[Footnote 52:  This statement of Dio’s appears to be erroneous.  See Cicero, Ad Familiares I, 7, 10, and Mommsen, Staatsrecht, 22, 672.]

[Footnote 53:  Gap in the MS. supplied by Bekker’s conjecture.]

[Footnote 54:  Suetonius says “five years” (Life of Caesar, chapter 24), and Plutarch and Appian make a similar statement of the time. (Plutarch, Caesar, chapter 21, and Pompey, chapters 51, 52.  Appian, Civil War, II, 17.)]

[Footnote 55:  The two kinds of naval tactics mentioned here (Greek:  periplous] and [Greek:  diechplous]) consist respectively (1) in describing a semi-circle and making a broadside attack with the purpose of ramming an opposing vessel, and (2) in dashing through the hostile ranks, breaking the oars of some ship and then returning to ram it when disabled.  Both methods were employed in early Greek as well as in Roman warfare.]

[Footnote 56:  Dio has evidently imitated at this point a sentence in Herodotos, VIII, 6 (as shown by the phraseology), where it is remarked that “the Persians [at Artemisium] were minded not to let a single soul” of the Greeks escape.  The expression is, in general, a proverbial one, applied to utter destruction, especially in warfare.  Its source is Greek, and lies in the custom of the Spartans (see Xenophon, Polity of the Lacedaemonians, chapter 13, section 2), which required the presence in their army of a priest carrying fire kindled at the shrine of Zeus the Leader, in Sparta, this sacred fire being absolutely essential to the proper conduct of important sacrifices.  Victors would naturally spare such a priest on account of his sacred character; he regularly possessed the inviolability attaching also to heralds and envoys:  and the proverb that represents him as being slain is (as Suidas notes) an effective bit of epigrammatic exaggeration.  Other references to this proverb may be found (by those interested) in Rawlinson’s note on the above passage of Herodotos, in one of the scholia on the Phoenician Maidens of Euripides (verse 1377), in Sturz’s Xenophontean Lexicon, in Stobaios’s Florilegium (XLIV, 41, excerpt from Nicolaos in Damascenos), in Zenobios’s Centuria (V, 34), and finally in the dictionaries of Suidas and Hesychios.

The following slight variations as to the origin of the phrase are to be found in the above.  The scholiast on Euripides states that in early times before the trumpet was invented, it was customary for a torch-bearer to perform the duties of a trumpeter.  Each of any two opposing armies would have one, and the two priests advancing in front of their respective armies would cast their torches into the intervening space and then be allowed to retire unmolested before the clash occurred.  Zenobios, a gatherer of proverbs, uses the word “seer” instead of priest.  That the saying was an extremely common one seems to be indicated by the rather naive definition of Hesychios:  Fire-Bearer. The man bearing fire.  Also, the only man saved in war.