II] OF MULES AND HINNIES 211 



the sacrifice prepared: would the gentlemen please 

 come and sacrifice for themselves. For my part, I ex- 

 claimed, I won't let you go until you give me my 

 due, the third act, in which figure mules, dogs, and 

 shepherds. There is little to be said about them, 

 answered Murrius, for both mules and hinnies are 

 mongrels — grafts — not springing from roots of their 

 own kind. For from mare and he-ass comes a mule, 

 2 while from horse and she-ass a hinny.^ Both of 

 them are good for work, while neither earns any- 



the conversations in this book were held on the occasion of the 

 Pariliay and that the sacrifice here mentioned was to Pales, 

 the god of shepherds. Cf. Ovid, Fasti, iv, 775 : 



Quae precor eveniant: et nos faciamtcs ad annum 

 Pastorum dominae grandia liba Pali. 



But the Partita would be celebrated in the provinces as well as 

 at Rome. So that this does not tell against the supposition that 

 the place of these conversations was Sicily. Cf. note, ii, 5, i. 



The liba were, of course, cakes made of flour and milk, or 

 of pounded cheese, fine flour, and eggs; cf Cato, Ixxv. The 

 priest's slave in Horace, Epist., i, 10, 10, ran away because he 

 was tired of eternal cakes. 



Utque sacerdotis fugitivus liba recuso. 



' Hinnus. Columella (vi, 37, 5) : Qui ex equo ct asina con- 

 cepti generantuTf quamvis a patre nomen traxerint quod hinni 

 vocantur matri per omnia magis similes sunt. Pliny (viii, 44) 

 speaks of hinni sls being ** unmanageable and incurably slow." 

 Aristotle (An. Gen., ii, 8, end) calls y7yvog the ofi'spring of a 

 horse and an ass, which has suffered in the womb, and says 

 that it is 17/xtovoc dvdirripoi, "a damaged mule," and like aporcus 

 cordtts (rd fUTuxotpa Iv toIq xoipoto). The small size of the Pyg- 

 mies, he continues, is accounted for in the same way (by illness 

 of the foetus). 



