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1. Erasmus, Apophthegmata, VII, Arcesilaus, II.

2. Cicero, Epistulae ad familiares, XV, 19.

3. Seneca, Epist. moral., XIII, 3.

4. Epaminondas was a Pythagorean; Socrates’ wife Xanthippe was, for Plato, the archetypal shrew.

5. Plutarch, Life of Marius.

6. As in the myth of Hesiod, Works and Days, 289 f.

7. Cicero, Tusc. disput., I, xxx, 74.

8. Julius Caesar; defeated by him at Pharsalia, Cato killed himself later at Utica.

9. Horace, Odes, I, xxxvii, 29.

10. Cicero, De officiis, I, xxxi, 112.

11. Erasmus, Apophthegmata, III, Aristippus, XXXV.

12. Virgil, Aeneid, XI, 154–5.

13. Horace, Satires, I, vi, 65–7.

14. Horace, Odes, II, xvii, 13–16. (To be born under the equable Balance, Libra, was to be learned and judicious: cf. Manilius, Astronomica, IV, 202 ff.)

15. Erasmus, Apophthegmata, VII; Antisthenes Atheniensis, XXVII.

16. Erasmus, Apophthegmata, III; Aristippus, III and XXXVII.

17. Diogenes Laertius, Life of Epicurus.

18. Juvenal, Satires, VIII, 164–5.

19. For Stoics the virtues are individually impossible without all the others. Cf. Cicero, De finibus, IV, xxviii, 77 ff. Augustine, Catalogus hereseon considers that this doctrine favours the Jovinian heresy.

20. Diogenes Laertius, Life of Aristotle.

21. Zopyrus the Physiognomist judged from Socrates’ features that he was lecherous and a dullard. Socrates agreed: he was born such, but had ‘reformed’ his soul: see Erasmus, Apophthegmata, III; Socratica, LXXX; and Cicero, De fato, V, 10 for both Socrates and Stilpo.

22. Lucretius, IV, 1099–10.

23. Margaret of Navarre, Heptaméron, IIIe Journée, conte 30; she states that St Ambrose had to forbid such tests of virtue.

24. ’80: I think a more appropriate comparison would be with hunting, in which there seems to be more rapture: not in my opinion that the pleasure in itself is greater but because it affords us no leisure to brace and prepare ourselves against it, and that it surprises us when…

25. ’80: The shock of this pleasure strikes us so furiously that it would be difficult for those who love the hunt to bring their soul at this point back from its rapture. Love gives way to the pleasure of the chase, say the poets: that is why they make Diana…

26. Horace, Epodes, II, 37–8.

27. The author is Suetonius (Life of Julius Caesar). Related by Erasmus, Apophthegmata, IV; Julius Caesar, I.

28. The text of the Bordeaux manuscript addition is partly damaged, but clearly tells of the same event in much the same words. Here [’95] replaces [C] as being more reliable.

29. Luke 12:4. (Christ’s own words, but cited inexactly from memory).

30. Cicero, Tusc. disput., I, xliv, 106 (citing Ennius)

31. Described in Montaigne’s Journal de Voyage.

32. Erasmus, Apophthegmata, V, Artoxerxes, XVIII. (Similarly cited in Amyot’s Plutarch, but as Artaxerxes).

33. Herodotus, History, II, xlvii.

34. Seneca, Epist. moral., XC, 45.

35. Virgil, Aeneid, VII, 501.

36. Erasmus, Adages, I, I, II, Amicitia aequalis; section Pythagorae Symbolae: A pisces abstineto; then, Ovid, Metamorphoses, XV, 106–7.

37. ’80: sympathy and love [amitié] which I confess that I feel for them… An echo of the Pythagorean adage of Erasmus, Amicitia aequalis (see note 36).

38. The Druids were the priests and philosophers of the Ancient Gauls: Caesar, Gallic Wars, V, xiii ff.

39. Ovid, Metamorphoses, XV, 106–7. The Egyptian origin of metempsychosis is mentioned by Ovid’s commentators (e.g., among many, the Venice edition, 1586, p. 295).

40. [A]: body more vile, or less so…

41. Claudius Claudianus, In Ruffinum, II, 482–7.

42. Ovid, Metamorphoses, XV, 160–1 – from the verses which sympathetically expound Pythagoras’ ideas.

43. Such ‘cousinship’ is briefly mentioned by Brassicanus in his remarks on Pythagoras’ adage Ab animalibus abstine, with an allusion to Ovid’s ‘truly golden’ verses in the Metamorphoses, XV, which, throughout the Renaissance, is the source always cited or followed.

44. Cicero, De nat. deorum, I, xxxvi, 101.

45. Juvenal, Satires, XV, 2–6.

46. Plutarch (tr. Amyot), De Isis et Osiris, 333F–334H.

47. Plutarch (tr. Amyot), Les demandes des choses Romaines, 475E. The geese heard the Barbarians scaling the walls while the guard-dogs slept (Quels animaux sont les plus advisez, 514 D-E).

48. The Hecatompedon (‘the Hundred-feet long’) was the regular name for the Parthenon (the temple of Athena Parthenos in the citadel of Athens). It was rebuilt by Pericles on the site of a previous temple of that name.

49. Same examples in Ravisius Textor, Officina (Bruta animalia honorata sepulchris out statuis).

50. Plutarch, Life of Cato.