Cornelius Nepos, a celebrated biographer of the Augustan age, was born on the banks of the Po, which he quitted in his youth; and, attracted by the splendour and pleasures of a gallant and polite court, removed to Rome, where his talents and taste for literature procured him the friendship of Cicero, and many other eminent persons. Of all his much-admired writings nothing remains but his “Lives of the most illustrious Greeks and Romans.”
[NOTE 23.]
Puteoli.
Puteoli, or, as it is now called, Puzzoli, was much frequented by the Romans for the sake of its hot-wells: being at a convenient distance from the capital, not more than a day’s journey. It is now become comparatively inconsiderable, while Naples, in its vicinity, has grown into importance. Puzzoli, however, still affords some attraction to the curious; as there are the ruins of a temple of Jupiter Apis, or Serapis, to be seen there. This town was originally called Dicearchea: named, probably, after Dice, a daughter of Jupiter.
[NOTE 24.]
On the first of March.
The Roman ladies were allowed to exercise extraordinary authority on this day, on which they celebrated the festival called Matronalia, instituted in gratitude to Mars, who permitted a termination of the war between the Romans and Sabines; in which the women were particularly concerned. The privileges allowed to ladies on the first of March, were, I believe, confined to the matrons, in commemoration of the successful interference of the married women, in the year 749, B. C., which put an end to the war between the Romans and the Sabines, who had taken up arms to revenge the rape of their women by the Romans, at a festival to which Romulus had invited them. (Vide [Note 28].)
[NOTE 25.]
Santra.
Little is known of Santra, but that he was cotemporary with Cicero, and author of some biographical Memoirs, and “A Treatise on the Antiquity of Words,” which are now entirely lost. His family, probably, were plebeians, and of no great note.
[NOTE 26.]
He would not have requested it from Scipio and Lælius, who were then extremely young.
Santra’s argument is of no force: for when Terence published the Andrian, in the year of Rome 587, at twenty-seven years of age, Scipio was eighteen, and might, at that age, have been perfectly capable of assisting Terence; for, independent of his excellent education, on which his father had bestowed infinite care and pains, he was possessed of a very superior genius: and nature had united in him all the fine qualities of his father, and of his grandfather by adoption, Scipio the Great. Velleius Paterculus wrote his eulogium as follows, “Publius Scipio Æmilianus inherited the virtues of his grandfather Publius Africanus, and of his father Lucius Paulus, excelled all his cotemporaries in wit and learning, and in all the arts of war and peace; and, in the course of his whole life never did, said, or thought, any thing, but what was worthy of the highest praise.”
“We have seen princes in France, who, at the age of eighteen, were capable of assisting a poet, as well with respect to the conduct and arrangement of his subject; as in what related to the manners, the diction, and the thoughts. Menander published his first piece at twenty years of age. It is clear, then, that there have been persons of eighteen, capable of assisting a poet. It appears, moreover, that the enemies of Terence did not publish this imputation against him till the latter years of his life, for the poet complains of it only in the prologues to the Self-tormentor and the Brothers: the first of which was played three years, and the last but one year before his death. When the first appeared, he was thirty-one, and Scipio twenty-two: and when the last was published, he was thirty-four, and Scipio was twenty-five.”—Madame Dacier.