133. Moreover those who are called Antipodes, because they are believed to be opposite to our feet, so that, being as it were placed beneath the earth, they tread in footsteps that are opposed to our feet. It is by no means to be believed, because neither the solid texture nor the center of the earth admits it. Besides, this is not established by any historical evidence, but the poets arrive at this conclusion by a sort of reasoning.
Chapter 3. On kingdoms and terms used in warfare.
2. Whole nations have enjoyed sovereignty each in its own turn, as the Assyrians, Medes, Persians, Egyptians, Greeks, whose turns the lot of time so rolled around that one was destroyed by another. Amid all the kingdoms of the earth, however, two are said to be more glorious than the rest; that of the Assyrians first, then that of the Romans, being separated and distinguished from one another both in time and place.
3. For as the former was earlier and the latter later, so the former arose in the East and the latter in the West; finally at the destruction of the former the beginning of the latter immediately appeared. All other kingdoms and all other kings are regarded as appendages of these.
[325] This is the only part of the _Etymologies_ in which Isidore gives up every principle of organization of his subject-matter except the alphabetical one. Elsewhere the terms are grouped according to their meaning, with sometimes traces of alphabetical order in the groups, but here the dictionary method alone is used.
1. Though the derivation of words by the philosophers involves this belief, that _homo_ comes from _humanitas_, _sapiens_ from _sapientia_, because _sapientia_ exists before _sapiens_, still another special cause is evident in the derivation of certain names, as _homo_ from _humus_, whence in a true sense _homo_ is so called. And we have set down certain of these derivations in this work for the sake of example.
44. _Compilator_, one who mixes the words of other men with his own as painters are wont to mix and pound different things in a mortar. Of this crime the famous poet of Mantua was once accused when he had translated certain verses of Homer and mingled them with his own, and when he was called by his rivals a plunderer of the ancients he replied: “Magnarum esse virium clavam Herculi extorquere de manu”.