Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.5, 1865).djvu/423

 ARATUS. 415 the officers attempted to lay hands on the heads of the people, and they on the other side, coming upon the offi- cers with the multitude, killed them, and very near two hundred persons with them. Philip havmg committed this wickedness, and doing his best to s^t the Messenians by the ears together more than before, Ai'atus arrived there, and both showed plainly that he took it ill himself, and also he suffered his son bitterly to reproach and revile him. It should seem that the young man had an attachment for Philip, and so at this time one of his expressions to him was, that he no longer appeared to him the handsomest, but the most deformed of all men, after so foul an action. To all which Phihp gave him no answer, though he seemed so angry as to make it expected he would, and though several times he cried out aloud, while the young man was speaking. But as for the elder Aratus, seeming to take all that he said in good part, and as if he were by nature a politic character and had a good command of himself, he gave him liis hand and led him out of the theatre, and carried him with him to the Ithomatas,* to sacrifice there to Jupiter, and take a view of the place, for it is a post as fortifiable as the Acro-Corinthus, and, with a garrison m it, quite as strong and as impregnable to the attacks of all around it. Philip therefore went up hither, and having offered sacrifice, receiving the entrails of the ox with both his hands from the priest, he showed them to Aratus and Demetrius the Pharian, presenting them sometimes to the one and sometimes to the other, asking them what they judged, by the tokens in the sacri- • The Ithomatas (the name of Mount Ithome is said to be rather the god himself) is used to mean higher than the Acro-Corinthus, the mount Ithome as sacred to and and even more remarkable in ap- oceupied by the temple of the Itho- pearance. metan Jupiter, Zeus Ithomatas.