Attic Nights, Vol. II

are produced. However, we preferred to seem not to understand what it means to act or imitate someone playing, rather than to accuse him of being less than understanding himself.
5Instead, Scaurus ought rather to have criticized the commentaries of Caesellius by asking for something he had omitted, namely, why he did not explain how ludens playing differs—if indeed it differs at all, or by how little—from ludibundus playful, or ridens laughing from ridibundus laughing, or errans wandering from errabundus wandering, and the other similar terms; or whether they differed slightly from the principal verbs, and what force this final particle added to such words had in general. This is what ought to have been investigated in a study of a figure of this kind, just as it is usually investigated in vinulentus full of wine, lutulentus full of mud, and turbulentus full of disturbance: whether such a formation is empty and vain—of the sort the Greeks call παραγωγαί derivations—or whether that final particle possesses some significance of its own.

7While we were noting that criticism of Scaurus, we recalled that Sisenna, in the fourth book of his histories, used a word of this same figure in the following way: "He arrived at the town," he says, "in a state of populabundus ravaging the fields," which clearly signifies "while he was ravaging the fields," not, as Scaurus says in similar verbs, "while he was acting the ravager" or "imitating a ravager."

8But when we were inquiring what the rationale and origin of this kind of figure—populabundus, errabundus, laetabundus full of joy, ludibundus, and many other words of this type—might be, our friend Apollinaris remarked that, by Hercules, he thought that last particle, in which such words end, demonstrated the force, abundance, and