That the wise Pallas, holiest of goddesses,
Should in the mountain groves have taken up
That clever instrument, and then again
Thrown it away, fearing to draw her mouth
Into an unseemly shape, to be a glory
To the nymph-born, noisy monster Marsyas.
For how should chaste Minerva be so anxious
About her beauty, when the Fates had given her
A childless, husbandless virginity?
intimating his belief that she, as she was and always was to continue a maid, could not be alarmed at the idea of disfiguring her beauty. And in a subsequent passage he says—