He took great pains over the elegance of his clothes, and to make sure he was leaving the house well turned out, he searched his appearance in a mirror, wrapping his toga around his body while he watched and using a skillful knot to keep the pleats in place—no random pleats, but carefully arranged!—and to make sure that the fold of the garment as it fell followed the contours of his upper body. Once, when he was striding along dressed to the nines, he brought a suit against a colleague for a tort—because the man chanced to brush against him when they met in narrow alley-way and mussed the arrangement of his toga—regarding it as a capital offense that a pleat had been dislodged on his shoulder.
fuit enim vestitu ad munditiem curioso et ut bene amictus iret, faciem in speculo quaerebat, ubi se intuens togam corpori sic adplicabat, ut rugas non forte sed industria locatas artifex nodus astringeret et sinus ex composito defluens modum lateris ambiret. is quondam cum incederet elaboratus ad speciem, collegae de iniuriis diem dixit, quod sibi in angustiis obvius offensu fortuito structuram togae destruxerat, et capital putavit quod in umero suo locum ruga mutasset.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Monday, March 09, 2015
A Roman Dandy
Macrobius, Saturnalia 3.13.4-5 (on Quintus Hortensius; tr. Robert A. Kaster):