[Footnote F: 'The Child of Rhea.'-L. 29. Jupiter, so called by
Pindar.]
[Footnote G: 'Drove him from the upper sky.'—L. 29. That Jupiter dethroned his father Saturn is recorded by all the mythologists. Phurnutus, or Cornutus, the author of a little Greek treatise on the nature of the gods, informs us that by Jupiter was meant the vegetable soul of the world, which restrained and prevented those uncertain alterations which Saturn, or Time, used formerly to cause in the mundane system.]
[Footnote H: 'Then social reign'd The kindred powers.'—L. 31. Our mythology here supposeth, that before the establishment of the vital, vegetative, plastic nature (represented by Jupiter), the four elements were in a variable and unsettled condition, but afterwards well-disposed, and at peace among themselves. Tethys was the wife of the Ocean; Ops, or Rhea, the Earth; Vesta, the eldest daughter of Saturn, Fire; and the Cloud-Compeller, or [Greek: Zeus nephelaegeretaes], the Air, though he also represented the plastic principle of nature, as may be seen in the Orphic hymn inscribed to him.]
NOTE I.
'The sedgy-crowned race.'—L. 34.
The river-gods, who, according to Hesiod's Theogony, were the sons of
Oceanus and Tethys.
NOTE J.
'From them are ye, O Naiads.'—L. 37.
The descent of the Naiads is less certain than most points of the Greek mythology. Homer, Odyss. xiii. [Greek: kourai Dios]. Virgil, in the eighth book of the Æneid, speaks as if the Nymphs, or Naiads, were the parents of the rivers: but in this he contradicts the testimony of Hesiod, and evidently departs from the orthodox system, which represented several nymphs as retaining to every single river. On the other hand, Callimachus, who was very learned in all the school-divinity of those times, in his hymn to Delos, maketh Peneus, the great Thessalian river-god, the father of his nymphs: and Ovid, in the fourteenth book of his Metamorphoses, mentions the Naiads of Latium as the immediate daughters of the neighbouring river-gods. Accordingly, the Naiads of particular rivers are occasionally, both by Ovid and Statius, called by patronymic, from the name of the river to which they belong.