The spreading nose of Socrates was no
doubt a source of great regret to him, whether
its faults and failings were of Xanthippe's
making or, as Zopyrus had the incivility to
inform him, inherited from drunken, thieving
and lascivious ancestors; yet who would
willingly forego the emotions and sentiments
inspired by that unusual nose? It seems a
precious part of his philosophy.
The connection between the poetic eminence of Ovid and the noses from which his family, the Nasones, derived its name is doubtless more than accidental, and to our knowledge of his hereditary nasal equipment, albeit we know not the precise nature of the endowment, must be ascribed a part of our interest in his work. He to whom the secret of metamorphosis was an open book is not affirmed to have made any attempt to alter the family feature, as he doubtless would have done had he not recognized its essential rela- tion to his genius.
Plutarch declares that Cicero owed his surname to the fact that his nose had the shape of a vetch — cicer. Anyhow, his nose was as remarkable as his eloquence, in its different way. Gibbon and the late Prince Gortschakoff had noses uncommonly minute for men
