The brethren beating, and the blows go round.
Dryden.
[159] He took the sickle.] In a fragment of Sanchoniatho, the Phœnician philosopher, translated by Philo the Jew, is recorded this very history of Uranus and Cronus, or Saturn. De Gebelin, in his “Monde Primitif,” resolves it, according to his system, into the invention of reaping, which he supposes Saturn to personify. But Saturn is often represented with a ship, as well as a sickle; which has no reference to agriculture. The explanation may, however, be correct, if we consider Saturn not as a mere figurative prosopopœia of reaping, but as the real person who restored the labours of harvest; in the same manner as his Greek name Cronus, which some have thought to intimate a personification of Time, points out very significantly the person who began the new æra of time: the great father of the post-diluvian world. The type of the ship on the ancient coins of Saturn is an apposite emblem of the ark: and the concealment of the children of Heaven in a cavern seems an obscure remnant of the same tradition.
[160] The foam-born goddess.] The name of the Dove among the ancient Amonians was Iön and Iönah. This term is often found compounded, and expressed Ad-Iönah, queen dove: from which title another deity, Adiona, was constituted. This mode of idolatry must have been very ancient, as it is mentioned in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and is one species of false worship, which Moses forbade by name. According to our method of rendering the Hebrew term it is called Idione. This Idione or Adione was the Dione of the Greeks: the deity who was sometimes looked upon as the mother of Venus: at other times as Venus herself: and styled Venus Dionæa. Venus was no other than the ancient Iönah: and we shall find in her history numberless circumstances relating to the Noachic dove, and to the deluge. We are told, when the waters covered the earth, that the dove came back to Noah, having roamed over a vast uninterrupted ocean, and found no rest for the sole of her foot. But upon being sent forth a second time by the patriarch, in order to form a judgment of the state of the earth, she returned to the ark in the evening, and “Lo! in her mouth was an olive leaf plucked off.” From hence Noah conceived his first hopes of the waters being assuaged, and the elements reduced to order. He likewise began to foresee the change that was to happen in the earth: that seed-time and harvest would be renewed, and the ground restored to its pristine fecundity. In the hieroglyphical sculptures and paintings where this history was represented, the dove was depicted hovering over the face of the deep. Hence it is that Dione, or Venus, is said to have risen from the sea. Hence it is, also, that she is said to preside over waters, to appease the troubled ocean, and to cause by her presence a universal calm: that to her were owing the fruits of the earth, and the flowers of the field were renewed by her influence. The address of Lucretius to this goddess is founded on traditions, which manifestly allude to the history above mentioned. Bryant.
[161] Love track’d her steps.] What the Greeks called Iris, was expressed Eiras by the Ægyptians. The Greeks out of Eiras formed Eros, a god of love, whom they annexed to Venus, and made her son: and finding that the bow was his symbol, instead of the iris they gave him a material bow, with the addition of a quiver and arrows. The bows of Apollo and Diana were formed from the same original. After the descent from the ark the first wonderful occurrence was the bow in the clouds, and the covenant of which it was made an emblem. At this season another æra began. The earth was supposed to be renewed, and Time to return to a second infancy. They therefore formed an emblem of a child with the rainbow, to denote this renovation in the world, and called him Eros, or Divine Love. But however like a child he might be expressed, the more early mythologists esteemed him the most ancient of the gods; and Lucian, with great humour, makes Jupiter very much puzzled to account for the appearance of this infant deity. “Why thou urchin,” says the father of the gods, “how came you with that little childish face, when I know you to be as old as Iapetus?” The Greek and Roman poets reduced the character of this deity to that of a wanton, mischievous pigmy: but he was otherwise esteemed of old. He is styled by Plato a mighty god; and it is said that Eros was the cause of the greatest blessings to mankind. Bryant.
[162] Virgin whisperings.] These attributes of Venus suggest a comparison with the properties of her cestus as described by Homer:
It was an ambush of sweet snares: replete
With love, desire, soft intercourse of hearts,
And music of resistless whisper’d sounds,
Which from the wisest steal their best resolves.