[64:4] Plutarch in his _Apophthegms_, says of Artaxerxes Longimanus, who was not an unwise, but an over-indulgent king: “He first ordained as a punishment for his nobles who had offended, that they should be stripped and their garments scourged instead of their bodies; and whereas their hair should have been plucked out, that the same should be done to their turbans.” We do not learn that his example was followed by any of his successors, or that he employed this method as to criminals in general. But the illustration is a happy one. [65:1] In these forms of punishment, it is the soul’s clothes, i. e. the body, not the soul itself, that is punished. [66:1] The body of a brute. [67:1] There were in Naxos, on Parnassus, and elsewhere various caves dedicated to Bacchus, i. e. to mirth and jollity; and the mouths of these caves were, of course, decked with all of verdure and bloom that could make them charming and attractive. [67:2] Dionysus as the son of Zeus had a right to leave the abode of the dead, and to claim his seat on Olympus. His mother Semele, being a mortal woman, had no such right; but he rescued her from the dead, and bore her to Olympus, where she became a goddess under the name of Thyone. [68:1] _Oblivion._ [68:2] Γένεσις. According to this derivation γένεσις comes from γῆ, _the earth_, and νεύειν, _to incline toward_,—a fanciful derivation, the genuineness of which there is good reason to doubt. [69:1] Themis preceded Apollo as the inspirer of the Delphian oracle. [69:2] The ancients imagined, as we easily may, something like the outlines of a human face in the disk of the moon, and among their myths, or rather poetical fancies, was this of a Sibyl revolving with the moon, and singing, as she rides across the firmament, the fate of men and nations. [70:1] The great eruption of A. D. 79. [70:2] The earlier name of Puteoli. [70:3] Vespasian, who died in A. D. 79. [73:1] Nero’s matricide is here referred to. Plutarch, no doubt, had in his mind some then well-known figure or description in a poem of Pindar now lost. [73:2] Some interpreters suppose that this creature is a swan. I have no doubt that it is a frog. Even had not the empire passed entirely out of the possible reach of the Caesars, I do not believe that Plutarch would have shown any tenderness to Nero’s memory, and certainly there was no conceivable motive for it under the reign of Titus or Domitian. There is a fine satire in this final destiny of Nero. He has been horribly punished, and has been tortured into the likeness of the reptile regarded by the ancients as the only matricide in their zoölogy; and now for the one good act of his reign a little mercy is shown him. He had prided himself and annoyed his subjects as a singer, and now he is transformed into the singer that is a perpetual annoyance to all dwellers near swamps and ponds.