Kitap 19
8
WHEN I was a young man at Rome, before I went to Athens, I often paid a visit to Cornelius Fronto, when I had leisure from my masters and my lectures, and enjoyed his refined conversations, which abounded besides in excellent information. Whenever I saw him and heard him speak, I almost never failed to come away improved and better informed. An example is the following little talk of his, held one day on a trivial subject, it is true, but yet not without importance for the study of the Latin language. For when an intimate friend of his, a learned man and an eminent poet of the day, said that he had been cured of dropsy by the use of hot sand (calentes harenae), thereupon Fronto in jesting fashion said: "You are indeed freed of your complaint, but not of the complaint of improper language. For Gaius Caesar, the famous life-dictator and father-in-law of Gnaeus Pompeius, from whom the family and the name of the Caesars are derived, a man of wonderful talent, surpassing all others of his time in the purity of his diction, in the work On Analogy, which he dedicated to Marcus Cicero, wrote ii. p. 126, Dinter. that harenae is an improper term, since harena ought never to be used in the plural, Harenae is used by Virgil, Horace, and Ovid (e.g. Hor. Odes, i. 28. 1; iii. 4. 31; Virg. Aen. i. 107); also by Seneca the philosopher Tacitus, Suetonius (Aug. lxxx.) and other post-Augustan prose-writers and poets. any more than caelum (heaven) and triticum (wheat). But on the other hand he thinks that quadrigae, even though it be a single chariot, that is, one team of four horses yoked together, ought always to be used in the plural number, like arma (arms), moenia (walls), comitia (election) and inimicitiae (hostility)—unless, my finest of poets, you have anything to say in reply, to excuse yourself and show that you have not made an error."
