In the pages of Plutarch we read that Philip of Macedon, in answer to an irate ambassador, who complained to him that the citizens on his way to the palace had called him a traitor, replied: "My subjects are a blunt people, and call things always by their right names. To them figs are figs, and they call spades spades." The adage is one of unknown antiquity, and may be found in the writings of Aristophanes, Demosthenes, Lucian, and other classic authors. Erasmus, in his "Apophthegmes," published in 1542, tells the story of the discomfiture of the embassy to the Macedonian court very quaintly: "When those persons that were at Lasthenes found themselfes greued and toke fumishly that certain of the traine of Phillipus called theim traitours, Phillipus answered that the Macedonians were feloes of no fine witte in their termes, but altogether grosse, clubbish, and rusticall, as the whiche had not the witte to cal a spade by any other name than a spade, alluding to that the commen vsed prouerbe of the Grekes calling figgues figgues, and a bote a bote. As for his mening was that they were traitours in very deede. And the fair flatte truthe that the vplandishe or homely and play-clubbes of the countree dooen use, nameth eche thinge of the right names." In Taverner's "Garden of Wysdome," published in 1539, the Macedonians are described as "very homely men and rudely brought vppe, which call a mattok nothing els but a mattok, and a spade a spade"--a very right and proper thing for Macedonians or anyone else to do on most occasions, but sometime a little too much like the unconscious brusqueness of children, who have in such matters no discretion, and who forget, or have never been taught, the more cautious precept that "all truths are not to be told on all occasions."