[90.] Mount Pindus.]—Ver. 570. Pindus was a mountain situate on the confines of Thessaly.
[91.] Like thin smoke.]—Ver. 571. He speaks of the spray, which in the fineness of its particles resembles smoke.
[92.] Spercheus.]—Ver. 579. The Spercheus was a rapid stream, flowing at the foot of Mount Æta into the Malian Gulf, and on whose banks many poplars grew.
[93.] Enipeus.]—Ver. 579. The Enipeus rises in Mount Othrys, and runs through Thessaly. Virgil (Georgics, iv. 468) calls it ‘Altus Enipeus,’ the deep Enipeus.
[94.] Apidanus.]—Ver. 580. The Apidanus, receiving the stream of the Enipeus at Pharsalia, flows into the Peneus. It is supposed by some commentators to be here called ‘senex,’ aged, from the slowness of its tide. But where it unites the Enipeus it flows with violence, so that it is probably called ‘senex,’ as having been known and celebrated by the poets from of old.
[95.] Amphrysus.]—Ver. 580. This river ran through that part of Thessaly known by the name of Phthiotis.
[96.] Æas.]—Ver. 580. Pliny the Elder (Book iii, ch. 23[C]) calls this river Aous. It was a small limpid stream, running through Epirus and Thessaly, and discharging itself into the Ionian sea.
[97.] Inachus.]—Ver. 583. This was a river of Argolis, now known as the Naio. It took its rise either in Lycæus or Artemisium, mountains of Arcadia. Stephens, however, thinks that Lycæus was a mountain of Argolis.
[98.] Lerna.]—Ver. 597. This was a swampy spot on the Argive territory, where the poets say that the dragon with seven heads, called Hydra, which was slain by Hercules, had made his haunt. It is not improbable that the pestilential vapors of this spot were got rid of by means of its being drained under the superintendence of Hercules, on which fact the story was founded. Some commentators, however, suppose the Lerna to have been a flowing stream.
[99.] So often detected.]—Ver. 606. Clarke translates ‘deprensi toties mariti’ by the expression, ‘who had been so often catched in his roguery.’