Life of Pelopidas, page 204. The verse is from the Suppliants of Euripides (861), where Adrastus describes to Theseus the chiefs who fell at Thebes.
Page 205.—The battle at Mantinea is the first and less famous battle, fought in the period of the Peloponnesian War by the Argives and their allies against the Lacedæmonians, and described by Thucydides in his 5th book.
Page 206, Androclides, and, page 207, Damoclides, might be more correctly written Androclidas or Androcleidas, and Damoclidas or Damocleidas, like Meneclidas or Menecleidas, in page 225. The whole of the narrative that follows, of the way in which the plot was carried out, is ingeniously expanded so as to form the framework of Plutarch's philosophic piece On the Genius (or daimonion) of Socrates. Caphisias, brother of Epaminondas, being at Athens shortly after as an envoy, relates it to his philosophic friends there; the interest of course being in the events, but the greater amount of space being given to the conversation that had passed on the philosophic subject, this in its turn serving to show the composure and equanimity of the noble Thebans at the time.
Page 210.—Archias with Phillidas should be, as appears by the parallel passage in the dialogue De Genio Socratis, Archias with Philippus or Philip.
Page 218.—The line is from Nestor's speech, Iliad II., 363. Page 219.—The disaster of Laius, or, more correctly, what befell Laius, alludes to the tale of his carrying away Chrysippus, the son of Pelops by the nymph Danais, an obscure story, which is, however, mentioned elsewhere by Plutarch.
Page 220.—Scedasus was a man who lived at Leuctra, and had daughters named Hippo and Molpia. Those were violated by men of Lacedæmon, Parathemidas, Phrudarchidas, and Parthenius. The young women hung themselves, and the father, after going in vain to Sparta to seek redress, came home to Leuctra and killed himself.
Page 231.—One Epicrates, a baggage carrier, should at any rate be Epicrates the baggage carrier (skeuophoros); perhaps Epicrates the shield carrier (sakesphoros), a name which he has in the Comic writers (Aristophanes, Ecclesiasuzæ, 71, and Plato, Legati, fragm. 3), because of his immense shield-like beard. Epicrates was long prominent as a public speaker; he took part in the expulsion of the thirty tyrants and in all the subsequent political proceedings, and is the subject of one of the extant orations of Lysias.
Page 232.—In the 7th line, after three hundred horse volunteers, should be added and mercenary soldiers; but the text appears to be uncertain. Life of Marcellus, page 238.—The verses are from the fourteenth Iliad, 86.
Page 246.—A golden cup of a hundred pounds weight is quite uncertain; there is no number given in the present text of Plutarch; Amyot, who translates "du poids de cent marcs," may have had the number before him in a manuscript now lost; but litrōn, pounds, which is all there is in the Greek, is changed by some critics into lutrōn, spoils,—a golden cup from the produce of the spoils.
Page 250.—Three hundred should probably be thirteen hundred. Livy, whom Plutarch appears to be following in the narrative, says 1272.
Page 262.—Ephesus was the workhouse of war when Agesilaus made it his head-quarters in his Asiatic campaigns. The quotation from Pindar is from the beginning of the 2nd Pythian ode. Rude, unrefined, only for great things good, is the description of Hercules in fragment No. 1 of the Licymnius. The words are quoted elsewhere by Plutarch as applying to Cimon; see Vol. III, p. 202.
Page 273.—The fragment from Pindar is No. 256, in Boeckh; nothing more is known of it. Comparison, page 278.—The passage referred to in the Cyropædia is the 1st chapter of the 4th book. It is not certain how much of the sentiment contained, a little below, in the two verses of the translation, belongs to what Euripides said. Plutarch, who gives it in an unmetrical form here, quotes elsewhere two lines identical with the latter part. But if it be lawful to die, then it is noble to die, making virtue (or honor) the term of our life. Grotius gives, as a translation of the whole:— Vincere vivereque optima res est; Si moriendum est, ita dulce mori Vitam ut virtus sorbeat in se.
See Matthiæ's Euripides (Fragment. incert., 110).
Life of Aristides, page 281.—The way of writing in use since the time of Euclides differed from the previous usage more particularly in the introduction of the Ionic letters eta and omega, the long e and o, which up to that date had never appeared in public inscriptions or documents. The year of the archonship of Euclides is 403 B. C., the first after the end of the Peloponnesian War; in the course of which the thirty tyrants were expelled, the amnesty decreed, and the democracy reëstablished.
Page 284.—The verses from Æschylus relating to Amphiaraus are from the Seven against Thebes, lines 574 to 576. Well known he was, &c., is ascribed to Euripides. Page 305.—The inscription is by Simonides. Plutarch's text omits one line, which is found elsewhere in one of his minor works.
Page 312.—What Plato declares is found in the Gorgias, pages 519 and 526.
Page 313.—The death of Paches in the judgment-hall is an incorrect expression. Paches, after his suppression of the revolt of Lesbos, was brought to trial, on his return home, and killed himself in the presence of the people assembled to try him, as he stood on the speaker's stand (the hustings). Compare the account in the beginning of the life of Nicias, Vol. III. p. 296.
Life of Cato, page 320.—Scipio the great did not seem to envy, but, on the contrary, as the right translation would stand, to be envied by Fabius. See the account at the end of the life of Fabius Maximus, Vol I. p. 321. In the 13th line from the bottom, the word general should probably be altered for prætor; when he was holding the office of prætor, or of consul.
Page 324.—For Socrates in the description of Plato, see the Symposium, p. 215; a famous portraiture, placed in the mouth of Alcibiades. Cato is compared, rather at random, to Lysias, in Cicero's Brutus, chapter 16.
Page 335.—He is reported to have escaped at least fifty indictments should be, to have defended himself in at least fifty causes. Page 351.—The quotation is from the 10th book of the Odyssey, line 495: Among the dead, whom Ulysses is to visit, Tiresias, Circe tells him, alone has retained his wisdom after death, the rest flit about as shadows.
Comparison, page 356.—The lines from Homer are from the Odyssey (XIV., 222).
Life of Philopœmen, page 374.—The passage of Plato, about the Athenians becoming ill mariners, is in the fourth book of the Laws, p. 706.
Page 379.—Aristænus (this is the more recognized form) is the same as the Aristæus of page 373; the readings vary.
Page 380.—The hill of Evander is thought to be a mis-reading for the hill of Evas (or Evan, in the accusative case), mentioned by Polybius and Pausanias. Polybius, the historian, is the general's son, who carried the urn, mentioned in pages 382 and 383.
Life of Flamininus, page 385.—Manlius should be Manius; it is Manius Curio that is meant.
Page 388.—After the name Charops, in line 14, the words the son of Machatus have been accidentally omitted.
Page 397.—The Achæans and Phthiotians should not be distinguished as two separate tribes; it should be the Achæans of Phthiotis.
Volume 3 The Lives in this volume were translated for Dryden's edition, as follows:— Pyrrhus, by William Croune, M. D., Fellow of the College of Physicians.
Marius, by Miles Stapleton, Fellow of All-Souls College, Oxford. Lysander, by the Honorable Charles Boyle, of Christ's Church, (the once famous editor of the Epistles of Phalaris, and unequal opponent of Bentley).
Sylla, by William Davies, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Cimon, by Mat. Morgan, A. M., of St. Johns' College, Oxford.
Lucullus, by Giles Thornburgh, A. M.
Nicias, by Thomas Rymer, Esq., (the critic and antiquary).
Crassus, by —————— Amhurst, Esq.
Eumenes, by some one unnamed.
Sertorius, by Edward Browne, M. D.
Some notes in addition to those in the text are subjoined.
Life of Pyrrhus, page 4.—The affairs of Alexander, called Ægus, son by Roxana, and lawful heir of Alexander the Great, proved unfortunate, as did those of all the blood royal of the old Macedonian family, in the time of Cassander. Alexander and Roxana were both put to death by his orders. Olympias, with whom they had acted, was cousin to Pyrrhus's father, Æacides. For the great battle of Ipsus where all the kings, or as one reading has it, all the kings of the earth were engaged, see the life of Demetrius in Volume V.
Page 6.—The only peninsula or chersonese of Epirus that appears to be mentioned, is that on which Buthrotum stands. Niebuhr suggests the peninsula in the lake of Janina. Tymphæa and Parauæa are corrections of Niebuhr's for Nymphæa and Paralia. They are districts commanding the passage from Macedonia to the Greek city, Ambracia, which Strabo tells us became Pyrrhus's capital.
Page 10.—Not by the lot decide, But with the sword the heritage divide, is from the Phœnissæ of Euripides, (66).
Page 17.—The saying of Euripides, that the force of words, Can gain whate'er is done by conquering swords, is in the Phœnissæ, 516, 517.
Page 24.—The translation of the first sentence should be, Yet most were well inclined to a peace. Cineas was not listened to with any delight or eagerness, when he made his moderate proposals; nevertheless, it was evident that the greater number were prepared to make concessions for peace. Page 30.—Homer uses such words as madness or frenzy, for example, of Hector, who rages beyond all further withstanding, and bold in Zeus, is possessed with a terrible frenzy. Fortitude, through the Latin, has become the cardinal name of the virtue, which in the Greek has not chiefly to do with the endurance of pain, but is exercised in the encounter of all danger, and is more properly bravery, courage, or intrepidity, etymologically manliness. It is in the Greek ethics the virtue or excellence of the active part, as temperance is of the passive, and wisdom in its two divisions, practical and scientific, of the intellectual part, of the human soul. This classification of the elements of our nature into the active impulses, the sensibilities or appetites, and the reason or mind, occurs everywhere in Greek. It is the basis, for example, of the whole system of Plato's republic with its triple division, corresponding to this, of soldiers, artisans, and governors.
Life of Marius, page 49.—Cirrhæaton is simply a corruption for Cirrhæatæ, equivalent to Cereatæ or Cereate, a little town in the district of Arpinum, which in Pliny's time was a municipality whose people, the Cereatini Mariani, still bore Marius's name; of which, if the site be correctly identified with the monastery of Casa Mara or Casamari, some traces may be thought to remain even now.
Page 50.—The bill for the regulation of voting had no natural connection with the courts of justice. A very slight correction of a single word would change courts of justice into elections: but it is of course always possible for Plutarch to make a mistake about Roman matters, or a slip of a word in copying from his authorities.
Page 53.—For the tumors, or swellings, with which Marius was troubled in his legs, Mr. Long in his translation has varicose veins, on the authority of Cicero, who in his Tusculan Disputations (II., 15 and 22) uses the word varices. Cicero adduces the story in elucidation of the question as to the nature of pain. Of the fortitude of Marius there could be no doubt: others had followed the example after him; but he had been the first who ever had submitted to the operation without being tied down. Yet that with him pain was not simply indifferent, (neither an evil nor a good, as the Stoics taught,) appeared by his declining to let the surgeon have his other leg to cut.
Page 55.—The images of ancestors are emphatically the imagines, the busts, in wax or other material, of those of their ancestry who had borne office and gained distinction, which it was the pride of a Roman family to accumulate in the hall (the atrium), and to display on great occasions.
Page 63.—The great trench or canal bore the name of Fossa Mariana. The phrase just below, to march against Marius by the seaside through Liguria, is an incorrect one, but the incorrectness seems to be Plutarch's. Marius was on the Rhone, to oppose any march into Liguria. What the Teutones and Ambrones proposed to do was to beat him, and so enter Italy by Liguria.
Page 66.—In the sixth line, the soldiers might be omitted and them substituted. The text is as the translation, but it must be corrected. It was certainly the soldiers who recognized the birds, not the birds who saluted the soldiers.
Page 70.—The others refreshed with victuals and sleep is more correctly translated, the others who got their supper in good time and went to bed. Page 72.—Plutarch's words, attired in the purple-bordered robe (which might be more closely rendered, girding himself, and taking up, or wearing the purple-bordered robe), are meant to describe the cinctus Gabinus or Gabine cincture, used by officiating persons on great occasions; when the purple-bordered or purple-striped robe, the prætexta or trabea, was gathered up, and tied like a girdle round the body. As in Virgil: "Ipse Quirinali trabea cinctuque Gabino Insignis reserat stridentia limina consul."
Page 80.—The passage in which Pindar calls Truth the first principle of heroic virtue is a fragment of a lost and unknown composition, found, however, at a little greater length elsewhere. "First beginning of great virtue, queen Truth, shipwreck not my faith on any rock of falsehood;" i.e. let not my promise ever come to be broken by me; keep me ever faithful to my engagements. (Boeckh, Fragm. Incerta, 118.)
Page 89.—The line about the eagle's young, ascribed to Musæus, is cited also by Aristotle in his History of Animals. Page 100.—A part of the ceremonial of the consul's appearing on his first assuming office on the calends of January was to go up and offer sacrifice in the Capitoline Temple, attended apparently by the senate, a full meeting of which took place immediately after. The words, a little above, as if a change of wind were coming on, are more expressive in the original; it is, as if the wind, which had been blowing steadily from the one quarter, were setting in from the opposite. The word tropaia (the turn or return wind), according to a passage of Aristotle (quoted by Coray), was specially applied to the wind which set from the sea after it had blown for its regular time from the shore; the sea breeze, succeeding the land breeze.
Page 102.—The story of Plato's thanks to the providence and fortune of his life is told a little more fully by Lactantius (Instit. III., 19). " Plato returned thanks," he says, "that he had been born, first, a human and not a brute creature; secondly, a man and not a woman; thirdly, a Greek and not a barbarian; lastly, an Athenian, and in the age of Socrates;" as if, adds Lactantius, scornfully, had he been born a barbarian, a woman, or an ass, he would still have been the same Plato.
Life of Lysander, page 104.—In the description of the statue, the phrase, but indeed it is Lysander's, representing him, is in the original a good deal more precise; but indeed it is an iconic figure of Lysander. Iconic (from the Greek icon or eikon, the word that is used in the title Ikon basilike, and forms part of the compound iconoclast, and means an image or likeness) was a technical term applied in Latin, as well as Greek, to real portraitures from the life, as distinguished from ideal representations.
Page 105.—Aristotle has a long chapter in his Problemata (XXX., 1) on this subject. Why is it, he asks, that all remarkable men that have ever lived, in philosophy, politics, poetry, or the arts, have been atrabilious (melan-cholic)? some so much so as to be subject to maladies occasioned by black bile, as we are told Hercules was, from whom epileptic fits have received a name, and who also suffered before his death on Œta from an eruption of boils on his skin, a thing often caused by black bile. Lysander, the Lacedæmonian, before his death, suffered from them. Ajax and Bellerophon among the heroes are other instances. In later times, Empedocles, Plato, Socrates, and many other famous men. So, too, the great majority of the Poets. He proceeds to compare the vaporous effects of this temperament to those of wine, which he says is so creative of character and moral dispositions.
Page 117.—As Theophrastus writes in his history should be rather, as Theophrastus the historian or historical inquirer writes.
Page 120.—The first chorus in the Electra begins at the 167th line.
Page 126.—Others besides Ulysses deep can be is thought by some critics to be a fragment of the lost Palamedes of Euripides.
Page 136.—The localities about Haliartus, the spring of Cissusa, the rivulet Hoplites, and the hill Orchalides or Alopecus (p. 138), are identified by Col. Leake in his Travels in Northern Greece (Chap. XIII., Vol. II., pages 206 to 211). Haliartus is on a low hill terminating in cliffs on the edge of the lake Copais, and, "though not fifty feet higher than the water," the "rocky point projecting into the marsh is remarkable from every part of the plain." Hoplites is "the rivulet under the western wall," and Cissusa, "the fountain below the cliffs." In Plutarch's time, the town was extinct; one of the few remaining objects when Pausanias went there, was a monument of Lysander. Alea, the name of the tomb ascribed to Rhadamanthus, should in correctness be Aleës or Aleäs. There is no reason for supposing Cissusa to be a corruption for Tilphussa or Tilphossa, the spring beside which Tiresias died; this is in a different place.
Page 138.—The sanctuary of Ismenus, or the Ismenian sanctuary, is the temple of the Ismenian Apollo. Life of Sylla, page 143.—The long attachment for Metrobius the player has very likely been brought in here by some copyist from the passage in page 189. The text is various and uncertain.
Page 145.—Euripides's warning against Ambition is in the Phœnissæ (532). Cæsar, just below, is of course not the great Cæsar, but a Cæsar of the previous generation; probably Sextus Cæsar, his uncle.
Page 153.—Picinæ should perhaps be Pictæ, a place mentioned by Strabo. Page 163.—Panope is more correctly Panopeus; the oracle near Lebadea is that of Trophonius. The details in these pages (162 to 171), taken, it would seem, from Sylla's own memoirs, and enlivened by Plutarch's knowledge of and interest in the localities, are examined at length by Col. Leake, who goes through the whole narrative (Northern Greece, Vol. II., Chap. XIII., pages 192 to 201). Chæronea itself, under its high citadel-hill of Petrochus, is described in pages 113 to 117. An antique chair of marble in the church is called Plutarch's chair. But a memorial more probably connected with him and his family existed in an inscription, read by Colonel Leake on a stone near a fountain below the theatre, in remembrance of Demetrius Autobulus, a Platonic philosopher. And there is a record of another being extant in the time of Meletius the geographer, distinctly "in memory of Sextus Claudius Autobulus, the sixth from Plutarch, remarkable for every excellence in conduct and in words, erected by his grandmother Calliclea, his parents, and his sisters." Autobulus is a family name in Plutarch's minor works. Plutarch's own son Autobulus is there spoken of as married, and having a son of his own. See Vol. I., Life of Plutarch, page xii.
Page 176.—The text of the passage about Neleus of Scepsis is uncertain. But the account is probably taken for the most part from Strabo (XIII. 1, 54), who, in speaking of Scepsis near Troy, tells us that Neleus, a native of the town, a scholar of Aristotle and Theophrastus, succeeded to the possession of Theophrastus's library, which included that of Aristotle, who left his to Theophrastus; Aristotle being the first man, to Strabo's knowledge, who collected a library, setting the example to the Egyptian kings. Neleus took the books to Scepsis, where those who afterwards came into his properly kept them shut up without much care for their preservation; and when the kings of the house of Attalus were searching everywhere for books for the library at Pergamus, they buried them underground; and in the damaged condition they thus were in, the works of Theophrastus and Aristotle were bought at last by Apellicon the Teian, who was more, however, of a book-collector than a philosopher, and had copies made with the gaps filled in at a venture. Thus the earlier Peripatetics were left without the works of their master, and the later had faulty copies. And after Sylla, on taking Athens, carried Apellicon's library to Rome, Tyrannion the grammarian made a recension of them, and bad copies were made for booksellers, as is commonly the case, he says, with books written for sale both here (in Rome) and in Alexandria. Strabo was Tyrannion's scholar, and probably gives the story from his account; the statement, however, that the early Peripatetics had no copies of Aristotle's writings, is said to be open to a good deal of exception.
Page 177.—The mountain of Hephæus in Campania seems to be quite unknown. It has been thought that Tifata (Tiphata in Greek) may have been the name originally written.
Page 183.—Afidius, the last word in this page, is probably a mistake (of Plutarch or of a transcriber) for Fufidius.
Comparison, page 194.—The proverb Lions at home occurs in verse, but not in the same form, in Aristophanes's play of the Peace (1189). The scholiast, in his note on the passage, says it was originally said of the Spartans after some mishap in Ionia, "Lions at home, but in Ephesus—mere Laconians." Sallust's affirmation about Sylla was probably made in one of his lost Histories.
Page 196.—Sharp only at the inglorious point of tongue is a verse, of which nothing is known.
Life of Cimon, page 202.—Miltiades and his family were Laciadæ, or Laciads, this being the name of the members of the township or demus of Lacia, which itself was more commonly thus called, the township Laciadæ or the Laciads. Compare page 211.—For the quotation Rude and unrefined, see a note on the life of Marcellus at the end of Vol. II.
Page 203.—Laodice, of the daughters of Priam the best in appearance, occurs in the third Iliad (124). Iris took her form when she went to summon Helen to the walls, in the interval before the combat between Paris and Menelaus. Pace 207.—These inscriptions are quoted by Æschines (In Ctesiphont., p. 573), in his speech on the Crown; the simple honors of old times contrasting favorably for his purpose with those now offered to Demosthenes. Butes is Boges in Herodotus, and Sochares (p. 208) is Sophanes.
Page 212.—King Agesilaus is a doubtful reading; Agesilas or Arcesilas is more probable.
Page 221.—The quotation from Aristophanes is from the Lysistrata (1138).
Page 223.—Posidonia is Pæstum; this is one of the first things mentioned of it.
Page 226.—Such was the Greek commander is a translation that has come from Amyot, "telle donc a esté la vie du capitaine Grec." The text, as we have it (agon, not hegĕmon), means Such is the Greek game, i. e., thus much is to be said for the Greek competitor in the present pair of lives.
Life of Lucullus, page 228.—Lash as a wounded tunny does the sea is quoted again in Plutarch's Essay on the Tardiness of the Gods in inflicting Punishment (de Sera Numinis Vindicta), where Wyttenbach, in his note, conjectures merely that it comes from a lost play of Æschylus or Sophocles, and the fragment following from a Comic writer. But nothing further is known.
Page 232.—Marius should in correctness be Manius, as appears from Velleius Paterculus (II., 18), who relates how on the occupation of the coast and islands of Asia Minor by Mithridates, Manius Aquillius and other Romans were handed over to him by the Mitylenæans.
Page 235.—The Sophists in Plato's dialogues always begin boldly with any showy, blustering piece of logic that occurs to them; and it is only when Socrates has quietly exposed the futility of this, that they bring forward something less pretentious and more to the point.
Page 277.—The city and adjoining villages or vici; such is Plutarch's expression; but the vici are properly the subdivisions of the regions, or wards, of the city, each under its proper officers or vici-magistri. Augustus made them four hundred and twenty-four in number. Many of these might in Lucullus's time have been called vici, but not included in the city.
Page 278.—The Lucullean gardens were those of the Garden Hill (the Collis Hortulorum), the Pincian of the present time. Horace, in the last line, is in the original Flaccus.
Comparison, page 284.—Plato says it scornfully not of Orpheus, but Musæus, in the Republic (II., p. 363). The feast of Venus, the Aphrodisia, is often spoken of as kept formally by sailors on their return to port, and, in a general way, the phrase is used of all indulgence and feasting after business, labor, or danger.
Page 286.—Plato's words about Cimon's ostracism are in the Gorgias (p. 516). 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 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.