Note 411 — APPENDIX.
Reading edition
The story told by Aulus Gellius, (NN. AA., Lib. XIX. c. 9,) about Antoninus Julianus, a Spaniard, who exercised the profession of a rhetorician at Rome, shows pleasantly that there was no Spanish language at that time (circa A. D. 200) except the Latin; for when the “Greci plusculi” at table reproached Antoninus with the poverty of Latin literature, they reproached him as one who was a party concerned, and he defended himself just as a Roman would have done, by quotations from the Latin poets. His patriotism was evidently Roman, and the patria lingua which he vindicated was the Latin.