Page:Correspondence of Marcus Cornelius Fronto volume 2 Haines 1920.djvu/295



After 143 A.D.

1. chanced that Cornelius Fronto and Postumius Festus and Sulpicius Apollinaris were standing together in the porch of the Palace talking. I was standing by at the same time with some others and eagerly listening to their conversation on the niceties of language.

2. Then said Fronto to Apollinaris:

"Certify me, I beseech you, master, whether I was right in giving up speaking of men of very small stature as nani and preferring to call them pumiliones, since I remembered to have seen the word in the old writers: but nani I believed to be a mean and barbarous word."

3. "This word," said Apollinaris in reply, "is in fact commonly used by the uneducated vulgar, but it is not barbarous, and is classified as Greek by origin; for the Greeks styled men of short and low stature, such as stood but little above the ground; and they used it in this way from some reference to its etymology, which tallies with the meaning of the word. And if my memory," he added, "is not at fault, it is found in the comedy of Aristophanes which is called . But this word would at once have been granted the franchise or been naturalized as a Latin colonist, if you had deigned to use it, and would be ever so much more worthy of approval than  279