Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.4, 1865).djvu/576

 568 APPENDIX. bated (arlopteusai for proraleusai, a conjecture of Hermann's). The copyist had been misled by the mention of the ships just before, and changed the word into one that seemed to suit them. But there are several other con- jectures. • Page 503. — Cleomenes's body should be flayed and hung up. Flayed is not the correct term ; it was one way of insulting a dead body to sew it into the Bkin of a brute animal and hang it up. Thus a case is quoted from Polybius where a man first has his extremities cut off, then is beheaded, and his trunk then stitched into an ass's skin and hung on a cross. The strange theory of dead oxen generating bees, dead horses wasps, and dead men snakes, seems to have been very- prevalent. Ovid, in the last book of the Metamorphoses, men- tions all the three supposed phenomena (XV., 3G5, 3G8, 379). Virgil has made the first well known by the story of Aristaeus and his bees in the fourth Georglc, and Pliny speaks of the third as a received tradition (Hist. Nat., X., CG). Life of Tiberius Gracchus, page 50G. — The story of the two snakes is told by Cicero (de Divinatione I., 18, II., 29), who says it was left on record by Caius Gracchus in a letter written to Marcus Pomponius. Page 510. — Fannius is quoted by Cicero as the author of a history, in which the times of the Gracchi were included. He was the son-in-law of Lajlius, and is one of the speakers in Cicero's dialogue, de Amicitia. Page 513. — The friends and reasoners who urged on Tiberius. The original word for reasoners is sophistic ; perhaps it would be better to translate it friends and philosophical teachers, or teachers of philosophy and rhetoric. Diophanes and Blossius are meant, who are described in the following page. 77ie work- houses full of foreign born slaves are what the Romans called their ergastula. The Latin word Sapiens has, he says, p. 514, the two meanings of Wise and of Prudent ; the two original words for which are sophos and phronimos, famous in Greek philosophy, sophia and phroncsis being the two forms of intellectual virtue or excellence, sophia, the knowledge of the truth as it is, phrqnesis, the knowledge of its practical application. What the sophos sees by the light of reason, the phronimos converts into immediate precepts for action ; sophos is the epithet of the philosopher, phronimos of the statesman ; the first and supreme principles of morality are discerned by the sophos, the rules of life and conduct are supplied by the phronimos. No two English words exactly express a dis- tinction which is scarcely recognized in English modes of thought. Wisdom is with us rather the practical habit, phronesis than sophia; yet speculative is a term which it is a disparagement to apply to sophia, the perceptions of which are of an absolute certainty : the word science would bo better, as implying this, but the range of scientific knowledge must be extended (to make it commensurate with the claims of Greek intellect) to include subjects to which, in modern use, such an expression would never be applied. What geometry is to magnitudes, such is another, not less exact science to the highest phenomena of the world and of human nature, and in the knowledge of this consists the proper exercise of sophia. Page 517. — The words in revellings and bacchic play are from the Baccho)