No More Learning

383, sq.

98 --_Scamander,_ or Scamandros, was a river of Troas, rising, according
to Strabo, on the highest part of Mount Ida, in the same hill with
the Granicus and the OEdipus, and falling into the sea at Sigaeum;
everything tends to identify it with Mendere, as Wood, Rennell, and
others maintain; the Mendere is 40 miles long, 300 feet broad, deep
in the time of flood, nearly dry in the summer. Dr. Clarke
successfully combats the opinion of those who make the Scamander to
have arisen from the springs of Bounabarshy, and traces the source
of the river to the highest mountain in the chain of Ida, now
Kusdaghy; receives the Simois in its course; towards its mouth it is
very muddy, and flows through marshes. Between the Scamander and
Simois, Homer's Troy is supposed to have stood: this river,
according to Homer, was called Xanthus by the gods, Scamander by
men. The waters of the Scamander had the singular property of giving
a beautiful colour to the hair or wool of such animals as bathed in
them; hence the three goddesses, Minerva, Juno, and Venus, bathed
there before they appeared before Paris to obtain the golden apple:
the name Xanthus, "yellow," was given to the Scamander, from the
peculiar colour of its waters, still applicable to the Mendere, the
yellow colour of whose waters attracts the attention of travellers.

99 It should be "his _chest_ like Neptune. " The torso of Neptune, in
the "Elgin Marbles," No. 103, (vol. ii. p. 26,) is remarkable for
its breadth and massiveness of development.

100 "Say first, for heav'n hides nothing from thy view. "

--"Paradise Lost," i. 27.
"Ma di' tu, Musa, come i primi danni
Mandassero a Cristiani, e di quai parti:
Tu 'l sai; ma di tant' opra a noi si lunge
Debil aura di fama appena giunge. "

--"Gier. Lib. " iv. 19.

101 "The Catalogue is, perhaps, the portion of the poem in favour of
which a claim to separate authorship has been most plausibly urged.
Although the example of Homer has since rendered some such formal
enumeration of the forces engaged, a common practice in epic poems
descriptive of great warlike adventures, still so minute a
statistical detail can neither be considered as imperatively
required, nor perhaps such as would, in ordinary cases, suggest
itself to the mind of a poet. Yet there is scarcely any portion of
the Iliad where both historical and internal evidence are more
clearly in favour of a connection from the remotest period, with the
remainder of the work. The composition of the Catalogue, whensoever
it may have taken place, necessarily presumes its author's
acquaintance with a previously existing Iliad. It were impossible
otherwise to account for the harmony observable in the recurrence of
so vast a number of proper names, most of them historically
unimportant, and not a few altogether fictitious: or of so many
geographical and genealogical details as are condensed in these few
hundred lines, and incidentally scattered over the thousands which
follow: equally inexplicable were the pointed allusions occurring in
this episode to events narrated in the previous and subsequent text,
several of which could hardly be of traditional notoriety, but
through the medium of the Iliad. "--Mure, "Language and Literature of
Greece," vol. i. p. 263.

102 --_Twice Sixty:_ "Thucydides observes that the Boeotian vessels,
which carried one hundred and twenty men each, were probably meant
to be the largest in the fleet, and those of Philoctetes, carrying
fifty each, the smallest. The average would be eighty-five, and
Thucydides supposes the troops to have rowed and navigated
themselves; and that very few, besides the chiefs, went as mere
passengers or landsmen.