[24:1] The Spanish fly, which was used for medicinal purposes in very early times, as it is now.
[25:1] Such spectacles—never, so far as we know, witnessed in Greece—were not uncommon in Rome. Christians were thus exhibited and murdered on the stage in the sight of admiring and applauding multitudes; and we have no reason to doubt that other reputed malefactors were similarly dealt with. This treatise may have been written after Plutarch had been in Rome; at any rate, Roman customs were well known throughout the empire.
[27:1] Agamemnon, the husband of Clytemnestra, whom she murdered on his return from Troy, was the son of Pleisthenes. Stesichorus wrote a tragedy entitled Orestes, from which, undoubtedly, these verses are taken.
[28:1] Apollodorus, king of the small state of Cassandreia, was regarded as having been unsurpassed in tyranny, cruelty, and debauchery. The mention of his daughters in this vision makes it probable that he was guilty of some horrible outrage of violence or lust of which they were the victims.
[28:2] The crime or type of depravity of which Hipparchus was guilty can be inferred only from the vision here reported.
[28:3] Ptolemy Ceraunus was the eldest son of Ptolemy Soter; but, on account of his violent passions and moral obliquity, his father designated a younger son as his successor. Ceraunus then emigrated to Macedonia, became intimate with Seleucus, murdered him treacherously, and himself assumed the sovereignty; but in less than a year he was defeated by the Gauls who then first invaded that region, was taken prisoner, and was put to death with the utmost barbarity.
[28:4] Plutarch tells this story with fuller details in his life of Cimon. The Pausanias referred to is the Spartan viceroy and general of that name. Byzantium, which had been a stronghold of the Persians, was held by the Lacedaemonians, under Pausanias, at the time of the retreat of the Ten Thousand.
[29:1] The rites differ; but the belief in necromancy has undergone no essential change from the days of the witch of Endor to the present time, and there have probably been in every age, as now, ceremonies which have brought credulous men and women into imagined communion with departed spirits. The history of necromancy shows many resemblances, and still more analogies, in different countries, ages, and degrees of culture.
[30:1] One of Alexander’s generals, and after Alexander’s death king of Thrace.
[30:2] Simonides is said to have been the first poet who eulogized the subjects of his verse from mercenary motives. As his panegyrics had great poetical merit, and were much sought and well paid for, yet with few expressions of gratitude, he was wont to say that his chest of money was full, the chest designed for thanks empty.