Plut. Mor., Greek Questions 38 — Greek Questions

Plut. Mor., Greek Questions 38 — Greek Questions, Plutarch; served verbatim

Question 38. Who amongst the Boeotians were the Ψολόεις, and who the Ὀλεῖαι?Solution. They say that Minos’s daughters—Leucippe, Arsinoe, and Alcathoe—falling mad, had a greedy appetite for man’s flesh, and accordingly cast lots for their children. Whereupon it fell to Leucippe’s lot to produce her son Hippasus to be cut in pieces. The husbands of these women, that were clothed in coarse apparel by reason of sorrow and grief, were called Psoloeis, the women Ὀλεῖαι that is ὀλοαί (destructive). And to this day the Orchomenians call their posterity so. And it is so ordered that, in the yearly feast called Agrionia, there is a flight and pursuit of them by the priest of Bacchus, with a drawn sword in his hand. It is lawful for him to slay any of them that he takes, and Zoilus a priest of our time slew one. This thing proved unlucky to them; for Zoilus, sickening upon a wound that he got, wasted away for a long time and died; whereupon the Orchomenians, falling under public accusations and condemnations, removed the priesthood from their family, and made choice of the best man in the whole multitude.

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

Arsinoe — a candidate entry Leucippe — a candidate entry Minos — a life

Greek Questions, Plutarch — translated by Isaac Chauncy (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)