86 ([return])
[ Most probably more than one prince. Greece has three well accredited pretenders to the name and attributes even of the Grecian Hercules.
87 ([return])
[ Herodotus marks the difference between the Egyptian and Grecian deity, and speaks of a temple erected by the Phoenicians to Hercules, when they built Thasus, five hundred years before the son of Amphitryon was known to the Greeks. The historian commends such of the Greeks as erected two temples to the divinity of that name, worshipping in the one as to a god, but in the other observing only the rites as to a hero.-B. ii., c. 13, 14.
88 ([return])
[ Plot. in Vit. Thes.—Apollod., l. 3. This story is often borrowed by the Spanish romance-writers, to whom Plutarch was a copious fountain of legendary fable.
89 ([return])
[ Plut. in Vit. Thes.
90 ([return])
[ Mr. Mueller’s ingenious supposition, that the tribute was in fact a religious ceremony, and that the voyage of Theseus had originally no other meaning than the landings at Naxos and Delos, is certainly credible, but not a whit more so than, and certainly not so simple as, the ancient accounts in Plutarch; as with mythological, so with historical legends, it is better to take the plain and popular interpretation whenever it seems conformable to the manners of the times, than to construe the story by newly-invented allegories. It is very singular that that is the plan which every writer on the early chronicles of France and England would adopt,—and yet which so few writers agree to*****[Footnote three illegible words in the print copy:***** the obscure records of the Greeks.