friends, but also of your enemies.” “Practise piety, with temperance.” “Cultivate truth, good faith, experience, cleverness, sociability, and industry.” V. He wrote also some songs, of which the following is the most celebrated one:— The wise will only face the wicked man, With bow in hand well bent, And quiver full of arrows— For such a tongue as his says nothing true, Prompted by a wily heart To utter double speeches. He also composed six hundred verses in elegiac metre; and he wrote a treatise in prose, on Laws, addressed to his countrymen. VI. He flourished about the forty-second Olympiad; and he died when Aristomenes was Archon, in the third year of the fifty-second Olympiad; having lived more than seventy years, being a very old man. And on his tomb is this inscription:— Lesbos who bore him here, with tears doth bury Hyrradius’ worthy son, wise Pittacus. Another saying of his was, “Watch your opportunity.” VII. There was also another Pittacus, a lawgiver, as Phavorinus tells us in the first book of his Commentaries; and Demetrius says so too, in his Essay on Men and Things of the same name. And that other Pittacus was called Pittacus the less. VIII. But it is said that the wise Pittacus once, when a young man consulted him on the subject of marriage, made him the following answer, which is thus given by Callimachus in his Epigrams. Hyrradius’ prudent son, old Pittacus The pride of Mitylene, once was asked By an Atarnean stranger; “Tell me, sage, I have two marriages proposed to me; One maid my equal is in birth and riches; The other’s far above me;—which is best? Advise me now which shall I take to wife?” Thus spoke the stranger; but the aged prince, Raising his old man’s staff before his face, Said, “These will tell you all you want to know;” And pointed to some boys, who with quick lashes Were driving whipping tops along the street. “Follow their steps,” said he; so he went near them And heard them say, “Let each now mind his own.”— So when the stranger heard the boys speak thus, He pondered on their words, and laid aside Ambitious thoughts of an unequal marriage. As then he took to shame the poorer bride, So too do you, O reader, mind thy own. And it seems that he may have here spoken from experience, for his own wife was of more noble birth than himself, since she was the sister of Draco, the son of Penthilus; and she gave herself great airs, and tyrannized over him.