[Footnote 66: The force of this taunt is weakened in Pope's translation by the change from the second person to the third, as though the invectives of Juno had not been addressed to Jupiter himself.]
[Footnote 67: Jupiter visited Semele, the daughter of Cadmus, in all the majesty of the thunderer, and she was consumed by the lightning.]
[Footnote 68: Homer makes Juno say that there are three cities pre-eminently dear to her--Argos, Sparta, and Mycenæ. Samos had no less title to the distinction. It was one of the localities which contended for the renown of having given her birth, and was, with Argos, the principal seat of her worship. Virgil ranks Samos second among the places she delighted to honour.]
[Footnote 69: The river Alpheus, which takes its rise in Arcadia, loses itself underground in parts of its course, and again reappears. This suggested the fiction that it ran in a subterranean channel, below the bottom of the sea, to the fountain of Arethusa in Sicily, where it once more emerged to day. Pope had less regard to the text of Statius than to Dryden's translation of Virgil's lines on the same legend in Ecl. x. 5:
So may thy silver streams beneath the tide, Unmixed with briny seas, securely glide.]
[Footnote 70: The Arcadians celebrated the worship of Jupiter with human sacrifices.]
[Footnote 71: He was king of Pisa in Elis, where was the celebrated Olympia, with its temple of Jupiter. Oenomaus had ascertained from an oracle that he would perish by the agency of his son-in-law, and he was anxious, in self-defence, to keep his daughter, Hippodamia, from marrying. As he possessed the swiftest horses in the world he required her suitors to contend with him in a chariot-race, which allowed them no chance of success. The prize of victory was to be his daughter; the penalty of defeat was death, and the bones which laid unburied in the neighbourhood of Jupiter's temple were those of the lovers of Hippodamia.]
[Footnote 72: The Cretans claimed to possess both the birth-place and burial-place of Jupiter.]
[Footnote 73: "Derived from Jove," inasmuch as Perseus, one of the kings of Argos, was the son of Jupiter and Danae.]
[Footnote 74: Eteocles and Polynices.--POPE.]
[Footnote 75: Mercury, so called because he was born upon Mount Cyllene.]