“The pillars of Heaven and Earth upon his shoulders.”
If the reader is a curious person, he will ask how Atlas when standing on the Earth—in the extreme west of the Earth—could bear the pillars of Heaven and Earth? and the question will be a very proper one; for the fact is that, as Hesiod distinctly states the case, he bore the pillars of Heaven only (Theog. 517). This is, indeed, the only possible idea that could be admitted into a mythology which proceeded on the old principle that the Earth was a flat solid platform in the centre of the Universe, round which the celestial pole (πόλος) wheeled. The phrase “pillars of Heaven and Earth” is, therefore, to a certain extent an improper one; for the Earth, being the stable base of all things, required no pillars to support it. In one sense it is true that the pillars of Atlas are the pillars of Heaven and Earth, viz., in so far as they have Heaven at one end and Earth at the other, which is what Homer means when he says (Odyssey I. 54), that these pillars “γᾶιάν τε καὶ ὀυρανὸν ἀμφὶς ἔχουσιν.” And that this is the idea of Æschylus, also, is plain, both from the present passage, and from the Epode of the next following Chorus, where, unless we force in one conjecture of Schütz, or another of Hermann into the text, there is no mention of anything but the celestial pole. In all this I but express in my own words, and with a very decided conviction, the substance of the admirable note in Schoe. to v. 426, Well.
“. . . Typhon.”
The idea of Typhon is that of a strong windy power, δεινόν ὑβριστήν τ ἄνεμον, according to the express statement of Hesiod (Theog. 307). The Greek word Typhon, with which our typhus fever is identical, expresses the state of being swollen or blown up; with this, the other idea of heat, which belongs also to Typhon (Sallust, περὶ θεῶν, c. 4), is naturally connected. According to the elementary or physical system of mythology, therefore, Typhon is neither more nor less than a simoom or hot wind.
“Knowest thou not this, Prometheus, that mild words
Are medicines of fierce wrath?”
The reader may like to see Cicero’s version of these four lines—