[p. 307]
IV
[4arg] How Sulpicius Apollinaris made fun of a man who asserted that he alone understood Sallust's histories, by inquiring the meaning of these words in Sallust: incertum, stolidior an vacnior.WHEN I was already a young man at Rome, having laid aside the purple-bordered toga of boyhood, and was on my own account seeking masters of deeper knowledge, I happened to be with the booksellers in Shoemaker's Street at the time when Sulpicius Apollinaris, the most learned man of all within my memory, in the presence of a large gathering made fun of a boastful fellow who was parading his reading of Sallust, and turned him into ridicule with that kind of witty irony which Socrates used against the sophists. For when the man declared that he was the one and only reader and expositor of Sallust, and openly boasted that he did not merely search into the outer skin and obvious meaning of his sentences, but delved into and thoroughly examined the very blood and marrow of his words, then Apollinaris, pretending to embrace and venerate his learning, said: “Most opportunely, my good master, do you come to me now with the blood and marrow of Sallust's language. For yesterday I was asked what in the world those words of his meant which he wrote in the fourth book of his Histories about Gnaeus Lentulus, of whom he says that it is uncertain whether he was more churlish or more unreliable”; and he quoted the very words, as Sallust wrote them: 1 “But Gnaeus Lentulus, his colleague, surnamed Clodianus, a man of patrician family—and it is not at all easy to say whether he ”
