Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.1, 1865).djvu/15

Rh dialogues he describes himself as a young man conversing on philosophy with Ammonius in the time of Nero's visit to Greece, 66–67; and that he was certainly alive and still writing in  106, the winter which Trajan, after building his bridge over the Danube, passed in Dacia. "We are told," he says, in his Inquiry into the Principle of Cold, "by those who are now wintering with the Emperor on the Danube, that the freezing of water will crush boats to pieces."

To this bare outline of certainties, several names and circumstances may be added from his writings; on which indeed alone we can safely rely for the very outline itself. There are a few allusions and anecdotes in the Lives, and from his miscellaneous compositions, his Essays, Lectures, Dialogues, Table-Talk, etc., the imagination may furnish itself with a great variety of curious and interesting suggestions.

The name of his great-grandfather, Nicarchus, is incidentally recorded in the life of Antony. "My great-grandfather used," he says, "to tell, how in Antony's last war the whole of the citizens of Chæronea were put in requisition to bring down corn to the coast of the gulf of Corinth, each man carrying a certain load, and soldiers standing by to urge them on with the lash." One such journey was made, and they had measured out their burdens for the second, when news arrived of the defeat at Actium. Lamprias, his grandfather, is also mentioned in the same life. Philotas, the physician, had told him an anecdote illustrating the luxuriousness of Antony's life in Egypt. His father is more than once spoken of in the minor works, but never mentioned by his name.

The name of Ammonius, his teacher and preceptor at Athens,