Teleboans, and conquered their country. Pterilaus' daughter Comætho had first killed her father by plucking out the golden hair, to whose continual possession was attached the boon of immortality bestowed on him by Poseidon. He slew the traitress, and, handing over the Taphian kingdom to Cephalus, he returned to Thebes and married Alcmene. She gave birth to twins; Iphiclēs by him, and Heracles by Zeus. At last he falls in the war with Ergīnus (q.v.) the Minyan king of Orchŏmĕnus.
Amphŏra, Lat. (Gr. Amphŏreus). A two-handled, big-bellied vessel, usually of clay, with a longish or shortish neck, and a mouth proportioned to the size, sometimes resting firmly on a foot, but often ending in a blunt point, so that in the store-room it had to lean against the wall, or be sunk in sand, and when brought out for use, to be put in a basket, wine-cooler, or hollow stand. (See Vessels, fig. 2, a and b). It served to keep oil, honey, and more especially the wine drawn off from the big fermenting vats. It was fastened with a clay stopper, plastered over with pitch, loam, or gypsum, and had a ticket stating the kind, the year, and the quantity of the wine it contained. The Greek amphoreus was a large liquid measure, holding nearly 9 gallons (see Metretes), the Roman measure called amphora held 6 gallons and 7 pints.
Amphŏtĕrus. See Acarnan.
Ampliātio. The Latin term for a delay of verdict pending the production of further evidence in a case not clear to the judges. Comp. Comperendinatio.
Ampulla. See Vessels.
Amy̌cus. Son of Poseidōn; a gigantic king of the Bebrycians on the Bithynian coast, who forced every stranger that landed there to box with him. When the Argonauts wished to draw water from a spring in his country, he forbade them, but was conquered and killed in a match with Polydeucēs (Pollux).
Amymone. A daughter of Dănăus (q.v.), and mother of Nauplius by Poseidōn.
Anacrĕōn. A Greek lyric poet, born about 550 b.c. at Teos, an Ionian town of Asia, whose inhabitants, to escape the threatened yoke of Persia, migrated to Abdēra in Thrace b.c. 540. Prom Abdera Anacreon went to the tyrant Polycrătēs, of Samos, after whose death (b.c. 522) he removed to Athens on the invitation of Hipparchus, and lived there, till the fall of the Peisistrătĭdæ, on friendly terms with his fellow poet Simōnĭdēs and Xanthippus, the father of Perĭclēs. He is said to have died at Abdera, in his eighty-sixth year, choked by the stone of a dried grape. A statue of him stood in the Acrŏpŏlis at Athens in the guise of an aged minstrel inspired by the wine-god. For Anacreon was regarded as the type of a poet who, in spite of age, paid perpetual homage to wine and love. Love and wine and merry company formed the favourite subjects of his light, sweet, and graceful songs, which were cast in the metres of the Æolic poets, but composed in the Ionic dialect. Beside fragments of such songs and of elegies, we have also a number of epigrams that bear his name. His songs were largely imitated, and of such imitations we have under his name a collection of about sixty love-songs and drinking-songs of very various (partly much later) dates, and of different degrees of merit.
Anacrĭsĭs. In Attic law, the preliminary examination of the parties to a suit.
Anaxagoras. A Greek philosopher, of Clazomĕnæ in Asia Minor, born about 500 b.c. Sprung from a noble family, but wishing to devote himself entirely to science, he gave up his property to his kinsmen, and removed to Athens, where he lived in intimacy with the most distinguished men, above all with Perĭclēs. Shortly before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War he was charged by the political opponents of Pericles with impiety, i.e. with denying the gods recognised by the State; and though acquitted through his friend's influence, he felt compelled to emigrate to Lampsăcus, where he died soon after, aged 72. He not only had the honour of giving philosophy a home at Athens, where it went on flourishing for quite a thousand years, but he was the first philosopher who, by the side of the material principle, introduced a spiritual, which gives the other life and form. He laid down his doctrine in a work On Nature in the Ionic dialect, of which only fragments are preserved. Like Parmĕnĭdēs, he denied the existence of birth or death; the two processes were rather to be described as a mingling and unmingling. The ultimate elements of combination are indivisible, imperishable primordia of infinite number, and differing in shape, colour, and taste, called by himself "seeds of things," and by later writers (from an expression of Aristotle) hŏmæŏmĕrē, i.e. particles of like kind with each other and with the whole that is made up of them. At first
