[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:— Ὀψὲ θεῶν ἀλέουσι μύλοι, ἀλέουσι δὲ λεπτά. “The mills of the gods grind late, but they grind fine.” [7:2] Αὐτὸν, evidently meaning Plutarch. [7:3] I doubt whether there is reference here to every third wave as having a fuller flow. Timon, though inclined at the outset to the other side, is represented as so affected by the arguments of Patrocleas and Olympicus that he is prepared to make a third speech against the Divine Providence, yet is willing to yield place to his brother; and the speech which Plutarch supersedes is the third wave. [8:1] In some poem not now extant. [9:1] We have evidence from other sources that the Spartans were accustomed to shave the upper lip, and in Sparta custom and law were identical. [9:2] Slaves might be manumitted in Rome by having their names inscribed on the roll of taxable citizens with permission of their masters, in which case they must have been possessed of some _peculium_,—property of their own earning or given them by their masters. They might also be made free by will. But the oldest mode of manumission is that here referred to. The slave was brought before the magistrate, whose lictor laid a rod or wand on his head, after which ceremony the master pronounced him free.