The Lemnian women, as Apollodorus relates (I. 9, 17), having neglected to pay due honor to Venus, were, by that goddess, made so ill-favoured and intolerable to consort with (ἀυταῖς ἐμβάλλη δοσοσμίαν), that their husbands, abandoning them, took themselves other wives from among the captive women that they had brought over from Thrace. The Lemnian women, in revenge, murdered both their fathers and their husbands; from which atrocious act, and another bloody deed mentioned by Herodotus (VI. 138), "it hath been the custom," says the historian, "to call by the name Lemnian any monstrous and inhuman action." Note 50 (p. 118). "And honor from the threshold hies, On which the doom god-spoken lies." We are not always sufficiently alive to the deep moral power which lay concealed beneath the harlequin dress of the old Greek Polytheism. What Æschylus puts into the mouth of a theatrical chorus in sounding rhythm, Xenophon, in plain prose, teaches from the mouth of a Greek captain thus--"Whosoever violates an oath to which the gods are witness, him I can never be brought to look on as a happy man. For, when the gods are once hostile, no one can escape their anger--not by hiding himself in darkness--not by fencing himself within a strong place. For all things are subject to the gods."--_Anab_. II. 5. Think on some of the Psalms! Note 51 (p. 119). "But nice regard for the fine feeling ear." I have here with a certain freedom of version expressed KL.'s idea, that the preference expressed by Orestes for a male ear to receive his message arose from the nature of his news; but I do not think it is "inept" to believe, with BL. and PEILE, that we have here merely an instance of the general secluded state in which Greek women lived, so that it was esteemed not proper to talk with them, in public--as Achilles says, in Euripides-- ἀισχρὸν δέ μοὶ γυναιξὶν συμβὰλλειν λόγους. "For me to hold exchange of words with women Were most improper."--IPHIG. AULID. 830. Note 52 (p. 119). "Hot baths." To an English ear this sounds more like the apparatus of modern luxury than the accompaniment of travel in the stout heroic times. It is a fact, however, as KL. well notes, that of nothing is there more frequent mention in Homer than of warm baths. This is especially frequent in the Odyssey, {368} where so many journeys are made. Telemachus, for instance, at Pylus, is washed by the beautiful Polycaste, the youngest daughter of his venerable host; and the poet records with pleasure how "out of the bath he came in appearance like to the immortal gods" (III. 468), a verse which might serve as a very suitable motto to a modern work on Hydropathy. Note 53 (p. 119).