Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.2, 1865).djvu/427

Rh with himself whether he should kill the Cyclops as he lay drunk and asleep, but reflected that there would then be no one to move away the stone from the door and let them out. He spoke; Achilles, with quick pain possessed, is from Iliad I., 188, and the lines about Bellerophon from Ilad VI., 161. Coray in his notes compares the doctrine given at the end of the first paragraph of the following page (91) with a passage in Plato's Critias (p. 109), where it is said, that we in our several tribes and cities are the flocks whom the divine beings severally tend, not by any bodily compulsion applied to our bodies, but by an intellectual agency operating on the rudder, to which all living things most aptly answer, of the soul. Page 92.—Through all this narrative Plutarch appears to have made a mistake. The mother of Coriolanus was Veturia, and his wife Volumnia.

Page 98.—The divine nature, differing from us in all respects, may very well be conceived to differ in its acts and mode of agency yet more than in any thing else. The sense of the passage from Heraclitus, which is quoted also by Clement of Alexandria (Stromata V., cxiii), is very uncertain. It may merely mean that divine things transcend our powers of belief and knowledge.

, page 107.—As they sat at meat in the tent, after Achilles had consented to give Priam Hector's body, Priam, son of Dardanus, eyed Achilles, admiring his stature and his qualities, and his appearance, as it were of a god, and Achilles in turn looked with admiration upon Priam (Iliad, XXIV., 629). The line that follows is from a lost play, the Tympanistæ of Sophocles, a fragment found at great length elsewhere:—

Page 139.—The pine, sacred to Neptune, was the original Isthmian garland; then came parsley in its place, and then, not long before Plutarch's time, the pine was returned to again. There is a whole chapter in the Symposiaca (V., 3) devoted to a conversation on this subject. At a dinner at Corinth, given by Lucanius the priest, in the time of the games, the question is started, why the pine is used? One of the company, a pretender to learning, shows by numerous quotations that in old times it was parsley. Lucanius, when he has finished, quietly points out by other citations that originally it was pine, and that parsley came in at a later time.

Page 146.—

are the words with which Medea first enters the stage and addresses the chorus in Euripides's tragedy.

Page 149.—The lines from Sophocles are a fragment of a lost play. (Dindorf, 710).

, page 181. The battle fought in Italy (rather, by the Italian Greeks), near the river Sagra, or Sagras, is that mentioned by Justin (XX., 3), Cicero (de Natura Deorum, II., 2), and Strabo (VI., 10), in