Part 7

[35:1] A small town in Central Asia, built by the Branchidae, who were priests and custodians of the temple of Apollo Didymeus in an Ionian city bearing their name, near Miletus. The temple was burned by Darius, was rebuilt, and was burned again by Xerxes, on his retreat from Greece. The priests surrendered the treasures under their charge to Xerxes, followed him in his flight to escape punishment for sacrilege, and built the town which Alexander destroyed. His alleged motive for his cruel treatment of the Branchidae was revenge for the sacrilege and treason of their ancestors.

[36:1] It was at Scheria, according to Homer, that Odysseus was kindly received by Nausicaa, entertained sumptuously by King Alcinous, her father, and provided with the ship on board of which he reached Ithaca. The inhabitants of Corcyra maintained that their island was the Homeric Scheria, which very probably never existed except in the poet’s brain.

[36:2] Polyphemus.

[36:3] The territory of Pheneus is so situated at the confluence of two mountain streams as to be of necessity liable to inundation. There was an old canal, said to have been constructed by Hercules, and designed to carry off any abnormal excess of water; but it had early become obstructed and useless, and Pliny says that there had been no less than five periods when the region had been entirely devastated by the overflow of the rivers.

[37:1] There were three occasions on which the Sybarites incurred the special anger of Hera. Her statue was overturned in some civic commotion. Afterward the people of Sybaris killed thirty members of a delegation from their neighbors of Crotona, and cast out their bodies to be devoured by wild beasts. On this occasion, the goddess was seen by night with an angry and threatening mien. In the third place, a slave who had taken refuge at her altar was pursued and scourged by his master, who held his father’s tomb as so much more sacred than her temple that he ceased beating the slave when he sought refuge there. Sybaris is known to have been twice destroyed before Plutarch’s time. There may have been a third destruction of which we have no record; but there is nothing in the text to forbid our so construing it as to leave the threat still hanging over the city, and the third destruction still impending.

[37:2] The tradition was that Ajax was guilty of an outrage on Cassandra, the priestess of Athene. He on his return voyage was destroyed by shipwreck, and the Locrians were supposed to have suffered on account of his crime visitations of pestilence and other dire calamities. When they consulted the oracle, the reply was, that the guilt of Ajax could be expiated only by their sending annually to Troy, for a thousand years, two virgins to perform menial service in the temple of Athene. The hero, the crime, and the expiation are, more probably than not, all mythical.

[38:1] The Thracian men were tattooed as well as the women, and it was probably for both men and women a preferred mode of ornament.

[38:2] I can find nowhere else any reference to this observance; but nothing is more probable than that Phaethon’s name should have been attached to some religious anniversary in the region in which he was said to have perished.

[39:1] “Of the viands” is an interpolation of my own. At a feast a “portion” was “carried off,” and I know not what it could have been, if not a part of the food and wine on the table. If there were none of Pindar’s posterity at hand to receive the portion, there were undoubtedly hungry officials ready in this behalf to represent them.

[39:2] I suppose that the first place at a Spartan civic festival was formally assigned to Terpander, long dead, and that the most distinguished living guest was made to regard himself as second in honor.

[40:1] Ὑμεῖς. Plutarch is here addressing, not Timon alone, but two or all three of his interlocutors.

[40:2] Descendants of Opheltes. He came from Thessaly to Thebes, and brought with him a body of armed adherents. He founded a royal line in Boeotia.

[40:3] Delphi being in Phocis, the claims on the score of Daiphantus would be availing in all processions and festivities connected with the temple service.

[40:4] A victory that the Phocians under Daiphantus had gained five hundred years before was still celebrated in Plutarch’s time.

[40:5] I can find elsewhere no notice of these races, or families.

[41:1] Lachares was a demagogue who early in the third century B. C. obtained virtually supreme power in Athens, plundered the Parthenon, stripped the statue of Athene of its ornaments, committed numerous acts of high-handed tyranny, and was finally expelled from the city on the charge of having taken measures for betraying it into the hands of Antiochus.

[41:2] Ariston was an Epicurean philosopher, who raised himself to a virtual tyranny in Athens, but surrendered to Sulla when he besieged the city.

[42:1] Ἠρυγγίτην, _eryngium_, now the name of a genus containing several species of snakeroot.

[42:2] The plague that raged in Athens early in the Peloponnesian war, of which Thucydides gives so remarkable an account.

[43:1] Plutarch gives an early specimen of this argument in his life of Theseus: “The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned [from Crete] was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus; for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers for the logical question, as to things that grow; one party holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.”

[45:1] Athens had been under the government of men who had been virtually Cassander’s viceroys. The city after his death came under the rule of Demetrius Poliorcetes, and it was probably by his order that the statue of Cassander was destroyed.

[45:2] Dionysius the elder.

[45:3] Nisaeus was the son of Dionysius the elder, and was sovereign of Syracuse for a short time while his brother Dionysius the younger was in exile. Aelian names him in a chapter specially devoted to eminent φιλοπόται, i. e. drunkards.

[45:4] Apollocrates was the son of Dionysius the younger, and grandson of the elder. His father in going into exile left him in command of the citadel of Syracuse, which he was soon compelled to surrender. He holds the third place, as Nisaeus the second, in Aelian’s list of distinguished drunkards.

[45:5] These were both sons of Cassander. Philip succeeded his father as king of Macedonia, but died almost immediately upon his accession to the throne, leaving probably memory of his vices, of which Plutarch had knowledge, but no record of which has come down to our time. Antipater, his next younger brother, in some sort succeeded him, first murdering his mother, who favored the claims of her still younger son. He himself was murdered before he could obtain undisturbed possession of his kingdom.

[46:1] These obsolete modes of medical practice can now only provoke a smile; but the argument is complete, if we will substitute for them the treatment cited at the close of the sentence,—blood-letting for ophthalmia, which, if not in rule now, was so thirty years ago.

[48:1] The reference in this last clause is to the opinion largely held by the Stoics, that the soul is not immortal, but is destined to survive the body, and to live till the consummation of the existing universe, which, after completing a cycle of many thousands of years, will be destroyed by fire.

[48:2] This sentence is, as I believe, ironical. Some editors and translators make it interrogative; but the grammatical construction, as it seems to me, is opposed to this view.

[48:3] This term, as applied to vessels or shallow earth-beds, where what is sown can only spring up and wither without coming to seed, occurs in Plato’s Phaedrus. The very brief life and untimely end of Adonis may perhaps account for this peculiar use of his name.

[49:1] Several hundred years ago. Archilochus, the earliest Ionian lyric poet, flourished, and was killed in battle, in the seventh century B. C. This entire passage may be regarded as an _argumentum de concessis_, and as such it is perfectly legitimate. The inspiration of the Delphian oracle and priestess was believed in by many of those for whom Plutarch wrote; and to them he said, “Can you believe that all these oracular utterances about expiations for the dead and posthumous honors to be paid to them have had reference to beings that ceased to exist when they ceased to breathe?”

[50:1] Or, “the home of the grasshopper”; for _tettix_ (τέττιξ) means _grasshopper_. The oracle, as usual, was ambiguous. Calondas, _alias_ Corax, is represented as not understanding it at first, but finding out afterward that a Cretan named Tettix had settled at Taenarus, or Taenarum, he inferred that his home was designated by the oracle.

[50:2] This place was on the southernmost cape of Greece, now Cape Matapan. The peninsula which forms this cape had a famous temple of Poseidon, was sacred to the infernal gods, and was the site of an avenue, through a cave, to and from the infernal regions,—the avenue by which Hercules dragged Cerberus to the light of day.

[50:3] Pausanias, the Spartan, after a career of mingled glory and shame, being detected in treasonable intrigues, took refuge in the temple of Athene. When he was nearly exhausted by hunger the Ephori dragged him out of the temple, and he died at its threshold. For their sacrilege the Delphian oracle ordered that he should be re-interred on the spot where he died, and that two brazen statues should be erected in honor of the goddess in her temple at the public charge. Very naturally, his ghost was supposed to haunt the sacred enclosure whence he had been taken to die. See p. 28, n. 4.

[51:1] The clause, “than there is that they should be fully rendered in this life,” has nothing in the original to correspond to it; but it is necessary in order to convey the obvious meaning of the sentence.

[52:1] Probably, as it seems to me, not Bion the poet, but a philosopher of that name,—a man of infamous character, an atheist in his professed belief, and remarkable for pithy and epigrammatic sayings, full of bitter humor and biting sarcasm, some of which are still extant. Horace speaks of those who find pleasure in _Bioneis sermonibus et sale nigro_.

[54:1] Or, “Is not God wiser than Hesiod?” With this interrogative construction, which the sentence will bear, the sense is,—“Hesiod teaches the hereditary transmission of character as a fact; God, still more, traces these inherited traits before they appear to human view.” According to the rendering that I have given, the sense is,—“The transmission of character from father to son is recognized not only by God in his providence, but equally by wise men, as, for instance, by Hesiod.”

[57:1] Demetrius Poliorcetes, king of Macedonia, who was guilty of great crimes, and in a not over-virtuous age was distinguished for unbounded licentiousness. He died in captivity, having surrendered to Seleucus, king of Syria, after expulsion from his own kingdom and a series of consequent disasters. Antigonus, his son, was a man of eminent virtue, had a diversified, but on the whole a prosperous career, and died at the age of eighty, after a reign of nearly half a century.

[57:2] Augeas, having made a contract with Hercules by which a tenth part of his cattle were to be the price for cleansing his stables in a day, refused to pay the price; and Hercules waged with him a war in which he and all his sons but Phyleus perished. Hercules placed Phyleus on his father’s throne, as king of the Epeians in Elis. The father’s story is, of course, mythical, and the son hardly falls within the domain of authentic history.

[57:3] The chief offence charged in Grecian myth against Neleus was his refusing to perform expiatory rites for Hercules after he had killed Iphitus, whose father was the friend of Neleus. Hercules, according to some traditions, made war on Pylos, the kingdom of Neleus, and killed him, with all his sons except Nestor.

[58:1] _Sparti_, from σπείρω, _the sown men_, i. e. the armed men that sprang from the teeth of the dragon sown by Cadmus, from whom the oldest families in Thebes—a large part of the Boeotian aristocracy—were said to have descended. Something like this mythical birthmark had probably made its appearance on the body of a member of one of these ancient families. Nisibis was a Syrian city with an extensive commerce, with many Greek, and probably some Boeotian immigrants.

[58:2] It may be that, in cases where the inheritance of a morbid physical constitution, or of proclivity to moral evil, seems to lapse in the first generation and to reappear in the second, the children of the diseased or depraved father have the physical or moral traits of their father, but are made and kept vigilant and faithful in self-care and self-discipline by the memory of their father’s infirmities or sins; while their children have the inheritance without the warning.

[59:1] If Plutarch made this story, as he probably did, it was undoubtedly suggested by the story, unlike in its details, yet with not dissimilar purpose, which Plato tells of Er, the Pamphilian, in the tenth book of _The Republic_.

[59:2] Soli was a considerable city in Cilicia.

[59:3] Μεθ’ ἡμᾶς, _after us_, is the reading in all the manuscripts and older editions; μεθ’ ἡμῶν, _with us_, is a conjectural emendation which the sense seems to require.

[60:1] Amphilochus was one of the heroes of the Trojan war. He was the son of a seer, and was believed to be endowed with the gift of prophecy. The oracle bearing his name at Mallos in Cilicia was said to have been founded by him, and it had a wider and more enduring reputation for veracity than any other ancient oracle.

[60:2] Εἰ βέλτιον βιώσεται. The question related to his property,—to his means of comfortable living. I therefore use in translating it the familiar colloquialism, _better off_. The answer has a moral significance. Βέλτιον is an ambiguous word,—applicable equally to condition and to character.

[60:3] “Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy,” was sound ethical doctrine, equally with Gentile and with Jew, until men saw in the divine humanity of Jesus Christ the qualities of character which had been most despised, transfigured and glorified.

[62:1] Thespesius means _divine_.

[63:1] Plutarch (Greek Questions, 39) writes: “The Pythagoreans say that the souls of the dead neither give a shadow nor wink.”

[63:2] Ἀνάγκη. This mythical parentage may account for the name of Adrasteia, which is probably derived from διδράσκειν, _to escape_, with the α privative, and thus means _unescapable_.

[64:1] _Punishment._

[64:2] _Justice._

[64:3] One of the Erinnyes, or Furies. There are different myths as to their number, though there were commonly said to be three. Their name is probably derived from ἐρινύειν, _to be in a rage_. They were in Grecian fable the type of implacable anger and unrelenting vengeance.

[64:4] Plutarch in his _Apophthegms_, says of Artaxerxes Longimanus, who was not an unwise, but an over-indulgent king: “He first ordained as a punishment for his nobles who had offended, that they should be stripped and their garments scourged instead of their bodies; and whereas their hair should have been plucked out, that the same should be done to their turbans.” We do not learn that his example was followed by any of his successors, or that he employed this method as to criminals in general. But the illustration is a happy one.

[65:1] In these forms of punishment, it is the soul’s clothes, i. e. the body, not the soul itself, that is punished.

[66:1] The body of a brute.

[67:1] There were in Naxos, on Parnassus, and elsewhere various caves dedicated to Bacchus, i. e. to mirth and jollity; and the mouths of these caves were, of course, decked with all of verdure and bloom that could make them charming and attractive.

[67:2] Dionysus as the son of Zeus had a right to leave the abode of the dead, and to claim his seat on Olympus. His mother Semele, being a mortal woman, had no such right; but he rescued her from the dead, and bore her to Olympus, where she became a goddess under the name of Thyone.

[68:1] _Oblivion._

[68:2] Γένεσις. According to this derivation γένεσις comes from γῆ, _the earth_, and νεύειν, _to incline toward_,—a fanciful derivation, the genuineness of which there is good reason to doubt.

[69:1] Themis preceded Apollo as the inspirer of the Delphian oracle.

[69:2] The ancients imagined, as we easily may, something like the outlines of a human face in the disk of the moon, and among their myths, or rather poetical fancies, was this of a Sibyl revolving with the moon, and singing, as she rides across the firmament, the fate of men and nations.

[70:1] The great eruption of A. D. 79.

[70:2] The earlier name of Puteoli.

[70:3] Vespasian, who died in A. D. 79.

[73:1] Nero’s matricide is here referred to. Plutarch, no doubt, had in his mind some then well-known figure or description in a poem of Pindar now lost.

[73:2] Some interpreters suppose that this creature is a swan. I have no doubt that it is a frog. Even had not the empire passed entirely out of the possible reach of the Caesars, I do not believe that Plutarch would have shown any tenderness to Nero’s memory, and certainly there was no conceivable motive for it under the reign of Titus or Domitian. There is a fine satire in this final destiny of Nero. He has been horribly punished, and has been tortured into the likeness of the reptile regarded by the ancients as the only matricide in their zoölogy; and now for the one good act of his reign a little mercy is shown him. He had prided himself and annoyed his subjects as a singer, and now he is transformed into the singer that is a perpetual annoyance to all dwellers near swamps and ponds.

[74:1] He freed the province of Achaia from taxes, and endowed it with certain political rights and privileges. Vespasian restored the province to its previous condition.

INDEX.

Adrasteia, presiding over the punishment of disembodied souls, 63.

Aesculapius, sprung from a vicious stock, 22.

Aesop, murder of, 34.

Ajax, crime of, 37 n.

Alexander, revenge of, on the Branchidae for the guilt of their ancestors, 35.

Amphilochus, oracle of, 60 n.

Apollodorus, the prey of terrific visions, 28. serving a cannibal feast to his associates in crime, 32.

Archytas, forbearance of, 12.

Aristo, punished for sacrilege, 23.

Aristocrates, treachery of, 4.

Artaxerxes Longimanus, penal discipline of, 64 n.

Bessus, the parricide, betraying his crime from remorse, 24.

Bion, the philosopher, cavils of, at the reality of inherited punishment, 52. character of, 52 n.

Brasidas, death of, 2.

Callippus, killed by the dagger with which he had procured Dion’s death, 22.

Calondas, expiating the slaughter of Archilochus, 49.

Cassander, not punished till he had restored Thebes, 7.

Character, hereditary, 44.

Children, inheriting the rewards and punishments due to their fathers, 39.

Cimon, infamy and fame of, 16.

Dionysius, left unpunished for the good that he might do, 18.

Forbearance, the Divine, affording space for repentance, 13.

Gelon, reformation of, 14.

Glaucus, fraud and punishment of, 32.

God, in his slowness to punish, an example to man, 11.

Hereditary transmission of punishment no more mysterious than transitions in space, 42.

Heritage of moral qualities lapsing in the first, and reappearing in some subsequent generation, 58.

Hieron, reformation of, 14.

Hipparchus, punishment of, anticipated in vision, 28.

Immortality, made probable by God’s retributive providence, 48.

Laws, human, often unintelligible, 9.

Lethe, cavern of, 67.

Lyciscus, treachery of, 5.

Lydiades, a tyrant, and afterward a patriot, 15.

Miltiades, a tyrant, yet a patriot, 16.

Mitius, the murderer of, punished, 23.

Municipal life and character, continuous, 43.

Nero, doom of, 73.

Odysseus, redeemed by his own virtues from the curse resting on his father, 22.

Pausanias, haunted by the apparition of a victim of his lust and cruelty, 29. haunting the temple near which he died, 50.

Peisistratus, a usurper, yet a beneficent ruler, 15.

Periander, punishment of, deferred that he might first render service, 17.

Pericles, of an accursed and infamous race, 28.

Plato, quoted as making God an example to man, 10. forbearance of, 12.

Plutarch, birthplace and residence of, vii. education of, viii. family of, ix. philosophy of, x. theology of, xi. ethics of, xii. relation of, to Christianity, xiv. “Lives” of, xvii. “Moralia” of, xx. letter of, to his wife on the death of their child, xxii. “Apophthegms” of, xxv. treatise of, on the Delay of the Divine Justice, xxvi.

Pompey the Great, son of a worthless father, 21.

Providence, the Divine, beyond man’s full comprehension, 8.

Ptolemy Ceraunus, punishment of, foretold in dreams, 28.

Punishment, alleged to be not recognized as such, when delayed, 6. for the children of bad men, preceding and preventing guilt, 55.

Sibyl in the moon, predictions of, 69.

Sicyon, the people of, punished for wantonness and cruelty, 21.

Slowness of retribution, alleged to be disheartening to those who suffer wrong, 3.

Souls cast no shadow, 63.

Sybaris destroyed for the guilt of its inhabitants, 37.

Themistocles, early profligacy and subsequent public services of, 16.

Thespesius, story of, 59.

Transformation of men into beasts, 71.

Wicked men, preserved for services that they may render, 18. employed by God as executioners before their own destruction, 20. punished not late, but long, 24. punished most severely of all in their children, 51.

University Press: John Wilson & Son, Cambridge.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

In the Synopsis, the first numbered paragraph on each page was preceded by a section symbol in the original. Only the first section symbol has been retained.

Variations in spelling and hyphenation remain as in the original.

The following corrections have been made to the original text:

Page xxix: equally the postulate[original has “postulete”] of the unsophisticated reason

Page 6: they place it to the account of misfortune[original has “misforfune”]

[4:3] scene of the story was probably[original has “propably”] Orchomenus

[57:3] Hercules, according[original has “accerding”] to some traditions