Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius

9. Likewise another: I want to learn this, he says; I do not want that. This one desires to start from the Symposium of Plato because of the revelry of Alcibiades; that one from the Phaedrus because of the speech of Lysias. 10. There is even, he says, by Jupiter! one who requests to read Plato, not for the sake of adorning his life, but for the sake of polishing his language and speech, not that he might become more modest, but that he might become more elegant. 11. These things Taurus was accustomed to say, weighing the novice followers of philosophers against the ancient Pythagoreans. 12. But that also must not be passed over, that all who were received into that band of disciplines by Pythagoras gave into a common pool whatever money and property each had; and an inseparable society was formed, just as if it had been that ancient consortium which was called by Roman law and word ercto non cito undivided inheritance.

CHAPTER X.

1. The philosopher Favorinus said to a young man, who was very eager for old words and was bringing out many words that were too ancient and quite unknown in daily and common conversation: Curius, he said, and Fabricius, and Coruncanius, our most ancient men, and older than these, those triplet Horatii, spoke plainly and clearly with their own people; and they spoke with the words of their own age, not those of the Aurunci, or the Sicani, or the Pelasgians, who are said to have been the first to inhabit Italy. 2. You, however, just as if you were speaking now with the mother of Evander a mythical figure associated with ancient times, use language that has been abandoned for many years, because you do not want anyone to know or understand what you are saying. Do you not, you foolish man, keep silent so that you might obtain what you want in abundance? 3. But you say that antiquity pleases you, because it is honest and good and sober and modest. 4. Live, therefore, by the customs of the past; speak with the words of the present; and always keep in your memory and in your heart that which was written by C. Caesar, a man of excellent talent and prudence, in the first book of his On Analogy, that you should flee from an unheard-of and unusual word just as a sailor flees from a reef.