[40:2] Descendants of Opheltes. He came from Thessaly to Thebes, and brought with him a body of armed adherents. He founded a royal line in Boeotia. [40:3] Delphi being in Phocis, the claims on the score of Daiphantus would be availing in all processions and festivities connected with the temple service. [40:4] A victory that the Phocians under Daiphantus had gained five hundred years before was still celebrated in Plutarch’s time. [40:5] I can find elsewhere no notice of these races, or families. [41:1] Lachares was a demagogue who early in the third century B. C. obtained virtually supreme power in Athens, plundered the Parthenon, stripped the statue of Athene of its ornaments, committed numerous acts of high-handed tyranny, and was finally expelled from the city on the charge of having taken measures for betraying it into the hands of Antiochus. [41:2] Ariston was an Epicurean philosopher, who raised himself to a virtual tyranny in Athens, but surrendered to Sulla when he besieged the city. [42:1] Ἠρυγγίτην, _eryngium_, now the name of a genus containing several species of snakeroot. [42:2] The plague that raged in Athens early in the Peloponnesian war, of which Thucydides gives so remarkable an account. [43:1] Plutarch gives an early specimen of this argument in his life of Theseus: “The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned [from Crete] was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus; for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers for the logical question, as to things that grow; one party holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.” [45:1] Athens had been under the government of men who had been virtually Cassander’s viceroys. The city after his death came under the rule of Demetrius Poliorcetes, and it was probably by his order that the statue of Cassander was destroyed. [45:2] Dionysius the elder. [45:3] Nisaeus was the son of Dionysius the elder, and was sovereign of Syracuse for a short time while his brother Dionysius the younger was in exile. Aelian names him in a chapter specially devoted to eminent φιλοπόται, i. e. drunkards. [45:4] Apollocrates was the son of Dionysius the younger, and grandson of the elder. His father in going into exile left him in command of the citadel of Syracuse, which he was soon compelled to surrender. He holds the third place, as Nisaeus the second, in Aelian’s list of distinguished drunkards.