[52:1] Probably, as it seems to me, not Bion the poet, but a philosopher of that name,—a man of infamous character, an atheist in his professed belief, and remarkable for pithy and epigrammatic sayings, full of bitter humor and biting sarcasm, some of which are still extant. Horace speaks of those who find pleasure in Bioneis sermonibus et sale nigro.
[54:1] Or, “Is not God wiser than Hesiod?” With this interrogative construction, which the sentence will bear, the sense is,—“Hesiod teaches the hereditary transmission of character as a fact; God, still more, traces these inherited traits before they appear to human view.” According to the rendering that I have given, the sense is,—“The transmission of character from father to son is recognized not only by God in his providence, but equally by wise men, as, for instance, by Hesiod.”
[57:1] Demetrius Poliorcetes, king of Macedonia, who was guilty of great crimes, and in a not over-virtuous age was distinguished for unbounded licentiousness. He died in captivity, having surrendered to Seleucus, king of Syria, after expulsion from his own kingdom and a series of consequent disasters. Antigonus, his son, was a man of eminent virtue, had a diversified, but on the whole a prosperous career, and died at the age of eighty, after a reign of nearly half a century.
[57:2] Augeas, having made a contract with Hercules by which a tenth part of his cattle were to be the price for cleansing his stables in a day, refused to pay the price; and Hercules waged with him a war in which he and all his sons but Phyleus perished. Hercules placed Phyleus on his father’s throne, as king of the Epeians in Elis. The father’s story is, of course, mythical, and the son hardly falls within the domain of authentic history.
[57:3] The chief offence charged in Grecian myth against Neleus was his refusing to perform expiatory rites for Hercules after he had killed Iphitus, whose father was the friend of Neleus. Hercules, according to some traditions, made war on Pylos, the kingdom of Neleus, and killed him, with all his sons except Nestor.
[58:1] Sparti, from σπείρω, the sown men, i. e. the armed men that sprang from the teeth of the dragon sown by Cadmus, from whom the oldest families in Thebes—a large part of the Boeotian aristocracy—were said to have descended. Something like this mythical birthmark had probably made its appearance on the body of a member of one of these ancient families. Nisibis was a Syrian city with an extensive commerce, with many Greek, and probably some Boeotian immigrants.
[58:2] It may be that, in cases where the inheritance of a morbid physical constitution, or of proclivity to moral evil, seems to lapse in the first generation and to reappear in the second, the children of the diseased or depraved father have the physical or moral traits of their father, but are made and kept vigilant and faithful in self-care and self-discipline by the memory of their father’s infirmities or sins; while their children have the inheritance without the warning.
[59:1] If Plutarch made this story, as he probably did, it was undoubtedly suggested by the story, unlike in its details, yet with not dissimilar purpose, which Plato tells of Er, the Pamphilian, in the tenth book of The Republic.
[59:2] Soli was a considerable city in Cilicia.
[59:3] Μεθ’ ἡμᾶς, after us, is the reading in all the manuscripts and older editions; μεθ’ ἡμῶν, with us, is a conjectural emendation which the sense seems to require.