[51]
Such ambiguity may even go so far as to present all the
appearance of a riddle, witness the jest that Cicero
made at the expense of Pletorius, the accuser of
Fonteius: “His mother,” he said, “kept a school
while she lived and masters after she was dead.”1
The explanation is that in her lifetime women
of infamous character used to frequent her
house, while after her death her property was
sold. (I may note however that ludus, is used
metaphorically in the sense of school, while
magisiri is used ambiguously.)
1 magister may mean a schoolmaster or a receiver (magister bonorum)placed in charge of the goods to be sold. The phrase here has the same suggestion as “having the bailiffs in the house.” This passage does not occur in the portions of the pro Fonteio which survive.
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1921.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.