Notes

The notes are the translator’s. Each is marked in the text with a dagger and a roman numeral.

1. †I Du Prel gives no source for his motto. The saying comes down only through Plutarch, who quotes it in his Life of Coriolanus (38.4): “most of the Deity’s powers, as Heracleitus says, ‘escape our knowledge through incredulity’” (Bernadotte Perrin’s translation, Loeb Classical Library, 1916, read on LacusCurtius, penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Coriolanus*.html; Perrin’s note numbers it fragment 116 in Bywater’s edition). Du Prel’s German makes “truth” the subject; Plutarch’s sentence is about the powers of the divine.