[p. 215] Marcus Varro says 1 that Euripides also, although he wrote seventy-five tragedies, was victor with only five, 2 and was often vanquished by some very poor poets. Some say that Menander left one hundred and eight comedies, others that the number was a hundred and nine. But we find these words of Apollodorus, a very famous writer, about Menander in his work entitled Chronica: 3
Cephissia's child, by Diopeithes sired,Yet Apollodorus also writes in the same book that out of all those hundred and five dramas Menander gained the victory only with eight.
An hundred plays he left and five besides;
At fifty-two he died.
V
[5arg] That it is by no mears true, as some meticulous artists in rhetoric affirm, that Marcus Cicero, in his book On Friendship, made use of a faulty argument and postulated “the disputed for the admitted”; with a careful discussion and examination of this whole question.MARCUS CICERO, in the dialogue entitled Laelius, or On Friendship, wishes to teach us that friendship ought not to be cultivated in the hope and expectation of advantage, profit, or gain, but that it should be sought and cherished because in itself it is rich in virtue and honour, even though no aid and no advantage can be gained from it. This thought he has expressed in the following words, put into the mouth of Gaius Laelius, a wise man and a very
