Chapter 3. On kingdoms and terms used in warfare.
2. Whole nations have enjoyed sovereignty each in its own turn, as the Assyrians, Medes, Persians, Egyptians, Greeks, whose turns the lot of time so rolled around that one was destroyed by another. Amid all the kingdoms of the earth, however, two are said to be more glorious than the rest; that of the Assyrians first, then that of the Romans, being separated and distinguished from one another both in time and place.
3. For as the former was earlier and the latter later, so the former arose in the East and the latter in the West; finally at the destruction of the former the beginning of the latter immediately appeared. All other kingdoms and all other kings are regarded as appendages of these.
BOOK X
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WORDS[325]
EXTRACTS
1. Though the derivation of words by the philosophers involves this belief, that homo comes from humanitas, sapiens from sapientia, because sapientia exists before sapiens, still another special cause is evident in the derivation of certain names, as homo from humus, whence in a true sense homo is so called. And we have set down certain of these derivations in this work for the sake of example.
44. Compilator, one who mixes the words of other men with his own as painters are wont to mix and pound different things in a mortar. Of this crime the famous poet of Mantua was once accused when he had translated certain verses of Homer and mingled them with his own, and when he was called by his rivals a plunderer of the ancients he replied: “Magnarum esse virium clavam Herculi extorquere de manu”.
194. Nepos,[326] so called from a certain kind of scorpion that eats its own young, excepting one which has a seat upon its back; this one, being saved, eats its father. Whence men who eat up in luxury the goods of their parents are called Nepotes.