Attic Nights, Vol. II

to use new, unknown, and unheard-of words than those that are common and base. I say that those words also appear "new" which are unusual and disused, even if they are ancient. This vice is indeed generally a result of late learning, which the Greeks call opsimathia late-learning/pedantry: that when you have learned something you never knew before, and have long been ignorant of it, once you begin to know it, you make a great point of saying it in any place and on any subject. For example, in Rome, in our presence, a man who was old and celebrated in legal cases, but endowed with a sudden and as it were disorganized learning, while speaking before the city prefect and wishing to say that a certain man lived on poor and miserable fare, ate bran bread, and drank wine that was sour and foul, said: "This Roman knight eats apluda bran/chaff and drinks flocces wine dregs/lees." Everyone who was present looked at one another, at first appearing saddened, with disturbed and inquiring expressions, wondering what on earth those two words might mean; then afterward, as if he had spoken in some unknown Tuscan or Gallic tongue, they all laughed. He, however, had read that the ancient rustics called the bran of grain apluda and that it had been used by Plautus in the comedy which is titled Astraba. Likewise, he had heard that flocces in ancient parlance signified the dregs of wine pressed from the grape-skins, just as fraces dregs of oil from olives, and he had read that in Caecilius in the Polumeni The Men Pleased, and he had saved those two words for himself as ornaments for his speeches. Another person also, apirokalos inexperienced/lacking taste in such readings, when his adversary requested that the case be adjourned, said: "I ask,