Nadagara. See: [♦]Nagara.
[♦] reference not found
Nænia, the goddess of funerals at Rome, whose temple was without the gates of the city. The songs which were sung at funerals were also called nænia. They were generally filled with the praises of the deceased, but sometimes they were so unmeaning and improper, that the word became proverbial to signify nonsense. Varro, [♦]Antiquitates rerum humanarum et divinarum.—Plautus, Asinaria. [♠]act 4, scene 1, li. 63.
[♦] ‘de Vitâ P. R.’ replaced with ‘Antiquitates rerum humanarum et divinarum’
[♠] ‘41’ replaced with ‘4’
Cnæus Nævius, a Latin poet in the first Punic war. He was originally in the Roman armies, but afterwards he applied himself to study and wrote comedies, besides a poetical account of the first Punic war, in which he had served. His satirical disposition displeased the consul Metellus, who drove him from Rome. He passed the rest of his life in Utica, where he died, about 203 years before the christian era. Some fragments of his poetry are extant. Cicero, Tusculanæ Disputationes, bk. 1, ch. 1; de Senectute.—Horace, bk. 2, ltr. 1, li. 53.——A tribune of the people at Rome, who accused Scipio Africanus of extortion.——An augur in the reign of Tarquin. To convince the king and the Romans of his power as an augur, he cut a flint with a razor, and turned the ridicule of the populace into admiration. Tarquin rewarded his merit by erecting to him a statue in the comitium, which was still in being in the age of Augustus. The razor and flint were buried near it under an altar, and it was usual among the Romans to make witnesses in civil causes swear near it. This miraculous event of cutting a flint with a razor, though believed by some writers, is treated as fabulous and improbable by Cicero, who himself had been an augur. Dionysius of Halicarnassus.—Livy, bk. 1, ch. 36.—Cicero, de Divinatione, bk. 1, ch. 17; De Natura Deorum, bk. 2, ch. 3; bk. 3, ch. 6.
Nævŏlus, an infamous pimp in Domitian’s reign. Juvenal, satire 9, li. 1.
Naharvali, a people of Germany. Tacitus, Germania, ch. 43.
Nāiădes, or Naides, certain inferior deities who presided over rivers, springs, wells, and fountains. The Naiades generally inhabited the country, and resorted to the woods or meadows near the stream over which they presided, whence the name (ναιειν, to flow). They are represented as young and beautiful virgins, often leaning upon an urn, from which flows a stream of water. Ægle was the fairest of the Naiades, according to Virgil. They were held in great veneration among the ancients, and often sacrifices of goats and lambs were offered to them, with libations of wine, honey, and oil. Sometimes they received only offerings of milk, fruit, and flowers. See: [Nymphæ]. Virgil, Eclogues.—Ovid, Metamorphoses, bk. 14, li. 328.—Homer, Odyssey, bk. 13.
Nais, one of the Oceanides, mother of Chiron or Glaucus by Magnes. Apollodorus, bk. 1, ch. 9.——A nymph, mother by Bucolion of Ægesus and Pedasus. Homer, Iliad, bk. 6.——A nymph in an island of the Red sea, who by her incantations turned to fishes all those who approached her residence, after she had admitted them to her embraces. She was herself changed into a fish by Apollo. Ovid, Metamorphoses, bk. 4, li. 49, &c.——The word is used for water by Tibullus, bk. 3, poem 7.