Most common, proverbial sayings are, doubtless, of great antiquity. Chopping-blocks with a razor is a common illustration of the employment of a subtle ingenuity, upon coarse and uninteresting topics. Thus Goldsmith, in his Retaliation, says of Burke—
In short, ’twas his fate, unemploy’d, or in place, sir,
To eat mutton cold, and chop blocks with a razor.
The latter illustration is as old as Livy—novacula cotem discindere.
The Romans made a prodigious fuss, about their beards. The first crop, called prima barba, and sometimes lanugo, was, according to Petronius, consecrated to some god. Suetonius says, in his Life of Nero, 12—Gymnico quod in septis edebat, inter buthysiæ apparatum, barbam primam posuit, conditamque in auream pyxidem, et pretiosissimis margaritis adornatam, capitolio consecravit.—During the games, which he had given in the enclosures, and in the very midst of the splendor of the sacrifice, for the first time, he laid down his beard, and having placed it in a golden box, adorned with precious stones, he made a sacred deposit thereof, in the capitol.
After the custom of shaving had been introduced, by Mena, A. U. C. 454, it went out, for a short time, in Rome, during the time of Adrian, who as Spartianus relates, in his Life of that Emperor, having some ugly excrescences on his chin, suffered his beard to grow to conceal them—of course the courtiers followed the example of the emperor—the people, that of the courtiers. The grave concealed those excrescences, more effectually, A. D. 139, and the navacula again came into use, among the Romans: Marcus Antoninus, his successor, had no excrescences on his chin.
The day, upon which a young Roman was said ponere barbam, that is, to shave for the first time, was accounted a holiday; and Juvenal says, iii. 187, he received presents from his friends.
Ovid, Trist. iv. 10, 67, dates his earliest literary exhibitions, before the people, by his first or second shave, or clip—
Carmina quum primum populo juvenilia legi,
Barba resecta mihi bisve semelve fuit.
Which may be thus translated—
When first in public I began
To read my boyish rhymes,
I scarcely could be call’d a man,
And had not shav’d three times.