No More Learning

42 --_i. e. _ during the whole time of their striving the will of Jove was
being gradually accomplished.

43 Compare Milton's "Paradise Lost" i. 6

"Sing, heavenly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Horeb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd. "

44 --_Latona's son: i. e. _ Apollo.

45 --_King of men:_ Agamemnon.

46 --_Brother kings:_ Menelaus and Agamemnon.

47 --_Smintheus_ an epithet taken from sminthos, the Phrygian name for a
_mouse,_ was applied to Apollo for having put an end to a plague of
mice which had harassed that territory. Strabo, however, says, that
when the Teucri were migrating from Crete, they were told by an
oracle to settle in that place, where they should not be attacked by
the original inhabitants of the land, and that, having halted for
the night, a number of field-mice came and gnawed away the leathern
straps of their baggage, and thongs of their armour. In fulfilment
of the oracle, they settled on the spot, and raised a temple to
Sminthean Apollo. Grote, "History of Greece," i. p.
68, remarks that
the "worship of Sminthean Apollo, in various parts of the Troad and
its neighboring territory, dates before the earliest period of
Aeolian colonization. "

48 --_Cilla,_ a town of Troas near Thebe, so called from Cillus, a
sister of Hippodamia, slain by OEnomaus.

49 A mistake. It should be,


"If e'er I _roofed_ thy graceful fane,"


for the custom of decorating temples with garlands was of later
date.

50 --_Bent was his bow_ "The Apollo of Homer, it must be borne in mind,
is a different character from the deity of the same name in the
later classical pantheon. Throughout both poems, all deaths from
unforeseen or invisible causes, the ravages of pestilence, the fate
of the young child or promising adult, cut off in the germ of
infancy or flower of youth, of the old man dropping peacefully into
the grave, or of the reckless sinner suddenly checked in his career
of crime, are ascribed to the arrows of Apollo or Diana. The
oracular functions of the god rose naturally out of the above
fundamental attributes, for who could more appropriately impart to
mortals what little foreknowledge Fate permitted of her decrees than
the agent of her most awful dispensations? The close union of the
arts of prophecy and song explains his additional office of god of
music, while the arrows with which he and his sister were armed,
symbols of sudden death in every age, no less naturally procured him
that of god of archery. Of any connection between Apollo and the
Sun, whatever may have existed in the more esoteric doctrine of the
Greek sanctuaries, there is no trace in either Iliad or
Odyssey. "--Mure, "History of Greek Literature," vol. i. p. 478, sq.

51 It has frequently been observed, that most pestilences begin with
animals, and that Homer had this fact in mind.

52 --_Convened to council. _ The public assembly in the heroic times is
well characterized by Grote, vol.