Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights
John C. Rolfe, Ed.

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[p. 489] his friend the consul, who was hearing cases from the tribunal—and I at the time was in attendance on him—he asked, I say, what that inscription manubiae seemed to us really to mean. Then one of those who were with him, a man of a great and wide-spread reputation for his devotion to learned pursuits, said: “Ex manubiis is the same as ex praeda; for manubiae is the term for booty which is taken mann, that is 'by hand.'” Then Favorinus rejoined: “Although my principal and almost my entire attention has been given to the literature and arts of Greece, I am nevertheless not so inattentive to the Latin language, to which I devote occasional or desultory study, as to be unaware of this common interpretation of manubiae, which makes it a synonym of praeda. But I raise the question, whether Marcus Tullius, a man most careful in his diction, in the speech which he delivered against Rullus on the first of January On the Agrarian Law, joined manubiae and praeda by an idle and inelegant repetition, if it be true that these two words have the same meaning and do not differ in any respect at all.” And then, such was Favorinus' marvellous and almost miraculous memory, he at once added Cicero's own words. These I have appended: ¹ “The decemvirs will sell the booty (praedam), the proceeds of the spoils (manubias), the goods reserved for public auction, in fact Gnaeus Pompeius' camp, while the general sits looking on”; and just below he again used these two words in conjunction: ² “From the booty (ex praeda), from the proceeds of the spoils (ex manubiis), from the crown-money.” ³ Then, turning to the man who had said that manubiae was the same as praeda, Favorinus said, "Does it seem to you that in both