number of four to whom alone the possession of pre-eminent wisdom was
ascribed by some authorities. He is said to have been the author of the
selfish maxim, that one should love his friends as if he were at some
future time going to hate them.
[4:2] Aristocrates, king of Orchomenus in Arcadia, joined the
Messenians in war against Sparta, and was bribed by the Lacedaemonians
to betray his allies in the battle of Taphrus. Many years afterward,
his treachery became known, and he was stoned to death by his own
subjects.
[4:3] There is no historical vestige of this transaction, or of the
king implicated in it. The scene of the story was probably Orchomenus
in Boeotia, and Plutarch, as a Boeotian, would naturally have been
familiar with chapters of local history too remote in time or too
insignificant to have left any permanent record.
[5:1] Probably, if not Lyciscus, those implicated with him in his
crime took refuge in Athens, and many years afterward, at some crisis
which created superstitious alarm, their bodies were disinterred and
transported beyond the limits of the state,—a not unusual mode of
lustration in the early time.
[5:2] This is from a lost tragedy.
[6:1] This name occurs as that of an interlocutor in one of the
Symposiacs.
[7:1] The reference here is, undoubtedly, to an hexameter
verse from some unknown poet, quoted by Sextus Empiricus in the third
century:—
Ὀψὲ θεῶν ἀλέουσι μύλοι, ἀλέουσι δὲ λεπτά.
“The mills of the gods grind late, but they grind fine.”
[7:2] Αὐτὸν, evidently meaning Plutarch.
[7:3] I doubt whether there is reference here to every third wave as
having a fuller flow. Timon, though inclined at the outset to the other
side, is represented as so affected by the arguments of Patrocleas and
Olympicus that he is prepared to make a third speech against the Divine
Providence, yet is willing to yield place to his brother; and the
speech which Plutarch supersedes is the third wave.
[8:1] In some poem not now extant.
[9:1] We have evidence from other sources that the Spartans were
accustomed to shave the upper lip, and in Sparta custom and law were
identical.
[9:2] Slaves might be manumitted in Rome by having their names
inscribed on the roll of taxable citizens with permission of their
masters, in which case they must have been possessed of some
_peculium_,—property of their own earning or given them by their
masters. They might also be made free by will. But the oldest mode of
manumission is that here referred to. The slave was brought before the
magistrate, whose lictor laid a rod or wand on his head, after which
ceremony the master pronounced him free.
[9:3] In this, which was one of several modes in which wills were
made in Rome, the testator made a fictitious sale of his property to
a friend, who received his instructions as to the disposal of it. The
person thus made the purchaser filled very much the place that with us
is held by the executor of a will.
[10:1] Solon’s theory was, that neutrality in a disturbed condition of
the state indicated either indifference to the public well-being or the
most sordid selfishness; while sedition might be sometimes justifiable,
and at the worst was not inconsistent with honesty of purpose.
[10:2] The “harbor or refuge” is man’s inevitable ignorance of Divine
things, which is often a sufficient answer for doubts or objections
which man cannot solve or refute.
[11:1] From an unknown poet.
[12:1] A tragedian, of whom only a few fragments are preserved.
[12:2] This whole section looks almost like a paraphrase of St. Paul’s
exhortation: “Be ye kind, tender-hearted, forgiving one another,
even as God [for Christ’s sake] hath forgiven you. _Be ye_ therefore
_followers of God_, as dear children; and walk in love.”
[14:1] Τρόπος, from τρέπειν, _to turn_. Our phrase _turn of mind_
virtually denotes a change, i. e. a direction of mind not native or
normal.
[14:2] Ἦθος, _habit_. Habits are not native, but always imply a change
from a previous state in which they had not begun to be.
[14:3] A man in the upper part of his body; in the lower, a dragon.
[14:4] Gelon first obtained the sovereignty of Gela in Sicily, by
setting aside the minor sons of the late king, of whom he had been
appointed guardian. He subsequently availed himself of dissensions in
Syracuse, to obtain the sovereignty of that city, which rose to great
prosperity and wealth under his reign.
[14:5] Hieron was the brother and successor of Gelon, who left an
infant son. Some accounts say that he assumed the sovereignty in his
nephew’s name, and retained it as in his own right. He was tyrannical
in his rule, but was successful in war, and was distinguished for his
patronage of literature and of learned men. Aeschylus and Pindar were
among his invited and permanent guests.
[15:1] Peisistratus obtained supreme power in Athens no less than three
times, and always by intrigue and violence. But his administration was
wise and beneficent. He enriched Athens with several of the most costly
and tasteful public edifices. He was a liberal patron of letters. He
settled the poor of the city in the outlying districts of Attica, and
laid the foundation for the agricultural prosperity of the state.
[15:2] This treaty could have had only a temporary effect; for at a
subsequent period we read of two hundred children being burned at
the shrine of Cronus in Carthage, as a propitiatory sacrifice when a
successor of Gelon appeared in arms before the city. In the Hebrew
Scriptures we learn that this particular form of human sacrifice was
largely practised by the Canaanites,—the stock of which the Phoenicians
who settled Carthage were an offshoot.
[15:3] Lydiades rose from an obscure condition to a despotic
sovereignty over Megalopolis, and probably with little scruple as to
the means of elevation; but, becoming convinced that it was for the
interest of the city to join the Achaean league as a free state, he
abdicated the crown, and was chosen commander of the forces of the
republic thus constituted. He died in battle.
[16:1] We are reminded here of the stanza in Byron’s song:—
“The tyrant of the Chersonese
Was freedom’s best and bravest friend;
That tyrant was Miltiades.
O that the present hour might send
Another despot of the kind!
Such chains as his were sure to bind.”
[16:2] Elpinice, whose first husband was Cimon, was his father’s
daughter; but they had different mothers. In the earlier ages, for
obvious reasons, kindred was reckoned only on the mother’s side, and
the intermarriage of the children of the same father and different
mothers was legal, and not unusual. We find traces of the lawfulness
of such marriages in Hebrew history as late as the time of David.
Cimon’s marriage was probably lawful; but public sentiment had then
advanced so far as to render such a union discreditable, if not
absolutely infamous. It is worthy of remark here that the Greek names
for _brother_ and _sister_, ἀδελφός and ἀδελφή, in their derivation and
original use denote a relation on the mother’s side alone.
[16:3] The stories that have come down to us of the riotous living,
recklessness, and debauchery of Themistocles as a young man almost
transcend belief. It is related of him that he was once drawn in a
carriage through the thronged market-place by four shameless women
harnessed like horses.
[17:1] Ἀρτεμίσιον, Artemisium. The first naval battle between the
Grecian forces and Xerxes was fought off Artemisium. Themistocles
commanded the Athenian portion of the fleet, and the splendid victory
was ascribed, in great part, to his skill and prowess.
[17:2] From Pindar,—commemorative of this battle.
[18:1] Before Dionysius the elder obtained the undisputed sovereignty
of Syracuse, Sicily had been devastated by the Carthaginians, and
several of its chief cities destroyed. In the first year of his reign,
the Carthaginian general, after a successful campaign, offered him
terms of peace, solely because his own army had suffered severely
from pestilence. But in subsequent wars Dionysius repeatedly defeated
the Carthaginians, and, whatever his demerits, he raised his kingdom
to a high degree of prosperity, and rendered it attractive to the
emigrants whom the over-peopled Greek cities were constantly sending to
every region where Greek enterprise, genius, and skill could hope for
recognition and reward.
[19:1] Periander was the tyrant of Corinth in the seventh century
before Christ. His history is obscure; but the traditions with regard
to him relate many acts of violence and cruelty, and also very great
misfortunes, and his domestic life was overshadowed equally by crime
and by misery. The three places named in this sentence were early
Corinthian colonies, and they may have been settled by Periander’s
enterprise, or may have been places of refuge from his caprice and
oppression.
[19:2] The island of Leucadia was a peninsula in Homer’s time, and was
probably still so when the Corinthian colony was established.
[19:3] Alexander destroyed Thebes; twenty years afterward Cassander
rebuilt it. Plutarch very probably refers to the tradition that
Cassander poisoned Alexander. Not that he was free from other undoubted
crimes; for his whole life was marked by sporadic acts of violence. He
cannot be said to have received any specific punishment; but he was
kept in perpetual harassment by the quarrels among the successors of
Alexander.
[19:4] That is, this temple of Delphi, the scene of the dialogue.
[20:1] In the Phocian war two Phocian leaders with their associates
seized the treasure deposited in the temple at Delphi, and used it to
hire foreign mercenaries. Those concerned in the robbery were wandering
as outlaws in Peloponnesus, when Timoleon enlisted them for service
in Sicily against the Carthaginians. They contributed largely to his
success; but after their dispersion most of them encountered such
disasters as were regarded as the normal penalty of sacrilege.
[20:2] So little is really known about Phalaris that he is almost a
mythical personage. His name, however, will always remain associated
with his brazen bull, and his trying his first experiment with it by
roasting in it its inventor, who certainly best deserved the doom.
[20:3] The readers of Roman history may doubt the medicinal virtue of
Marius, who certainly served as a seton on the body politic.
[21:1] History throws no light on this specific crime; but the
Sicyonians had the reputation of being a licentious and otherwise
vicious people. The curative process under Orthagoras and the dynasty
that he founded lasted a full century.
[21:2] Of Cleonae we know very little except that it was, and now is
not. Near its site is a hamlet of half a dozen houses that bears the
name of Clenes. Nemea, where the Nemean games were held, was in its
territory.
[21:3] One of his maternal ancestors had been cursed, and banished from
Athens, a century and a half before his birth, for an insurrectionary
enterprise.
[21:4] He was killed by lightning, which the people regarded as a
retributive bolt from heaven. He deserved hatred, Cicero says, for his
cruelty, treachery, and avarice.
[22:1] One tradition makes Odysseus the son of Sisyphus, and only the
step-son of Laertes, who, however, married Anticleia before her son was
born. Autolycus was the father of Anticleia, and it was he that stole
the cattle of Iphitus.
[22:2] Aesculapius in Grecian fable was the son of Apollo by Coronis,
the daughter of Phlegyas, who, in what might seem righteous indignation
against the wanton god, set fire to his Delphian temple, having of
course first ravaged it.
[23:1] Dion obtained supreme power in Syracuse, though not the title
of King, on the expulsion of Dionysius the younger. Callippus, his
professed friend, was the leader of the band of malcontents that
killed Dion, although he did not kill him with his own hand, perhaps
shrinking from the act of murder on account of an oath which, when
under suspicion, he had sworn at the altar of Persephone, that he
would remain faithful to his friend. His aim was the place which Dion
had held. It was his but a little while, and then, after a series of
misfortunes and wanderings, he was killed at Rhegium with the same
weapon that had been employed in the murder of Dion.
[23:2] Eriphyle received a golden necklace as a reward for betraying
her husband Amphiaraus, who secreted himself to avoid going to the
Theban war in which it was predicted that he should perish. His son
Alcmaeon avenged his father by killing his mother, and then made of
the necklace a sacred deposit in the temple at Delphi. Aristo was the
commander of one of the bands of mercenaries hired by the pillage of
the temple.
[23:3] The Phocian leaders who committed this sacrilege.
[23:4] In this temple.
[24:1] The Spanish fly, which was used for medicinal purposes in very
early times, as it is now.
[25:1] Such spectacles—never, so far as we know, witnessed in
Greece—were not uncommon in Rome. Christians were thus exhibited
and murdered on the stage in the sight of admiring and applauding
multitudes; and we have no reason to doubt that other reputed
malefactors were similarly dealt with. This treatise may have been
written after Plutarch had been in Rome; at any rate, Roman customs
were well known throughout the empire.
[27:1] Agamemnon, the husband of Clytemnestra, whom she murdered on
his return from Troy, was the son of Pleisthenes. Stesichorus wrote a
tragedy entitled _Orestes_, from which, undoubtedly, these verses are
taken.
[28:1] Apollodorus, king of the small state of Cassandreia, was
regarded as having been unsurpassed in tyranny, cruelty, and
debauchery. The mention of his daughters in this vision makes it
probable that he was guilty of some horrible outrage of violence or
lust of which they were the victims.
[28:2] The crime or type of depravity of which Hipparchus was guilty
can be inferred only from the vision here reported.
[28:3] Ptolemy Ceraunus was the eldest son of Ptolemy Soter; but,
on account of his violent passions and moral obliquity, his father
designated a younger son as his successor. Ceraunus then emigrated to
Macedonia, became intimate with Seleucus, murdered him treacherously,
and himself assumed the sovereignty; but in less than a year he was
defeated by the Gauls who then first invaded that region, was taken
prisoner, and was put to death with the utmost barbarity.
[28:4] Plutarch tells this story with fuller details in his life of
Cimon. The Pausanias referred to is the Spartan viceroy and general of
that name. Byzantium, which had been a stronghold of the Persians, was
held by the Lacedaemonians, under Pausanias, at the time of the retreat
of the Ten Thousand.
[29:1] The rites differ; but the belief in necromancy has undergone no
essential change from the days of the witch of Endor to the present
time, and there have probably been in every age, as now, ceremonies
which have brought credulous men and women into imagined communion with
departed spirits. The history of necromancy shows many resemblances,
and still more analogies, in different countries, ages, and degrees of
culture.
[30:1] One of Alexander’s generals, and after Alexander’s death king of
Thrace.
[30:2] Simonides is said to have been the first poet who eulogized the
subjects of his verse from mercenary motives. As his panegyrics had
great poetical merit, and were much sought and well paid for, yet with
few expressions of gratitude, he was wont to say that his chest of
money was full, the chest designed for thanks empty.
[31:1] These verses are probably from a lost tragedy of Euripides.
The myths about Ino are various, and mutually inconsistent. According
to some she killed, according to others she endeavored to kill, the
children of her husband, Athamas, by a former wife. Still others charge
her with the murder of her own son or sons. She at length leaped into
the sea, and emerged a goddess, under the name of Leucothea,—certainly
a better name in heaven than she could have borne on earth.
[32:1] Apollodorus is said to have bound his associates in some
movement for his own aggrandizement by bringing them together at a
festival, and at its close giving them evidence that they had been
feeding on human victims.
[33:1] Glaucus, a Lacedaemonian, had a high reputation for integrity,
and on the ground of it received from a foreigner a deposit of a large
sum of money. When the owner’s sons claimed the deposit, he disclaimed
all knowledge of it. But a threat of the Delphian oracle led him to
make restitution afterward. Nevertheless the threat took effect, and he
and his whole family perished.
[33:2] In this section Timon seems to cite indiscriminately the cases
of delayed or protracted punishment by men which are confessedly
foolish or wicked, and alleged instances of delayed punishment on the
part of the gods. The _gravamen_ of the objection is, “How can that
be just or right for the gods to do, which when men do they encounter
either ridicule or condemnation?”
[34:1] That Aesop was killed by the Delphians for the cause here stated
there seems to be no doubt; nor yet that Idmon, a descendant of the man
of the same name who had owned and emancipated Aesop, received a large
sum of money from the Delphians by way of expiation for their crime,
to which they had probably in the mean time ascribed every bad harvest
and every epidemic. It must be remembered that, before the rotation
of crops became the habit of agriculturists, bad harvests were very
frequent, and that, in the absence of sanitary rules and precautions,
dangerous epidemics prevailed at short intervals in all the cities of
the old world. It was not unnatural that these calamities should have
been regarded as retributive judgments where a gross crime had been
committed.
[34:2] A _mina_ was about the metallic equivalent of twenty dollars,
but of course with a much larger purchasing power.
[35:1] A small town in Central Asia, built by the Branchidae, who were
priests and custodians of the temple of Apollo Didymeus in an Ionian
city bearing their name, near Miletus. The temple was burned by Darius,
was rebuilt, and was burned again by Xerxes, on his retreat from
Greece. The priests surrendered the treasures under their charge to
Xerxes, followed him in his flight to escape punishment for sacrilege,
and built the town which Alexander destroyed. His alleged motive for
his cruel treatment of the Branchidae was revenge for the sacrilege and
treason of their ancestors.
[36:1] It was at Scheria, according to Homer, that Odysseus was kindly
received by Nausicaa, entertained sumptuously by King Alcinous, her
father, and provided with the ship on board of which he reached Ithaca.
The inhabitants of Corcyra maintained that their island was the Homeric
Scheria, which very probably never existed except in the poet’s brain.
[36:2] Polyphemus.
[36:3] The territory of Pheneus is so situated at the confluence of two
mountain streams as to be of necessity liable to inundation. There was
an old canal, said to have been constructed by Hercules, and designed
to carry off any abnormal excess of water; but it had early become
obstructed and useless, and Pliny says that there had been no less
than five periods when the region had been entirely devastated by the
overflow of the rivers.
[37:1] There were three occasions on which the Sybarites incurred
the special anger of Hera. Her statue was overturned in some civic
commotion. Afterward the people of Sybaris killed thirty members of a
delegation from their neighbors of Crotona, and cast out their bodies
to be devoured by wild beasts. On this occasion, the goddess was seen
by night with an angry and threatening mien. In the third place, a
slave who had taken refuge at her altar was pursued and scourged by
his master, who held his father’s tomb as so much more sacred than her
temple that he ceased beating the slave when he sought refuge there.
Sybaris is known to have been twice destroyed before Plutarch’s time.
There may have been a third destruction of which we have no record; but
there is nothing in the text to forbid our so construing it as to leave
the threat still hanging over the city, and the third destruction still
impending.
[37:2] The tradition was that Ajax was guilty of an outrage on
Cassandra, the priestess of Athene. He on his return voyage was
destroyed by shipwreck, and the Locrians were supposed to have suffered
on account of his crime visitations of pestilence and other dire
calamities. When they consulted the oracle, the reply was, that the
guilt of Ajax could be expiated only by their sending annually to
Troy, for a thousand years, two virgins to perform menial service in
the temple of Athene. The hero, the crime, and the expiation are, more
probably than not, all mythical.
[38:1] The Thracian men were tattooed as well as the women, and it was
probably for both men and women a preferred mode of ornament.
[38:2] I can find nowhere else any reference to this observance; but
nothing is more probable than that Phaethon’s name should have been
attached to some religious anniversary in the region in which he was
said to have perished.
[39:1] “Of the viands” is an interpolation of my own. At a feast a
“portion” was “carried off,” and I know not what it could have been,
if not a part of the food and wine on the table. If there were none
of Pindar’s posterity at hand to receive the portion, there were
undoubtedly hungry officials ready in this behalf to represent them.
[39:2] I suppose that the first place at a Spartan civic festival
was formally assigned to Terpander, long dead, and that the most
distinguished living guest was made to regard himself as second in
honor.
[40:1] Ὑμεῖς. Plutarch is here addressing, not Timon alone, but two or
all three of his interlocutors.
[40:2] Descendants of Opheltes. He came from Thessaly to Thebes, and
brought with him a body of armed adherents. He founded a royal line in
Boeotia.
[40:3] Delphi being in Phocis, the claims on the score of Daiphantus
would be availing in all processions and festivities connected with the
temple service.
[40:4] A victory that the Phocians under Daiphantus had gained five
hundred years before was still celebrated in Plutarch’s time.
[40:5] I can find elsewhere no notice of these races, or families.
[41:1] Lachares was a demagogue who early in the third century B. C.
obtained virtually supreme power in Athens, plundered the Parthenon,
stripped the statue of Athene of its ornaments, committed numerous
acts of high-handed tyranny, and was finally expelled from the city on
the charge of having taken measures for betraying it into the hands of
Antiochus.
[41:2] Ariston was an Epicurean philosopher, who raised himself to a
virtual tyranny in Athens, but surrendered to Sulla when he besieged
the city.
[42:1] Ἠρυγγίτην, _eryngium_, now the name of a genus containing
several species of snakeroot.
[42:2] The plague that raged in Athens early in the Peloponnesian war,
of which Thucydides gives so remarkable an account.
[43:1] Plutarch gives an early specimen of this argument in his life
of Theseus: “The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned
[from Crete] was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of
Demetrius Phalereus; for they took away the old planks as they decayed,
putting new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this
ship became a standing example among the philosophers for the logical
question, as to things that grow; one party holding that the ship
remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.”
[45:1] Athens had been under the government of men who had been
virtually Cassander’s viceroys. The city after his death came under the
rule of Demetrius Poliorcetes, and it was probably by his order that
the statue of Cassander was destroyed.
[45:2] Dionysius the elder.
[45:3] Nisaeus was the son of Dionysius the elder, and was sovereign of
Syracuse for a short time while his brother Dionysius the younger was
in exile. Aelian names him in a chapter specially devoted to eminent
φιλοπόται, i. e. drunkards.