Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.3, 1865).djvu/454

446 Page 15.—But sat and languished far.—Iliad, I. 491, 492.

Page 17.—The saying of Euripides, that the force of words, Can gain whate'er is done by conquering swords, is in the Phœnissæ, 516, 517.

Page 24.—The translation of the first sentence should be, Yet most were well inclined to a peace. Cineas was not listened to with any delight or eagerness, when he made his moderate proposals; nevertheless, it was evident that the greater number were prepared to make concessions for peace.

Page 30.—Homer uses such words as madness or frenzy, for example, of Hector, ''who rages beyond all further withstanding, and bold in Zeus, is possessed with a terrible frenzy. Fortitude, through the Latin, has become the cardinal name of the virtue, which in the Greek has not chiefly to do with the endurance of pain, but is exercised in the encounter of all danger, and is more properly bravery, courage, or intrepidity, etymologically manliness''. It is in the Greek ethics the virtue or excellence of the active part, as temperance is of the passive, and wisdom in its two divisions, practical and scientific, of the intellectual part, of the human soul. This classification of the elements of our nature into the active impulses, the sensibilities or appetites, and the reason or mind, occurs everywhere in Greek. It is the basis, for example, of the whole system of Plato's republic with its triple division, corresponding to this, of soldiers, artisans, and governors.

, page 49.—Cirrhæaton is simply a corruption for Cirrhæatæ, equivalent to Cereatæ or Cereate, a little town in the district of Arpinum, which in Pliny's time was a municipality whose people, the Cereatini Mariani, still bore Marius's name; of which, if the site be correctly identified with the monastery of Casa Mara or Casamari, some traces may be thought to remain even now.

Page 50.—The bill for the regulation of voting had no natural connection with the courts of justice. A very slight correction of a single word would change courts of justice into elections: but it is of course always possible for Plutarch to make a mistake about Roman matters, or a slip of a word in copying from his authorities.

Page 53.—For the tumors, or swellings, with which Marius was troubled in his legs, Mr. Long in his translation has varicose veins, on the authority of Cicero, who in his Tusculan Disputations (II., 15 and 22) uses the word varices. Cicero adduces the story in elucidation of the question as to the nature of pain. Of the fortitude of Marius there could be no doubt: others had followed the example after him; but he had been the first who ever had submitted to the operation without being tied down. Yet that with him pain was not simply indifferent, (neither an evil nor a good, as the Stoics taught,) appeared by his declining to let the surgeon have his other leg to cut.

Page 55.—The images of ancestors are emphatically the imagines, the busts, in wax or other material, of those of their ancestry who had borne office and gained distinction, which it was the pride of a Roman family to accumulate in the hall (the atrium), and to display on great occasions.

Page 63.—The great trench or canal bore the name of Fossa Mariana. The phrase just below, to march against Marius by the seaside through Liguria, is an