[5] It can hardly be necessary to do more than remind the reader how exquisitely this story is told in Tennyson’s “Œnone.”
[6] “Standing before the castle portal of Mycenæ, even he who knows nothing of Homer must imagine to himself a king like the Homeric Agamemnon, a warlike lord with army and fleet, who maintained relations with Asia, and her wealth of gold and arts.”—Curtius’s Hist. of Greece, i. 145.
[7] Catullus’s Nuptials of Peleus and Thetis (transl. by Theodore Martin).
[8] The legend bears a remarkable resemblance to that of the hero Siegfried, in the German ‘Nibelungen Lied.’ By bathing in the blood of the slain dragon he acquires the same property of invulnerability, with the exception of one spot on his back which had been kept dry by a fallen leaf. And he meets his death, like Achilles, by a wound in that spot, dealt treacherously.
[9] Nat. Hist., xvi. 44.
[10] The mythology of Homer supposes the gods to dwell in an aërial city on Mount Olympus (in the north-east of Thessaly), whose summit was always veiled in cloud, and from which there was imagined to be an opening into the heavens.
[11] Why specially “blameless?” has been sometimes asked. The author of the ‘Mill on the Floss’ suggests that it was because they lived so far off that they had no neighbours to criticise them.
[12] Translations, 1863.
[13] It may be satisfactory to a matter-of-fact reader to know that Eurybates, his attendant, takes care of it. The old Greek bard is much more particular on such points than modern novelists, who make even their heroines take sudden journeys without (apparently) having any chance of carrying with them so much as a sac-de-nuit.
[14] Page 17.