* Watteau’s painting, Embarkation for Cythera, symbolized the spirit of the upper classes in eighteenth-century France, which had shed just enough theology to be epicurean.

* The traditional dates for the founding of the Greek cities in the West are given in the Chronological Table. These dates were taken by Thucydides from the old logographer Antiochus of Syracuse; they are highly uncertain, and Mahaffy believed that the Sicilian foundations came later than those in Italy. Thucydides’ chronology, however, has still many supporters.⁷

† Cooks or confectioners who invented new dishes or sweets—Athenaeus reports—were allowed to patent them for a year.¹⁰ Perhaps Athenaeus mistook caricature for history.

* The name given by the Romans to the Greek cities in southern Italy.

* Cf. Chap. IX, sect, IV, below.

* The Pythagoreans appear to have been the first to use the word mathematike with the meaning of mathematics; before them it had been applied to the learning (mathema) of anything.³⁰

* In the fragment “On the Improvement of the Intellect.”

† Science tries to reduce all phenomena to quantitative, mathematical, Verifiable statements; chemistry describes all things in terms of symbols and figures, arranges the elements mathematically in a periodic law, and reduces them to an intra-atomic arithmetic of electrons; astronomy becomes celestial mathematics, and physicists seek a mathematical formula to cover the phenomena of electricity, magnetism, and gravitation; some thinkers of our time have tried to express philosophy itself in mathematical form.

‡ We should note, in passing, that Pythagoras, slightly anticipating Pasteur, denied spontaneous generation, and taught that all animals are born from other animals through “seeds.”⁴¹

* The Greeks were so fond of this fable that they told it also of the laws of Catana and Thurii. The plan was especially pleasing to Michel de Montaigne, and may not have outlived its utility.

* Or perhaps a generation later; cf. note to p. 160 above.

* He cast his warning into the form of a fable. A horse, annoyed by the invasion of a stag into its pasturage, asked a man to help it punish the poacher. The man promised to do this if the horse would allow him to bestride it javelin in hand. The horse agreed, the stag was frightened away, and the horse found that he was now a slave to the man.

* “Gelon of Syracuse,” says Lucian, “had disagreeable breath, but did not find it out himself for a long time, no one venturing to mention such a circumstance to a tyrant. At last a foreign woman who had a connection with him dared to tell him; whereupon he went to his wife and scolded her for never having, with all her opportunities of knowing, warned him of it; she put in the defense that as she had never been familiar or at close quarters with any other man, she had supposed all men were like that.”⁶⁶ He was disarmed.