Note 423 — Chapter IV · LATER WRITERS.

This Antonius Julianus, from another notice (xx. 9), seems to have been a person of slightly florid but by no means bad taste. For Gellius tells us that he used to say his ears were delighted and caressed by the coined words in the first mimiambic of C. Matius,[a] such as Columbulatim, which is certainly not a little charming and very Caroline. After all, the famous advice to regard and avoid an unusual word, tanquam scopulum (which, by the way, Gellius gives us), is fatal to poetry.

a. The fragments of this author may be found either in the sixth volume of Baehrens’s Poetæ Latini Minores, or in the appendix to Otto Crusius’s edition of Herondas (Leipsic, 1898). He has another word which Herrick might have Englished, albicascit.