To immortal gods
A foe.]
Probably from his destroying the human favourites of the gods, and the sons of the goddesses who have descended to mortal amours: as in the instances of Hyacinthus, the favourite of Apollo; and Memnon, the son of Aurora; whose death and burial are described with such romantic fancy in Quintus Calaber, Post-Homerics, or Supplemental Iliad.
[222] And stern Prosérpina.] Many of the temples of Ceres were dedicated to the deity under the name of Persephone or Proserpine, who was supposed her daughter; but they were in reality the same personage. Persephone was styled Cora; which the Greeks misinterpreted the virgin or damsel. This was the same as Cura, a feminine title of the Sun; by which Ceres also was called at Cnidos. However mild and gentle Proserpine may have been represented in her virgin state by the poets, yet her tribunal seems in many places to have been very formidable. In consequence of this we find her, with Minos and Rhadamanthus, condemned to the shades below as an infernal inquisitor. Nonnus says, “Proserpine armed the Furies:” the notion of which Furies arose from the cruelties practised in the Prutaneia, or fire-temples. They were originally only priests of fire; but were at last ranked among the hellish tormentors. Herodotus speaks of a Prutaneion in Achaia Pthiotic, of which he gives a fearful account. No person, he says, ever entered the precincts, that returned: whatever person strayed that way was immediately seized upon by the priests and sacrificed. Bryant.
With arch’d roofs
Of loftiest rock o’erhung.]
Not far from the ruins (of Nonacrum, a town of Arcadia,) is a lofty cliff: I have seen none that ascended to such a height. A stream distils from the declivity. This water is denominated Styx by the Greeks. It is deadly to man and to all animals whatever. Pausanias, Arcadics, b. viii.
Le Clerc supposes an opinion to have existed, that a person wrongfully accused might securely drink the water of Styx: and conceives Hesiod to mean that the gods drank of the water at the same time that they made a libation, and if they took a false oath, were convicted by the lethargic properties of this noxious stream.
[224] Jove sends Iris down.] To this covenant (with Noah) Hesiod alludes: he calls it the great oath. He says that this oath was Iris, or the bow in the heavens; to which the deity appealed when any of the inferior divinities were guilty of an untruth. On such an occasion the great oath of the gods was appointed to fetch water from the extremities of the ocean, with which those were tried who had falsified their word. Bryant.