[78] Artaxerxes Longimanus, so called from the circumstance of his right hand being longer than his left. He reigned from 465 to 425.
[79] About £5,200, ($25,000), if gold is to be reckoned at thirteen times the value of silver. This is Herodotus’ calculation, and it probably held good in Greece for a century or more from his time, until, in fact, the enormous influx of gold from the Asiatic conquests of Alexander altered the proportion.
[80] The last scene of his life is described by Xenophon. I give the passage with some explanation. When he drank the fatal cup he threw the dregs on the floor with the peculiar jerk given in playing the game of Cottabos. This game had several forms; but the feature common to them all was the heaving of wine out of a cup. Sometimes the object seems to have been a kind of fortune telling. A guest when he had finished his cup would jerk out any dregs that might be left. At the same time he named the guest who was to drink next, and the sound made by the drops falling was supposed to give some omen good or bad. “To the gracious Critias,” said Theramenes. It was to be a prophecy of his fate. As a matter of fact Critias fell a few weeks afterward in a battle with Thrasybulus and the exiles of the democratic party.
[81] It was usual to kick not to knock with the hand.
[82] About $18,000.
[83] Something less than $6.
[84] The battle of Delium (between the Bœotians and the Athenians) was fought in 424. The precise age of Socrates at the time of his death was seventy.
[85] The lines from Hesiod:
“No labor mars an honest name;
’Tis only Idleness is shame,”
was one instance (quoted by Xenophon in the Recollections of Socrates). Another (from the same source) is the story of how Ulysses stayed the Greeks from hurrying to their ships and leaving the siege of Troy. The common men he struck, but if he found a chief in the crowd he only remonstrated with him,