Professors XXI. — Crispus and Urbicus, Greek and Latin Grammarians

Your name also, Crispus shall be kept in memory by this sad lament which I offer you and go down to future ages — you who used to teach the youngest boys, unskilled in speech, the simple signs of their new task, the alphabet: at times it was thought that you used to prime yourself with wine in order to produce verse rivalling passages of Vergil and of Flaccus.

I For you also, Urbicus, held of less account for Latin themes, though famous for your Greek, thus will I raise a chant of grief. For in the company of your friend Crispus you would pour out a flood of words in prose and verse with equal ease and with such eloquence as to remind us of those heroes sung by old Homer — that son of Pleisthenes, so sweet but terse, and the impetuous lord of Dulichium whose words were as flakes of snow, and Nestor the king, whose melodious speech was sweet of utterance with the nectar of his honeyed lips.

Both ready speakers, both learned in all the lore of poesy, and skilled alike in mythic fictions and in history, you were both freedmen by birth, but in your natures such as might well have deserved to be called the sons of free-born fathers.