[186] The glassy depth of lakes.] All fountains were esteemed sacred: but especially those which had any preternatural quality and abounded with exhalations. It was an universal notion that a divine energy proceeded from the effluvia; and that the persons who resided in their vicinity were gifted with a prophetic quality. Fountains of this nature, from the divine influence with which they were supposed to abound, the Amonians styled Ain-omphe, or oracular fountain. These terms the Greeks contracted to numphe, a nymph: and supposed such a person to be an inferior goddess who presided over waters. Hot springs were imagined to be more immediately under the inspection of the nymphs. Another name for these places was Ain-Ades, the fountain of Ades or the Sun; which in like manner was changed to Naïades, a species of deities of the same class. Bryant.
[187] East, West, and South, and North.] Le Clerc and the generality of editors suppose Hesiod to omit the east-wind entirely: and consider αργεστεω as an epithet, signifying swift or serene: as the term is so used by Homer. Grævius quotes a subsequent line of the Theogony as authority for αργεστης being so used by Hesiod also: but there is evidence for αργεστης being the name of a wind; though Aulus Gellius and Pliny suppose it to be a west-wind, called by the Latins Caurus. Aristotle also, as is observed by the Monthly Reviewer, describes the αργεστης as a westerly wind, which blows from that part of the heaven in which the sun sets at the summer solstice: and adds that by some it is called Olympias, by others Iapyx. We see however from this very passage of Aristotle, that the names of winds were capricious and arbitrary: and in fact almost every district in Greece called the winds by names different from those which the neighbouring district used. The same critic observes that in a note to the word σκειροιν (Caurus), in Alberti’s edition of Hesychius, an opinion is intimated that αργεστης is properly an easterly wind, απηλιωτης ανεμος: nor can there be the least doubt of the matter, in so far as regards Hesiod. The London Reviewer, indeed, remarks that “the omission of the wind would be no proof of Hesiod’s ignorance of its existence”: a similar omission occurs in the Psalms. “Promotion cometh neither from the east, nor the west, nor yet from the south.” But it is forgotten that Hesiod is describing the genealogy of the winds: and it is very inconceivable that one of the four cardinal winds should have escaped his notice. The editions of Stephens and Trincavellus read
Νοσφι Νοτου, Βορεω τε, και Αργεστου, Ζεφυρου τε:
instead of αργεστεω Ζεφιροιο: and I have no doubt that this is the true reading.
Not apart from Jove
Their mansion is.]
So Callimachus, Hymn to Jupiter:
No lots have made thee king above all gods:
But works of thy own hands: thy Strength and Force,