Book 17
2
They thought, says he, Frag. 5, Peter2. that those who were without and those that were within the citadel were exchanging communications (commutationes) and plans Commutationes, meaning conferences and communications, is not usual, but, by Heaven! is neither erroneous nor inelegant.
2
These few notes on that book, such things as I remembered after reading it, I have now jotted down for my own use.
3
The words of Marcus Varro in the twenty fifth book of his Humran Antiquities, in which he has interpreted a line of Homer contrary to the general opinion.
3
IT happened in the course of conversations which we carried on about the dates of various inventions for human use, that a young man not without learning observed that the use of spartum or Spanish broom also was for a long time unknown in the land of Greece and that it was imported from Spain many years after the taking of Ilium. One or two half-educated fellows who were present there, of the class that the Greeks call a)gorai=oi, or haunters of the market-place, laughed in derision of this statement, and declared that the man who had made it had read a copy of Homer which happened to lack the following verse: Iliad ii. 135.
