XXII
[22arg] The words of Titus Castricius to his young pupils on unbecoming clothes and shoes.TITUS CASTRICIUS, a teacher of the art of rhetoric, who held the first rank at Rome as a declaimer and an instructor, a man of the greatest influence and dignity, was highly regarded also by the deified Hadrian for his character and his learning. Once when 1 happened to be with him (for I attended him as my master) and he had seen some pupils of his who were senators wearing tunics and cloaks on a holiday, and with sandals on their feet, 1 he said: “For my part, I should have preferred to see you in your togas, or if that was too much trouble, at least with girdles and mantles. But if this present attire of yours is now pardonable from long custom, yet it is not at all seemly for you, who are senators of the Roman people, to go through the streets of the city [p. 479] in sandals, nor by Jove! is this less criminal in you than it was in one whom Marcus Tullius once reproved for such attire.” This, and some other things to the same purport, Castricius said in my hearing with true Roman austerity. But several of those who had heard him asked why he had said soleatos, or “in sandals,” of those who wore gallicae, or “Gallic slippers,” and not soleae. But Castricius certainly spoke purely and properly; for in general all kinds of foot-gear which cover only the bottom of the soles, leaving the rest almost bare, and are bound on by slender thongs, are called soleae, or sometimes by the Greek word crepidulae. But gallicae, I think, is a new word, which came into use not long before the time of Marcus Cicero. In fact, he himself uses it in his second Oration against Antony: 2 “You ran about,” says lie, “in slippers (gallicis) and cloak.” Nor do I find this word with that meaning in any other writer—a writer of high authority, that is; but, as I have said, they called that kind of shoe crepidae and crepidulae, shortening the first syllable of the Greek word κρηπῖδες, and the makers of such shoes they termed crepidarii. Sempronius Asellio in the fourteenth book of his Histories says: 3 “He asked for a cobbler's knife from a maker of slippers (crepidarius sutor).”
