This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
Table of Contents:
Question 20. What is that darkness at the oak, spoken
of in Priene?
Solution. The Samians and Prienians waging war with
each other, as at other times they sufficiently injured
each other, so at a certain great fight the Prienians slew
a thousand of the Samians. Seven years after, fighting
with the Milesians at the said oak, they lost all the principal and chief of their citizens together, at the time when
Bias the Wise (who was sent ambassador from Priene to
Samos) was famous. This grievous and sad calamity befalling the women, there was established an execration
and oath—to be taken about matters of the greatest concern—by ‘the Darkness at the Oak,’ because their children, fathers, and husbands were there slain.
Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by. William W. Goodwin, PH. D. Boston. Little, Brown, and Company. Cambridge. Press Of John Wilson and son. 1874. 2.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.