“O Onca, blest Onca.”
Onca, says the Scholiast, was a name of Athena, a Phœnician epithet, brought by Cadmus from his native country. The Oncan gate was the same as the Ogygian gate of Thebes mentioned by other writers, and the most ancient of all the seven.—Unger. p. 267; Pausan. IX. 8.
“The seven-gated city deliver, deliver.”
The current traditional epithet of Thebes, whose seven gates were as famous as the seven mouths of the Nile—
“Rari quippe boni: numerus vix est totidem quot
Thebarum portæ vel divitis ostia Nili.”—Juv. Sat. XIII. 26.
And Homer, in the Odyssey XI. 263, talks of—
“Amphion and Zethus,