[NOTE 10.

That boys in the Praetexta did not bathe in the public baths, is certain; and most unquestionably that is the meaning of the expression in Juvenal so much disputed—­“Nisi qui nondum aere lavantur.”  By aes he means the ahenum, a common name for the public bath, which was made of copper; in our navy, “the coppers” is a name for the boilers.  “Nobody believes in such tales except children,” is the meaning.  This one exclusion cut off three eighths of the Roman males.]

[NOTE 11.

“His young—­English bride.”—­The case of an old man, or one reputed old, marrying a very girlish wife, is always too much for the gravity of history; and, rather than lose the joke, the historian prudently disguises the age, which, after all, was little above fifty.  And the very persons who insist on the late dinner as the proximate cause of death, elsewhere insinuate something else, not so decorously expressed.  It is odd that this amiable prince, so memorable as having been a martyr to late dining at eleven, A.M., was the same person who is so equally memorable for the noble answer about a King of France not remembering the wrongs of a Duke of Orleans.]

[NOTE 12.

“Took their coena at noon.”—­And, by the way, in order to show how little coena had to do with any evening hour (though, in any age but that of our fathers, four in the afternoon would never have been thought an evening hour in the sense implied by supper,)—­the Roman gourmands and bons vivants continued through the very last ages of Rome to take their coena, when more than usually sumptuous, at noon.  This, indeed, all people did occasionally, just as we sometimes give a dinner even now so early as four, P.M., under the name of a dejeuner a la fourchette.  Those who took their coena so early as this, were said de die coenare—­to begin dining from high day.  Just as the line in Horace—­“Ut jugulent homines surgunt de nocte latrones,” does not mean that the robbers rise when others are going to bed, viz., at nightfall, but at midnight.  For, says one of the three best scholars of this earth, de die, de nocte, mean from that hour which was most fully, most intensely day or night, viz., the centre, the meridian.  This one fact is surely a clencher as to the question whether coena meant dinner or supper.]