1310 (return) [ Early in May.]
1311 (return) [ In November.]
1312 (return) [ In October.]
1313 (return) [ For pounding corn.]
1314 (return) [ A mallet for breaking clods after ploughing.]
1315 (return) [ The loaf is a flattish cake with two intersecting lines scored on its upper surface which divide it into four equal parts.]
1316 (return) [ The meaning is obscure. A scholiast renders ‘giving eight mouthfulls’; but the elder Philostratus uses the word in contrast to ‘leavened’.]
1317 (return) [ About the middle of November.]
1318 (return) [ Spring is so described because the buds have not yet cast their iron-grey husks.]
1319 (return) [ In December.]
1320 (return) [ In March.]
1321 (return) [ The latter part of January and earlier part of February.]
1322 (return) [ _i.e._ the octopus or cuttle.]
1323 (return) [ _i.e._ the darker-skinned people of Africa, the Egyptians or Aethiopians.]
1324 (return) [ _i.e._ an old man walking with a staff (the ‘third leg’— as in the riddle of the Sphinx).]
1325 (return) [ February to March.]
1326 (return) [ _i.e._ the snail. The season is the middle of May.]
1327 (return) [ In June.]
1328 (return) [ July.]
1329 (return) [ _i.e._ a robber.]
1330 (return) [ September.]
1331 (return) [ The end of October.]
1332 (return) [ That is, the succession of stars which make up the full year.]
1333 (return) [ The end of October or beginning of November.]
1334 (return) [ July-August.]
1335 (return) [ _i.e._ untimely, premature. Juvenal similarly speaks of ‘cruda senectus’ (caused by gluttony).]
1336 (return) [ The thought is parallel to that of ‘O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath.’]
1337 (return) [ The ‘common feast’ is one to which all present subscribe. Theognis (line 495) says that one of the chief pleasures of a banquet is the general conversation. Hence the present passage means that such a feast naturally costs little, while the many present will make pleasurable conversation.]
1338 (return) [ _i.e._ ‘do not cut your finger-nails’.]
1339 (return) [ _i.e._ things which it would be sacrilege to disturb, such as tombs.]
1340 (return) [ H.G. Evelyn-White prefers to switch ll. 768 and 769, reading l. 769 first then l. 768.—DBK]
1341 (return) [ The month is divided into three periods, the waxing, the mid-month, and the waning, which answer to the phases of the moon.]
1342 (return) [ _i.e._ the ant.]
1343 (return) [ Such seems to be the meaning here, though the epithet is otherwise rendered ‘well-rounded’. Corn was threshed by means of a sleigh with two runners having three or four rollers between them, like the modern Egyptian _nurag_.]
1401 (return) [ This halt verse is added by the Scholiast on Aratus, 172.]
1402 (return) [ The “Catasterismi” (“Placings among the Stars”) is a collection of legends relating to the various constellations.]
1403 (return) [ The Straits of Messina.]
1501 (return) [ Or perhaps ‘a Scythian’.]
1601 (return) [ The epithet probably indicates coquettishness.]
1602 (return) [ A proverbial saying meaning, ‘why enlarge on irrelevant topics?’]
1603 (return) [ ‘She of the noble voice’: Calliope is queen of Epic poetry.]
1604 (return) [ Earth, in the cosmology of Hesiod, is a disk surrounded by the river Oceanus and floating upon a waste of waters. It is called the foundation of all (the qualification ‘the deathless ones...’ etc. is an interpolation), because not only trees, men, and animals, but even the hills and seas (ll. 129, 131) are supported by it.]
1605 (return) [ Aether is the bright, untainted upper atmosphere, as distinguished from Aer, the lower atmosphere of the earth.]
1606 (return) [ Brontes is the Thunderer; Steropes, the Lightener; and Arges, the Vivid One.]
1607 (return) [ The myth accounts for the separation of Heaven and Earth. In Egyptian cosmology Nut (the Sky) is thrust and held apart from her brother Geb (the Earth) by their father Shu, who corresponds to the Greek Atlas.]
1608 (return) [ Nymphs of the ash-trees, as Dryads are nymphs of the oak-trees. Cp. note on _Works and Days_, l. 145.]
1609 (return) [ ‘Member-loving’: the title is perhaps only a perversion of the regular PHILOMEIDES (laughter-loving).]
1610 (return) [ Cletho (the Spinner) is she who spins the thread of man’s life; Lachesis (the Disposer of Lots) assigns to each man his destiny; Atropos (She who cannot be turned) is the ‘Fury with the abhorred shears.’]
1611 (return) [ Many of the names which follow express various qualities or aspects of the sea: thus Galene is ‘Calm’, Cymothoe is the ‘Wave-swift’, Pherusa and Dynamene are ‘She who speeds (ships)’ and ‘She who has power’.]
1612 (return) [ The ‘Wave-receiver’ and the ‘Wave-stiller’.]
1613 (return) [ ‘The Unerring’ or ‘Truthful’; cp. l. 235.]
1614 (return) [ _i.e._ Poseidon.]
1615 (return) [ Goettling notes that some of these nymphs derive their names from lands over which they preside, as Europa, Asia, Doris, Ianeira (‘Lady of the Ionians’), but that most are called after some quality which their streams possessed: thus Xanthe is the ‘Brown’ or ‘Turbid’, Amphirho is the ‘Surrounding’ river, Ianthe is ‘She who delights’, and Ocyrrhoe is the ‘Swift-flowing’.]
1616 (return) [ _i.e._ Eos, the ‘Early-born’.]
1617 (return) [ Van Lennep explains that Hecate, having no brothers to support her claim, might have been slighted.]
1618 (return) [ The goddess of the _hearth_ (the Roman _Vesta_), and so of the house. Cp. _Homeric Hymns_ v.22 ff.; xxxix.1 ff.]
1619 (return) [ The variant reading ‘of his father’ (sc. Heaven) rests on inferior MS. authority and is probably an alteration due to the difficulty stated by a Scholiast: ‘How could Zeus, being not yet begotten, plot against his father?’ The phrase is, however, part of the prophecy. The whole line may well be spurious, and is rejected by Heyne, Wolf, Gaisford and Guyet.]
1620 (return) [ Pausanias (x. 24.6) saw near the tomb of Neoptolemus ‘a stone of no great size’, which the Delphians anointed every day with oil, and which he says was supposed to be the stone given to Cronos.]
1621 (return) [ A Scholiast explains: ‘Either because they (men) sprang from the Melian nymphs (cp. l. 187); or because, when they were born (?), they cast themselves under the ash-trees, that is, the trees.’ The reference may be to the origin of men from ash-trees: cp. _Works and Days_, l. 145 and note.]
1622 (return) [ _sc_. Atlas, the Shu of Egyptian mythology: cp. note on line 177.]
1623 (return) [ Oceanus is here regarded as a continuous stream enclosing the earth and the seas, and so as flowing back upon himself.]
1624 (return) [ The conception of Oceanus is here different: he has nine streams which encircle the earth and then flow out into the ‘main’ which appears to be the waste of waters on which, according to early Greek and Hebrew cosmology, the disk-like earth floated.]
1625 (return) [ _i.e._ the threshold is of ‘native’ metal, and not artificial.]
1626 (return) [ According to Homer Typhoeus was overwhelmed by Zeus amongst the Arimi in Cilicia. Pindar represents him as buried under Aetna, and Tzetzes reads Aetna in this passage.]
1627 (return) [ The epithet (which means literally _well-bored_) seems to refer to the spout of the crucible.]
1628 (return) [ The fire god. There is no reference to volcanic action: iron was smelted on Mount Ida; cp. _Epigrams of Homer_, ix. 2-4.]
1629 (return) [ _i.e._ Athena, who was born ‘on the banks of the river Trito’ (cp. l. 929l)]
1630 (return) [ Restored by Peppmuller. The nineteen following lines from another recension of lines 889-900, 924-9 are quoted by Chrysippus (in Galen).]
1631 (return) [ _sc_. the aegis. Line 929s is probably spurious, since it disagrees with l. 929q and contains a suspicious reference to Athens.]
1701 (return) [ A catalogue of heroines each of whom was introduced with the words E OIE, ‘Or like her’.]
1702 (return) [ An antiquarian writer of Byzantium, c. 490-570 A.D.]
1703 (return) [ Constantine VII. ‘Born in the Porphyry Chamber’, 905-959 A.D.]
1704 (return) [ “Berlin Papyri”, 7497 (left-hand fragment) and “Oxyrhynchus Papyri”, 421 (right-hand fragment). For the restoration see “Class. Quart.” vii. 217-8.]
1705 (return) [ As the price to be given to her father for her: so in _Iliad_ xviii. 593 maidens are called ‘earners of oxen’. Possibly Glaucus, like Aias (fr. 68, ll. 55 ff.), raided the cattle of others.]
1706 (return) [ _i.e._ Glaucus should father the children of others. The curse of Aphrodite on the daughters of Tyndareus (fr. 67) may be compared.]
1707 (return) [ Porphyry, scholar, mathematician, philosopher and historian, lived 233-305 (?) A.D. He was a pupil of the neo-Platonist Plotinus.]
1708 (return) [ Author of a geographical lexicon, produced after 400 A.D., and abridged under Justinian.]
1709 (return) [ Archbishop of Thessalonica 1175-1192 (?) A.D., author of commentaries on Pindar and on the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_.]
1710 (return) [ In the earliest times a loin-cloth was worn by athletes, but was discarded after the 14th Olympiad.]
1711 (return) [ Slight remains of five lines precede line 1 in the original: after line 20 an unknown number of lines have been lost, and traces of a verse preceding line 21 are here omitted. Between lines 29 and 30 are fragments of six verses which do not suggest any definite restoration. (NOTE: Line enumeration is that according to Evelyn-White; a slightly different line numbering system is adopted in the original publication of this fragment.—DBK)]