Saturday, April 09, 2022

 

Source of a Latin Quotation Revisited

Dear Mr. Gilleland,

On the recent entry in your blog "Source of a Latin Quotation":

In the second part of Don Quixote, Cervantes puts in the mouth of a character (Sansón Carrasco) these words referring to the first part of the book: “Los niños lo manosean, los mozos lo leen, los hombres lo entienden y los viejos lo celebran” (“Children handle it, youths read it, men understand it and old men celebrate it”)

The resemblance to "aliud legunt pueri, aliud viri, aliud senes" is enough to suggest that perhaps Cervantes had that maxim in mind when he wrote that. I don't know if Cervantes knew and read Hugo Grotius (Hugo Grocio in Spain), but it seems unlikely to me, and more likely that the Latin maxim is, if not from Terentius, then from some Roman author...

[....]

José Mardomingo Sierra



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