[22] A talent, I may remind my readers, was about equivalent to £200; a drachma to something less than tenpence, a franc, it may be said, for convenience of recollection, though, strictly speaking, the drachma and the franc stand in the proportions of 39 to 38.
[23] The Taurus range may be said, speaking roughly, to be the eastern boundary of Lesser Asia.
[24] The legend was that in the reign of this king a lion’s cub was born in some marvellous way, that an oracle declared that if the creature were carried round the fortifications of the city they never could be taken; that it was so carried round, but that when the bearers came to the citadel, it seemed so absurd that a place so strong could be in any danger of capture, the king ordered that it should not be carried any further. But this was the very place which was successfully attacked by the soldiers of Cyrus, when that king was besieging Crœsus the Lydian in his capital.
[25] The Princess Ada was one of the five children of Hecatomnus, King of Caria, who was descended from the famous queen, “the Carian Artemisia, strong in war,” as Tennyson describes her, who fought at Salamis. It was the custom of the Carian reigning house (as it was afterwards of the Ptolemies, the Greek kings of Egypt) for brothers to marry sisters. Hecatomnus, dying in 379, was succeeded by his son Mausolus and his daughter Artemisia. Mausolus died in 352, and was succeeded by his widow. She reigned alone for two years, and was succeeded by Idrieus and Ada, her father’s second son and second daughter. Idrieus died 344, and Ada reigned alone, till in 340 she was expelled by her youngest brother, Pixodarus. The daughter of the usurper was married to a Persian noble who, on his father-in-law’s death in 335, received Caria as a satrapy.
[26] “First in the large-experienced craft” is the title with which the writer or transcriber of his epitaph apostrophises him. I say “transcriber” because the epigram is found in the Greek Anthology as well as among the remains of Halicarnassus.
[27] In the epitaph on Herodotus, it is said that he left Halicarnassus, his native town, to “escape from ridicule.”
[28] “Let no one enter who knows not geometry,” was written on the door of the house in which Plato taught the chosen few. His popular lectures were addressed to much larger audiences.
[29] These are allusions to the story in the Odyssey. It is “Memnon the god-like, the goodliest man in the host,” the “son of the Day-dawn light,” by whom Antilochus was slain. But the story is told by post-Homeric writers. Dictys Cretensis says, that Memnon came with an army of Ethiopians and Indians from Caucasus to Troy, that he slew Antilochus, when that hero tried to rescue his father the aged Nestor, and that he was himself slain by Achilles.
[30] B.C. 371.
[31] Gibraltar.