statues; and the chief agent in their destruction was one who was
descended on his father’s side from the injured deity--Hermocrates, son
of Hermon.” I wonder, my dearest Terentian, how he omitted to say of the
tyrant Dionysius that for his impiety towards Zeus and Herakles he was
deprived of his power by Dion and Herakleides.

4
Yet why speak of Timaeus, when even men like Xenophon and Plato--the
very demi-gods of literature--though they had sat at the feet of
Socrates, sometimes forgot themselves in the pursuit of such paltry
conceits. The former, in his account of the Spartan Polity, has these
words: “Their voice you would no more hear than if they were of marble,
their gaze is as immovable as if they were cast in bronze; you would
deem them more modest than the very maidens in their eyes.”[1] To speak
of the pupils of the eye as “modest maidens” was a piece of absurdity
becoming Amphicrates[2] rather than Xenophon. And then what a strange
delusion to suppose that modesty is always without exception expressed
in the eye! whereas it is commonly said that there is nothing by which
an impudent fellow betrays his character so much as by the expression of
his eyes. Thus Achilles addresses Agamemnon in the _Iliad_ as “drunkard,
with eye of dog.”[3]

[Footnote 1: _Xen. de Rep. Laced._ 3, 5.]

[Footnote 2: C. iii. sect. 2.]

[Footnote 3: _Il._ i. 225.]

5
Timaeus, however, with that want of judgment which characterises