[61] The king of Argos.
[62] Tantalus, king of Argos, invited the gods to a banquet, and served up the boiled flesh of his own son, Pelops.
[63] Phoroneus was commonly reputed to have been the founder of the city of Argos.
[64] Juno employed Argus to keep guard over Io, transformed by Jupiter into a cow. Mercury, being sent by Jupiter to rescue Io, lulled Argus to sleep by melodious airs on the flute, and then cut off his head.
[65] An oracle announced to Acrisius, king of Argos, that he would die by the hands of his grandson. The king endeavoured to escape his fate by imprisoning his daughter, Danae, in a brazen tower, but Jupiter obtained access to her in the shape of a shower of gold, and she became the mother of Perseus, who fulfilled the prediction, according to the established legendary usage.
[66] The force of this taunt is weakened in Pope's translation by the change from the second person to the third, as though the invectives of Juno had not been addressed to Jupiter himself.
[67] Jupiter visited Semele, the daughter of Cadmus, in all the majesty of the thunderer, and she was consumed by the lightning.
[68] Homer makes Juno say that there are three cities pre-eminently dear to her—Argos, Sparta, and Mycenæ. Samos had no less title to the distinction. It was one of the localities which contended for the renown of having given her birth, and was, with Argos, the principal seat of her worship. Virgil ranks Samos second among the places she delighted to honour.
[69] The river Alpheus, which takes its rise in Arcadia, loses itself underground in parts of its course, and again reappears. This suggested the fiction that it ran in a subterranean channel, below the bottom of the sea, to the fountain of Arethusa in Sicily, where it once more emerged to day. Pope had less regard to the text of Statius than to Dryden's translation of Virgil's lines on the same legend in Ecl. x. 5:
So may thy silver streams beneath the tide,
Unmixed with briny seas, securely glide.