plagiarists, could not leave to Xenophon the possession of even this
piece of frigidity. In relating how Agathocles carried off his cousin,
who was wedded to another man, from the festival of the unveiling, he
asks, “Who could have done such a deed, unless he had harlots instead of
maidens in his eyes?”

6
And Plato himself, elsewhere so supreme a master of style, meaning to
describe certain recording tablets, says, “They shall write, and deposit
in the temples memorials of cypress wood”;[4] and again, “Then
concerning walls, Megillus, I give my vote with Sparta that we should
let them lie asleep within the ground, and not awaken them.”[5]

[Footnote 4: _Plat. de Legg._ v. 741, C.]

[Footnote 5: _Ib._ vi. 778, D.]

7
And Herodotus falls pretty much under the same censure, when he speaks
of beautiful women as “tortures to the eye,”[6] though here there is
some excuse, as the speakers in this passage are drunken barbarians.
Still, even from dramatic motives, such errors in taste should not be
permitted to deface the pages of an immortal work.

[Footnote 6: v. 18.]


V

Now all these glaring improprieties of language may be traced to one