Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.2, 1865).djvu/426

418 Page 7.—The expression used by Thucydides occurs in his account of one of Alcibiades's orations on the Sicilian War (VI., 15), where he speaks of it as one of the chief causes which ultimately led to the disasters of the city, that people, in alarm at the excessiveness of his personal licentiousness and scorn of all legal restrictions in his habits of life, would not trust themselves to his guidance, which was the best and wisest, in matters of public policy.

Page 10.—Demosthenes in his oration against Midias, whom he prosecuted for an assault upon himself, has a long passage about the way in which Alcibiades, in former times, in spite of all his great pretensions, high birth and wealth, capacity as a general, and skill as an orator, had not been tolerated in his insolence to private persons.

Page 17.—At Agraulos is the old reading, but in [the temple] of Agraulos is the early and certain correction. Agraulos, or Agraule, from whom the township of Agraule took its name, was one of the daughters of Cecrops, who, to fulfil an oracle which promised victory on such a condition, threw herself from the rocks of the Acropolis. The people built her a temple, and here the young Athenians, on first assuming arms, took this oath.

Page 18.—The quotations from Aristophanes are lines 1445, 1452 of the Frogs.

Page 28.— ' Tis not Achilles's son, but he himself, the very man, is quoted elsewhere by Plutarch, but is otherwise unknown.  ' Tis the same woman still is said of Helen by Electra in the Orestes of Euripides (129), when, in making a funeral offering, she had, to save her beauty, cut off only the very ends of her hair.

, page 69.—To beware of self-will, which belongs to the family of solitude, is Plato's phrase of caution to Dion (Epist. IV., p. 321). See the life of Dion, where it is repeated more than once.

Page 78.—The adage about wealth is from Herachtus, and is quoted in two other places by Plutarch, as also by Aristotle. I have let the conplet stand, but the original, though it has the run of an iambic verse, was probably prose. The line from Homer is from Helen's description, in the fourth book of the Odyssey (IV., 246).

Page 85.—Bola, in the list with Toleria, Lavici,and Peda (or Pedum), is obviously meant for a different town from Bola, a few lines below,—a town not above ten miles from Rome. The spelling in the Greek differs, and there is little doubt that in the latter place Bolla, so written in the Greek, should be turned into Boïlla, the equivalent used for the Latin Bovillæ.

Page 90.—But him the blue-eyed goddess did inspire is the first line of the 21st book of the Odyssey, only that for him, we should have her; Minerva inspires Penelope with the thought of the trial by the bow. Plutarch no doubt quoted from memory. The next two lines are wholly diflferent from any thing now to be found in Homer. The third quotation is from the ninth Odyssey (339), where the Cyclops is described coming home at evening to his cave, and were it some thought of his own, or so ordered him by a god, he left none of his flock outside, but drove them all into his hollow fold. In the same book (IX., 299), is also the line: But I consulted with my own great soul; Ulysses