Life of Nicias, page 289.—The fragment from Pindar is No. 119, in the Uncertain Fragments of Boeckh's edition. Diphilus is a Comic poet.
Page 291.—The quotation is loosely taken from the Knights of Aristophanes (Equites, 1096).
Page 294.—The allusion of Teleclides in the case of Charicles is to the habit, apparently very frequent with rich and childless women in Greece, of introducing supposititious children into a family. For the words of Cleon (or, more correctly, of Agoracritus, Cleon's opponent), in Aristophanes, see the Knights, 358.
Pages 295–296.—The words of Agamemnon are from the Iphigenia in Aulis of Euripides (449).
Page 299.—For the first quotation, see the Birds (643); the second is from a lost play.
Page 300.—Egypt is thus described in the fourth Odyssey (230).
Page 301.—My lance I'll leave is a fragment of the lost Erechtheus of Euripides. It is found at greater length in Stobæus. See Matthiæ's fragments of the play, No. xiii.
Page 305.—Hipparchus was kin to the tyrant Pisistratus.
Page 306.—The benches, literally the semicircles, are probably the seats of this form, which were set in public places, in porches and gardens and exercise grounds, rather perhaps than the regular seats of the theatres.
Page 322.—Instead of Autoclides, we have elsewhere Anticlides. His Commentaries, or Exegetics, as the Greek term is, would be a book of directions or prescriptions as to what to do in a particular case of good or bad omens; exegesis referring specially to the oral instructions given by a priest, for example, to a worshipper for the performance of a ceremony; it is applied, for instance, to the dictation of the words of an oath.
Life of Crassus, page 341.—Salenæ or Salinæ (the latter is a conjecture), and the Lucanian lake, in page 343, are uncertain localities; the mountains of Petelia, page 344, are near Petelia in Bruttium.
Page 352.—Hierapolis, the "holy city," so called by the Greeks (Bambyce by the natives), was the seat of the worship of the Syrian Venus or Astarte, the personified divine prolific moisture of the universe, out of which all things are born and grow, and seek their proper good. In this sense, she would be Hera or Juno, perhaps, rather than Venus. See Lucian On the Syrian Goddess, a little narrative in imitation of the style of Herodotus, giving an account, apparently, of his own visit to the place. This holy city was on the way from Antioch to Zeugma, the Crossing, the ordinary passage of the Euphrates, and so to Seleucia, or Seleuceia, on the Tigris, at this time (Ctesiphon not as yet having outgrown it), the Greek capital of the Parthian kings.
Comparison, page 378.—A statesman ought not to regard how invidious the thing is, but how noble (or, more exactly, the part of the statesman is to strive upon the highest conditions to attain, not exemption from odium, but glory), is a sentiment taken from Thucydides, which Plutarch himself cites expressly with commendation in one of his minor works. It occurs in the address of Pericles to the citizens, in the year of the Plague. "Mere present hatred and unpopularity all must experience who seek dominion over others; he is wisest who takes the odium on the loftiest terms. The unpopularity does not last; the present splendor, and the glory that follows it, remain to an everlasting remembrance." (II., 64.)
Page 379.—A brave man anywhere but in the field, is, I believe, an unknown fragment.
Page 380.—If wrong we must do, says Euripides in the Phœnissæ, 521–525; it is the reply of Eteocles to the expostulations of his mother:— Come fire, come sword, yoke-to the steeds apace, Through all the plain let the war chariots race, I to my rival will not yield my place; If wrong we must do, let us, so 'tis best, To become kings do wrong, and right in all the rest.
Life of Sertorius, page 395.—Lucius Domitius is the old reading, followed by Amyot, but it may be Domitius Calvisius, or Domitius Calvinus. The Roman names in Plutarch must always be accepted under protest. Fufidius, just above, is a correction, and for Thoranius just below, and Lucius Manlius in the next page, there are other readings. Lucius Manilius appears to be the proper original of the latter, and "the true name of Thoranius," says Mr. Long, "is Thorius." Perpenna, in like manner, ought in correctness to be written Perperna, and Marcus Marius (p. 411), the envoy to Mithridates, should most likely, both here and in the Life of Lucullus (p. 242), be Varius. And the same uncertainty attaches to the orthography of the names of the Spanish localities.
Life of Eumenes, page 422.—His hat should be rather, perhaps, his bonnet; it is the Macedonian broad-flapping causia, which their kings, even in Egypt, retained as a mark of their nationality. See the account in the Life of Antony, Vol. V., page 208.
Volume 4 APPENDIX.
The Lives in the fourth volume were translated as follows:— Agesilaus, by W. Needham, M. D.
Pompey, by W. Oldys, LL. D.
Alexander, by Mr. Evelyn, (one of the minor compositions of the author of Sylva, and not unworthy of him).
Cæsar, by the Rev. Dr. James Smalridge.
Phocion, by Ph. Fowke, M. D.
Cato the Younger, by Stephen Waller, LL. D.
Agis, by Sir Robert Thorold, Bart.
Cleomenes, by the Rev. Mr. Creech, Fellow of All-Soul's College, Oxford. The translator of Lucretius, whose name has appeared before in Vols. I. and II. as of Wadham College. He became Fellow of All-Souls afterwards.
Tiberius and Caius Gracchus, by John Warren, Fellow of Catherine Hall, Cambridge.
The following notes may be added:— Life of Agesilaus, page 17.—The two verses are those of the old translation, and express Plutarch's meaning. But in the original passage, O Greeks, that have found out barbarian ills, or, crimes such as only barbarians could be guilty of, is what Andromache says, when the herald, Talthybius, has announced to her, that her child, Astyanax, is to be put to death.—(Eurip., Troades, 759.)
Page 18.—The passage in the Iliad from which the words his object unachieved are borrowed is the lament of Agamemnon over Menelaus's wound, when he had been shot by Pandarus,—if he dies, the Achaeans will at once cry out to go home; Helen the Argive will be left for Priam and the Trojans to boast of, while his bones shall rot in the soil, as he lies in Trojan earth, his object unachieved. "Lying in Trojan earth, having failed in what he attempted," or, "without having done what he wanted," is the last line.
Page 19.—The Trallians are evidently not the people commonly called by this name, the inhabitants of the town of Tralles, in Asia Minor, still flourishing in Plutarch's time, but a tribe of wild Thracians. The name may perhaps be corrupt; but certain Trallians of Thrace are spoken of as having taken part in the foundation of the town in Asia which took their name.
Page 21.—Xenophon, who was present, calls it the hardest-fought battle of his time in the Hellenics (IV., 3, 16), referring evidently to the last struggle between Thebans and Spartans, when "they met shield against shield, pushing, fighting, killing, and falling;" to which he adds in his Agesilaus (II., 12), "there was no war-shout or cry, though not silence either, only the sort of utterance that comes of anger and fierce fighting." The temple of Minerva the Itonian, spoken of in the next page, standing near the battle-field, was a great sanctuary of the whole Bœotian people, founded by them when they first entered Bœotia, in the plain before Coronea; they called it after the name of that in their own late country in Thessaly. Here the feast of All Bœotians (the Pambœotia) was held, and the congress of the Bœotian towns met. There were in the temple brazen statues, made by Agoracritus, Phidias's scholar, of the Itonian Minerva, and Jupiter, or Pluto, who was worshipped here in some mystic connection with Minerva. See Pausanias (IX., 24), and Strabo (IX., 2, 29), and Col. Leake, Northern Greece (Vol. II., chap. xii., pp. 137–141.) The Thessalian Minerva Itonis is mentioned in the Life of Pyrrhus (Vol. III., p. 35); the little stream that ran by the temple, the Curalius, was also called by the name of that near the temple in Thessaly.
Page 33.—The site of Tegyræ or Tegyra, where the Spartans were beaten by the Thebans in a set battle, more fully described in the life of Pelopidas, is placed above the marshes, on the heights that rise to the north of the lake. "In the time of Plutarch, all the part of Bœotia to the northward of the Lake Copais seems to have been no better inhabited than at present, for in one of his dialogues he introduces an assertion that about Tegyra and Mount Ptoum, two places formerly so much famed for their oracles, hardly a herdsman or shepherd was to be met with in a day's journey." (Leake's Northern Greece, Vol. II., ch. xii., p. 159.) The passage referred to is in the Dialogue on the Cessation of Oracles, a phenomenon which one of the speakers, Ammonius the philosopher, explains by the general depopulation which former wars and factions have occasioned in pretty nearly all the habitable world, and more particularly in Greece, the whole of which could now scarcely furnish the three thousand men-at-arms whom the single town of Megara sent to fight at Platæa. With so few to consult him in these days, why should the deity keep up all his former oracles? (De Defectu Oraculorum, 8.)
Page 35.—Xenophon's remark about the casual sayings of good men is in the beginning of his Banquet.
Life of Pompey, page 50.—Ah, cruel sire! how dear thy son to me! is from the Prometheus Unbound, the lost play of Æschylus, where Hercules releases whom his father Jupiter had bound. Pompey's father was of course a Pompeius like himself, Cnaeus Pompeius Strabo; but the name of Strabo made way in the son's case for that of Magnus.
Page 79.—Olympus (it is Olympus alone in the Greek) is not Mount Olympus, say the commentators, at any rate not that of Thessaly, nor that of Prusa, the modern Broussa, but Olympus in Lycia, which, however, appears to have been a mountain as well as a town. "It was the strong-hold," says Strabo (XII., 7), "of the pirate Zenicetus, a mountain and a fortified place of the same name, from whence there is a view of all Lycia, Pamphylia, and Pisidia." The strong-hold had been wrested from the pirates before Pompey's time by Servilius Isauricus, when Zenicetus burnt himself and all his household in it; but it had doubtless soon been re-occupied.
Page 83.—Thy humbler thoughts make thee a god the more. Literally, In so far as you know yourself man, even so far you are a god; an Attic conceit, expressing the same meaning as Horace's Dis te minorem quod geris, imperas.
Page 86.—See for the death of Hector, Iliad, XXII., 207.
Page 101.—Of Pompey's famous and stately theatre some small remains are still supposed to exist. It was the first building for theatrical shows which was erected in Rome for permanent use. Up to that time, all had been temporary stages, pulled down after the occasion for which they were set up. This stood far out from the walls, with a large portico, and plane trees planted about it, on the very edge of the Campus Martius, beyond the public buildings which had by this time covered the new quarter (the Prata Flaminia), outside and under the Capitoline. Agrippa went a little beyond it with the Pantheon. Whether the house which Pompey built as a sort of appendix to it for himself was near the theatre, and different from his house within the walls, in the Carinæ, is made a question. Plutarch's words certainly do not require us to suppose that it was locally an appendix or appendage to the theatre, and there seems no doubt that the house in the Carinæ was his real residence. See the story in the Life of Antony (Vol. V., p. 185), of the retort made to Antony by Sextus Pompeius.
Page 113.—There was a necessity to sail, but no necessity to live. "Necesse est ut eam, non ut vivam."
Page 117.—The combatants are waiting to begin is an unknown comic fragment.
Page 118.—The four verses are a very liberal translation of one quoted by Plutarch. All was divided in three, and each had a portion assigned him. It is from the passage in the fifteenth Iliad (189), the reply of Neptune when Jupiter, waking out of sleep, sees the Trojans flying and Neptune busy aiding the Greeks, and sends Iris to order him to quit the field; somewhat an arrogant message, replies Neptune in anger, to one his equal in honor. "We are three brothers, all sons of Cronus by Rhea our mother, Zeus, and I, and Hades, the third, in the world underneath us; three shares were made of all things, and each of us had his portion; I had the lot of the white salt sea for my possession; Hades had the thick darkness; Zeus had the open sky and the clouds in the heaven above us; and as common to all remain the earth and the heights of Olympus."
Page 129.—Cicero accuses him (of deserting the city like Themistocles in the Persian, when he ought to have maintained it like Pericles in the Peloponnesian war), in the letters to Atticus (VII., 11), "Fecit idem Themistocles. At idem Pericles non fecit." Would he do so, he continues, if the Gauls came?
Page 132.—Lucius Vibullius Rufus is pretty certainly the real name of the person meant by Jubius; but the manuscripts of Cæsar write it corruptly, sometimes Jubellius, or Jubilius, or Jubulus; and one of these bad readings Plutarch may have had in his copy.
Page 136.—A temple or chapel dedicated to Venus Victrix, or, the Victorious, formed the highest part of Pompey's theatre at Rome.
Page 138.—Cæsar much condemns this command. Cæsar de Bello Civili, III., 92.
Page 141.—The translation from the Iliad (XI., 543), should have been made a little less epigrammatic; the following rough correction is truer to Homer's swift plain-speaking:— But Jove from heaven struck Ajax with a fear; He stopped and stood as in amazement there; Put on his back his shield of sevenfold hide, And trembling on the advancing numbers spied.
Page 143.—O heaven in those that noble are is an uncertain fragment of Euripides. (Matthiæ Fragm. Incert., 119.)
Page 145.—The words, we must leave the divine power to act as we find it do, have been wrongly included between the inverted commas.
Page 149.—The verses are a fragment from a lost and unknown play. Fragm. Incert., 54; in Dindorf, 711.
Life of Alexander, page 166.—The bridle and the rudder too. Sophocles, Fragm. Incert., 55; in Dindorf, 712.
Page 171.—On husband and on father and on bride (Jason, Creon, king of Corinth, and Glauce). Euripides, Medea, 288.
Page 175, in the last line, forty-three thousand foot and three thousand horse should be forty-three thousand foot and five thousand horse. The numbers in this passage are, as numbers very generally are in manuscripts, given with variations. This, however, is the reading established by comparison with the corresponding passage in Plutarch's own treatise on the Merit or Fortune of Alexander. He says there, that Aristobulus made it 30,000 foot and 4,000 horse; Ptolemy, the king, 30,000 foot and 5,000 horse; and Anaximenes, 43,000 foot and 5,000 horse (De Alexandri s. Virtute s. Fortuna, I., 3).
Page 180.—The passage from Menander is only known by this quotation. It may perhaps belong to the character of some Boastful Soldier, like a fragment in Athenæus from his play called the Flatterer, in which it is made a compliment to say, "You have drunk more than king Alexander." The twelve years of the campaigns of Alexander were those of the boyhood of Menander, who was not quite twenty-one when his first play was acted two years after Alexander's death (321 B. C.).
Page 181.—Darius had been one of the royal Couriers (Courtier, in the twenty-second line, is a misprint), or king's messengers. Astandes, the Greek word of the original, is of Persian derivation. The system of regular relays of horses and couriers for conveying the government despatches seems to have been one of the good points in the Persian imperial system. It was adopted in the Macedonian kingdoms, and passed from them to the Romans.
Page 192.—An island lies where loud the billows roar is from Menelaus's story of his return from Troy, told by him to Telemachus at Sparta in the fourth Odyssey (354). A neck of land would be better, a strip (it is literally a ribbon) of land.
Page 195.—Ichor, such as immortal gods are wont to shed, flows from the wounded hand of Venus (Iliad V., 340).
Page 211.—Bagoas's house, at Susa, is probably the sense, but the words at Susa, omitted in the translation, are doubtful.
Page 226.—The passage from the Andromache is a speech of Peleus to Menelaus (693–702). The fragment (p. 228), in disparagement of the wise man who is not wise to his own interest (miso sophisten hostis oukh hautoi sophos), is quoted also, once in Greek, and twice in a Latin form given it by Ennius (qui ipse sibi sapiens prodesse non quit, nequidquam sapit), by Cicero (Ad Diversos, XIII., 15, a letter to Cæsar, & VII., 6, & de Officiis, III., 15). It is No. CXI. in Matthiæ's Uncertain Fragments. 'Tis easy on good subjects to excel is from the mouth of Tiresias in the Bacchæ (266–267). In civil strife e'en villains rise to fame (p. 229) is a verse which Plutarch has already used twice in the Lives, once in that of Nicias, and again in the comparison between Lysander and Sylla, and it occurs a third time in the Essay on Brotherly Love; but where it comes from is, I believe, unknown. Death seized at last on great Patroclus too is from the uncompassionate answer returned by Achilles to the prayers of Lycaon, one of Priam's sons, in the battle of the rivers (Iliad XXI., 107). While yet Patroclus lived, he might haply have thought upon pity, now death was the doom of every Trojan man, and above all, of the children of Priam; wherefore, Be content, good friend, and die, and do not lament it; Patroclus died also, who was much better than you are.
Look at me and observe my size and beauty of person, Yet for me too death is at hand, and the fated appointment.
Either in the morning, or the evening, or at the noonday, Some one in the battle shall take the life from my body With the stroke of a spear or arrow shot from the bowstring.
Page 247.—Promachus won the prize (or crown), which was a talent. This appears to be the correct reading; the crown is simply taken as equivalent to the prize, and might, like a cup in English races, be something else, a sum of money.
Page 254.—As a sort of guard to his person should be rather, perhaps, as a sort of badge of the royal power which he himself exercised. The term seems to have been one in use for the mute person who appeared on the stage to attend the actor who represented a king.
Life of Cæsar, page 258.—Apollonius should not be called, as he is both here and in the Life of Cicero, Molon's son, but Molon, or Molo, which was his additional name. It is Plutarch's mistake.
Page 262.—High Priest is the Latin Pontifex Maximus. The highest religious dignities were held, at Rome, by laymen. Caesar, as High Priest, had an official residence, the Regia, in which he lived to the day of his death.
Page 271.—The words whose glory went up at that time to heaven should have perhaps been placed between inverted commas. The form, if not the exact words of the phrase, is from the Odyssey; the nearest passage to it is in the answer made by Ulysses to the inquiry of the Cyclops: "We are Achaians on our way from Troy, driven by the winds, the people of Atrides Agamemnon, whose glory is at this time the greatest under heaven, so great a city he has taken, and so many people has destroyed."
Page 284.—Returned the same way he went, and showed the barbarians—A better reading gives the following sense, returned, and showed the barbarians by the very roads he took.
Page 287.—The first basilica built in Rome was the Porcian, built by Cato the Elder; see his life, Vol. II., p. 240, and the life of the younger Cato, in this volume, p. 375. The Fulvian was the next, built by the joint censors Æmilius and Fulvius, adorned by subsequent members of the Æmilian family, and now restored with the help of Cæsar's money. This was the Basilica Paulli.
Page 309.—Antony's debauchery and Corfinius's profuseness ought perhaps to change places, and to stand as Corfinius's debauchery (or drunkenness) and Antony's profuseness: it was certainly Antony who bought Pompey's house; see his life, Vol. V., p. 164; and the statement there made is confirmed by Cicero in the second Philippic (c. 26).
Page 315.—Pomentium is Pometia, or Suessa Pometia, a town that had ceased to exist long before Cæsar's time, which, however, gave its name to the Pomptine marshes.
Page 328.—To the top of a rock is a mistranslation; the Greek is merely to a rocky place; and the place which Brutus made his refuge seems, by the account in his life, to have been at the bottom rather than at the top.
Life of Phocion, page 329.—When fortune fails, the sense we had before, Deserts us also, and is ours no more, is said by Antigone to Creon, in the play of Sophocles (Antigone, 563).
Page 332.—The passage in Cicero is in the letters to Atticus (II., 1): "Dicit enim tanquam in Platonis politeiai, non tanquam in Romuli fæce, sententiam." It does not, however, refer to his repulse as a candidate for the consulship.
Page 336.—The two elegiac verses from Archilochus are quoted also by Athenæus, as said by Archilochus of himself. They are the first fragment in Bergk.
Page 338.—Plutarch tells the story also in his essay on False Modesty (de Vitioso Pudore, c. 10), and again in his Political Precepts (Reipublicæ Gerendæ Præcepta, c. 31). These calls for subscriptions for public amusements and displays were snares to the unwise in his time also. From the turn he gives to Phocion's answer in the latter passage, it seems to be that he declines to make a gift by incurring a debt, to offer the state a present by borrowing money which he will not be able to repay, not as if he was already in debt to his banker or money-lender.
Page 345.—The defeat is the battle of Chæronea.
Page 346.—Unwise one, wherefore is what the sailors say to Ulysses in the story of the Cyclops, when they are rowing their boat from the shore, and Ulysses, though he has already by one bold speech provoked the Cyclops to hurl a rock which had nearly intercepted them, is, nevertheless, eager to accost him once again with a taunt.
Page 353.—A friend and old confidant should be a friend and old schoolfellow. Phocion in like manner replied, that they had not ever been at school together, nor had ever been acquainted or familiar with each other.
Page 356.—Diogenes Laertius, in his life of Xenocrates the philosopher, tells a pleasant story, which appears to belong to this occasion of his going as envoy with Phocion, and yet is quite inconsistent with Plutarch's account of it, and must, in some way or other, be inaccurate. Antipater, says Diogenes, asked him to supper. Xenocrates replied to the invitation by repeating the words in the Odyssey used by Ulysses to Circe, when, showing him hospitality, she placed the table before him, and saw him neither eating or drinking,—"O Circe, what man of a right mind could let himself touch meat or drink before he had ransomed his companions, and beheld them with his eyes,"—with which Antipater was so well pleased, that he released them. Xenocrates paid the alien-tax at Athens (below, p. 360), being a native of Chalcedon, opposite Constantinople.
Life of Cato, page 393.—Short-hand writers; in the Greek, semeiographi, writers by signs; in Latin, notarii, which has the same sense.
Page 394.—The life of Cato, like a dramatic piece, has this one scene or passage full of perplexity and doubtful meaning. Every tragedy, according to Aristotle's remark in the Poetics, consists simply of two portions, one the fastening or complication, the other the undoing or solution of the difficulty or embarrassment in which the plot consists (the nœud and the denouement of French criticism); and one particular part, one crisis, will usually bring the complication to its height: the tragic dilemma has first to be indicated, then stated in its strongest terms, then one or other alternative taken, or a middle course somehow discovered, and the spectator one way or other relieved of his anxiety. See for the tragic desis and lysis, Aristotle, Poetics, c. 18. Thrasea is the famous Thrasea Pætus, who died by Nero's orders, and who wrote a life of Cato, his Stoic example, just as Arulenus Rusticus wrote one of him.
Page 408.—To seize his goods as was the custom. The magistrate might seize a portion of a man's property, by way of distress, to compel him to the discharge of a public duty. The sum of money brought from Cyprus, seven thousand talents, which Cato says (below, p. 416) was more than Pompey brought home from the ransacked world, seems quite too small; the figure is probably wrong. Phylargyrus, just below, should be Philargyrus. The dock, in page 409, is the state-arsenal, or navalia, high up the river, at the other end of the Campus Martius, so that Cato passed through the whole city, and along a part of the Campus, before he brought his vessel to shore.
Page 417.—Apollodorus the Phalerian is described in Plato's Phædo as shedding tears all through the previous conversation, and, when Socrates took the hemlock, bursting into a passion of distress and horror. Xenophon, in the Memorabilia, calls him an ardent admirer of Socrates, but otherwise rather a silly person. He is also characterized at the beginning of Plato's Symposium.
Pago 423.—The verses are from the Hercules Furens (174); an answer to a charge of cowardice brought against Hercules.
Page 426.—The word domestics, used by the old translator, should have been altered; it is simply taken from the Latin word for the original Greek, which means, belonging to his house or family, and is not at all limited, as the word domestics is with us, to servants.
Page 441.—Cato could scarcely have read the Dialogue on the Soul (the Phædo) twice over in so short a time, and it is rather strange that he should have been said to have done so.
Life of Agis, page 445.—We follow these, though born their rightful lords, said by the herdsmen of their flocks, is a fragment conjectured to belong to the lost play of the Herdsmen, in which, apparently, the death of Protesilaus by the hand of Hector was the great event, the chorus being a company of herdsmen. It is No. 447 in Dindorf's fragments.
Page 453.—In the phrase fifteen companies, some of four hundred, some of two, the word companies is properly messes, or dining-companies, phiditia, which, as described in the life of Lycurgus, consisted each of fifteen. There would seem to be some corruption in the text. A fragment of Diodorus gives a verse of an oracular warning to Lycurgus, Love of wealth, and that only, shall be the ruin of Sparta; which is probably referred to in the passage below about "the oracles in old time." Cassandra, the daughter of Priam, was worshipped in Laconia under the name of Alexandra; there were temples dedicated to her in Amyclæ and Leuctra. Cicero, in his dialogues on Divination (I., 43), mentions the custom observed by the Lacedæmonian magistrates of sleeping, for the object of having dreams, in the temple of Pasiphae, in a country spot, near the city. But Thalamæ, named in this passage as the seat of the temple, is at some distance, on the coast, near the Messenian frontier; and here, on the way from Œtylus to Thalamæ, Pausanias says, stood a temple and an oracle of Ino or Paphia, pretty certainly a misreading for Pasiphae, in which inquiry was made after the manner described by Cicero. "People consult it," he says, "by sleeping; and of what they desire to know, the goddess sends them dreams." An Ephor has a dream in the temple of Pasiphae, in the Life of Cleomenes, below, page 473.
Page 464.—Of this execution-chamber, the Dechas, as it is called, or Dekhas, there appears to be no mention found elsewhere. The Ceadas, or Keadas, the pit in the rocks, into which the bodies of malefactors were thrown, out of which Aristomenes, the Messenian hero, made his escape, is well known, but cannot very well have any thing to do with it.
Life of Cleomenes, page 468.—Sphærus the Borysthenite came from the distant Greek colony of Borysthenis, or Olbia, on the north coast of the Black Sea, having the former name from the neighboring and larger river, the Dnieper, the ancient Borysthenes, but more correctly called Olbia (Wealthy), and actually situated on the Hypanis, the present Boug, not far from the Russian arsenal of Nicholaieff. Olbia was visited by Herodotus, and still flourished in the days of Plutarch. It seems to have been a sort of Greek Odessa. Zeno the Citiean, of Citium in Cyprus, is Zeno the founder of the Stoic philosophy. Sphærus was a philosopher of considerable reputation; in the list of his works given by Diogenes Laertius, there is a book On the Spartan Polity, and another On Lycurgus and Socrates.
Page 475.—A reverence still attends on fear. This is the end of a fragment quoted in Plato's Euthyphro, and said by the scholiast on the passage there to be taken from the Cypria or Cyprian Epics, attributed to the poet Stasinus, at one time thought to be Homer's. The Cypria contained the whole tale of Troy antecedent to the Iliad, as the Little Iliad, the Æthiopid, the Sack of Ilium, and other epic pieces, did the sequel. The two lines which Socrates uses to Euthyphro in the Dialogue are: "But Zeus who did it, and was the sower of it all, you are not willing to name; for where fear is, there also is reverence," or shame. Feared shall you be, dear father, and revered, are the words with which Helen when she comes to the walls of the city in the third Iliad returns Priam's salutation and inquiry as to the names of the Greek warriors, whom they see: "I approach you with shame, dear father-in-law, and with trembling. Would that an evil death had met me on the way when I came hither with your son, leaving my marriage chamber and friends, my little daughter, and pleasant companions!...But this of whom you ask me is the son of Atreus, Agamemnon with large dominions, brother-in-law, if indeed I may say so, of me the dishonored," (Iliad, III., 172). In silence fearing those that bore the sway is from the description of the steady advance of the Greek line of battle in the fourth Iliad (431). The word translated reverence (aidōs) is the same which in other places is shame, or modesty (more generally the fear of doing what is disgraceful than the shame at having done it), but it is continually and perhaps most properly used for the feeling of respect for persons and fear of behaving amiss to our betters. Diomede, out of aidōs or respect, would not answer Agamemnon's rebuke to him. I felt aidōs to do so in their presence, I could not for aidōs refuse or contradict him, are current expressions. The distinction between courage or bravery, and a mere absence of fear or being afraid of nothing, is enforced by Aristotle. Some things every one ought to be afraid of. And hence we come, with Plato, to perceive that courage is only another form of knowledge of the truth, knowing what is truly to be feared and avoided, and what is so only in appearance. The Virtues, he said, were all Knowledges.
Page 479.—The wine more plentiful is perhaps incorrect; it is more exactly, the wine less ascetic (literally more humane, more philanthrōpon), and he means, in quality, not in quantity. The passage, which he followed in Phylarchus the admiring historian of Cleomenes, is quoted in Athenæus, "When he had company, the wine was a little better." It is part of a long extract about Cleomenes and his habits. (Athenæus, p. 142.)
Page 481.—Even to the women's apartments is an allusion to what is told in the Life of Aratus of the conduct of Philip, the young king of Macedon, to the wife of Aratus's son.
Page 485.—Tritymallus the Messenian is in the Life of Aratus called Tripylus.
Page 489.—Rhœteum and Helicus are unknown. Possibly the right names are Zœtium and Helisson, which are Arcadian towns in Pausanias.
Page 491.—Polybius, in his second book, is Plutarch's authority for much of the history; the passage referred to here is II., 64, 2.
Page 493.—The baker was wanted first, and the pilot after, is literally in the Greek the kneader comes before the look-out man, or kneading before acting as look-out man, which seems too poor a saying to be the right one. By no very violent alteration it might be brought to the sense, they must knead before they baked (artopteusai for prorateusai, a conjecture of Hermann's). The copyist had been misled by the mention of the ships just before, and changed the word into one that seemed to suit them. But there are several other conjectures.
Page 503.—Cleomenes's body should be flayed and hung up. Flayed is not the correct term; it was one way of insulting a dead body to sew it into the skin of a brute animal and hang it up. Thus a case is quoted from Polybius where a man first has his extremities cut off, then is beheaded, and his trunk then stitched into an ass's skin and hung on a cross. The strange theory of dead oxen generating bees, dead horses wasps, and dead men snakes, seems to have been very prevalent. Ovid, in the last book of the Metamorphoses, mentions all the three supposed phenomena (XV., 365, 368, 379). Virgil has made the first well known by the story of Aristaeus and his bees in the fourth Georgic, and Pliny speaks of the third as a received tradition (Hist. Nat., X., 66).
Life of Tiberius Gracchus, page 506.—The story of the two snakes is told by Cicero (de Divinatione I., 18, II., 29), who says it was left on record by Caius Gracchus in a letter written to Marcus Pomponius.
Page 510.—Fannius is quoted by Cicero as the author of a history, in which the times of the Gracchi were included. He was the son-in-law of Lælius, and is one of the speakers in Cicero's dialogue, de Amicitia.