[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. [37:1] There were three occasions on which the Sybarites incurred the special anger of Hera. Her statue was overturned in some civic commotion. Afterward the people of Sybaris killed thirty members of a delegation from their neighbors of Crotona, and cast out their bodies to be devoured by wild beasts. On this occasion, the goddess was seen by night with an angry and threatening mien. In the third place, a slave who had taken refuge at her altar was pursued and scourged by his master, who held his father’s tomb as so much more sacred than her temple that he ceased beating the slave when he sought refuge there. Sybaris is known to have been twice destroyed before Plutarch’s time. There may have been a third destruction of which we have no record; but there is nothing in the text to forbid our so construing it as to leave the threat still hanging over the city, and the third destruction still impending. [37:2] The tradition was that Ajax was guilty of an outrage on Cassandra, the priestess of Athene. He on his return voyage was destroyed by shipwreck, and the Locrians were supposed to have suffered on account of his crime visitations of pestilence and other dire calamities. When they consulted the oracle, the reply was, that the guilt of Ajax could be expiated only by their sending annually to Troy, for a thousand years, two virgins to perform menial service in the temple of Athene. The hero, the crime, and the expiation are, more probably than not, all mythical. [38:1] The Thracian men were tattooed as well as the women, and it was probably for both men and women a preferred mode of ornament. [38:2] I can find nowhere else any reference to this observance; but nothing is more probable than that Phaethon’s name should have been attached to some religious anniversary in the region in which he was said to have perished. [39:1] “Of the viands” is an interpolation of my own. At a feast a “portion” was “carried off,” and I know not what it could have been, if not a part of the food and wine on the table. If there were none of Pindar’s posterity at hand to receive the portion, there were undoubtedly hungry officials ready in this behalf to represent them. [39:2] I suppose that the first place at a Spartan civic festival was formally assigned to Terpander, long dead, and that the most distinguished living guest was made to regard himself as second in honor. [40:1] Ὑμεῖς. Plutarch is here addressing, not Timon alone, but two or all three of his interlocutors.