[21:2] Of Cleonae we know very little except that it was, and now is not. Near its site is a hamlet of half a dozen houses that bears the name of Clenes. Nemea, where the Nemean games were held, was in its territory. [21:3] One of his maternal ancestors had been cursed, and banished from Athens, a century and a half before his birth, for an insurrectionary enterprise. [21:4] He was killed by lightning, which the people regarded as a retributive bolt from heaven. He deserved hatred, Cicero says, for his cruelty, treachery, and avarice. [22:1] One tradition makes Odysseus the son of Sisyphus, and only the step-son of Laertes, who, however, married Anticleia before her son was born. Autolycus was the father of Anticleia, and it was he that stole the cattle of Iphitus. [22:2] Aesculapius in Grecian fable was the son of Apollo by Coronis, the daughter of Phlegyas, who, in what might seem righteous indignation against the wanton god, set fire to his Delphian temple, having of course first ravaged it. [23:1] Dion obtained supreme power in Syracuse, though not the title of King, on the expulsion of Dionysius the younger. Callippus, his professed friend, was the leader of the band of malcontents that killed Dion, although he did not kill him with his own hand, perhaps shrinking from the act of murder on account of an oath which, when under suspicion, he had sworn at the altar of Persephone, that he would remain faithful to his friend. His aim was the place which Dion had held. It was his but a little while, and then, after a series of misfortunes and wanderings, he was killed at Rhegium with the same weapon that had been employed in the murder of Dion. [23:2] Eriphyle received a golden necklace as a reward for betraying her husband Amphiaraus, who secreted himself to avoid going to the Theban war in which it was predicted that he should perish. His son Alcmaeon avenged his father by killing his mother, and then made of the necklace a sacred deposit in the temple at Delphi. Aristo was the commander of one of the bands of mercenaries hired by the pillage of the temple. [23:3] The Phocian leaders who committed this sacrilege. [23:4] In this temple. [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.