Many
Similar Sayings Of Great Men And Philosophers Are Recorded In The
Saturnalia Of Macrobius.
When Cicero saw his son-in-law, Lentulus,
a man of small stature, with a long sword by his side:
"Who," says
he, "has girded my son-in-law to that sword?" thus changing the
accessary into the principal. The same person, on seeing the half-
length portrait of his brother Quintus Cicero, drawn with very
large features and an immense shield, exclaimed, "Half of my
brother is greater than the whole!" When the sister of Faustus had
an intrigue with a fuller, "Is it strange," says he, "that my
sister has a spot, when she is connected with a fuller?" When
Antiochus showed Hannibal his army, and the great warlike
preparations he had made against the Romans, and asked him,
"Thinkest thou, O Hannibal, that these are sufficient for the
Romans?" Hannibal, ridiculing the unmilitary appearance of the
soldiers, wittily and severely replied, "I certainly think them
sufficient for the Romans, however greedy;" Antiochus asking his
opinion about the military preparations, and Hannibal alluding to
them as becoming a prey to the Romans.
CHAPTER XV
Their boldness and confidence in speaking
Nature hath given not only to the highest, but also to the
inferior, classes of the people of this nation, a boldness and
confidence in speaking and answering, even in the presence of their
princes and chieftains. The Romans and Franks had the same
faculty; but neither the English, nor the Saxons and Germans, from
whom they are descended, had it.
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