Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.4, 1865).djvu/568

 660 APPENDIX. Page 21. — Xenophon, who was present, calls it the hardest-fought bottle of his time in the Hellenics (IV., 3, 16), referring evidently to the last struggle between Thebans and Spartans, when " they met shield against shield, pushing, fighting, killing, and falling ; " to which he adds in his Agesilaus (77., 12), " there was no war-shout or cry, though not silence either, only the sort of utterance that comes of anger and fierce fighting." The temple of Minerva the Itonian, spoken of in the next page, standing near the battle-field, was a great sanctuary of tho whole Boeotian people, founded by them when they first entered Bceotia, in the plain before Coronea ; they called it after the name of that in their own late country in Thessaly. Here the feast of All Boeotians (the Pamboeotia) was held, and the congress of the Boeotian towns met. There were in the temple brazen statues, made by Agoracritus, Phidias's scholar, of the Itonian Minerva, and Jupiter, or Pluto, who was worshipped here in some mystic connection with Minerva. See Pausanias (7X, 24), and Strabo (7A'., 2, 2D), and Col. Leake, Northern Greece (Vol. II., chap, xii., pp. 137-141.) The Thessalian Minerva Itonis is mentioned in the Life of Pyrrhus (Vol. III., p. 35); the little stream that ran by the temple, the Curabus, was also called by the name of that near the temple in Thessaly. Page 33. — The site of Tegyroz or Tegyra, where the Spartans were beaten by the Thebans in a set battle, more fully described in the life of Pelopidas, is placed above the marshes, on the heights that rise to the north of the lake. " In the time of Plutarch, all the part of Boeotia to the northward of the Lake Copais seems to have been no better inhabited than at present, for in one of his dia- logues he introduces an assertion that about Tegyra and Mount Ptoum, two places formerly so much famed for their oracles, hardly a herdsman or shepherd was to be met with in a day's journey." (Leake's Northern Greece, Vol. II., ch. xii, p. 159.) The passage referred to is in the Dialogue on the Cessation of Oracles, a phenomenon which one of the speakers, Ammonius the philosopher, explains by the general depopulation which former wars and factions have occa- sioned in pretty nearly all the habitable world, and more particularly in Greece, the whole of which could noxo scarcely furnish the three thousand men-at-arms whom the single town of Megara sent to fight at Platoja. With so few to consult him in these days, why should the deity keep up all his former oracles ? (De Defectu Oraculorum, 8.) Page 35. — Xenophon's remark about the casual sayings of good men is in the beginning of his Banquet. Life of PoMPEY,page 50. — Ah, cruel sire ! how dear thy son to me! is from the Prometheus Unbound, the lost play of iEsehylus, where Hercules releases whom his father Jupiter had bound. Pompey's father was of course a Pompeius like himself, Cnaeus Pompeius Strabo; but the name of Strabo made way in the son's case for that of Magnus. Page 79. — Olympus (it is Olympus alone in the Greek) is not Mount Olym- pus, say the commentators, at any rate not that of Thessaly, nor that of Prusa, the modern Broussa, but Olympus in Lycia, which, however, appears to have been a mountain as well as a town. " It was the strong-hold," says Strabo (XII., 7), "of the pirate Zenicetus, a mountain and a fortified place of the same