[31:1] These verses are probably from a lost tragedy of Euripides. The myths about Ino are various, and mutually inconsistent. According to some she killed, according to others she endeavored to kill, the children of her husband, Athamas, by a former wife. Still others charge her with the murder of her own son or sons. She at length leaped into the sea, and emerged a goddess, under the name of Leucothea,—certainly a better name in heaven than she could have borne on earth.
[32:1] Apollodorus is said to have bound his associates in some movement for his own aggrandizement by bringing them together at a festival, and at its close giving them evidence that they had been feeding on human victims.
[33:1] Glaucus, a Lacedaemonian, had a high reputation for integrity, and on the ground of it received from a foreigner a deposit of a large sum of money. When the owner’s sons claimed the deposit, he disclaimed all knowledge of it. But a threat of the Delphian oracle led him to make restitution afterward. Nevertheless the threat took effect, and he and his whole family perished.
[33:2] In this section Timon seems to cite indiscriminately the cases of delayed or protracted punishment by men which are confessedly foolish or wicked, and alleged instances of delayed punishment on the part of the gods. The gravamen of the objection is, “How can that be just or right for the gods to do, which when men do they encounter either ridicule or condemnation?”
[34:1] That Aesop was killed by the Delphians for the cause here stated there seems to be no doubt; nor yet that Idmon, a descendant of the man of the same name who had owned and emancipated Aesop, received a large sum of money from the Delphians by way of expiation for their crime, to which they had probably in the mean time ascribed every bad harvest and every epidemic. It must be remembered that, before the rotation of crops became the habit of agriculturists, bad harvests were very frequent, and that, in the absence of sanitary rules and precautions, dangerous epidemics prevailed at short intervals in all the cities of the old world. It was not unnatural that these calamities should have been regarded as retributive judgments where a gross crime had been committed.
[34:2] A mina was about the metallic equivalent of twenty dollars, but of course with a much larger purchasing power.
[35:1] A small town in Central Asia, built by the Branchidae, who were priests and custodians of the temple of Apollo Didymeus in an Ionian city bearing their name, near Miletus. The temple was burned by Darius, was rebuilt, and was burned again by Xerxes, on his retreat from Greece. The priests surrendered the treasures under their charge to Xerxes, followed him in his flight to escape punishment for sacrilege, and built the town which Alexander destroyed. His alleged motive for his cruel treatment of the Branchidae was revenge for the sacrilege and treason of their ancestors.
[36:1] It was at Scheria, according to Homer, that Odysseus was kindly received by Nausicaa, entertained sumptuously by King Alcinous, her father, and provided with the ship on board of which he reached Ithaca. The inhabitants of Corcyra maintained that their island was the Homeric Scheria, which very probably never existed except in the poet’s brain.
[36:2] Polyphemus.
[36:3] The territory of Pheneus is so situated at the confluence of two mountain streams as to be of necessity liable to inundation. There was an old canal, said to have been constructed by Hercules, and designed to carry off any abnormal excess of water; but it had early become obstructed and useless, and Pliny says that there had been no less than five periods when the region had been entirely devastated by the overflow of the rivers.