νάρθηξ—“still used for this purpose in Cyprus, where the reed still retains the old Greek name”—Welcker, Tril. p. 8, who quotes Walpole’s Memoirs relative to Turkey, p. 284, and Tournefort, Letter 6. I recollect at school smoking a bit of bamboo cane for a cigar.
“. . . Ah me! ah me! who comes?”
The increased agitation of mind is here expressed in the original by the abandonment of the Iambic verse, and the adoption of the Bacchic—τίς ἀχὼ, etc., which speedily passes into the anapæst, as imitated by my Trochees. Milton was so steeped in Greek, that I think he must have had this passage in his mind when he wrote the lines of Samson Agonistes, v. 110, beginning “But who are these?” Altogether, the Samson is, in its general tone and character, quite a sort of Jewish Prometheus.
“Daughters of prolific Tethys.”
The ancient sea-goddess, sister and wife of Oceanus, daughter of Heaven and Earth. The reader will observe that the mythology of this drama preserves a primeval or, according to our phrase, antediluvian character throughout. The mythic personages are true contemporaries belonging to the most ancient dynasty of the gods. For this reason Ocean appears in a future stage of the play, not Poseidon. Tethys, with the other Titans and Titanesses are enumerated by Hesiod, Theog. 132-7, as follows—
“Earth to Uranus wedded bore Ocean deep with whirling currents,
Coeus, Creios, Hyperion, Theia, Rhea, Iapetus,
Themis, Mnemosyne, lovely Tethys, likewise Phœbe golden-crowned,