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OCEAN.-Aye, but in foresight along with boldness * what mischief is there that thou seest to be inherent? in

form me.

PROM.-Superfluous trouble and empty-minded folly. OCEAN.-Suffer me to sicken in this said sickness, since 'tis of the highest possible advantage for one that is possessed of sound discretion not to seem to be discreet.

PROM.-(Not so, for) this trespass will seem to be mine. OCEAN.-Thy language is plainly sending me back to my home.

PROM. Why yes, let not thy lamentation over me bring thee into ill-will.

OCEAN,-Meanest thou with him that hath lately seated himself on the throne that ruleth over all?

PROM.-Beware of him lest at any time his heart be moved to wrath.

OCEAN.-Thy disaster, Prometheus, is my monitor. PROM.-Away! withdraw thee, preserve thy present

sentiments.

OCEAN.-Oh me, hastening my departure hast thou eagerly urged this injunction; for my winged quadruped is sweeping with his pinions the smooth causeway of æther; and blithely would he recline his limbs in his stalls at home.

[Exit OCEAN.

CHORUS.-I bewail thee for thy baleful fate, Prometheus; a flood of trickling tears from my quickly-excited eyes bedewed my cheek with its humid gushings: for Jupiter commanding this thine unenviable doom by laws

* Intellige audaciam prudentiâ conjunctam. Dr. Blomfield, 3rd edition. y The fourth of the reflexive uses of the middle voice in Mr. Tate's admirable sketch. Mus. Crit. i. 102.

“Where in such verbs as κόπτομαι lugeo, σεύομαι, τίλλομαι, etc. the direct action is done by A on himself, but an accusative or other case follows of B, whom that action farther regards . . . . . . . . To this class belong ovλáttw and φυλάττομαι, e. g. φυλάξαι τὸν παῖδα. φυλάξασθαι τὸν λέοντα.”

This is Dr. Maltby's sense. Compare 146.

a

of his own, displays to the gods that were aforetime a sceptre of arrogance. And now the whole land echoes with wailing-they wail the stately and time-honoured dignity of thee and thy brethren; and all they of mortal race that occupy a dwelling planted in hallowed Asia sympathize with thy deeply-deplorable sufferings: the virgins that dwell in the land of Colchis too, dauntless in battle, and the Scythian horde who possess the most remote region of earth around lake Mæotis: and the martial flower of Araby, who occupy a fortress on the craggy heights in the neighbourhood of Caucasus, a warrior-host, clamouring amid sharply-barbed spears.

One other only of the gods indeed have I heretofore beheld in miseries, the Titan Atlas, crushed in the tortures of adamantine shackles, who evermore in his back is groaning beneath the excessive mighty mass of the pole of heaven. And the billow of the deep roars as it falls in cadence, the depth moans, and the murky vault of Hades rumbles beneath the earth, and the fountains of the purestreaming rivers wail for his piteous distress.

a aixμáv. Dr. E. D. Clarke found the sheik of Beth-oor [Bethhoron] wield. ing an iron mace with a sphere at the upper extremity, longitudinally grooved so as to exhibit edges on every side. "This regal badge, evidently a weapon of offence, thus borne as a symbol of power in time of peace, only proves that among the wildest Arabs, as among the most enlightened nations, the ensigns of royalty were originally instruments of terror." Compare 1 Samuel, xviii. 10. with xix. 9.

b The sea of Azof.

c Dr. Monk would strike out the copula to help the metre. The passage seems to need a more extensive correction. Wellauer explains it as an Hendiadys, and I, in despair, have followed him.

□ “Zvμπírvwv Bog vertit Stanl. collisus mugit. Sed exquisitius dictum arbitror, aut ut doloris societas, aut ut loci vicinia notetur. Nempe vμπ. Bo₫ vel est i. q. πιτνῶν ξυμβοᾷ cadens, una cum Atlante clamat; vel ξυμπίτνων est i. q. propter labens." Schutz.

My readers perhaps will doubt the soundness of both these explanations as much as I do that of the latter.

e This close of the song of the Chorus is well calculated to cheer Prometheus, as it assures him of the very sympathy which he had invoked before his solitude was relieved by the tenderness of the Nymphs of the Ocean.

PROM. Do not, I pray you, suppose that I am holding my peace from caprice or self-will: but by reflection am I gnawed to the heart, now that I see myself thus visited with contumely. And yet who but myself defined altogether their prerogatives for these same new godsf? But on these matters I say nothing, for I shall speak to you of things with which you also are acquainted. But for the miseries that existed among mortals lend me your ears, how I made them, that aforetime lived in baby ignorance, rational and possessed of intellect. And I will tell you, not that I have any complaint to bring against mankind, but by way of detailing the graciousness of the boons which I bestowed upon them:-they who at first seeing saw to no purpose, hearing they heard not. But, the very counterparts of the forms of dreams", for many a day they used to huddle together all things at random, and not one jot knew they about brick-built houses placed with their fronts to the sun, nor carpentry: but they dwelt in holes of the earth like tinyi emmets in caverns uncheered by the light of day. And they had no unfailing sign either of winter, or of flowery spring, or of fruitful summer*: but they used to do every thing with

f In homoioteleuto θεοῖσι τοῖς νέοις τούτοις, inest ingratum aliquid non sine poetæ consilio. Butler.

Compare Isaiah, vi. 9. St. Matthew, xiii. 13. St. Mark, iv. 12. St. Luke, viii. 10.

h So Shakspeare, Tempest, IV. i.

We are such stuff

As dreams are made of

Compare Pindar. Pyth. viii. 136. In Aristophanes, Av. 685, etc. there is a beautiful collection of the most striking images of human frailty afforded by Greek poetry. A translation of the passage is given in the Quarterly Review, xxiv.

434.

i Wellauer also reads άnovpor and Dr. Maltby may be considered to have settled the matter-" præferenda... lectio, áýovpoɩ. inpr. quia cúpa penult. semper productam habet.”

Pliny (Hist. Nat. VII. lvi.) assigns the invention of brick houses to Euryalus and Hyperbius, two brothers of Athens.

Dr. Butler compares Tacitus, Germ. xxvi. . . . autumni perinde nomen ac

out judgment, until indeed I showed to them the risings of the stars and their settings', hard to be discerned.

And verily I discovered for them Numbers, the prince of scientific inventions", the combinations too of letters, and Memory, effective mother-nurse of all arts. I also was the first that bound with yokes beasts slaving to their collars; and in order that with their bodies they might become" to mortals substitutes for their severest toils, I brought harness-loving steeds under cars, an embellishment to exceedingly-opulent luxury. And none other than I invented the canvas-winged chariots of mariners that roam over the ocean. After discovering for mortals such inventions, wretch that I am, I myself have no expedient whereby I may rid me of the suffering that is now pressing upon me.

CHORUS.-Thou hast to bear unseemly suffering, baulked in thy discretion thou art erring; and like a bad physician, having fallen into a distemper thou art disheartened, and art, in reference to thyself, unable to discover by medicines of what kind thou mayest be cured.

bona ignorantur. In the original promise, Genesis, viii. 22. six seasons are distinguished, as is still common with some of the orientals.

1 Hermann (Obs. Crit. p. 18.) decides peremptorily in favour of the reading of Stobæus dvokpírovę odóvs. Whatever may be the authority for this variation, the explanation of duong, which is given by Mr. R. P. Joddrell in Potter, involves more astronomy than we can well suppose Eschylus to have possessed.

m Perhaps we have here a glimpse of the Pythagorean bias of Æschylus. See the ovσroxía in Wilkinson's note on the Ethics of Aristotle, I. vi. in which Number is made to take the lead of the archetypal ideas. The mythology made Mnemosyne, goddess of memory, mother of the Muses by Jupiter.

"Brunck, Porson, and Dr. Blomfield, read yśvowe, after Dawes, Misc. Crit. p. 501. ed. Kidd. The canon occurs at p. 136: it is admirably discussed by Mr. Tate in the Museum Criticum. vol. i. 525.

Wellauer retains the old reading, yévwve', which is defended by Hermann. Obs. Crit. p. 20. who contends that the rule was not so absolute as to admit of no exceptions: he might have supported this by the authority of Porson, Eur. Phoen. 68. Compare Matthiæ's Gr. Gr. §. 578.

• The comparison which the Chorus here employs seems to recal at once to the recollection of Prometheus another long list of benefits which he had conferred upon mortals.

PROM. When thou hearest the rest of my tale, what arts and advantages I sought out, thou wilt wonder still more. This was the chief: supposing that any one fell into a distemper, there was no remedy, neither in the way of diet, nor of liniment, nor of potion, but for lack of medicines they used to waste away to skeletons, before at least that I discovered to them the composition of mild restoratives, wherewith they parry the attacks of all their maladies. Many a mode too of the divining art did I classify, and was the first that discriminated among dreams those which are destined to be a true vision; obscure vocal omens too I made known to them: tokens also incidental to the road', and the flight of birds of crooked talons I clearly defined, both those that are in their nature auspicious, and the ill-omened, and what the kind of life that each leads, and what are their feuds and endearments and intercourse one with another: the smoothness too of the entrails, and what hue they must have to be acceptable to the gods, the various happy configurations of the gall and liver, and the limbs enveloped in fat: and having roasted the long chine I pointed mortals the way into an abstruse art; and I brought to light the fiery symbols *

S

P Per Ellipsin vocis réxŋ multa adjectiva in feminino usurpantur a Græcis ut, ἡ ὑφαντική, ars textoria. . . . ἡ Γραμματική, Μουσική, Λογική, Μαντική, etc. Bos. §. 265.

4 Compare Homer, Od. xx. 547.

Οὐκ ὄναρ, ἀλλ ̓ ὕπαρ ἐσθλὸν, ὅ τοι τετελεσμένον ἔσται.

r Stanley illustrates this by the eagles and hare in the Agamemnon, 110. and the mare's bringing forth a hare in the armament of Xerxes. Herod. VII. lvii. γαμψ. "Aves rapaces designantur, quibus potissimum in disciplina augurali utebantur." Schutz.

8

πoшíλŋv εvμoppíav. Perhaps, the vein-streaked beauty. I have followed Wellauer here, who points with a colon after σvykaλværà. Perhaps, however, the common construction accords better with what we know of ancient sacrifices. Compare Homer, Il. I. 458. and Soph. Antig. 1005.

* Schutz understands lightning and meteors. Dr. Blomfield explains it of the omens derived from the blaze of the sacrifice, according as it streamed upward single or forked, straight or oblique. See Potter, i. 371.

"Apyeμos-properly a disease of the eye, in which a webbed film forms within the iris and gradually extends over the pupil.

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