Note 68 (p. 128). ". . . not My father, but the Sun that fathers all With light." {371} There is a certain mannerism in this description of a thing by the negation of what is similar, to which the tragedians were much addicted. As to the invocation of the sun, see the note in the Prometheus to the speech beginning O divine ether and swift-winged winds. Note 69 (p. 128). "Or a torpedo, that with biteless touch Strikes numb who handles." Literally, _a lamprey_, μύραινα; but to translate so would have been ludicrous; and besides, as BLOM. has noted from Athenaeus, it was not a common lamprey that, in the imagination of the Greeks, was coupled with a viper, but "a sort of monstrous reptile begotten between a viper and a lamprey." Note 70 (p. 128). "This cloth to wrap the dead." 'Tis difficult to say whether δρόιτη, in this place, means the bath in which Agamemnon was murdered, or the bier on which any dead body is laid after death. KL. supports this latter interpretation. I have incorporated a reference to both versions. Note 71 (p. 129). "Others 'twixt hope and fear may sway, my fate Is fixed and scapeless." I read-- Ἄλλοις ἄν ἐι δή. τουτ᾽ ἂρ (ὀ)ιδ ὃπη τελ(ε)ι. PEILE. Note 72 (p. 129). "With soft-wreathed wool, and precatory branch." These insignia of suppliants are familiar to every reader of the Classics. I shall only recall two of the most familiar instances. In the opening scene of the Iliad the priest of Apollo appears before Agamemnon, and "In his hand he held the chaplet of the distant-darting Phœbus On a golden rod." And in the opening lines of the Œdipus Tyrannus, the old King asks the Chorus-- "Why swarm ye here around the seats of the gods, With branches furnished such as suppliants bear?" Note 73 (p. 129). ". . . navel of earth, where burns the flame Of fire immortal." As the old astronomers made Earth the centre of the planetary system, and as men are everywhere, and at all times, apt to consider their own position and point of view as of more importance in the great whole of things than it really is; so the Greeks, in their ignorant vanity, considered their own Delphi to be the navel, or central point of Earth. As to the immortal fire, STAN. quotes here from Plutarch, who, in his life of Numa (c. ix.), describing the institution of the Vestal Virgins, takes occasion to mention the sacred fire kept alive in Greece at two places, Delphi and Athens, which, if extinguished, was always rekindled from no earthly spark, but from the Sun. Note 74 (p. 130). "There is atonement." Ἐισιν καθαρμόι, SCHÜTZ, PAL.; (ε)᾽ σται καθαρμός, BOTHE. Either of these seems preferable to the vulgate ἐισω. FRANZ has ῟Εις σοι καθαρμὸς. _Eins bleibt Dir Sühnung._ {372} Note 75 (p. 130). "Ye see them not. I see them."