Cowper.
[102] Like aged men.] In the original, τριποδι βροτᾶ, a three-footed mortal: that is, a man with a crutch: a metaphor suggested, probably, by the ænigma of the Sphinx.
“What is that, which is two-footed, three-footed, and four-footed, yet one and the same? Œdipus declared that the thing propounded to him was man: for that a man, while an infant, went on four: when grown up, on two; and when old, on three: as using a staff through feebleness.” Diodorus, Bibl. 4.
[103] On a scant warp.] The nap is formed by the threads of the woof: Hesiod therefore directs the woof to be thick and strong, that the nap may the better exclude wet.
[104] A strong-dying ox.] This expression is borrowed from Chapman. Thus we find in Homer, “a thong from a slaughtered ox.” This is illustrated by Plutarch in his Symposiacs, 2. by the fact that the skins of slaughtered beasts are tougher, less flaccid, and less liable to be broken than those of animals which have died of age or distemper. The ancients, says Grævius, made their shoes of the raw hide.
Πιλοι, in Latin udones, were woollen socks; worn, when abroad, inside the shoes; or as substitutes for shoes, in the manner of slippers, when within doors and in the bed-chamber. Le Clerc.
[105] And kid-skins ’gainst the rigid season sew.] This was a sort of rough cloak of skins common to the country people of Greece.
Stripp’d of my garberdine of skins, at once
I will from high leap down into the waves.
Theocritus, Idyl. iii. 25.