In explanation of the fable, it may be observed, that as Jupiter is taken for the maker of all things, so Latona is physically understood to be the matter out of which all things were made, which, according to Plato, is called Λητω or Latona, from ληθειν to lie hid or concealed, because all things originally lay hid in darkness till the production of light, or birth of Apollo.
AURORA, goddess of the morning, was the youngest daughter of Hyperion and Theia, or, according to some, of Titan and Terra. Orpheus calls her the harbinger of Titan, for she is the personification of that light which precedes the appearance of the sun. The poets describe this goddess as rising out of the ocean in a saffron robe, seated in a flame-colored car, drawn by two or four horses, expanding with her rosy fingers the gates of light, and scattering the pearly dew. Virgil represents her horses as of flame color, and varies their number from two to four, according as she rises slower or faster.
She is said to have been daughter of Titan and the earth, because the light of the morning seems to rise out of the earth, and to proceed from the sun, which immediately follows it. She is styled mother of the four winds, because, after a calm in the night, the winds rise in the morning, as attendant upon the sun, by whose heat and light they are begotten. There is no other goddess of whom we have so many beautiful descriptions in the poets.
CHAPTER III.
Terrestrial Gods.
SATURN was the son of Cœlus and Titæa or Terra, and married his sister Vesta. She, with her other sisters, persuaded their mother to join them in a plot, to exclude Titan, their elder brother, from his birthright, and raise Saturn to his father's throne. Their design so far succeeded, that Titan was obliged to resign his claim, though on condition, that Saturn brought up no male children, and thus the succession might revert to the Titans again. Saturn, it is said, observed this covenant so faithfully, that he devoured, as soon as they were born, his legitimate sons. His punctuality, however, in this respect, was at last frustrated by the artifice of Vesta, who, being delivered of twins, Jupiter and Juno, presented the latter to her husband, and concealing the former, sent him to be nursed on Mount Ida in Crete, committing the care of him to the Curētes and Corybantes.
The reign of Saturn was so mild and happy, that the poets have given it the name of the golden age. The people, who before wandered about like beasts, were then reduced to civil society; laws were enacted, and the art of tilling and sowing the ground introduced; whence Varro tells us, that Saturn had his name a satu, from sowing.
He was usually represented as an old man, bare-headed and bald, with all the marks of infirmity in his eyes, countenance, and figure. In his right hand they sometimes placed a sickle or scythe; at others, a key, and a circumflexed serpent biting its tail, in his left. He sometimes was pictured with six wings, and feet of wool, to show how insensibly and swiftly time passes. The scythe denoted his cutting down and subverting all things, and the serpent the revolution of the year, quod in sese volvitur annus.
JANUS was a pagan deity, particularly of the ancient Romans. He was esteemed the wisest sovereign of his time, and because he was supposed to know what was past, and what was to come, they feigned that he had two faces, whence the Latins gave him the epithets of Biceps, Bifrons, and Biformis.