* So all classical antiquity believed except some Boeotian literati of the second century A.D., who questioned Hesiod’s authorship.⁸

* From aphros, foam. The final syllable is of uncertain derivation.

* History knows nothing of Hesiod’s death. Legend tells how, at the age of eighty, he seduced the maiden Clymene; how her brother killed him and threw his body into the sea; and how Clymene bore as his son the lyric poet Stesichorus—who, however, was born in Sicily.²²

* Twice the Greeks waged Sacred Wars over the perquisites of Apollo’s temple: once in 595-85, when the southern Greeks put an end to the exacting of greedy tolls by the people of neighboring Cirrha from pilgrims passing to Delphi through their port; and again in 356-46, when an allied Greek army under Philip of Macedon ousted the Phocians who had captured Delphi and appropriated the temple funds. The first war led to the neutralization of Delphi and the establishment of the Pythian games; the second led to the Macedonian conquest of Greece.

* A wild boar having devastated the fields of Calydon, Meleager, son of Calydon’s King Oeneus, organized a hunt for it, with such aides as Theseus, Castor and Pollux, Nestor, Jason, and the fair-faced, fleet-footed Atalanta. Several heroes were slain by the boar, but Atalanta shot it and Meleager killed it. Atalanta, sought by many wooers in her Arcadian home, agreed to marry any one of them that could outrun her, but those who lost were to be put to death. Hippomenes won by dropping as he ran the three golden apples of the Hesperides given him by Aphrodite; Atalanta stooped to pick them, and lost the race. Of Meleager’s secret love for Atalanta, and his tragic death, the reader may learn in Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon.

* Hence the wise counsel of Alexander Pope’s philosophical doggerel:

A little learning is a dangerous thing;

Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring.²⁴

* “Attica,” says Thucydides (i, 1), “because of the poverty of its soil, enjoyed from a very remote period freedom from faction [?] and invasion.”

* Probably named by the Phoenicians from shalam, peace; cf. Salem.³⁴

† Tradition placed this event in the thirteenth century B.C.; but the union of Attica under Athens could hardly have been completed before 700, since the “Homeric” Hymn to Demeter, composed about that date, speaks of Eleusis as still having its own king.³⁵

‡ A possibly legendary event attributed by tradition to 1068 B.C.

* The mark of a gentleman then, as in the days of Roman equites, French chevaliers, and English cavaliers.

* “Those that stole a cabbage or an apple were to suffer even as villains that committed sacrilege or murder.“—Plutarch, Solon.

* Probably this did not apply to commercial debts in which personal servitude was not involved.⁵⁶

* For the value of Athenian coins, see below, Chap. XII, sect. III.

† Grote and many others interpreted Plutarch’s statement to mean that Solon had depreciated the currency by twenty-seven per cent and had thereby given relief to landlords who, themselves debtors to others, were deprived of the mortgage returns upon which they had depended for meeting their obligations.⁶² Such inflation, however, would have fallen as a second blow upon those landlords who had lent sums to merchants; if it helped any class, it helped these merchants rather than the landlords or the peasants—whose mortgages had already been forgiven. Possibly Solon had no thought of debasing the currency, but wished merely to substitute, for a monetary standard that had been found convenient in trading with the Peloponnesus, another that would facilitate trade with the rich and growing markets of Ionia, where the Euboic standard was in common use.⁶³

* A medimnus—about one and a half bushels—was considered equivalent to one drachma in money.

* Diogenes Laertius tells this story rather of Soli in Cilicia—the town whose preservation of old Greek speech into Alexander’s day led to the word solecism.

* The word tyrant had come from Lydia, perhaps from the town of Tyrrha, meaning a fortress; probably it is a distant cousin to our word tower (Gk. tyrris). Apparently it was applied first to Gyges, the Lydian king.

* One would not be surprised to learn that they represented a resentful aristocracy, like Brutus and Cassius in Rome. Brutus, too, became the hero of a revolution, after eighteen centuries had obscured his history.

† Grandson of Cleisthenes, dictator of Sicyon.

* A similar institution was used at Argos, Megara, and Syracuse.

* A property qualification was placed upon the franchise in the earlier stages of American and French democracy.