(_frugalitas_) made my fortune. I came from Asia no taller than
that lamp stand; and used to measure my height against it day by
day, and grease my muzzle (_rostrum_) with oil from the lamp to
make a beard come."

Then follow some additional examples of the youth's sagacity, not
adapted for translation, but equally instances of worldly wisdom. Thus
every one of the actions which Trimalchio enumerated as the causes of
his prosperity are emanations from the _head_, not the _heart_; the
results of a crafty intellect, not of moral feeling; so that the
sentiment he professes, instead of being similar to, is exactly the
reverse of that expressed by Pope.

This explanation seems so satisfactory that we might be well contented
to rest here. But some MSS. have the reading _coricillum_ instead of
_corcillum_. If that be received as the genuine one, and some editors
prefer it, the interpretation above given will only be slightly
modified, but not destroyed, by the introduction of another image, the
essential point remaining the same. The insertion of a vowel, _i_,
precludes all connection with _cor_ and its diminutives, but suggests a
derivation from [Greek: korukos], dim. [Greek: korukion], a leathern
sack or bag, which, when well stuffed, the Greeks used to suspend in the
gymnasium, like the pendulum of a clock (as may be seem on a fictile
vase), to buffet to and fro with blows of the fist. The stuffed bag will
represent the human head on the end of its trunk; and the word may have
been a slang one of the day, or coined by the Asiatic Trimalchio, whose
general language is filled with provincial patois. The translation would
then be, in the familiar style of the original,--"The _noddle_ makes the
man," &c.