REMAINS OF FRONTO
facts and his felicity of expression, remarked, "But for you alone perhaps the Greek language would have come in first by a long way. But you, my Fronto, exemplify Homer's verse:
Now had you passed me by in the race or made it a dead heat.[1]
But while I listened with delight to all that you have so learnedly said, yet I was especially pleased with your analysis of the varieties of the colour flavus, and at your enabling me to understand those most charming lines from the fourteenth book of the Annals of Ennius, which I never understood:
They sweep forthwith the tranquil water's yellow flow;
Churned by the close-packt fleet the dark-blue ocean foams.
For the f dark-blue' sea did not seem to correspond with the 'yellow' flow. But since you have told us that the colour flavus is a blend of green and white, the foam of the green sea was assuredly most beautifully expressed by flavo marmore."
"Many Men" and "Many Mortals"
Inasmuch as Quadrigarius[2] uses the expression "with many mortals" what and how much difference it would make if he had said "with many men."
The words from the thirteenth book of the Annals of Claudius Quadrigarius are:
The assembly being dismissed, Metellus came into the Capitol with many mortals: on his return home from there he was escorted by the whole city.
- ↑ Hom. Il. xxiii. 382.
- ↑ A historian at the beginning of the first century B.C. who wrote a history of Rome from its capture by the Gauls.
