He views his food, would taste, yet dares not try,
But dreads the mould'ring rock that trembles from on high.
Apollo intrigued with Coronis, the daughter of Phlegyas. Her enraged father retaliated by firing the temple of Apollo, and was consigned for his rebellion to perpetual torture in the infernal regions. His terror lest the impending rock should crush him is a circumstance interpolated by Pope from Virgil's description of the punishment of Pirithous and Ixion, and the expression "mould'ring rock" is taken from Dryden's translation of the passage, Æn. vi. 816:
High o'er their heads a mould'ring rock is placed
That promises a fall, and shakes at ev'ry blast.
The revolting nature of the food itself is the reason assigned by Statius why Phlegyas forebore to partake of it, and preferred to endure the pangs of hunger.
[130] After Apollo, in the later mythology, had been identified with the sun, all the names personifying the sun, of which Titan was one, became applicable to Apollo.
[131] Diodorus maintained that the Osiris of the Egyptians was their god of the sun, and Statius has adopted this erroneous view. According to the statement of Herodotus, Osiris answered to the Grecian Bacchus, and there is little doubt that the old historian was right.
[132] Mithras was the Persian god of the sun. He was worshipped in caves, or, as Pope has it, in "hollow rocks," because the spherical form of the cave symbolised the universe, of which Mithras was the maker. The "blaze of light which adorns his head" in Pope's version, makes no part of the description in the original. The final line is explained by several ancient works of art, in which a man, wearing a Phrygian cap, is depicted cutting the throat of a bull he has flung to the ground. The man is said by an old scholiast on Statius to typify the sun, the bull the moon, and the intention, he states, is to represent the superiority of the sun over the moon. Statius speaks of the bull as indignant at being compelled to follow Mithras,—an idea which suits ill with the tranquil aspect of the moon as it floats through the heavens.