[Footnote 126: The Phrygian was Marsyas, who contended on the flute
against Apollo with his lyre. When the umpires decided in favour of the
god, he flayed Marsyas for his presumption.]
[Footnote 127: Tityus assaulted the mother of Apollo, and her son shot
the offender.]
[Footnote 128: Niobe, because she had seven sons and seven daughters,
thought herself superior to Latona, who had only one son, and one
daughter,--Apollo and Diana. These divinities, in revenge, destroyed the
fourteen children of Niobe.]
[Footnote 129: In the first edition:
He views his food, would taste, yet dares not try,
But dreads the mould'ring rock that trembles from on high.
Apollo intrigued with Coronis, the daughter of Phlegyas. Her enraged
father retaliated by firing the temple of Apollo, and was consigned for
his rebellion to perpetual torture in the infernal regions. His terror
lest the impending rock should crush him is a circumstance interpolated
by Pope from Virgil's description of the punishment of Pirithous and
Ixion, and the expression "mould'ring rock" is taken from Dryden's
translation of the passage, AEn. vi. 816:
High o'er their heads a mould'ring rock is placed
That promises a fall, and shakes at ev'ry blast.
The revolting nature of the food itself is the reason assigned by
Statius why Phlegyas forebore to partake of it, and preferred to endure
the pangs of hunger.]
[Footnote 130: After Apollo, in the later mythology, had been identified
with the sun, all the names personifying the sun, of which Titan was
one, became applicable to Apollo.]
[Footnote 131: Diodorus maintained that the Osiris of the Egyptians was
their god of the sun, and Statius has adopted this erroneous view.
According to the statement of Herodotus, Osiris answered to the Grecian
Bacchus, and there is little doubt that the old historian was right.]
[Footnote 132: Mithras was the Persian god of the sun. He was worshipped
in caves, or, as Pope has it, in "hollow rocks," because the spherical
form of the cave symbolised the universe, of which Mithras was the
maker. The "blaze of light which adorns his head" in Pope's version,
makes no part of the description in the original. The final line is
explained by several ancient works of art, in which a man, wearing a
Phrygian cap, is depicted cutting the throat of a bull he has flung to
the ground. The man is said by an old scholiast on Statius to typify the
sun, the bull the moon, and the intention, he states, is to represent
the superiority of the sun over the moon. Statius speaks of the bull as
indignant at being compelled to follow Mithras,--an idea which suits ill
with the tranquil aspect of the moon as it floats through the heavens.]