[p. 437] which are entitled Posteriores, of which three successive books, the thirty-eighth, thirty-ninth and fortieth, are full of information of that kind, tending to explain and illustrate the Latin language. Moreover, in the books which he wrote On the Praetor's Edict he has included many observations, some of which are graceful and clever. Of such a kind is this, which we find written in the fourth book On the Edict: 1 “A soror, or 'sister,'” he says, “is so called because she is, as it were, born seorsum, or ' outside,' and is separated from that home in which she was born, and transferred to another family.” 2 Moreover, Publius Nigidius, a man of prodigious learning, explains the word frater, or “brother,” by a no less clever and ingenious derivation: 3 “A frater,” he says, “is so called because he is, as it were, fere alter, that is, 'almost another self.'” 4
XI
[11arg] Marcus Varro's opinion of the just and proper number of banqueters; his views about the dessert and about sweetmeats.THAT is a very charming book of Marcus Varro's, one of his Menippean Satires, entitled You know not what the Late Evening may Bring, 5 in which he descants upon the proper number of guests at a dinner, and about the order and arrangement of the entertainment itself. Now he says 6 that the number of the guests ought to begin with that of the Graces and end with that of the Muses; that is,
