[p. 371] the cold have an onychinum tegimen, or “an onyx covering”; also his many humorous multiple compounds, as when he calls his detractors 1 subductisupercilicarptores, or “carpers with raised eye-brows.”
VIII
[8arg] An inquiry whether harena, caelum and triticum are found in the plural; also whether quadrigae, inimicitiae, and some other words, occur in the singular.WHEN I was a young man at Rome, before I went to Athens, I often paid a visit to Cornelius Fronto, when I had leisure from my masters and my lectures, and enjoyed his refined conversations, which abounded besides in excellent information. Whenever I saw him and heard him speak, I almost never failed to come away improved and better informed. An example is the following little talk of his, held one day on a trivial subject, it is true, but yet not without importance for the study of the Latin language. For when an intimate friend of his, a learned man and an eminent poet of the day, said that he had been cured of dropsy by the use of hot sand (calentes harenae), thereupon Fronto in jesting fashion said: "You are indeed freed of your complaint, but not of the complaint of improper language. For Gaius Caesar, the famous life-dictator and father-in-law of Gnaeus Pompeius, from whom the family and the name of the Caesars are derived, a man of wonderful talent, surpassing all others of his time in the purity of his diction, in the work On Analogy, which he dedicated to Marcus Cicero, wrote 2 that harenae is an improper term, since harena ought never to be
