[Sidenote: 164 E] The stream of ignorance and of misconception about the
Gods passed, from the very first, into two channels; one branch flowed,
as it were, over stony places, and has produced atheism in hard
characters, the other over moist ground, and this has produced
superstition in the tender ones. Now any error of judgement, especially
on such matters, is a vicious thing, but if passion be added it is more
vicious. For all passion is ‘deceit accompanied by inflammation’; and as
dislocations are more [Sidenote: F] serious when there is also a wound,
so are distortions of the soul when there is passion. A man thinks that
atoms and a void are the first principles of the universe; the
conception is a false one, but does not produce ulceration or spasm, or
tormenting pain. Another conceives of wealth as the greatest [Sidenote:
165] good; this falsity has poison in it, preys on his soul, deranges
it, allows him no sleep, fills him with stinging torments, thrusts him
down steep places, strangles him, takes away all confidence of speech.
Again, some think that virtue is a corporeal thing, and vice also; this
is a gross piece of ignorance perhaps, but not worthy of lament or
groans. But where there are such judgements and conceptions as these:
_Alas, poor Virtue! so thou art but words,
And as a thing I was pursuing thee_[263]—
dropping, he means, the injustice which makes money, and the
intemperance which is parent of all pleasure—, these it is worth our
while to pity and to resent also, because their presence [Sidenote: B]
in the soul breeds diseases and passions in numbers, very worms and
vermin.
II. And so it is with the subjects of our present discourse. Atheism,
which is a faulty judgement that there is nothing blessed or
imperishable, seems to work round through disbelief in the Divine to
actual apathy; its object in not acknowledging Gods is that it may not
fear them. Superstition is shown by its very name to be a state of
opinion charged with emotion and productive of such fear as debases and
crushes the man; he thinks that there are Gods, but that they are
[Sidenote: C] grievous and hurtful. The atheist appears to be unmoved at
the mention of the Divine; the superstitious is moved, but in a wrong
and perverted sense. Ignorance has produced in the one disbelief of the
power which is helping him, in the other a superadded idea that it is
hurting. Hence atheism is theory gone wrong, superstition is ingrained
feeling, the outcome of false theory.
III. Now all diseases and affections of the soul are discreditable, but
there is in some of them a gaiety, a loftiness, a distinction, which
come of a light heart; we may say that none of these is wanting in a
strong active impulse. Only there is this common charge to be laid
against every such affection, that by stress of the active impulse it
forces and [Sidenote: D] constrains the reason. Fear alone, as deficient
in daring as it is in reason, keeps the irrational part inoperative,
without resource or shift. Hence it has been called by two names,
‘Deima’ and ‘Tarbos’,[264] because it at once constricts and vexes the
soul. But of all fears that which comes of superstition is most
inoperative, and most resourceless. The man who never sails fears not
the sea, nor the non-combatant, war; the home-keeping man fears no
robbers, the poor no informers, the plain citizen no envy, the dweller
among the Gauls[265] no earthquake, among the Ethiopians no thunder. The
man who fears the Gods fears everything, land, sea; air, sky; darkness,
light; sound, silence; to dream, to wake. Slaves forget [Sidenote: E]
their masters while they sleep, sleep eases the prisoner’s chain; angry
wounds, ulcers that raven and prey upon the flesh, and agonizing pains,
all stand aloof from men that sleep:
_Dear soothing sleep, that com’st to succour pains,
How sweet is thy approach in this my need._[266]
Superstition does not allow a man to say this; she alone has no truce
with sleep, and suffers not the soul to breathe awhile, and [Sidenote:
F] take courage, and thrust away its bitter heavy thoughts about the
God. The sleep of the superstitious is a land of the ungodly, where
blood-curdling visions, and monstrous whirling phantoms, and sure
penalties are awake; the unhappy soul is hunted by dreams out of every
spell of sleep it has, lashed and punished by itself, as though by some
other, and receives injunctions horrible and revolting. Then when they
have risen out of sleep, they do not scorn it all, or laugh it down, or
perceive that none of the things which vexed them was real, but, escaped
from the shadow of an illusion with no harm in it, they fall upon a
vision of the day and deceive themselves outright, and spend [Sidenote:
166] money to vex their souls, meeting with quacks and charlatans who
tell them:
_If nightly vision fright thy sleep,
Or hags their hellish revel keep_,[267]
call in the wise woman, and take a dip into the sea, then sit on the
ground, and remain so a whole day.
_Ah! Greeks, what ills outlandish have ye found_,[268]
namely, by superstition—dabbling in mud, plunges into filth, keepings of
Sabbaths, falling on the face, foul attitudes, weird prostrations. Those
who were concerned to keep music regular used to enjoin on singers to
the harp to sing ‘with [Sidenote: B] mouth aright’. But we require that
men should pray to the gods with mouth aright and just; not to consider
whether the tongue of the victim be clean and correct, while they
distort their own and foul it with absurd outlandish words and phrases,
and transgress against the divine rule of piety as our fathers knew it.
The man in the comedy has a passage which puts it happily to those who
plate their bedsteads with gold and silver:
_The one free gift of gods to mortals, sleep,
Why make it for thyself a costly boon?_[269]
[Sidenote: C] So we may say to the superstitious man, that the Gods gave
sleep for oblivion of troubles and a respite from them; why make it for
thyself a cell of punishment, a chamber of abiding torment, whence the
miserable soul cannot run away unto any other sleep? Heraclitus[270]
says that ‘waking men have one world common to all, but in sleep each
betakes him to a world of his own.’ The superstitious has no world, no,
not a common world, since neither while he is awake does he enjoy his
reason, nor when he sleeps is he set free from his tormentor; reason
ever drowses, and fear is ever awake; there is no escape, nor change of
place.
IV. Polycrates was a terrible tyrant in Samos, Periander [Sidenote: D]
at Corinth, yet no one continued to fear them when he had removed to a
free and democratic state. But when a man fears the sovereignty of the
Gods as a grim inexorable tyranny, whither shall he migrate, where find
exile, what sort of land can he find where no Gods are, or of sea? Into
what portion of the world wilt thou creep and hide thyself, and believe,
thou miserable creature, that thou hast escaped from God? There is a law
which allows even slaves, if they have despaired of liberty, to petition
to be sold, and so change to a milder master. Superstition allows no
exchange of Gods, nor is it possible to find a God who shall not be
terrible to him who fears those of his country and his clan, who shivers
at the ‘Preservers’ and trembles in alarm before the beneficent beings
from whom we ask wealth, plenty, peace, concord, a successful [Sidenote:
E] issue for our best of words and works. And then these men reckon
slavery a misfortune, and say:
_A dire mishap it is, for man or maid,
To pass to service of some ill-starred lord._[271]
Yet how much more dire is it, think you, for them to pass to lords from
whom is no flight, or running away, no shifting. The slave has an altar
to flee unto, even for robbers many temples are inviolable, and
fugitives in war, if they lay hold of shrine or temple, take courage.
The superstitious shudders in alarm at those very things beyond all
others, wherein those who fear the worst find hope. Never drag the
superstitious man from temples; within them is punishment and
retribution [Sidenote: F] for him. Why more words? ‘Death is the limit
of life to all mankind.’[272] Yes, but even death is no limit to
superstition; superstition crosses the boundaries to the other side, and
makes fear endure longer than life. It attaches to death the
apprehension of undying ills, and when it ceases from troubles, it
[Sidenote: 167] thinks to enter upon troubles which never cease. Gates
are opened for it into a very depth of Hades, rivers of fire and streams
which flow out of Styx mingle their floods; darkness itself is spread
with phantoms manifold, obtruding cruel visions and pitiful voices;
there are judges and tormentors, and chasms and abysses which teem with
myriad evil things. Thus has superstition, that God-banned fear of Gods,
made that inevitable to itself by anticipation, of which it had escaped
the suffering in act.[273]
V. None of these horrors attaches to atheism. Yet its ignorance is
distressing; it is a great misfortune to a soul [Sidenote: B] to see so
wrong and grope so blindly about such great matters, because the light
is extinguished of the brightest and most availing out of many eyes when
the perception of God is lost. But to the opinion now before us there
does attach from the very first, as we have already said, an emotional
element, cankering, perturbing, and slavish. Plato[274] says that music,
whose work it is to make men’s lives harmonious and rhythmical, was
given to them by Gods, not for wanton tickling of the ears, but to clear
the revolutions and harmonies of the soul from the disturbing impulses
which rove within the body, such as most often run riot, where the Muse
is not or the Grace, [Sidenote: C] and do violence and mar the tune; to
bring them to order, to roll them smooth, to lead them aright, and
settle them.
_But they whom Zeus not loves_ (says Pindar)[275]
_Turn to the sound a dim disdainful ear
What time the Muses’ voice they hear._
Yes, they grow savage and rebellious, as the tigers, they say, are
maddened and troubled at the sound of the drum, and at last tear
themselves to pieces. A lesser evil then it is for those who, through
deafness and a dulled ear, are apathetic and insensible to music.
Tiresias was unfortunate that he could not see his children and familiar
friends, but far worse was the [Sidenote: D] case of Athamas and of
Agave, who saw them as lions and stags. Better, I think, it was for
Hercules in his madness not to see his sons, or feel their presence,
than to treat his dearest ones as enemies.
VI. What then? Comparing the feeling of the atheists with that of the
superstitious, do we not find a similar difference? The former see no
Gods at all, the latter think that they exist as evil beings. The former
neglect them, the latter imagine that to be terrible which is kind, that
tyrannical which is fatherly, loving care to be injury, the
‘unapproachable’[276] to be savage and brutal. Then, trusting to
coppersmiths, or marble workers, or modellers in wax, they fashion the
forms of the Gods in human shape, and these they mould and frame and
worship; while [Sidenote: E] they despise philosophers and men who know
life, if they point them to the majesty of God consisting with goodness,
and magnanimity, and patience, and solicitude. Thus in the former the
result is insensibility and want of belief in all that is fair and
helpful, in the latter confusion and fear in the presence of help. In a
word, atheism is an apathy for the Divine which fails to perceive the
good, superstition is an excess of feeling which suspects that the good
is evil. They fear the Gods, and they flee to the Gods for refuge; they
flatter and they revile them; they invoke and they censure them. It is
man’s common lot not to succeed always or in all. [Sidenote: F]
_They, from sickness free and age,
Quit of toils, the deep-voiced rage
Of Acheron for ay have left behind_,
as Pindar[277] says; but human sufferings and doings flow in a mingled
stream of vicissitude, now this way, now that.
VII. Now look with me at the atheist, first when things cross his
wishes, and consider his attitude. If he is a decent, quiet person, he
takes what comes in silence, and provides his own means of succour and
consolation. If he be impatient and querulous, he directs all his
complainings against Fortune, and [Sidenote: 168] the way things happen;
he cries out that nothing goes by justice or as Providence ordains, all
is confused and jumbled up; the tangled web of human life is unpicked.
Not so the superstitious: if the ill which has befallen him be the
veriest trifle, still he sits down and builds on to his annoyance a pile
of troubles, grievous and great and inextricable, heaping up for himself
fears, dreads, suspicions, worries, a victim to every sort of groaning
and lamentation; for he blames not man, nor fortune, nor [Sidenote: B]
occasion, nor himself, but for all the God. From that quarter comes
pouring upon him, he says, a Heaven-sent stream of woe; he is punished
thus by the Gods not because he is unfortunate, but because he is
specially hated by them, all that he suffers is his own proper deserts.
Then the atheist, when he is sick, reckons up his own surfeitings,
carouses, irregularities in diet, or over-fatigues, or unaccustomed
changes of climate or place. Or, again, if he have met with political
reverses, become unpopular or discredited in high quarters, he seeks for
the cause in himself or his party.
_Where my transgression? or what have I done? what duty
omitted?_[278]
But to the superstitious every infirmity of his body, every [Sidenote:
C] loss of money, any death of a child, foul weather and failures in
politics, are reckoned for blows from the God and assaults of the fiend.
Hence he does not even take courage to help himself, to get rid of the
trouble, or to remedy it, or make resistance, lest he should seem to be
fighting the Gods, and resisting when punished. So the doctor is thrust
out of the sick man’s chamber, and the mourner’s door is closed against
the sage who comes to comfort and advise. ‘Man,’ he says, ‘let me take
my punishment, as the miscreant that I am, an accursed [Sidenote: D]
object of hate to Gods and daemons.’ It is open to a man who has no
conviction that there are Gods, when suffering from some great grief and
trouble, to wipe away a tear, to cut his hair, to put off his mourning.
How are you going to address the superstitious in like case, wherein to
bring him help? He sits outside, clothed in sackcloth, or with filthy
rags hanging about him, as often as not rolling naked in the mud, while
he recites errors and misdoings of his own, how he ate this, or drank
that, or walked on a road which the spirit did not allow. At the very
best, if he have taken superstition in a mild form, he sits in the house
fumigating and purifying himself. The old women ‘make a peg of him’, as
Bion says, and on it they hang—whatever [Sidenote: E] they choose to
bring!
VIII. They say that Tiribazus, when arrested by the Persians, drew his
scimitar, being a powerful man, and fought for his life; then, when they
loudly protested that the arrest was by the king’s orders, at once
dropped his point, and held out his hands to be tied. Is not this just
what happens in the case before us? Other men make a fight against
mischances and thrust all aside, that they may devise ways of escape and
evade what is unwelcome to themselves. But the superstitious man listens
to nobody, and addresses himself thus: ‘Poor wretch, [Sidenote: F] thy
sufferings come from Providence, and by the order of the God.’ So he
flings away all hope, gives himself up, flies, obstructs those who try
to help him. Many tolerable troubles are made deadly by various
superstitions. Midas[279] of old, as we are to believe, dispirited and
distressed by certain dreams, was so miserable that he sought a
voluntary death by drinking bulls’ blood. Aristodemus, king of the
Messenians, during the war with the Lacedaemonians, when dogs were
howling like wolves, and rye grass sprouting around his ancestral
hearth, in utter despair at the extinction of all his hopes, cut his own
throat. Perhaps it would have been better for Nicias[280], the Athenian
[Sidenote: 169] general, to find the same release from superstition as
Midas or Aristodemus, and not, in his terror of the shadow when the moon
was eclipsed, to sit still under blockade, and afterwards, when forty
thousand had been slaughtered or taken alive, to be taken prisoner and
die ingloriously. For there is nothing so terrible when the earth blocks
the way, or when its shadow meets the moon in due cycle of revolutions;
what is terrible is that a man should plunge[281] into the darkness of
superstition, [Sidenote: B] and that its dark shadow should confound a
man’s reason and make it blind in matters where reason is most needed.
_Glaucus, see! the waves already from the depth of ocean stirred,
And a cloud is piling upwards, right above the Gyrean point,
Certain presage of foul weather._[282]
When the helmsman sees this, he prays that he may escape out of the
peril, and calls on the Gods that save; but, while he prays, his hand is
on the tiller, and he lowers the yard-arm,
_Furls his mainsail, and from billows black as Erebus he
flees._[283]
Hesiod[284] tells the farmer to pray to Zeus below the earth and holy
Artemis before he ploughs or sows, but to hold on to [Sidenote: C] the
plough-handle as he prays. Homer[285] tells us that Ajax, before meeting
Hector in single combat, commanded the Greeks to pray for him to the
Gods; then, while they were praying, he was arming. Agamemnon, when he
had given orders to the fighters:
_Let each his spear set, and prepare his shield_,
then begs of Zeus:
_Grant that this hand make Priam’s halls a heap._[286]
For God is the hope of valour, not the subterfuge of cowardice. The
Jews, on the other hand, because it was a sabbath, sat on in uncleansed
clothes, while their enemies planted their ladders and took the walls,
never rising to their feet, as though entangled in the one vast draw-net
of their superstition.[287]
IX. Such then is superstition in disagreeable matters and on [Sidenote:
D] what we call critical occasions, but it has no advantage, even in
what is more pleasant, over atheism. Nothing is more pleasant to men
than feasts, temple banquets, initiations, orgies, prayers to the Gods,
and solemn supplications. See the atheist there, laughing in a wild
sardonic peal at the proceedings, probably with a quiet aside to his
intimates, that those who think this all done for the Gods are crazed
and possessed; but that is the worst that can be said of him. The
superstitious man wants to be cheerful and enjoy himself, but he cannot.
_Rife too the city is with heavy reek
Of victims slain, and rife with divers cries,
The wail for healing and the moan for death._[288]
[Sidenote: E] So is the soul of the superstitious. With the crown on his
head he grows pale; while he sacrifices he shudders; he prays with a
quivering voice and offers incense with hands that shake; he shows all
through that Pythagoras[289] talks nonsense when he says: ‘We reach our
best when we draw near to the Gods.’ For it is then that the
superstitious are at their miserable worst; the halls and temples of the
Gods which they approach are for them dens of bears, lairs of serpents,
caverns of monsters of the sea!
X. Hence it comes upon me as a surprise when men say that [Sidenote: F]
atheism is impiety, but that superstition is not. Yet Anaxagoras had to
answer a charge of impiety for saying that the sun is a stone, whereas
no one has called the Cimmerians impious for thinking that there is no
sun at all. What do you say? Is the man who recognizes no Gods a profane
person, and does not he, who takes them for such beings as the
superstitious think, hold a far more profane creed? I know that I would
rather men said about me that there is not, and never has come
[Sidenote: 170] into existence, a Plutarch, than that there is a man
Plutarch unstable, shifty, readily provoked, revengeful over accidents,
aggrieved at trifles; who, if you leave him out of your supper party, if
you are busy and do not come to the door, if you pass him without a
greeting, will cling to your flesh like a leech and gnaw it, or will
catch your child, and thrash him to pieces, or will turn some beast, if
he keep one, into your crops, and ruin the harvest. When Timotheus was
singing of Artemis at Athens in the words:
_Wanderer, frenzied one, wild and inebriate!_
[Sidenote: B] Cinesias the composer rose from his place with ‘Such a
daughter be thine!’ Yet the like of this, and worse things too, do the
superstitious hold about Artemis:
_She would burn a hanging woman,
She a mother in her pangs;
She would bring pollution to you
From the chamber of a corpse.
In the crossways swoop upon you,
Fix on you a murderer’s shame._[290]
Nor will their views about Apollo, or Hera, or Aphrodite be a whit more
decent, they fear and tremble at them all. Yet what was there in Niobe’s
blasphemy about Latona, compared to what [Sidenote: C] superstition has
persuaded fools to believe about that goddess, how she felt herself
insulted and actually shot down the poor woman’s
_Six daughters, beauteous all, six blooming sons_,[291]
so greedy of calamities for another woman, so implacable! For if the
Goddess had really been full of wrath and resentment of wickedness, and
felt aggrieved at insults to herself, disposed to resent, rather than to
smile at human folly and ignorance, why then she ought to have shot down
those who lyingly imputed to her such savage bitterness, in speech or
books. Certainly we denounce the bitterness of Hecuba as savage and
beastly: [Sidenote: D]
_In whose mid-liver I my teeth would set,
And cling and gnaw._[292]
But of the Syrian Goddess superstitious men believe that if one eats
sprats or anchovies, she munches his shins, fills his body with sores,
and rots his liver.[293]
XI. How then? Is it impious to say bad things about the Gods, but not
impious to think them? Or is it the thought of the blasphemer which
makes his voice amiss? We men scout abusive language as the outward sign
of ill-feeling. We reckon for enemies those who speak ill of us because
we think that they also think ill. Now you see the sort of things which
the superstitious think about the Gods; they take them to be capricious,
[Sidenote: E] faithless, shifty, revengeful, cruel, vexed about trifles,
all reasons why the superstitious must perforce hate and fear the Gods.
Of course he does, when he thinks that they have been, and will be
again, authors of his greatest ills. But if he hates and fears the Gods,
he is their enemy. Yet he worships, and sacrifices, and sits before
their shrines. And no wonder; men salute tyrants also, and court them,
and set up their figures in gold. But ‘in silence’ they hate them,
‘wagging the head’.[294] Hermolaus remained Alexander’s courtier,
Pausanias served on Philip’s [Sidenote: F] bodyguard, Chaereas on that
of Caligula; but each of them would say while he attended on his master
_Sure thou shouldst rue it if my arm were strong._[295]
The atheist thinks there are no Gods, the superstitious wishes that
there were none; he believes against his will, for he fears to
disbelieve. And yet, as Tantalus would gladly slip from beneath the
stone swinging over his head, so is it with the superstitious and his
fear, a pressure no less sore. He would reckon the atheist’s mood a
blessed one, for there is freedom in it. As things are, the atheist is
quite clear of superstition; the superstitious is at heart an atheist,
only too weak to believe what he wishes to believe about the Gods.
[Sidenote: 171] XII. Again, the atheist is in no sense responsible for
superstition, whereas superstition provides atheism with a principle
which brings it into being, and then an apology for its existence which
is neither true nor honest, but is in a sense colourable. For it is not
because they find anything to blame in sky, or stars, or seasons, or
cycles of the moon, or movements of the sun around the earth, ‘those
artificers of day and night’,[296] or espy confusion and disorder in the
breeding of animals or the increase of fruits, that they condemn the
universe to godlessness. No! Superstition and its ridiculous doings and
emotions, words, [Sidenote: B] gestures, juggleries, sorceries,
coursings around and beatings of cymbals, purifications which are
impure, and cleansings which are filthy, weird illegal punishments and
degradations at temples—these give certain persons a pretext for saying
that better no Gods than Gods, if Gods accept such things and take
pleasure in them, Gods so violent, so petty, so sore about trifles.
XIII. Were it not better then for those Gauls[297] and Scythians to have
had no notion at all about Gods, neither imagination nor record of them,
than to think that there are Gods who take [Sidenote: C] pleasure in the
blood of slaughtered men and who accept that as the supreme form of
solemn sacrifice? What? Were it not an advantage to the Carthaginians to
have had a Critias or a Diagoras for their first lawgiver and to
recognize neither God nor daemon, than to offer such sacrifices as they
did offer to Cronus?[298] It was not the case which Empedocles puts
against those who sacrifice animals:
_Father, uplifting his son, not marking the change of the body,
Prays as he takes the dear life, poor fool._
Knowing and recognizing their own children, they used to sacrifice
them—nay, the childless would buy children from poor parents and cut
their throats as though they were lambs or chickens—, and the mother
would stand by dry-eyed and with [Sidenote: D] never a groan. If she
should groan or weep, she would have to lose the merit, and the child
was sacrificed all the same, while the whole space in front of the
shrine was filled with the rattle of drums and the din of fifes, in
order that the sound of the wailing might be drowned. Suppose that
Typhons, say, or Giants, had turned out the Gods and were our rulers, in
what sacrifices but these would they delight, or what other solemnities
would they require? Amestris,[299] wife of Xerxes, buried twelve men
alive, as her own offering to Hades, who, as Plato[300] tells us, is
[Sidenote: E] kind and wise and detains souls by persuasion and reason,
and so has been named ‘Hades’. Xenophanes,[301] the natural philosopher,
when he saw the Egyptians beating their breasts and wailing at their
feasts, gave them a home lesson: ‘If these are Gods, do not mourn them;
if men, why sacrifice to them?
XIV. There is no sort of disease so capricious and so varied in
emotions, such a medley of opposite, or rather conflicting, opinions, as
is that of superstition. We must flee from it then, but as safety and
advantage point, not like men who run for their lives from robbers or
beasts or fire, never looking round or using their heads, and plunge
into pathless wastes with pits and [Sidenote: F] precipices. For that is
how some flee from superstition and plunge into a rough and flinty
atheism, overleaping Piety seated in the middle space.
Footnote 262:
Polybius (6, 56) points to ‘Deisidaimonia’ as the force which has held
the Roman Commonwealth together, and kept the Romans honest.
Footnote 263:
See Nauck, p. 910 (Hercules speaks).
Footnote 264:
δεῖμα—δέω: τάρβος—ταράσσω.
Footnote 265:
Cf. Aristot. _Eth. Nic._ 3, 7.
Footnote 266:
Eur. _Or._ 211-12.
Footnote 267:
Nauck, p. 910, Fragm. 375 (probably from Aeschylus).
Footnote 268:
Eur. _Tro._ 759.
Footnote 269:
Meineke 4, p. 670.
Footnote 270:
Fr. 95.
Footnote 271:
Nauck, Fragm. adespota, 376.
Footnote 272:
Dem. _de Cor._, s. 97.
Footnote 273:
A difficult passage. I follow W.’s suggested restoration.
Footnote 274:
_Tim._ 47 C, &c.
Footnote 275:
_Pyth._ 1, 25.
Footnote 276:
Or perhaps ‘that which knows no wrath’.
Footnote 277:
Fr. 143, quoted twice elsewhere by Plutarch.
Footnote 278:
Pythag. _Carm. Aur._ 42.
Footnote 279:
See _Life of T. Q. Flamin._ c. 20.
Footnote 280:
_Life of Nicias_, c. 23. Thuc. 7, 50, 86.
Footnote 281:
i.e. as the moon plunges into the shadow of the earth. See p. 269.
Footnote 282:
Archilochus, Fr. 54, Bergk.
Footnote 283:
Nauck, Fragm. adespota, 377.
Footnote 284:
_W. and D._ 465 foll.
Footnote 285:
_Il._ 7, 193 foll.
Footnote 286:
_Il._ 2, 382, 414.
Footnote 287: