Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, Book XX, IX, section 9arg

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The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius: Book VI

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[9arg] A passage in the Mimiambi of Gnaeus Matius, in which Antonius Iulianus used to delight; and the meaning of Marcus Cato in the speech which he wrote on his own uprightness, when he said: “I have never asked the people for garments.”

ANTONIUS JULIANUS used to say that his ears were soothed and charmed by the newly-coined words of Gnaeus Matius, a man of learning, such as the following, which he said were written by Matius in his Mimiambi: ¹

Revive your cold love in your warm embrace,
Close joining lip to lip like amorous dove (columbulatim).

[p. 447] And this also he declared to be charmingly and neatly devised: ²

The shorn rugs now are drunken with the dye
With which the shell ³ has drenched and coloured them. . .

1 Frag. 12, Bahrens (F.P.R. p. 282).

2 Id. 13.

3 That is, the murex or “purple-fish.”

The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius. With An English Translation. John C. Rolfe. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1927.

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