Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.3, 1865).djvu/455

Rh incorrect one, but the incorrectness seems to be Plutarch's. Marius was on the Rhone, to oppose any march into Liguria. What the Teutones and Ambrones proposed to do was to beat him, and so enter Italy by Liguria.

Page 66.—In the sixth line, the soldiers might be omitted and them substituted. The text is as the translation, but it must be corrected. It was certainly the soldiers who recognized the birds, not the birds who saluted the soldiers.

Page 70.—The others refreshed with victuals and sleep is more correctly translated, the others who got their supper in good time and went to bed.

Page 72.—Plutarch's words, attired in the purple-bordered robe (which might be more closely rendered, girding himself, and taking up, or wearing the purple-bordered robe), are meant to describe the cinctus Gabinus or Gabine cincture, used by officiating persons on great occasions; when the purple-bordered or purple-striped robe, the prætexta or trabea, was gathered up, and tied like a girdle round the body. As in Virgil: " Ipse Quirinali trabea cinctuque Gabino Insignis reserat stridentia limina consul." Page 80.—The passage in which Pindar calls Truth the first principle of heroic virtue is a fragment of a lost and unknown composition, found, however, at a little greater length elsewhere. "First beginning of great virtue, queen Truth, shipwreck not my faith on any rock of falsehood;" i. e. let not my promise ever come to be broken by me; keep me ever faithful to my engagements. (Boeckh, Fragm. Incerta, 118.)

Page 89.—The line about the eagle's young, ascribed to Musæus, is cited also by Aristotle in his History of Animals.

Page 100.—A part of the ceremonial of the consul's appearing on his first assuming office on the calends of January was to go up and offer sacrifice in the Capitoline Temple, attended apparently by the senate, a full meeting of which took place immediately after. The words, a little above, as if a change of wind were coming on, are more expressive in the original; it is, as if the wind, which had been blowing steadily from the one quarter, were setting in from the opposite. The word tropaia (the turn or return wind), according to a passage of Aristotle (quoted by Coray), was specially applied to the wind which set from the sea after it had blown for its regular time from the shore; the sea breeze, succeeding the land breeze.

Page 102.—The story of Plato's thanks to the providence and fortune of his life is told a little more fully by Lactantius (Instit. III., 19). " Plato returned thanks," he says, "that he had been born, first, a human and not a brute creature; secondly, a man and not a woman; thirdly, a Greek and not a barbarian; lastly, an Athenian, and in the age of Socrates;" as if, adds Lactantius, scornfully, had he been born a barbarian, a woman, or an ass, he would still have been the same Plato.

, page 104.—In the description of the statue, the phrase, but indeed it is Lysander's, representing him, is in the original a good deal more precise; but indeed it is an iconic figure of Lysander. Iconic (from the Greek icon or eikon, the word that is used in the title Ikon basilike, and forms part of the compound iconoclast, and means an image or likeness) was a