The Iliad

      the river Cayster, near its mouth. See Virgil, "Georgics," vol. i.
      383, sq.

   98 --_Scamander,_ or Scamandros, was a river of Troas, rising, according
      to Strabo, on the highest part of Mount Ida, in the same hill with
      the Granicus and the OEdipus, and falling into the sea at Sigaeum;
      everything tends to identify it with Mendere, as Wood, Rennell, and
      others maintain; the Mendere is 40 miles long, 300 feet broad, deep
      in the time of flood, nearly dry in the summer. Dr. Clarke
      successfully combats the opinion of those who make the Scamander to
      have arisen from the springs of Bounabarshy, and traces the source
      of the river to the highest mountain in the chain of Ida, now
      Kusdaghy; receives the Simois in its course; towards its mouth it is
      very muddy, and flows through marshes. Between the Scamander and
      Simois, Homer's Troy is supposed to have stood: this river,
      according to Homer, was called Xanthus by the gods, Scamander by
      men. The waters of the Scamander had the singular property of giving
      a beautiful colour to the hair or wool of such animals as bathed in
      them; hence the three goddesses, Minerva, Juno, and Venus, bathed
      there before they appeared before Paris to obtain the golden apple:
      the name Xanthus, "yellow," was given to the Scamander, from the
      peculiar colour of its waters, still applicable to the Mendere, the
      yellow colour of whose waters attracts the attention of travellers.

   99 It should be "his _chest_ like Neptune." The torso of Neptune, in
      the "Elgin Marbles," No. 103, (vol. ii. p. 26,) is remarkable for
      its breadth and massiveness of development.

          100 "Say first, for heav'n hides nothing from thy view."

                                                  --"Paradise Lost," i. 27.

        "Ma di' tu, Musa, come i primi danni
        Mandassero a Cristiani, e di quai parti:
        Tu 'l sai; ma di tant' opra a noi si lunge
        Debil aura di fama appena giunge."

                                                     --"Gier. Lib." iv. 19.

  101 "The Catalogue is, perhaps, the portion of the poem in favour of
      which a claim to separate authorship has been most plausibly urged.
      Although the example of Homer has since rendered some such formal
      enumeration of the forces engaged, a common practice in epic poems
      descriptive of great warlike adventures, still so minute a
      statistical detail can neither be considered as imperatively
      required, nor perhaps such as would, in ordinary cases, suggest
      itself to the mind of a poet. Yet there is scarcely any portion of
      the Iliad where both historical and internal evidence are more
      clearly in favour of a connection from the remotest period, with the
      remainder of the work. The composition of the Catalogue, whensoever
      it may have taken place, necessarily presumes its author's
      acquaintance with a previously existing Iliad. It were impossible
      otherwise to account for the harmony observable in the recurrence of
      so vast a number of proper names, most of them historically
      unimportant, and not a few altogether fictitious: or of so many
      geographical and genealogical details as are condensed in these few
      hundred lines, and incidentally scattered over the thousands which
      follow: equally inexplicable were the pointed allusions occurring in
      this episode to events narrated in the previous and subsequent text,
      several of which could hardly be of traditional notoriety, but
      through the medium of the Iliad."--Mure, "Language and Literature of
      Greece," vol. i. p. 263.

  102 --_Twice Sixty:_ "Thucydides observes that the Boeotian vessels,
      which carried one hundred and twenty men each, were probably meant
      to be the largest in the fleet, and those of Philoctetes, carrying
      fifty each, the smallest. The average would be eighty-five, and
      Thucydides supposes the troops to have rowed and navigated
      themselves; and that very few, besides the chiefs, went as mere
      passengers or landsmen. In short, we have in the Homeric
      descriptions the complete picture of an Indian or African war canoe,
      many of which are considerably larger than the largest scale
      assigned to those of the Greeks. If the total number of the Greek
      ships be taken at twelve hundred, according to Thucydides, although
      in point of fact there are only eleven hundred and eighty-six in the
      Catalogue, the amount of the army, upon the foregoing average, will
      be about a hundred and two thousand men. The historian considers
      this a small force as representing all Greece. Bryant, comparing it
      with the allied army at Platae, thinks it so large as to prove the
      entire falsehood of the whole story; and his reasonings and
      calculations are, for their curiosity, well worth a careful
      perusal."--Coleridge, p. 211, sq.

  103 The mention of Corinth is an anachronism, as that city was called
      Ephyre before its capture by the Dorians. But Velleius, vol. i. p.
      3, well observes, that the poet would naturally speak of various
      towns and cities by the names by which they were known in his own
      time.

          104 "Adam, the goodliest man of men since born,
        His sons, the fairest of her daughters Eve.'

                                                --"Paradise Lost," iv. 323.

  105 --_AEsetes' tomb._ Monuments were often built on the sea-coast, and of
      a considerable height, so as to serve as watch-towers or land marks.
      See my notes to my prose translations of the "Odyssey," ii. p. 21,
      or on Eur. "Alcest." vol. i. p. 240.

  106 --_Zeleia,_ another name for Lycia. The inhabitants were greatly