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238 238 Miscellaneous Observations. historian! illam ad veteres fabellas amatorias, Milesiarum nomine appellatas, referendum esse existimant. If I venture to interpose a word in this discussion, it is certainly not because I attach any importance to the ques- tion, whether the story in Agathias is anything more than an idle fiction arbitrarily connected with a historical name. Few unprejudiced persons will think either much better of the Athenians, if they condemned their general for an atro- cious crime committed for his own private ends, or much worse of them, if they did not accept his public services as a sufficient defence against a charge of misconduct which appeared to them clearly proved. But still as the behaviour of the Athenians towards Paches has been made a ground of severe censure on them by some writers, both ancient and modern, the question deserves to be placed on a right footing, which, it seems to me, none of the critics whose remarks I have quoted have done. In the first place, the story in Agathias certainly does not gain the slightest degree of credibility by being compared with the fact mentioned by Aristotle : for that the two daugh- ters of Timophanes should have been the same women who became the victims of the lust of Paches, would be a most extraordinary coincidence, which it would be arbitrary beyond measure to assume without any authority : so that I can scarcely believe that this was Schneider's meaning. On the contrary, it would be very easy to conceive how the incident mentioned by Aristotle might in the course of ages be combined with the violent death of the conqueror Paches, and so worked up into the tale on which the epigram is founded, which would not be a stranger perversion of history than we find frequently occurring in Malalas. But this bare possibility is not in itself an argument sufficient even to raise a pre- sumption, and surely will not justify us in pronouncing the Lesbian legend to be no better than a Milesian story. The reasons given by Mr Jacobs for treating it with contempt^ are such as I should not have expected from an intelligent critic. I lay no stress on the public conduct of Paches, whom Mr Mitford, not certainly without reason, brands with the reproach of treachery and cruelty : because it does not follow, though he looked upon all means as indifferent in the