Plut. Mor., Apophthegms of Kings 3 — The Apopthegms or Remarkable Sayings of Kings and Great Commanders

Plut. Mor., Apophthegms of Kings 3 — The Apopthegms or Remarkable Sayings of Kings and Great Commanders, Plutarch; served verbatim

DARIUS. Darius the father of Xerxes used to praise himself, saying that he became even wiser in battles and dangers. When he laid a tax upon his subjects, he summoned his lieutenants, and asked them whether the tax was burthensome or not? When they told him it was moderate, he commanded them to pay half as much as was at first demanded. As he was opening a pomegranate, one asked him what it was of which he would wish for a number equal to the seeds thereof. He said, Of men like Zopyrus,—who was a loyal person and his friend. This Zopyrus, after he had maimed himself by cutting off his nose and ears, beguiled the Babylonians; and being trusted by them, he betrayed the city to Darius, who often said that he would not have had Zopyrus maimed to gain a hundred Babylons.

The Greek stands ready in the workroom; the English is served. Both faces will read together.

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Filed here — the addresses this episode attests; counted by the house’s first pass

Darius — a life Xerxes — a life Zopyrus — a candidate entry

The Apopthegms or Remarkable Sayings of Kings and Great Commanders, Plutarch — translated by Edward Hinton (rev. W. W. Goodwin), 1874
Apparatus shelf + pinned Perseus TEI — Plutarch's Morals (the Moralia), ed. William W. Goodwin, five volumes · 'Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin, Ph. D.', with an introduction by R. W. Emerson; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1874 (five volumes; a minority of the TEI transcriptions were keyed from the same publisher's 1878 reprint)
license: public-domain (US: the Goodwin edition is an 1874 Boston publication of a 1684-1694 translation — title pages verified on all five shelf scans at acquisition; Perseus digital editions CC BY-SA 4.0, attribution recorded per ops/corpus-staging/SOURCES.md pattern)