[p. 379] seemed the rarest, quadriga, I found used in the singular number in that book of Marcus Varro's Satires which is entitled Ecdemeticus. But I sought with less interest for an example of the plural harenae, because, except Gaius Caesar, no one among learned men has used that form, so far as I can recall. 1
IX
[9arg] The very neat reply of Antonius Julianus to certain Greeks at a banquet.A YOUNG man of equestrian rank from the land of Asia, gifted by nature, well off in manners and fortune, with a taste and talent for music, was celebrating the anniversary of the day on which he began life by giving a dinner to his friends and teachers in a little country place near the city. There had come with us then to that dinner the rhetorician Antonius Julianus, a public teacher of young men, who spoke in the Spanish manner, 2 but was very eloquent, besides being well acquainted with our early literature. When there was an end of eating and drinking, and the time came for conversation, Julianus asked that the singers and lyre-players be produced, the most skilful of both sexes, whom he knew that the young man had at hand. And when the boys and girls were brought in, they sang in a most charming way several odes of Anacreon and Sappho, as well as some erotic elegies of more recent poets that were sweet and graceful. But we were especially pleased with some delightful verses of Anacreon, written in his old age, 3 which I noted down, in order that sometimes the toil and worry of this task of mine might find relief in the sweetness of poetical compositions:
