[2:4] Brasidas, the most distinguished Spartan general, and the leader of the Spartan forces, in the earlier part of the Peloponnesian war, was slain near Amphipolis, at the moment of victory. Cleon, the Athenian general, was killed at the same time. The incident referred to in the text has no record in history; but a scholiast on Aristophanes says that Cleon and Brasidas killed each other, referring probably to the tradition that they both were killed by Cleon’s spear.
[3:1] A verse from the Orestes,—the reply of Orestes when asked whether Apollo would give him no assistance in his troubles.
[3:2] In a speech of Cleon in favor of the slaughter of the men and the enslavement of the women and children of Mytilene, for the attempt to release themselves from the sway of the Athenians.
[4:1] One of the seven wise men of Greece, as also of the smaller number of four to whom alone the possession of pre-eminent wisdom was ascribed by some authorities. He is said to have been the author of the selfish maxim, that one should love his friends as if he were at some future time going to hate them.
[4:2] Aristocrates, king of Orchomenus in Arcadia, joined the Messenians in war against Sparta, and was bribed by the Lacedaemonians to betray his allies in the battle of Taphrus. Many years afterward, his treachery became known, and he was stoned to death by his own subjects.
[4:3] There is no historical vestige of this transaction, or of the king implicated in it. The scene of the story was probably Orchomenus in Boeotia, and Plutarch, as a Boeotian, would naturally have been familiar with chapters of local history too remote in time or too insignificant to have left any permanent record.
[5:1] Probably, if not Lyciscus, those implicated with him in his crime took refuge in Athens, and many years afterward, at some crisis which created superstitious alarm, their bodies were disinterred and transported beyond the limits of the state,—a not unusual mode of lustration in the early time.
[5:2] This is from a lost tragedy.
[6:1] This name occurs as that of an interlocutor in one of the Symposiacs.
[7:1] The reference here is, undoubtedly, to an hexameter verse from some unknown poet, quoted by Sextus Empiricus in the third century:—