Plut. Mor., Apophthegms of Kings 5 — The Apopthegms or Remarkable Sayings of Kings and Great Commanders

Plut. Mor., Apophthegms of Kings 5 — The Apopthegms or Remarkable Sayings of Kings and Great Commanders, Plutarch; served verbatim

XERXES. Arimenes came out of Bactria as a rival for the kingdom with his brother Xerxes, the son of Darius. Xerxes sent presents to him, commanding those that brought them to say: With these your brother Xerxes now honors you; and if he chance to be proclaimed king, you shall be the next person to himself in the kingdom. When Xerxes was declared king, Arimenes immediately did him homage and placed the crown upon his head; and Xerxes gave him the next place to himself. Being offended with the Babylonians, who rebelled, and having overcome them, he forbade them weapons, but commanded they should practise singing and playing on the flute, keep brothel-houses and taverns, and wear loose coats. He refused to eat Attic figs that were brought to be sold, until he had conquered the country that produced them. When he caught some Grecian scouts in his camp, he did them no harm, but having allowed them to view his army as much as they pleased, he let them go.

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

← Plut. Mor., Apophthegms of Kings 4 contents Plut. Mor., Apophthegms of Kings 6 →

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

Darius — a life Xerxes — a life

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)