The old Jewish maxim of _an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth_, will here recur to every one; and, indeed, it is, to the present day, an instinctive dictate of social justice, however insufficient it may be as a general motive for individual conduct. In this spirit, wise old Nestor, in the Iliad (II. 354), considers that it would be disgraceful for the Greeks to think of returning home "before some Greek had slept with the wife of some Trojan," as a retaliation for the woes that Paris had inflicted on Greek social life, in the matter of Helen. In Dante's Inferno there are many instances, sometimes ingenious, sometimes only ridiculous, of the application of this principle to retributive punishment in a future life. Note 27 (p. 108). "There where in dark, the dead-man's day, thou liest." KL. appears to me to have supplied the true key to σκότω φάος ἰσόμοιρον, by comparing the exclamation of Ajax in Sophocles, v. 394-- Ιὼ σκότος ἐμὸν φάος ἔρεβος ὠ φαεννότατον ὡς εμόι! The gloomy state of the dead in Hades is pictured yet more darkly, by saying that the night, which covers them, is all that serves them for day. Note 28 (p. 109). "The monarch of the awful dead." The Hades of the ancients was, as is well remarked by KL. on this place, in all things an image of this upper world; an observation to be made on the surface of Virgil-- "Quae gratia currum Armorumque fuit viris, quæ cura nitentes Pascere equos, eadem sequitur tellure repostos." ÆNEID VI. 653. But the parallel most striking to the present passage occurs in the address of Ulysses to Achilles, Odyssey XI. 482-- "Achilles, Never man before was happier, nor shall ever be, than thou; When thou wert among the living all the Argives honoured thee Like a god, and now amid the dead thou sway'st with mighty power." To which address the hero gave the well-known reply, a reply characteristic at once of his own tremendous energy, and of the Greek views of a future state:-- "Noble Ulysses, praise me not the state of death; for I would rather Be a serf, and break the clods to him that owneth acres few On Earth, than reign the mighty lord of millions of the shadowy dead." Note 29 (p. 110). "Hyperborean bliss." "Fair birds have fair feathers;" so the Greeks, who had sent no voyages of discovery to the Arctic seas, were free, without contradiction, to place Utopia at the North Pole. (See Herodot. III. 106, quoted by _Nitzsh_ in his comments on the Phœacians, Od. VII. 201-6.) SCHÜTZ quotes POMP. MELA. III. 5--"_diutius quam ulli mortalium et beatius vivunt._" Some of {364} these Hyperboreans drank nothing but milk (γαλακτοφάγοι, Hom. Il. XIII. 6), and from this practice the alleged purity of their manners, according to certain modern theories of dietetics, may have arisen. Note 30 (p. 110). "O Jove, O Jove! that sendest from below."