_Enter_ APOLLO. Here commences a debate between the daughters of Night and the god accusing and defending, which, as Grote (History of Greece, I. 512) remarks, is "eminently curious." And not only curious, but unfortunately, to our modern sense at least, not a little ludicrous in some places. The fact is, that the strange moral contradictions and inconsistencies so common in the Greek mythology, so long as they are concealed or palliated under a fair imaginative show, give small offence; but when placed before the understanding, in order to be interrogated by the strict forms of judicial logic, they necessarily produce a collision with our practical reason and a smile is the result. Note 44 (p. 161) ". . . himself did bind With bonds his hoary-dated father Kronos." "In the fable of the binding of Kronos by his son Jove, Æschylus saw nothing disrespectful to the character of the supreme ruler, but only the imaginative embodiment of the fact, that one celestial dynasty had been succeeded by another. The image of binding, and of the battles of the Titans generally, might seem to his mind not the most appropriate; but the offence that lay in them was softened not a little by the consideration that the enchainment of Kronos and the Titans was only a temporary affair, leading to a reconciliation. The result was, that the Titans themselves at last acknowledged the justice of their punishment, and submitted themselves to Jove, as the alone legitimate ruler of Earth; and Herr Welcker is quite wrong in supposing that either here, or in the Agamemnon, or the Prometheus, there is any indication that the mind of Æschylus was fundamentally at war with his age in regard to the celestial dynasties."--SCHOEMANN's Prometheus, p. 97. Note 45 (p. 162). ". . . How With any clanship share lustration?" Or, with BUCK., "what laver of his tribe shall receive him?"--the word in the original being φρατόρων. The ancient Hellenic tribes φράτραι were social unions, founded originally in the family tie, and afterwards extended. These unions had certain religious ceremonies which they performed in common, and to which allusion is here made. (Compare Livy VI. 40, 41, _nos privatim auspicia habemus_ of the Patrician families.) To be ἀφρήτωρ, or _excluded from a tribe_ (Il. IX. 63), was among the Greeks of the heroic ages a penalty half-civil, half-religious, similar in character to the _excommunication_ of the middle ages. Of this extremely interesting subject, the English reader will find a most luminous exposition in GROTE's _Greece_, vol. iii. p. 74. Note 46 (p. 162). ". . . whom we call The mother begets not."