ALPHEUS, when he leaves Pisa and makes his way through beneath the deep, travels on to Arethusa with his waters that the wild olives drank, bearing her bridal gifts, fair leaves and flowers and sacred soil. Deep in the waves he plunges, and runs beneath the sea, and the salt water mingles not with the sweet. Nought knows the sea as the river journeys through. Thus hath the knavish boy, the maker of mischief, the teacher of strange ways—thus hath Love by his spell taught even a river to dive. IDYL VIII LEAVING his torch and his arrows, a wallet strung on his back, One day came the mischievous Love-god to follow the plough-share’s track: And he chose him a staff for his driving, and yoked him a sturdy steer, And sowed in the furrows the grain to the Mother of Earth most dear. Then he said, looking up to the sky: ‘Father Zeus, to my harvest be good, Lest I yoke that bull to my plough that Europa once rode through the flood!’ IDYL IX WOULD that my father had taught me the craft of a keeper of sheep, For so in the shade of the elm-tree, or under the rocks on the steep, Piping on reeds I had sat, and had lulled my sorrow to sleep. {210} FOOTNOTES {0a} This fragment is from the collection of M. Fauriel; _Chants Populaires de le Grèce_. {0b} _Empedocles on Etna_. {0c} Ballet des Arts, dansé par sa Majesté; le 8 janvier, 1663. A Paris, par Robert Ballard, MDCLXIII. {0d} These and the following ditties are from the modern Greek ballads collected by MM. Fauriel and Legrand. {0e} See Couat, _La Poesie Alexandrine_, p. 68 _et seq._, Paris 1882. {0f} See Couat, _op. cit._ p. 395. {0g} Couat, p. 434. {0h} See Helbig, _Campenische Wandmalerie_, and Brunn, _Die griechischen Bukoliker und die Bildende Kunst_. {0i} The _Hecale_ of Callimachus, or Theseus and the Marathonian Bull, seems to have been rather a heroic idyl than an epic. {6} Or reading Αίολικόν=Aeolian, cf. Thucyd. iii. 102. {9} These are places famous in the oldest legends of Arcadia. {11} Reading, καταδήσομαι. Cf. Fritzsche’s note and Harpocration, s.v. {13} On the word ραμβος, see Lobeck, _Aglaoph._ p. 700; and ‘The Bull Roarer,’ in the translator’s _Custom and Myth_. {19} Reading καταδήσομαι. Cf. line 3, and note. {21} He refers to a piece of folk-lore. {24} The shovel was used for tossing the sand of the lists; the sheep were food for Aegon’s great appetite. {26} Reading έρίσδεις. {34} Melanthius was the treacherous goatherd put to a cruel death by Odysseus. {36} Ameis and Fritzsche take νιν (as here) to be the dog, not Galatea. The sex of the Cyclops’s sheep-dog makes the meaning obscure. {40} Or, δόμον Ώρομέδοντος. Hermann renders this _domum Oromedonteam_ a gigantic house.’ Oromedon or Eurymedon was the king of the Gigantes, mentioned in Odyssey vii. 58.