1. Cicero’s Four Cardinal Virtues (adapted from the Stoics) are wisdom, justice, fortitude, and temperance. Augustus, going back to an earlier formulation (by Gorgias), established as the official slogans of his regime’ virtue’ (virtut also means ‘valour’), clemency, justice, and piety.

1. Euripides, especially, represents Odysseus (Ulysses) as sly and cowardly.

2. Perhaps from The Test of Arms of the tragic dramatist Pacuvius (220–c. 130 B.C.). The story was that Palamedes proved the madness fictitious by placing the baby Telemachus in front of the ox and ass which Ulysses had yoked to a plough to sow salt. Ulysses stopped the plough.

3. Consul during the First Punic War in 267 and 256 B.C., captured 255. The story that follows, repeated by Horace, may be apocryphal, invented to justify the torture and murder of Carthaginian prisoners by Regulus’s widow.

1. Cicero is wrong in identifying this Hamilcar with Hannibal’s father of the same name.

1. The Epicureans. Those quoted as holding the opposite view are the Stoics.

2. From Acciu’s tragedy the Atreus.

1. Probably from Ennius’s tragedy, the Thyestes.

2. The Stoics.

1. The Peripatetics – the ‘more rigorous school’ being the Stoics (p. 19)

2. After pretending to be reconciled with his brother Thyestes, Atreus served up to him at a banquet the flesh of his (Thyestes’) children.

3. From the Hippolytus of Euripides.

1. Between capua and Beneventum 321 B.C.

2. As consul, 137 B.C. After years of resistance Numantia, centre of spains’s resistance to Rome, fell to Scipio Aemilianus in 133. Quintus Pompeius Rufus, consul 140 B.C., had conciuded and then disowened a treaty with the Numantines.

1. Laws placing their transgressor under the ban of a divinity. For the Twelve Tables, see above, p. 181.

2. See Appendix C, p. 258.

3. Dictator 363 B.C.

1. Against the Latins. The story of the Torques is probably an aetiological myth to explain the name Torquatus. The (? unauthentic) battle near Veseris (‘battle of Vesuvius’) in the same war is celebrated for the self-immolation of the elder Publius Decius Mus (p. 230). The Latin towns submitted in 338 B.C.

2. The great Greek historian of Rome (204–122 B.C.).

1. A Roman Senator who interpreted in the Senate for a delegation of Greek philosophers in 155 B.C.

2. For Aristippus, Anniceris, Epicurus, see above, p. 18.

3. Metrodorus of Lampsacus was the most distinguished pupil of Epicurus (who described him as unoriginal).

1. Calliphon and Dinomachus tried to follow a middle path between the Stoics and Epicureans (third century B.C.).

2. See above, p. 94. Cicero, who wrote this treatise at his villa at Puteoli, never saw his son again.