Interpretative. The ancients were wont to glorify in fable constellations of remarkable brilliancy or form. The heavenly adventures of Orion are sufficiently explained by the text.
Illustrative. Spenser, Faerie Queene, 1, 3, 31; Milton, Paradise Lost, 1, 299, "Natheless he so endured," etc.; Longfellow, Occultation of Orion; R. H. Horne, Orion; Charles Tennyson Turner, Orion (a sonnet).
97. Electra. See genealogical table I. See same table for Merope, the mother of Glaucus and grandmother of Bellerophon (155).
Illustrative. Pleiads: Milton, Paradise Lost, 7, 374; Pope, Spring, 102; Mrs. Hemans has verses on the same subject; Byron, "Like the lost Pleiad seen no more below."
In modern sculpture, The Lost Pleiad of Randolph Rogers is famous; in painting, the Pleiades of Elihu Vedder (Fig. 72, in text).
98. Mount Latmos: in Caria. Diana is sometimes called Phœbe, the shining one. For the descendants of Endymion, the Ætolians, etc., see Table I.
Interpretative. According to the simplest explanation of the Endymion myth, the hero is the setting sun on whom the upward rising moon delights to gaze. His fifty children by Selene would then be the fifty months of the Olympiad, or Greek period of four years. Some, however, consider him to be a personification of sleep, the king whose influence comes over one in the cool caves of Latmos, "the Mount of Oblivion"; others, the growth of vegetation under the dewy moonlight; still others, euhemeristically, a young hunter, who under the moonlight followed the chase, but in the daytime slept.
Illustrative. The Endymion of Keats. Fletcher, in the Faithful Shepherdess, tells, "How the pale Phœbe, hunting in a grove, First saw the boy Endymion," etc. Young, Night Thoughts, "So Cynthia, poets feign, In shadows veiled, ... Her shepherd cheered"; Spenser, Epithalamion, "The Latmian Shepherd," etc.; Marvel, Songs on Lord Fauconberg and the Lady Mary Cromwell (chorus, Endymion and Laura); O. W. Holmes, Metrical Essays, "And, Night's chaste empress, in her bridal play, Laughed through the foliage where Endymion lay."
Poems. Besides Keats' the most important are by Lowell, Longfellow, Clough (Epi Latmo, and Selene), T. B. Read, Buchanan, L. Morris (Epic of Hades). John Lyly's prose drama, Endymion, contains quaint and delicate songs.