Regum et imperatorum apophthegmata
Plutarch
Plutarch. Moralia, Vol. III. Babbitt, Frank Cole, translator. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1931 (printing).
A young man, one of the pupils of Anaximenes the orator, pronounced before him a very carefully prepared oration, and he, wishing to gain some further information, asked a question. But when the young man relapsed into silence, he remarked, What is your answer ? Or
Is this the content of the written page ?[*](Euripides, Iphigeneia among the Taurians, 787.)
Hearing another orator say that the season had been snowy [*](This could hardly refer (as some think) to the unseasonably cold weather in the spring (of 307 B.C.?) recorded in Plutarch’s Life of Demetrius, chap. xii. (894 C).) and so had caused a lack of herbage in the land, he said, Please stop treating me as you treat a common crowd.
When Thrasyllus the Cynic asked him for a shilling, he said That is not a fit gift for a king to give. And when Thrasyllus said, Then give me two hundred pounds, he retorted, But that is not a fit gift for a Cynic to receive. [*](The story ist old more fully in Moralia, 551 E, and by Seneca, De beneficiis, ii. 17. 1.)
When he sent Demetrius his son, with many
ships and forces, to make the Greeks a free people, he said that his repute, kindled in Greece as on a lofty height, would spread like beacon-fires through out the inhabited world. [*](Cf. Plutarch’s Life of Demetrius, chap. viii. (892 B), where the phraseology is slightly different.)While Antagoras the poet was cooking a congereel, and was shaking the skillet with his own hand, Antigonus stepped up behind him and said, Antagoras, do you imagine that Homer cooked a conger while he was writing of the exploits of Agamemnon ? To which Antagoras retorted. And do you, Your Majesty, believe that Agamemnon, while he was performing those exploits, was overmuch concerned if anybody in the army cooked a conger ? [*](Cf. Moralia, 668 C, and Athenaeus, 240 F, who quotes as his authority Hegesander.)
In a dream he saw Mithradates reaping a golden harvest, and thereupon planned to kill him. He told Demetrius his son, and bound him by an oath to silence. But Demetrius took Mithridates to walk with him beside the sea, and with the butt of his spear wrote in the sand, Flee, Mithridates. And Mithridates, understanding the purport, fled to Pontus and reigned there until his end. [*](Plutarch tells the story at length in his Life of Demetrius, chap. iv. (890 C); cf. also Appian, Roman History, Mithridatic Wars, 9. Mithridates became the founder of the line of Pontic kings, which lasted until 63 B.C. when Mithridates VI. was conquered by Pompey.)