language, seems to me to have
been the effect of carelessness in our great author; for Navius did not
divide the regions, as he calls them, of the vine to find his sow, but
to find a grape.

[113] The Peremnia were a sort of auspices performed just before the
passing a river.

[114] The Acumina were a military auspices, and were partly performed
on the point of a spear, from which they were called Acumina.

[115] Those were called _testamenta in procinctu_, which were made by
soldiers just before an engagement, in the presence of men called as
witnesses.

[116] This especially refers to the Decii, one of whom devoted himself
for his country in the war with the Latins, 340 B.C., and his son
imitated the action in the war with the Samnites, 295 B.C. Cicero
(Tusc. i. 37) says that his son did the same thing in the war with
Pyrrhus at the battle of Asculum, though in other places (De Off. iii.
4) he speaks of only two Decii as having signalized themselves in this
manner.

[117] The Rogator, who collected the votes, and pronounced who was the
person chosen. There were two sorts of Rogators; one was the officer
here mentioned, and the other was the Rogator, or speaker of the whole
assembly.

[118] Which was Sardinia, as appears from one of Cicero's epistles to
his brother Quintus.

[119] Their sacred books of ceremonies.

[120] The war between Octavius and Cinna, the consuls.

[121] This, in the original, is a fragment of an old Latin verse,

_----Terram fumare calentem._

[122] The Latin word is _principatus_, which exactly corresponds with
the Greek word here used by Cicero; by which is to be understood the
superior, the most prevailing excellence in every kind and species of
things through the universe.

[123] The passage of Aristotle to which Cicero here refers is lost.

[124] He means the Epicureans.

[125] Here the Stoic speaks too plain to be misunderstood. His world,
his _mundus_, is the universe, and that universe is his great Deity,
_in quo sit totius naturae principatus_, in which the superior
excellence of universal nature consists.

[126] Athens, the seat of learning and politeness, of which Balbus will
not allow Epicurus to be worthy.

[127] This is Pythagoras's doctrine, as appears in Diogenes Laertius.

[128] He here alludes to mathematical and geometrical instruments.

[129] Balbus here speaks of the fixed stars, and of the motions of the
orbs of the planets. He here alludes, says