden beard taken off Aesculapius, claimed: "It 

isn't right that his father Apollo be smooth-cheeked 

while the one that was his son is seen bearded." 

553. Some thief was mocking Demosthenes's research 

and writings a little too impudently. So he told the 

man: "I realize that I'm bothering you by burning a 

lamp at night." 

554. When Lacon had married a very small woman, he 

wittily said: "You have to pick the lesser evil." 

555. When a certain young man, reduced to poverty by 

too much expensive living, was eating olives for 

dinner, Diogenes, chancing to pass by, said: "If you 

had had lunches like this, you would not now have 

dinners like this." 

556. When a certain inexperienced doctor asked 

Pausanias: "How is it, sir, that you have no health


problems?", he said: "Because I don't have you for 

a doctor." 

557. Galba, asked by somebody for a raincoat to use, 

wittily answered: "It is not raining, so you don't 

need it. If it rains, I'll use it myself." 

558. When Aristotle at the age of about 62 was working 

so hard that it seemed that his life was almost over, 

his followers came to him asking him to pick one of 

them to take his place. Among his students two 

were outstanding, Theophrastus of Lesbos and 

Menedemus of Rhodes. Aristotle answered that he 

would do what they asked when the occasion 

arose. A little later, when they had gathered around 

him for the same purpose, he said that he found 

the wine that he was drinking not very agreeable, 

and he asked that someone get him a foreign wine, 

either one from Rhodes or from Lesbos. As soon 

as that was managed, tasting the wine from 

Rhodes, he said: "That's certainly a robust and 

pleasant wine." Next tasting the wine from Lesbos, 

he said: "Both are outstandingly good, but I like the 

one from Lesbos better." When he said this, there 

was no doubt that with his statement he had 

chosen his successor, not wine, both politely and 

cleverly. He approved both and he did not remove 

from his students their prerogative to choose. [But 

the Greek language is a little bit more urbane, 

because oinos, that is, vinum, is a word of the 

masculine gender, so that this statement, ho 

lesbios hediôn might be used of a person.] 

559. A certain person in Hadrian the Sophist's circle had 

sent him a fish on a silver platter with a gold design 

on it. Taking delight in the plate he did not send it 

back, but merely answered the one who had sent 

it: "It was a nice touch to add the fish," as if the 

platter had been sent as a gift and the fish merely


added for effect. Some say this was done as a 

joke, to punish his disciple's fault since he was said 

to be rather stingy. 

560. Pollio would say that doing something just right 

leads to doing it often, but doing it often leads to 

doing it less well, for constant performance 

produces facility more than faculty, and not 

confidence but carelessness results. What we want 

done with care should be done seldom. 

561. Once at dinner with Dionysius, Philoxenus saw that 

the king had been served a remarkably large red 

mullet while he had been served a very tiny one, 

the mature fish of this species being the ones that 

people praise. So he moved his little fish to his ear. 

To Dionysius wondering at this and asking him the 

reason for it, he said: "I’ve got Galatea in my 

clutches, and I wanted to ask it certain things about 

her. But he says he is not old enough to know 

anything yet, but he says his grandfather is over 

there on your plate, and he could tell a lot if 

someone let him speak." The king was amused 

and sent him his own mullet. 

562. When the cuckoo-bird asked the smaller birds why 

they fled her, they said: "Because we suppose 

you'll turn out to be a hawk." (The cuckoo is quite 

close to the hawk in appearance.) [Beware of 

those who put out tyrannical signals in their 

behaviour.] From Plutarch. 

563. When Antisthenes was seen carrying some salted 

fish through the market-place, some people were 

surprised that the philosopher was performing such 

a lowly task in public rather than assigning it to a 

slave. He said to them: "What are you surprised 

at? I'm carrying this for myself, not for somebody 

else." He saw that what someone does for himself


is not base servility, so carrying salted fish was not 

improper for one who was going to enjoy them. 

564. Stilpo, seeing Crates turning red from the cold in 

the winter months, said: "You seem to me to need 

a new cloak." The wit that it is in the double 

meaning can not be translated into Latin: kainou as 

one word means new, an kai nou as two means 

and mind. The ears can hardly tell the difference, 

but the written form makes it plain. He said: "You 

seem to need a new cloak, or a new cloak and a 

new mind." The chill called for a new cloak; the 

foolishness of the Cynic, who would not adapt his 

clothing to the season, for a new mind. 

565. When someone asked him whether he had 

stopped beating his father, Menedemus of Eretria 

made this response: I have not beaten him and I 

have not stopped. When another person had 

postulated that he had to solve the ambiguity with 

a yes or a no, with either an affirmation or with a 

denial, he said: "It is ridiculous to follow your rules 

when you can run into them at the gates." The 

second one was trying to catch him with a 

treacherous line of questioning, for whether he 

would have answered "I have stopped" or "I have 

not stopped, he would have been admitting to the 

charge." Seeing this coming, he put a stop to their 

sophistic word-games. 

566. Bion, when asked whether he should marry, said: 

"If you marry an ugly one, you'll have to bear her, 

but if you marry a beautiful one, you'll have to 

share her." In the Greek, there's a bit more play: 

poinen and koinen. There's just as much in Latin 

too if we say suspectam [admired] and for the 

former despectam [looked down upon]. 

567. Epictetus was accustomed to sum up all 

philosophy in two words: anechou kai apechou,


"Sustain and Forbear." The first of these directs us 

to endure with a calm spirit the troubles that come 

our way; the second, to refrain from pleasures. So 

it will come about that we are not dejected when 

things go against us and we are not spoiled when 

they turn out in our favour. 

568. Heraclitus of Ephesus used to say that citizens 

should fight for their laws no less than for their 

walls. That is to say, a city would not be safe apart 

from its laws, while apart from its walls it could be. 

569. Galba had an unsightly hump on his back, about 

which people joked: "It is just like Galba to live in a 

bad residence!" When he would promote a cause 

in Caesar's presence, he would regularly say: 

"Straighten me out, Caesar, if you find anything to 

blame in me." The other answered, "I can counsel 

you, Galba, but I can not straighten you out." 

570. When a very great number of those indicted by 

Severus Cassius were released [absolverentur] 

and the engineer Caesar had contracted for 

construction work on the forum kept leading him on 

for a long time with delays, he said: "I wish Cassius 

had also indicted my forum!" [Absolvere also 

means "to finish."] 

571. They say that Alexander the Great, standing by 

Diogenes, had asked him whether he was afraid of 

him. But he said: "What are you, good or evil?" 

Alexander replied: "Good." He answered: "Who is 

afraid of what is good?" 

572. Once Diogenes, alone in his barrel, feeding on dry 

and mouldy bread, heard the whole city buzzing 

with all kinds of happy sounds since it was a 

holiday. He felt somewhat dejected, and for a long 

time thought about abandoning his way of life. But 

when he finally saw mice creeping up and eating 

the breadcrumbs, he said: "Why are you unhappy


with yourself Diogenes, you are rich enough, look 

you have even attracted parasites." 

573. A certain man carrying around a long beam in 

public had struck Diogenes by accident and blurted 

out instinctively: "Watch out!" But Diogenes said, 

"Why, you are not going to hit me again, are you?" 

574. When Diogenes, reading on a certain occasion for 

an extremely long time, had gotten to the point 

where he saw blank space, he said: "Courage, 

men, I see land." 

575 When Thraysyllus the Cynic asked for a drachma, 

Antiochus answered: "It is not the type of gift that a 

king gives." When the Cynic amended: "Then give 

me a talent," he said: "But it is not Cynical to 

accept such a gift." 

576. Faustus, Sulla's son, very cleverly teased his 

sister, who was seeing two married men at the 

same time, Fulvius, the son of Fullo, and Pompey, 

nicknamed Macula. He said: "I am surprised that 

my sister has a macula [spot] when she has a fullo 

[launderer]. 

577. When his son Titus was taking him to task over 

having devised a tax on latrines, Vespasian waved 

money from the first payment under his nose, 

asking him whether he found the smell offensive. 

When he said he didn't, Vespasian replied: "And 

yet it comes from urine." Hence the saying: "The 

smell of profit is good no matter what the source." 

578. The poet Virgil was noticed to be constantly letting 

out sighs. This is the source of that well-known 

answer of Augustus, when he was sitting between 

him and Flaccus Horatius, who was troubled with 

bleary eyes. Asked by one of his friends about 

what he was doing, he said: "I am sitting between 

sighs and tears."


579. Once a certain traveler making a journey abroad 

had turned aside into an inn, where an entirely 

vegetarian meal was set before him, with watereddown 

wine by a minimum of service. After he had 

had his dinner he asked that the doctor be called to 

get his fee. The inn-keeper inquired: "You 

scoundrel, why are you looking for a doctor for in 

this place that is so far out of the way? Then he 

said: "Sir, don't you know who you are? To make 

the fee suit your service, take what a doctor costs 

rather than an inn-keeper, since you fed me like a 

sick man at this poor little dinner." 

580. Pyrrhiniculus the Basque had pulled off the road to 

an inn and at supper was turning a young duck on 

his plate, nicely dressed and seasoned. Suddenly 

a Spanish traveler appeared at his side, with his 

eyes glued to the duck. "You, friend, can receive 

one coming kindly as a friend." Then Pyrrhiniculus 

asked him what his name was. Full of selfassertion 

and self-importance, he said "Alopantius 

Ausimarchides Hiberoneus Alarchides." Then 

Pyrrhiniculus said, "Indeed! Are there four birds 

here for these heroes, and Spanish ones at that? 

No offence intended. It is enough for Pyrrhiniculus 

alone: Small servings fit small people." From 

Pontanus. 

581. When Diogenes wanted to mock a man who was 

very bad at archery, he positioned himself near the 

target. Asked why he did this, he said: "So he 

doesn't hit me." 

582. A sharp and thoroughly sophisticated Florentine 

youth, brought in before a priest-Cardinal for 

amusing conversation, had spoken at length quite 

cleverly and also even brilliantly. The priest, turning 

to a friend who was standing nearby, whispered 

that when boys like this grow up their wits usually


get rather dull. "Really, good Cardinal, you must 

have been quite a brilliant little boy." 

583. A particular man who was growing grey asked 

Emperor Hadrian for something and was refused. 

When he asked for the same thing a little later, but 

now with a head of black hair (for he had dyed it), 

the Emperor, recognizing his face, said: "That very 

thing I refused your father." 

584. When Minutius was trapped by and enemy ambush 

and was in extreme danger, Fabius, mobilising his 

army from a mountain came to his aid so that he 

would not perish with his troops, and slaughtering 

many of the enemy, he pulled him out of the 

danger. When this had happened, Hannibal said to 

his own army: "Didn't I predict to you a good 

number of times that that a mountain-cloud would 

someday send a storm down on us?" 

585. When Augustus's daughter Julia greeted him, she 

realized that he had been offended by the sight of 

her overly provocative dress, although he tried to 

pretend he was not. And so the next day she wore 

a different kind of dress when she greeted her 

father with an embrace. Then the emperor who 

had contained his distress the day before could not 

contain his joy, and he said: "How much more 

becoming is that dress for Augustus's daughter." 

She replied: "Yes, to be sure, today I have dressed 

for my father's eyes; yesterday for a husband's." 

586. At the gladiatorial exhibition, Livia and Julia had 

attracted people's attention with the difference in 

their company. Mature and serious men encircled 

Livia, but exuberant young ones accompanied 

Julia. Julia's father mentioned to her through a 

note that he saw how big a difference there was 

between the two leading ladies. She wrote back: 

And these are going to grow old with me.


587. While Augustus was still in his youth, he cleverly 

scored against Vatinius. Since he was given to the 

pains of the gout, he was eager to seem to have 

shaken the affliction, and he would boast that he 

now walked a mile. "I'm not surprised," said the 

Emperor. "The days are a bit longer." 

588. Removed from his command of the cavalry, a 

certain person dared to request additional pay from 

Augustus, with the excuse that he was not seeking 

the pay for financial gain, but, he said: "So that I 

might seem to have gotten the gift by your decision 

and this way it will not be thought that I had been 

removed but that I had resigned." Augustus said: 

"You go tell everybody that you took it, and I won't 

deny it." 

589. At the beginning of his rule, Emperor Domitian was 

in the habit of taking private time for himself and 

doing nothing in the while other than catching flies 

and pinning them through with a sharply pointed 

stylus. So when someone asked if anyone was 

inside with the Emperor, Vibius Crispus quipped, 

"Not even a fly." 

590. Three men had been appointed to set out for 

Bithynia as legates. One of them was detained by 

the gout, another had a head riddled with wounds, 

and the third seemed to be struggling with mental 

instability. Cato laughed and said: "The delegation 

representing the Roman people has neither feet 

nor head nor heart." 

591. After the steward had ordered a modest meal for 

Lucullus, he summoned him and berated him. The 

fellow said "I did not think that there was a need for 

a lavish spread because you were going to be 

dining alone." Lucullus said: "What are you saying? 

Didn't you know that today Lucullus was going to 

dine at Lucullus's?"


592. When this same man had entertained some 

Greeks splendidly for several days, and they said 

that they were amazed that he would incur such 

expenses for their sake, he said: "Some was for 

you, my good guests, but the greatest part was for 

Lucullus." 

593. When Scipio Nasica had come to Ennius the poet's 

house and asked for him at the door, the maidservant 

told him that he was not at home, but 

Nasica realized that she was saying this at her 

master's request and that he was inside. But 

pretending not to notice this, he left. But a few days 

later, when Ennius had come to Nasica and asked 

for him at the door, Nasica himself shouted out that 

he was not at home. Then Ennius said: "What!? 

Don't I recognize your voice?" Nasica replied: "You 

really are a shameless man! When I was looking 

for you, I believed your maid-servant, and you 

don't even believe me!" 

594. Suetonius tells a story about the Emperor [lit: 

father] Vespasian, when he had incited a comic 

who was hurling many barbs at others to say 

something against himself as well. He said: "I will, 

when you finish doing your business," making 

reference to the Caesar's appearance, since he 

had the face of a man straining to defecate. 

595. They tell a story about Bede, referred to as "the 

Venerable." When he was on his way to Rome, 

they showed him the letters S.P.Q.R. engraved on 

a stone (meaning "The Senate and the People of 

Rome"), and they asked him as they would a host 

what those letters meant. Pretending he didn't 

know the true meaning, he said, "A Foolish People 

is looking for Rome." 

596. Asked why he put women who were wicked into his 

tragedies, when Sophocles put in ones that were


good, the poet Philoxenus made this very clever 

response: "He presents them as they ought to be; I 

present them as they are." 

597. When the same man was having a meal at his 

friend Sytho's, olives had been served and a little 

later fish brought in on a shallow pan. When it hit 

the small container of olives, he recited half of a 

Homeric line: matixen d'elaan, that is, "He whipped 

them so they would pull." (It is said of a charioteer.) 

But Philoxenus saw that the olives had to be taken 

away right away, and meanwhile he played on the 

Greek word elaion, which means of olives and 

elaan, which means to draw a chariot, or 

something like it. 

598. The same man was invited to a party. When black 

bread had been served, he said: "Be careful not to 

serve too much or you'll make the room dark." 

599. At a party, Phryne, in the bloom of her youth, when 

she was playing the party-game that had everyone 

do what one would do, first dipped her hand twice 

in water and moved it to her forehead. But since 

everyone had make-up on, the water flowed down 

and smeared the make-up, disfiguring everyone's 

face with a wrinkled look, while she herself, with 

her natural beauty at its best, looked even better 

with her face washed. 

600. Once Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, was 

hosting a matron from Campana who displayed to 

her her jewels, which were the most beautiful ones 

available in that whole era. Cornelia drew out the 

conversation until her children got back from class. 

Then she said "And these are my jewels," thinking 

that nothing was more beautiful to a matron, or 

more precious, than children who had been 

brought up correctly.


601. When everyone was begging for an end to the 

Tyrant Dionysius, one old woman was in the habit 

of imploring the gods early every day that he 

remain safe and sound. Summoned by the king, 

the woman was asked where she got so kind 

attitude toward the king. She said: "When I was a 

girl and we had a bad tyrant, I hoped for his death. 

When he had been killed, a worse one took control 

of the citadel. And I hoped for his destruction. Now 

that we have you, even worse than the earlier 

ones, I am afraid that if you pass away someone 

even worse will follow you." 

602. Demonax the Cynic was once asked what he 

thought about the disagreement of two people, one 

of whom put forth a silly proposition and the other 

of whom gave a non-sensical response. He said: 

"It seems to me that one is milking a male goat and 

the other is holding a sieve ready." 

603. Once Socrates put up with Xanthippe's quarrelling 

for a long while and finally worn out, he sat down in 

front of the door, but even more exasperated by 

the peacefulness and mildness of the man, she 

poured the contents of the chamber-pot on him 

from the window. The people passing by laughed, 

and he smiled too, saying to them: "I just knew that 

after such a thundering, rain would follow." 

604. When Alcibiades was amazed at how Socrates 

suffered Xanthippe who was so excessively 

quarrelsome at home. He answered: "Don't you, 

Alcibiades, put up with the noise of your clucking 

chickens at your house?" He said: "I do, but my 

chickens produce eggs and chicks for me." "And 

my Xanthippe bears me children," said Socrates. 

605. When Curtius, a Roman knight dissipating himself 

in his enjoyments, was dining at Caesar's, he 

picked up a skimpy thrush from the serving-pan


and holding it, asked Caesar if he could send it. 

When he had replied: "Why not?", he immediately 

threw [misit] the bird through the window, getting a 

joke out of the double-meaning of the word. For is 

is a custom among the Romans to send food from 

a party to friends as a gift. 

606. When Augustus was greeted by a parrot, he had it 

bought. Admiring a magpie, he bought it as well. 

This pattern incited a certain little scrawny fellow all 

out of luck to train a raven to make this kind of 

greeting. And since its cost left him broke, he was 

accustomed to regularly say to the bird when it did 

not answer him: "My work and money are lost!" 

Finally he succeeded by persevering to make the 

raven sound out the greeting that he wanted it to. 

And when it had greeted Augustus when he was 

passing by, the Emperor said: "I have enough of 

such greetings at home." Then the raven also 

remembered those words that he had heard so 

often and added: "My work and money are lost!" 

Smiling at this, Augustus had this bird bought at a 

higher price than he had ever paid before. 

607. There had come to Rome from the provinces a 

certain youth who had such an uncanny 

resemblance to Augustus that he attracted 

everyone's attention. Hearing about this, the 

Emperor had him brought in and, looking him over, 

questioned him this way: "Tell me, young man, was 

your mother ever at Rome?" He said no, and 

getting the idea for a joke he shot back: "But my 

father often was." 

608. When a certain Roman knight had died, it was 

discovered that he had been in such great debt 

that he could not in any way pay it off. While he 

was alive, he had hidden this fact. So when his 

property was put up for auction to pay some of his


creditors, Augustus had his mattress bought for 

himself. To those who were surprised by this 

instruction, he said: "To get some sleep for myself, 

I have to have that mattress on which he could 

take his rest even while under the burden of such 

debt." For Augustus often spent most of the night 

awake on account of his tremendous concerns. 

END

praxis grammatica - California State University, Sacramento

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