This was artificially contrived by Caesar, because it was not lawful
for a private man to stamp his own figure upon the coin of the
commonwealth. Cicero, who was so called from the founder of his
family, that was marked on the nose with a little wen like a vetch,
which is Cicer in Latin, instead of Marcus Tullius Cicero, ordered
the words Marcus Tullius, with a figure of a vetch at the end of
them, to be inscribed on a public monument. This was done probably
to show that he was neither ashamed of his name nor family,
notwithstanding the envy of his competitors had often reproached him
with both. In the same manner we read of a famous building that was
marked in several parts of it with the figures of a frog and a
lizard; those words in Greek having been the names of the
architects, who by the laws of their country were never permitted to
inscribe their own names upon their works. For the same reason it
is thought that the forelock of the horse, in the antique equestrian
statue of Marcus Aurelius, represents at a distance the shape of an
owl, to intimate the country of the statuary, who, in all
probability, was an Athenian. This kind of wit was very much in
vogue among our own countrymen about an age or two ago, who did not
practise it for any oblique reason, as the ancients above-mentioned,
but purely for the sake of being witty.
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