[874. The soothsaying Glaucus] was a prophet, and gave oracles at Delos. He is represented as a man whose hair and beard are dripping with water, with bristly eyebrows, his breast covered with sea-weeds, and the lower part of his body ending in the tail of a fish.
[875. By Leucothĕa’s lovely hands,]
And her son that rules the strands.
Ino, after she had slain herself and her son Melicertes, by leaping with him into the sea, became a protecting deity of mariners under the name Leucothea, or the white goddess. So she came to the aid of Ulysses when he was passing on his raft from Calypso’s isle to Phæacia. She there appears “with fair ankles,” and when she receives back from him her veil, which she had lent him, she does it with “lovely hands.”
Melicertes becomes a protecting deity of shores, under the name Palæmon. The Romans identified him with their god Portunus.
[877. By Thetis’ tinsel-slippered feet.] Thetis was the wife of Peleus, and the mother of Achilles. In Homer she has the epithet silver-footed.
[878. the songs of Sirens.] See [note on line 253].
[879. By dead Parthenope’s dear tomb.] Parthenope was one of the Sirens. At Naples her tomb was shown.
[880. And fair Ligea’s golden comb.] Ligea was probably also a siren. In Virgil, Georgics IV 336, we find a nymph of this name, spinning wool with other nymphs, “their bright locks floating over their snowy necks.” The name Ligea means shrill-voiced.
[887.] In the reading make in an adverb.