Noctes Atticae

Gellius, Aulus

Gellius, Aulus. The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius. Rolfe, John C., translator. Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press; William Heinemann, 1927 (printing).

Of the singular death of Milo of Croton. [*](The same story is told by Strabo, vi. 1. 12 (iii, p. 45, L.C.L.).)

MILO of Croton, a famous athlete, who was first crowned at the sixty-second Olympiad, [*](32 B.C.) as the chronicles record, ended his life in a strange and lamentable manner. When he was already advanced in age and had given up the athletic art, he chanced to be journeying alone in a wooded part of Italy. Near the road he saw an oak tree, the middle of which gaped with wide cracks. Then wishing, I suppose, to try whether he still had any strength left,

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he put his fingers into the hollows of the tree and tried to rend apart and split the oak. And in fact he did tear asunder and divide the middle part; but when the oak was thus split into two parts, and he relaxed his hold as if he had accomplished his attempt, the tree returned to its natural position when the pressure ceased, and catching and holding his hands as it came together and united, it kept the man there, to be torn to pieces by wild beasts.

Why young men of noble rank at Athens gave up playing the pipes, although it was one of their native customs.

ALCIBIADES the Athenian in his boyhood was being trained in the liberal arts and sciences at the home of his uncle, Pericles; and Pericles had ordered Antigenides, a player on the pipes, to be sent for, to teach the boy to play on that instrument, which was then considered a great accomplishment. But when the pipes were handed to him and he had put them to his lips and blown, disgusted at the ugly distortion of his face, he threw them away and broke them in two. When this matter was noised abroad, by the universal consent of the Athenians of that time the art of playing the pipes was given up. This story is told in the twenty-ninth book of the Commentary of Pamphila. [*](F.H.G. iii. 521. 9.)

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