Book 3
9
The meaning is the same of that other old proverb, which I have heard quoted thus: the gold of Tolosa. For when the town of Tolosa in the land of Gaul was pillaged by the consul Quintus Caepio, and a quantity of gold was found in the temples of that town, whoever touched a piece of gold from that sack died a wretched and agonizing death.
9
Gavius Bassus reports that he saw this horse at Argos; that it was of incredible beauty and strength and of the richest possible colouring.
9
This colour, as I have said, we call poeniceus; the Greeks sometimes name it foi=nic, at others spa/dic, since the branch of the palm (foi=nic), torn from the tree with its fruit, is called spadix. See ii. 26, 10. The colour is a purple-red, or reddish purple.
10
That in many natural phenomena a certain power and efficacy of the number seven has been observed, concerning which Marcus Varro discourses at length in his Hebdomades. Fr. p. 255, Bipont. This work, more commonly called Imagines, consisted of seven hundred portraits of dis. tinguished men, arranged in seven categories of Greeks and Romans; besides the fourteen books thus formed there was an introductory fifteenth. Under each portrait was a metrical elogium and an account of the personage in prose. Cf. Plin. N.H. xxxv. 11.
