Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.1, 1865).djvu/451

Rh copies of Plutarch change into Cleophylus, and Dryden's coadjutor miswrote or misprinted Cleobulus. Creophylus was spoken of already in Plato's time as the companion of Homer.—(De Republica, X. p. 600.)

Pages 90 and 92.—Plato's criticisms are in the third book of the Laws, pages 691, 692.

Page 113.—The passage of Pindar is from a lost and unknown poem. One of their own poets is Alcinan.

Page 122.—For the reference to Plato, see the Timæus, p. 38, where the divine Creator, desirous to add to his works the resemblance of eternity, proceeds to create "this which we call Time."

, page 132.—Plutarch speaks more at length of this distinction of the wise Egyptians in one of the Dinner Conversations.—On the sixth of Thargelion they kept the birthday of Socrates, and, on the seventh, met again to celebrate that of Plato. Apollo himself, according to the story, had been born on this seventh day; and it had been no disparagement to the god, said one of the company, to attribute to him, as many had done, the mortal procreation of one that had been, under the tuition of Socrates, a greater healer of human maladies and diseases than ever Æsculapius (Apollo's mythological son) had become under that of Chiron. And he referred, at the same time, to the warning which Ariston, Plato's acknowledged father, was said to have received in a dream, forbidding him the company of his wife during the ten months preceding Plato's birth. To this another of the party opposes the incorruptible nature of the godhead: yet that by some creative, not procreative, power, the eternal and unbegotten God is the father and maker of the world and all begotten things, Plato, he adds, himself admits, nor can we limit the modes in which such divine intervention may operate; and then he gives the Egyptian dogma.—(Symposiaca, VIII. 1).

Page 138, Note.—The Greek would, however, not be Aimulos or Æmylus, but Haimulos.

Page 139.—The stone bridge, the Pons Æmilius or Lapidens, seems to have been built, for the actual traffic, close alongside of the original wooden bridge, the Pons Sublicius, which was allowed to remain for religious purposes, but was not otherwise used. Dionysius of Halicarnassus says it was still remaining in his time.

Page 148.—Dacier, in his note on the Egyptian wheels, refers to a passage in Clement of Alexandria, to the effect, that the Egyptian priests gave those who came to the temples to pray, a wheel, which they were to turn, and flowers, both of them emblems of change and instability.

Page 152.—The correct name is not Mercedinus but Mercedonius.

Page 155.—The verses are from a Pæan, or song of triumphal rejoicing, of Bacchylides. The complete passage is found in Stobæus; it is Fragment 13 of Bacchylides, in Bergk's Poetæ Lyrici.

Page 156.—The saying which Plato ventured to pronounce, is the famous demand made with such fear and trembling in the fifth book of the Republic (p. 473) for the rule of the king-philosopher. It is repeated in the fourth book of the Laws, from which latter place come the words of the next sentence, the wise