[413]. The saying is probably one of the widespread proverbs which imply parables. The idea is obviously that with which we are familiar in the Gospel “grain of mustard seed.” Here, as in the “kicking against the pricks” of Acts ix. 5, xxvi. 14, and Agam. v. 1604, we are carried back to a period which lies beyond the range of history as that in which men took note of the analogies and embodied them in forms like this.
[414]. So in the Odyssey (xix. 228), Odysseus appears as wearing a woollen cloak, on which are embroidered the figures of a fawn and a dog.
[415]. An obvious reproduction of the words of Andromache (Il. vi. 429).
[416]. The words seem to imply that burning alive was known among the Greeks as a punishment for the most atrocious crimes. The “oozing pitch,” if we adopt that rendering, apparently describes something like the “tunica molesta” of Juvenal. (Sat. viii. 235.) Hesychios (s. v. Κωνῆσαι) mentions the practice as alluded to in a lost play of Æschylos.
[417]. The words are both doubtful and obscure. Taking the reading which I have adopted, they seem to mean that while men in general had means of propitiating the Erinnyes and other Powers for the guilt of unavenged bloodshed, Orestes and Electra had no such way of escape open to them. If they, the next of kin, failed to do their work, they would be exposed to the full storm of wrath. But a conjectural emendation of one word gives us,
“For making known to men the earth-born ills
That come from wrathful Powers.”
[418]. Either that old age would come prematurely, or that the hair itself would share the leprous whiteness of the flesh.
[419]. The words, as taken in the text, refer to Orestes seeing even in sleep the spectral forms of the Erinnyes. By some editors the verse is placed after v. 276, and the lines then read thus:—
“And that he calls fresh onsets of the Erinnyes