I have followed the Latin version in so rendering the words καὶ διαφθεῖραι πολλοὺς τῶν διαφερόντων. But I have felt some doubt—needlessly, I think—whether the Greek participle would bear this meaning, and also whether the sense so given is strong and suitable. Wyttenbach felt doubts too, for in his posthumous _Index_, s.v. διαφέρω, the rendering given is ‘hostes vel amici’, i.e. ‘friends or foes’. The sense is excellent, but seems hardly to be in the Greek; probably it was a mere query or jotting. The Teubner editor prints τῶν ἰδίᾳ διαφόρων ὄντων, i.e. ‘those with whom they had private differences’, giving Cobet’s name for the last two words. I have not been able to trace the reference in Cobet, but in _Novae Lectiones_, p. 565, he examines instances where he thinks that ἰδίᾳ should be supplied or suppressed, as the case may be, before compounds of διά. The sense seems good, but too special to be introduced into a text without cogent evidence, since, once given currency, it is difficult for a future critic to go back upon it. Meanwhile, in Wyttenbach’s note on ii, 75 A, he collects many instances where οἱ διάφοροι is used by Plutarch for ‘the enemy’, ‘the other party’, and τῶν διαφερόντων may have grown out of τῶν διαφόρων with τῶν repeated. I have thought it the more peaceable course to preserve the old rendering. I only quote this instance, which is of no great importance but is of some, as one where a _Variorum_ editor would have stated at length and evaluated the possible alternatives. That a translator should do so is perhaps a case of ‘putting the cart before the horse’. The other instance is one of real interest, where the problem is perhaps insoluble upon our present knowledge. In the long dialogue _On the Cessation of the Oracles_, c. 20 (420 c.), where Cleombrotus has been pressing a view that there may be daemons with a long, but yet a limited, term of existence, against the Epicureans, whose own strange theory of _Eidola_ he derides, Ammonius replies in words which appear thus in the Latin: ‘Recte, inquit, mihi pronunciare videtur Theophrastus, quid enim obstat quin sententiam gravissimam et philosophiae convenientissimam recipiamus dicentis: opinionem de Daemonibus, si reiciatur, multa eorum simul abolere quae fieri possunt demonstratione autem carent; _sin admittatur multa secum trahere impossibilia et quae non exstiterint_.’