[286] The forty-seventh proposition of the first book of Euclid is unanimously ascribed to him by the ancients. Dr. Wotton, in his Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning, says, “It is indeed a very noble proposition, the foundation of trigonometry, of universal and various use in those curious speculations about incommensurable numbers.”
[287] These votive tables, or pictures, were hung up in the temples.
[288] This passage is a fragment from a tragedy of Attius.
[289] Hipponax was a poet at Ephesus, and so deformed that Bupalus drew a picture of him to provoke laughter; for which Hipponax is said to have written such keen iambics on the painter that he hanged himself.
Lycambes had promised Archilochus the poet to marry his daughter to him, but afterward retracted his promise, and refused her; upon which Archilochus is said to have published a satire in iambic verse that provoked him to hang himself.
[290] Cicero refers here to an oracle approving of his laws, and promising Sparta prosperity as long as they were obeyed, which Lycurgus procured from Delphi.
[291] Pro aris et focis is a proverbial expression. The Romans, when they would say their all was at stake, could not express it stronger than by saying they contended pro aris et focis, for religion and their firesides, or, as we express it, for religion and property.
[292] Cicero, who was an Academic, gives his opinion according to the manner of the Academics, who looked upon probability, and a resemblance of truth, as the utmost they could arrive at.
[293] I.e., Regulus.
[294] I.e., Fabius.