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us bought a thousand goats, hoping that he might thereby derive from his property an income of a thousand deniers a day: but so it fell out that he lost all his goats after a brief illness. On the other hand, among the Sallentini and near Casinum they graze their goats in flocks of one hundred. "Almost the same difference of opinion exists as to the relative number of bucks to nannies, for some, and I am among them, allow a buck to every ten nannies, but others, like Menas, make it fifteen, and some even twenty, like Murrius." _Of swine_ IV. "And now," concluded Cossinius, "which of you Italian swine breeders will stand forth and tell us of his herd? Surely he should be able to speak with the most authority whose cognomen is Scrofa." At this pleasantry, Tremelius turned upon Cossinius and said: "You seem to be ignorant why I am called Scrofa, but, in order that our friends sitting beside you may understand, you should know my family did not always bear this swinish cognomen, nor am I of the race of Eumaeus. The first of us to be called Scrofa was my grandfather who, when he was quaestor under the praetor Licinius Nerva, and was left in command of the army in the province of Macedonia during the absence of the praetor, it so happened that the enemy thought they had an opportunity to gain a victory and began to attack the camp. My grandfather, in exhorting the soldiers to take up their arms and go out against the enemy, exclaimed that he would soon scatter them as a sow (scrofa) does her pigs, and he was as good as his word. For in that battle he so overwhelmed and discomfited the enemy, that on account of it the praetor Nerva was hailed Imperator and my grandfather obtained his cognomen and so was called Scrofa.[127] So, while neither my great grandfather nor any of my ancestors of the Tremelian family was ever called Scrofa, yet as I am not less than the sixth of our family in succession who has attained praetorian rank, it ill becomes me to run away in the face of your challenge, so I will tell you what I know about swine. Indeed from my youth I have been devoted to agriculture, so that I am perhaps as well acquainted with that animal as is any of you great stockmen: for who of us cultivates a farm but keeps hogs, and who has not heard his father say that that man is either lazy or a spendthrift who hangs in the meat house a flitch of bacon obtained from the butcher rather than from his own farm. "He who w
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