ἱστορίαι Historiai
Plut. Mor., Craft of Water and Land Animals 17 Which are the most crafty, water-animals or those creatures that breed upon the land?, Plutarch; served verbatim
As for love and observance of society joined with understanding and prudence, Juba produces many examples of it in elephants. For it is the usual practice of the elephant-hunters to dig large pits in the elephants’ walks, and cover them slightly over with dry twigs or other materials; into which if any elephant happens to fall, the rest fetch wood and stones to fill up the cavity of the pit, that the other may the more easily get out again. And some report of the elephants, that they make prayers to the Gods by natural instinct, that they perform divine ceremonies to the sea, and worship the rising sun, lifting up the proboscis to heaven instead of hands. For which reason they are creatures the most beloved of any by the Gods, as Ptolemy Philopator testified. For having vanquished Antiochus, and being desirous to pay a more than ordinary honor to the Deity, among many other oblations of thanksgivings for his victory, he sacrificed four elephants. After which being terrified with a dream, which threatened him with the wrath of the Deity for that prodigious sacrifice, he sought out several ways to expiate his offence, and among the rest by way of propitiation, he erected four elephants of brass to atone for the four elephants he had slaughtered. Examples not inferior of the observance of society are to be found among lions. For the younger carry forth the slow and aged, when they hunt abroad for their prey. When the old ones are weary and tired, they rest and stay for the younger that hunt on; who, when they have seized upon any thing, call to the old ones, making a noise like the bleating of a calf. They presently hear, and so meeting all together, they feed in common upon the prey.

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
Antiochus — a candidate entry Deity — a candidate entry Juba — a candidate entry Ptolemy — a candidate entry

Which are the most crafty, water-animals or those creatures that breed upon the land?, Plutarch — translated by John Philips> (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)