has fallen; not indeed to lament because a man has been born or has died,[1] but because it has happened to him in his life time to have lost the things which are his own, not that which he received from his father, not his land and house, and his inn,[2] and his slaves; for not one of these things is a man's own, but all belong to others, are servile, and subject to account (ὑπεύθυνα), at different times given to different persons by those who have them in their power: but I mean the things which belong to him as a man, the marks (stamps) in his mind with which he came into the world, such as we seek also on coins, and if we find them, we approve of the coins, and if we do not find the marks, we reject them. What is the stamp on this Sestertius?[3] The stamp of Trajan. Present it. It is the stamp of Nero. Throw it away: it cannot be accepted, it is counterfeit.[4] So also in this case: What is
- ↑ The allusion is to a passage (a fragment) in the Cresphontes of Euripides translated by Cicero into Latin Iambics (Tusc. Disp. i. 48)—Herodotus (v. 4) says of the Trausi, a Thracian tribe: 'when a child is born, the relatives sit round it and lanient over all the evils which it must suffer on coming into the world and enumerate all the calamities of mankind: but when one dies, they hide him in the earth with rejoicing and pleasure, reckoning all the evils from which he is now released and in possession of all happiness.'
ἔδει γὰρ ἡμᾶς σύλλογον ποιουμένους
τὸν φύντα θρηνεῖν εἰς ὅσ᾽ ἔρχεται κάκα.
τὸν δ᾽ αὖ θανόντα καὶ πόνων πεπαυμένον
χαίροντας, εὐφημοῦντας ἐκπέμπειν δόμων. - ↑ The word is πανδοκεῖον, which Schweig. says that he does not understand. He supposes the word to be corrupt; unless we take it to mean the inn in which a man lives who has no home. I do not understand the word here.
- ↑ See the note of Schweig. on the word τετράσσαρον in the text.
- ↑ This does not mean, it is said, that Nero issued counterfeit coins, for there are extant many coins of Nero which both in form and in the purity of the metal are complete. A learned numismatist, Francis Wise, fellow of Trinity College Oxford, in a letter to Upton, says that he can discover no reason for Nero's coins being rejected in commercial dealings after his death except the fact of the tyrant having been declared by the Senate to be an enemy to the Commonwealth. (Suetonius, Nero, c. 49.) When Domitian was murdered, the Senate ordered his busts to be taken down, as the French now do after a revolution and all memorials of him to be destroyed (Suetonius, Domitian, c. 23). Dion also reports (lx.) that when Caligula was
