“Hyperborean bliss.”
“Fair birds have fair feathers;” so the Greeks, who had sent no voyages of discovery to the Arctic seas, were free, without contradiction, to place Utopia at the North Pole. (See Herodot. III. 106, quoted by Nitzsh in his comments on the Phœacians, Od. VII. 201-6.) Schütz quotes Pomp. Mela. III. 5—“diutius quam ulli mortalium et beatius vivunt.” Some of these Hyperboreans drank nothing but milk (γαλακτοφάγοι, Hom. Il. XIII. 6), and from this practice the alleged purity of their manners, according to certain modern theories of dietetics, may have arisen.
“O Jove, O Jove! that sendest from below.”
“Zeus, though his proper region is above, yet, by reason of his perfect concord with his brother in the moral government of the world, exercises authority also in Hades”—Kl. This is one of the many instances to be found in Homer and Æschylus of the Monotheistic principle of an enlightened Deism controlling and overruling the apparent confusion and anarchy of Polytheism.
“Ye that honoured reign below.”
What the true reading of the corrupt original here is, no one can know; but it may be some satisfaction to the student to note that the different readings of all the emendators bring out substantially the same sense. I give the various translations as follows:—
You, whose dreaded power
The infernal realms revere, ye Furies, hear me!—Pot.