Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.3, 1865).djvu/52

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44
PYRRHUS.

Cretans, and some of the most active men among the Spartans, and all falling on at once upon the Gauls, put them in great disorder. Pyrrhus, entering in with noise and shouting near the Cylarabis,[1] when the Gauls returned the cry, noticed that it did not express courage and assurance, but was the voice of men distressed, and that had their hands full. He, therefore, pushed forward in haste the van of his horse that marched but slowly and dangerously, by reason of the drains and sinks of which the city is full. In this night engagement, there was infinite uncertainty as to what was being done, or what orders were given; there was much mistaking and straggling in the narrow streets; all generalship was useless in that darkness and noise and pressure; so both sides continued without doing any thing, expecting daylight. At the first dawn, Pyrrhus, seeing the great citadel Aspis full of enemies, was disturbed, and remarking, among a variety of figures dedicated in the market-place, a wolf and bull of brass, as it were ready to attack one another, he was struck with alarm, recollecting an oracle that formerly predicted fate had determined his death when he should see a wolf fighting with a bull. The Argives say, these figures were set up in record of a thing that long ago had happened there. For Danaus, at his first landing in the country, near the Pyramia in Thyreatis, as he was on his way towards Argos, espied a wolf fighting with a bull, and conceiving the wolf to represent him, (for this stran-

  1. This was an exercise ground, a gymnasium near one of the city gates; the tomb of Licymnius, mentioned presently, was also near it. "As you follow a straight road towards the gymnasium of Cylarabes, so called from the son of Sthenelus, stands the tomb of Licymnius, the son of Electryon. . . . In the gymnasium, there is a statue of Athena called Pania, and they show a tomb of Sthelenus, and one of Cylarabes himself: and not far off, there is a monument in memory of the Argives, who sailed with the Athenians on the expedition for subjugating Syracuse and Sicily." Pausanias, ii. 22. Cylarabes, son of the Homeric hero Sthenelus, ruled Argos, while Orestes did in Mycenæ.