[1121] We have an account of the victories, honours, and unfortunate fate of Manlius in Livy, B. vi. c. 14-20. In enumerating the honours conferred upon him, the numbers are given somewhat differently in c. 20; thirty spoils of enemies slain, forty donations from the generals, two mural and eight civic crowns.—B.
[1122] M. Sergius Silus. He was one of the city prætors B.C. 197.
[1123] Among the Jews and other nations of antiquity, it was considered an essential point for the priests to be without blemish, perfect and free from disease.—B.
[1124] In allusion to the compliment paid by the senate to the consul, M. Terentius Varro, by whose rashness the battle of Cannæ was lost. On his escape and safe return to Rome, instead of visiting him with censure, he received the thanks of the senate, “that he had not despaired of the Republic.”
[1125] It appears somewhat remarkable, considering the extraordinary acts of valour here enumerated, as performed by Sergius, that we hear so little of him from other sources.—B.
[1126] Hardouin takes the meaning to be, that though ill fortune overtook the Romans in their wars with Hannibal, nevertheless Sergius defeated Fortune herself, in dying before his country was overwhelmed by those calamities.
[1127] Pliny informs us, B. xiii. c. 1, that the art of making perfumes originated with the Persians.—B.
[1128] The city was taken by him by assault, and all its buildings, with the exception of the house of Pindar, levelled to the ground; most of the inhabitants were slaughtered, and the rest sold as slaves.
[1129] Stagirus, or Stagira, a town of Macedonia, in Chalcidice, on the Strymonic Gulf. It was a colony of Andros, founded B.C. 656, and originally called Orthagoria. It was destroyed by Philip, and, according to some accounts, was rebuilt by him, as having been the native place of Aristotle.
[1130] Archilochus of Paros was one of the earliest Ionian lyric poets, and was the first who composed in Iambic verse according to fixed rules. He flourished about 714-676 B.C. Pliny speaks here of his murderers; but it is generally stated by historians that he was murdered by one individual by some called Calondas, or Corax, a Naxian, by others Archias.