The aged mule story is charming; we can scarcely hear it too often, but somehow it _is_ oddly familiar; have we not heard it before in slightly different form? Yes; surely it is the story Plutarch[338] tells when he is recounting the kindness of Cato to his beasts. ‘A good man will take care of his horses and dogs, not only while they are young, but when they are old and past service. Thus the people of Athens, _when they were building the Hecatompedon_ set at liberty those mules which they thought had worked hardest and let them go free, and one of them, it is said, afterwards came of her own accord back to the works and trotted by the side of the beasts who were drawing the waggons and led them on and seemed to be exhorting and encouraging them. And the people passed a vote that she should be entertained at the public expense to the day of her death.’ The same story is told by Aelian[339] of the time ‘_when the Athenians were building the Parthenon_,’ and he quotes as his authority Aristotle. It is Aristotle[340] who has set the whole uncertainty going. He tells the story of the time ‘when at Athens _they were building the temple_.’ By the ‘temple’ Aelian and Plutarch are almost certainly right in understanding the Parthenon. If they are right, we can infer that Tarantinos, an author whose date is unknown, and whom we have no ground for regarding as an authority on Athenian topography, has made at any rate one mistake, when he identifies ‘the temple’ with the great temple of his own day, the temple ‘of Zeus.’ Tarantinos is, presumably, taking the story from Aristotle. If so, it is clear that, besides wrongly identifying ‘the temple,’ he supposed that the Enneakrounos, which on this hypothesis he for the first time imports into the story, was identical with the Kallirrhoë of the Ilissos[341]. But what is the value of his evidence? His supporters may fairly be challenged to produce the credentials of a witness whose only title to be regarded as an authority is an identification almost certainly wrong. There is nothing to rebut the simple supposition that, like the author of the _Etymologicum Magnum_, he is merely confusing the two Kallirrhoës[342].