“Memory, handmaid true
And mother of the Muses.”
Footnote 167:
In Greece, as throughout the East, the ox was used for all
agricultural labours, the horse by the noble and the rich, either in
war chariots, or stately processions, or in chariot races in the great
games.
Footnote 168:
Compare with this the account of the inventions of Palamedes in
Sophocles, _Fragm._ 379.
Footnote 169:
Here we can recognise the knowledge of one who had studied in the
schools of Pythagoras, or had at any rate picked up their terminology.
A more immediate connexion may perhaps be traced with the influence of
Epimenides, who was said to have spent many years in searching out the
healing virtues of plants, and to have written books about them.
Footnote 170:
The lines that follow form almost a manual of the art of divination as
then practised. The “ominous sounds” include chance words, strange
cries, any unexpected utterance that connected itself with men's fears
for the future. The flights of birds were watched by the diviner as he
faced the north, and so the region on the right hand was that of the
sunrise, light, blessedness; on the left there were darkness and gloom
and death.
Footnote 171:
So Io was represented, we are told, by Greek sculptors (Herod. ii.
41), as Isis was by those of Egypt. The points of contact between the
myth of Io and that of Prometheus, as adopted, or perhaps developed,
by Æschylos are—(1) that from her the destined deliverer of the
chained Titan is to come; (2) that both were suffering from the
cruelty of Zeus; (3) that the wanderings of Io gave scope for the wild
tales of far countries on which the imagination of the Athenians fed
greedily. But, as the _Suppliants_ may serve to show, the story itself
had a strange fascination for him. In the birth of Epaphos, and Io's
release from her frenzy, he saw, it may be, a reconciliation of what
had seemed hard to reconcile, a solution of the problems of the world,
like in kind to that which was shadowed forth in the lost _Prometheus
Unbound_.
Footnote 172:
Argos had been slain by Hermes, and his eyes transferred by Hera to
the tail of the peacock, and that bird was henceforth sacred to her.
Footnote 173:
Inachos the father of Io (identified with the Argive river of the same
name), was, like all rivers, a son of Okeanos, and therefore brother
to the nymphs who had come to see Prometheus.
Footnote 174:
The words used have an almost technical meaning as applied to animals
that were consecrated to the service of a God, and set free to wander
where they liked. The fate of Io, as at once devoted to Zeus and
animalised in form, was thus shadowed forth in the very language of
the Oracle.
Footnote 175:
Lerna was the lake near the mouth of the Inachos, close to the sea.
Kerchneia may perhaps be identified with the Kenchreæ, the haven of
Korinth in later geographies.
Footnote 176:
The wicker huts used by Skythian or Thrakian nomads (the Calmucks of
modern geographers) are described by Herodotos (iv. 46) and are still
in use.
Footnote 177:
_Sc._, the N.E. boundary of the Euxine, where spurs of the Caucasos
ridge approach the sea.
Footnote 178:
The Chalybes are placed by geographers to the south of Colchis. The
description of the text indicates a locality farther to the north.
Footnote 179:
Probably the Araxes, which the Greeks would connect with a word
conveying the idea of a torrent dashing on the rocks. The description
seems to imply a river flowing into the Euxine from the Caucasos, and
the condition is fulfilled by the Hypanis or _Kouban_.
Footnote 180:
When the Amazons appear in contact with Greek history, they are found
in Thrace. But they had come from the coast of Pontos, and near the
mouth of the Thermodon (_Thermeh_). The words of Prometheus point to
yet earlier migrations from the East.
Footnote 181:
Here, as in Soph. _Antig._ (970) the name Salmydessos represents the
rockbound, havenless coast from the promontory of Thynias to the
entrance of the Bosporos, which had given to the Black Sea its earlier
name of Axenos, the “inhospitable.”
Footnote 182:
The track is here in some confusion. From the Amazons south of the
Caucasos, Io is to find her way to the Tauric Chersonese (the Crimea)
and the Kimmerian Bosporos, which flows into the Sea of Azov, and so
to return to Asia.
Footnote 183:
Here, as in a hundred other instances, a false etymology has become
the parent of a myth. The name Bosporos is probably Asiatic not Greek,
and has an entirely different signification.
Footnote 184:
The lines refer to the story that Zeus loved Thetis the daughter of
Nereus, and followed her to Caucasos, but abstained from marriage with
her because Prometheus warned him that the child born of that union
should overthrow his father. Here the future is used of what was still
contingent only. In the lost play of the Trilogy the myth was possibly
brought to its conclusion and connected with the release of
Prometheus.
Footnote 185:
Heracles, whose genealogy was traced through Alcmena, Perseus, Danae,
Danaos and seven other names, to Epaphos and Io.
Footnote 186:
Probably the Kimmerian Bosporos. The Tanais or Phasis has, however,
been conjectured.
Footnote 187:
The history of the passage in brackets is curious enough to call for a
note. They are not in any extant MS., but they are found in a passage
quoted by Galen (v. p. 454), as from the _Prometheus Bound_, and are
inserted here by Mr. Paley.
Footnote 188:
Kisthene belongs to the geography of legend, lying somewhere on the
shore of the great ocean-river in Lybia or Æthiopia, at the end of the
world, a great mountain in the far West, beyond the Hesperides, the
dwelling-place, as here, of the Gorgons, the daughters of Phorkys.
Those first-named are the Graiæ.
Footnote 189:
Here, like the “wingèd hound” of v. 1043, for the eagles that are the
messengers of Zeus.
Footnote 190:
We are carried back again from the fabled West to the fabled East. The
Arimaspians, with one eye, and the Grypes or Gryphons (the griffins of
mediæval heraldry), quadrupeds with the wings and beaks of eagles,
were placed by most writers (Herod. iv. 13, 27) in the north of
Europe, in or beyond the _terra incognita_ of Skythia. The mention of
the “ford of Pluto” and Æthiopia, however, may possibly imply (if we
identify it, as Mr. Paley does, with the Tartessos of Spain, or
Bœtis—_Guadalquivir_) that Æschylos followed another legend which
placed them in the West. There is possibly a _paronomasia_ between
Pluto, the God of Hades, and Plutos, the ideal God of riches.
Footnote 191:
The name was applied by later writers (Quintus Curtius, iv. 7, 22;
Lucretius, vi. 848) to the fountain in the temple of Jupiter Ammon in
the great Oasis. The “river Æthiops” may be purely imaginary, but it
may also suggest the possibility of some vague knowledge of the Niger,
or more probably of the Nile itself in the upper regions of its
course. The “Bybline hills” carry the name Byblos, which we only read
of as belonging to a town in the Delta, to the Second Cataract.
Footnote 192:
Comp. Sophocles, _Trachin._, v. 1168.
Footnote 193:
The Adriatic or Ionian Gulf.
Footnote 194:
In the _Suppliants_, Zeus is said to have soothed her, and restored
her to her human consciousness by his “divine breathings.” The thought
underlying the legend may be taken either as a distortion of some
primitive tradition, or as one of the “unconscious prophecies” of
heathenism. The deliverer is not to be born after the common manner of
men, and is to have a divine as well as a human parentage.
Footnote 195:
See the argument of the _Suppliants_, who, as the daughters of Danaos,
descended from Epaphos, are here referred to. The passage is
noticeable as showing that the theme of that tragedy was already
present to the poet's thoughts.
Footnote 196:
Argos. So in the _Suppliants_, Pelasgos is the mythical king of the
Apian land who receives them.
Footnote 197:
Hypermnæstra, who spared Lynceus, and by him became the mother of Abas
and a line of Argive kings.
Footnote 198:
Heracles, who came to Caucasos, and with his arrows slew the eagle
that devoured Prometheus.
Footnote 199:
The word is simply an interjection of pain, but one so characteristic
that I have thought it better to reproduce it than to give any English
equivalent.
Footnote 200:
The maxim, “Marry with a woman thine equal,” was ascribed to Pittacos.
Footnote 201:
The Euhemerism of later scholiasts derived the name from a king
Adrastos, who was said to have been the first to build a temple to
Nemesis, and so the power thus worshipped was called after his name. A
better etymology leads us to see in it the idea of the “inevitable”
law of retribution working unseen by men, and independently even of
the arbitrary will of the Gods, and bringing destruction upon the
proud and haughty.
Footnote 202:
Comp. _Agam._ 162-6.
Footnote 203:
Either a mere epithet of intensity, as in our “thrice blest,” or
rising from the supposed fact that every third wave was larger and
more impetuous than the others, like _fluctus decumanus_ of the
Latins, or from the sequence of three great waves which some have
noted as a common phenomenon in storms.
Footnote 204:
Here again we have a strange shadowing forth of the mystery of
Atonement, and what we have learnt to call “vicarious” satisfaction.
In the later legend, Cheiron, suffering from the agony of his wounds,
resigns his immortality, and submits to die in place of the
ever-living death to which Prometheus was doomed.
Footnote 205:
It is noticeable that both Æschylos and Sophocles have left us
tragedies which end in a thunderstorm as an element of effect. But the
contrast between the _Prometheus_ and the _Œdipus at Colonos_ as to
the impression left in the one case of serene reconciliation, and in
the other of violent antagonism, is hardly less striking than the
resemblance in the outward phenomena which are common to the two.