Plut. Mor., Greek and Roman Parallels 5 — Parallels, or a comparison between the Greek and Roman Histories

Plut. Mor., Greek and Roman Parallels 5 — Parallels, or a comparison between the Greek and Roman Histories, Plutarch; served verbatim

There was a terrible earthquake, with a wonderful eruption of water, at Celaenae, a city of Phrygia, that swallowed up a great many houses, people and all. Midas upon this consults the oracle, which gave him for answer, that if he would cast into that gulf the most precious thing that he had in the world, the earth should close again. Whereupon he threw in a mass of gold and silver; but never the better. This put it in the head of Anchurus, the son of Midas, to consider, that the most precious thing in Nature is the life and soul of a man; so that he went presently and embraced his father and his wife Timothea, mounted his horse, and leaped into the abyss. The earth closed upon it, and Midas raised a golden altar in the place, laid his hand upon it, and dedicated it TO JUPITER IDAEUS. This altar becomes stone at that time of the year when it was usual to have these eruptions; and after that season was over, it is turned to gold again.— My author is Callisthenes, in his Second Book of Transformations. The River Tiber, in its course over the Forum, opened a huge cavity in the ground, so that a great many houses were buried in it. This was looked upon as a judgment upon the place, from Jupiter Tarsius; who, as the oracle told them, was not to be appeased without throwing into it what they held most valuable. So they threw a quantity of gold and silver into it. But Curtius, one of the bravest young men they had, gave a better guess at the mind of the oracle; and reflecting upon it, that the life of a man was much more excellent than treasure, took his horse and plunged himself into the gulf, and so redeemed his country.—Aristides, in the Fortieth Book of his Italian History.

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

Aristides — a life Jupiter — a candidate entry Midas — a life

Parallels, or a comparison between the Greek and Roman Histories, Plutarch — translated by John Oswald (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)