206.  The daughters of Danaos are always represented as fifty in number. It seems probable, however, that the vocal chorus was limited to twelve, the others appearing as mutes.

207.  The alluvial deposit of the Delta.

208.  Syria is used obviously with a certain geographical vagueness, as including all that we know as Palestine, and the wilderness to the south of it, and so as conterminous with Egypt.

209.  Elsewhere in Æschylos (Agam. 33, Fr. 132) we trace allusion to games played with dice. Here we have a reference to one, the details of which are not accurately known to us, but which seems to have been analogous to draughts or chess.

210.  See the whole story, given as in prophecy, in the Prometheus, v. 865-880.

211.  The invocation is addressed—(1) to the Olympian Gods in the brightness of heaven; (2) to the Chthonian deities in the darkness below the earth; (3) to Zeus, the preserver, as the supreme Lord of both.

212.  An Athenian audience would probably recognise in this a description of the swampy meadows near the coast of Lerna. The descendants of Io had come to the very spot where the tragic history of their ancestors had had its origin.

213.  The invocation passes on to Epaphos, as a guardian deity able and willing to succour his afflicted children.

214.  Philomela. See the tale as given in the notes to Agam. 1113.

215.  “Streams,” as flowing through the shady solitude of the groves which the nightingale frequented.

216.  “Ionian,” as soft and elegiac, in contrast with the more military character of Dorian music.

217.  In the Greek the paronomasia turns upon the supposed etymological connection between θεὸς and τιθήμι. I have here, as elsewhere, attempted an analogous rather than identical jeu de mot.

218.  The Greek word which I have translated “bluff” was one not familiar to Attic ears, and was believed to be of Kyrenean origin. Æschylos accordingly puts it into the lips of the daughters of Danaos, as characteristic more or less of the “alien speech” of the land from which they came.

219.  So in v. 235 Danaos speaks of the “second Zeus” who sits as Judge in Hades. The feeling to which the Chorus gives utterance is that of—

220.  Some mound dedicated to the Gods, with one or more altars and statues of the Gods on it, is on the stage, and the suppliants are told to take up their places there. The Gods of conflict who are named below, Zeus, Apollo, Poseidon, presided generally over the three great games of Greece. Hermes is added to the list.

221.  Comp. Libation-Pourers, 1024, Eumen. 44.

222.  The Argives are supposed to share the love of brevity which we commonly connect with their neighbours the Laconians.

223.  The “mighty bird of Zeus” seems here, from the answer of the Chorus, to mean not the “eagle” but the “sun,” which roused men from their sleep as the cock did, so that “cockcrow” and “sunrise” were synonymous. It is, in any case, striking that Zeus, rather than Apollo, appears as the Sun-God.

224.  The words refer to the myth of Apollo's banishment from heaven and servitude under Admetos.

225.  In the Acropolis at Athens the impress of a trident was seen on the rock, and was believed to commemorate the time when Poseidon had claimed it as his own by setting up his weapon there. Something of the same kind seems here to be supposed to exist at Argos, where a like legend prevailed.

226.  The Hellenic Hermes is distinguished from his Egyptian counterpart, Thoth, as being different in form and accessories.

227.  A possible reference to the Egyptian Osiris, as lord or judge of Hades. Comp. v. 145.

228.  “Shall I,” the Chorus asks, “speak to you as a private citizen, or as a herald, or as a king?”

229.  It would appear from this that the king himself bore the name Pelasgos. In some versions of the story he is so designated.

230.  The lines contain a tradition of the wide extent of the old Pelasgic rule, including Thessalia, or the Pelasgic Argos, between the mouths of Peneus and Pindos, Perrhæbia, Dodona, and finally the Apian land or Peloponnesos.

231.  The true meaning of the word “Apian,” as applied to the Peloponnesos, seems to have been “distant.” Here the myth is followed which represented it as connected with Apis the son of Telchin (son of Apollo, in the sense of being a physician-prophet), who had freed the land from monsters.

232.  The description would seem to indicate—(1) that the daughter of Danaos appeared on the stage as of swarthy complexion; and (2) that Indians, Æthiopians, Kyprians, and Amazons, were all thought of as in this respect alike.

233.  The line is conjectural, but some question of this kind is implied in the answer of the Chorus.

234.  By sacrificing personal likings to schemes of ambition, men and women contract marriages which increase their power.

235.  The Gods of conflict are the pilots of the ship of the State. The altar dedicated to them is as its stern: the garlands and wands of suppliants which adorn it are as the decorations of the vessels.

236.  Some editors have seen in this an attempt to enlist the constitutional sympathies of an Athenian audience in favour of the Argive king, who will not act without consulting his assembly. There seems more reason to think that the aim of the dramatist was in precisely the opposite direction, and that the words which follow set forth his admiration for the king who can act, as compared with one who is tied and hampered by restrictions.

237.  By an Attic law, analogous in principle to that of the Jews, (Num. xxxvi. 8; 1 Chron. xxiii. 22), heiresses were absolutely bound to marry their next of kin, if he claimed his right. The king at once asserts this as the law which was primâ facie applicable to the case, and declares himself ready to surrender it if the petitioners can show that their own municipal law is on the other side. He will not thrust his country's customs upon foreigners, who can prove that they live under a different rule, but in the absence of evidence must act on the law which he is bound officially to recognise.

238.  Sc., the pollution which the statues of the Gods would contract if they carried into execution their threat of suicide.

239.  Inachos, the river-God of Argos, and as such contrasted with Neilos.

240.  i.e., “Unconsecrate,” marked out by no barriers, accessible to all, and therefore seeming to offer but little prospect of a safe asylum. The place described seems to have been an open piece of turf rather than a grove of trees.

241.  Comp. the narrative as given in Prometheus Bound, vv. 660, et seq.

242.  Teuthras' fort, or Teuthrania, is described by Strabo (xii. p. 571) as lying between the Hellespont and Mount Sipylos, in Magnesia.

243.  Kypros, as dedicated to the worship of Aphrodite, and famous for its wine, and oil, and corn.

244.  The question, what caused the mysterious exceptional inundations of the Nile, occupied, as we see from Herodotos (ii. c. 19-27), the minds of the Greeks. Of the four theories which the historian discusses, Æschylos adopts that which referred it to the melting of the snows on the mountains of central Africa.

245.  Typhon, the mythical embodiment of the power of evil, was fabled to have wandered over Egypt, seeking the body of Osiris. Isis, to baffle him, placed coffins in all parts of Egypt, all empty but the one which contained the body.

246.  The fame of the Nile for the purity of its water, after the earthy matter held in solution had been deposited, seems to have been as great in the earliest periods of its history as it is now.

247.  Io was represented as a woman with a heifer's head, and was probably a symbolic representation of the moon, with her crescent horns. Sometimes the transformation is described (as in v. 294) in words which imply a more thorough change.

248.  Perhaps—

249.  The passage takes its place among the noblest utterances of a faith passing above the popular polytheism to the thought of one sovereign Will ruling and guiding all things, as Will—without effort, in the calmness of a power irresistible.

250.  Double, as involving a sin against the laws of hospitality, so far as the suppliants were strangers—a sin against the laws of kindred, so far as they might claim by descent the rights of citizenship.

251.  If, as has been conjectured, the tragedy was written with a view to the alliance between Argos and Athens, made in B.C. 461, this choral ode must have been the centre, if not of the dramatic, at all events of the political interest of the play.

252.  The image is that of a bird of evil omen, perched upon the roof, and defiling the house, while it uttered its boding cries.

253.  The suppliants' boughs, so held as to shade the face from view.

254.  The name of Hecate connected Artemis as, on the one side, with the unseen world of Hades, so, on the other, with childbirth, and the purifications that followed on it.

255.  The name of Lykeian, originally, perhaps, simply representing Apollo as the God of Light, came afterwards to be associated with the might of destruction (the Wolf-destroyer) and the darts of pestilence and sudden death. The prayer is therefore that he, the Destroyer, may hearken to the suppliants, and spare the people for whom they pray.

256.  The “three great laws” were those ascribed to Triptolemos, “to honour parents, to worship the Gods with the fruits of the earth, to hurt neither man nor beast.”

257.  The Egyptian ships, like those of many other Eastern countries, had eyes (the eyes of Osiris, as they were called) painted on their bows.

258.  A side-thrust, directed by the poet, who had fought at Marathon, against the growing effeminacy of the Athenian youth, many of whom were learning to shrink from all activity and exposure that might spoil their complexions. Comp. Plato, Phædros, p. 239.

259.  The saying is somewhat dark, but the meaning seems to be that if the “dogs” of Egypt are strong, the “wolves” of Argos are stronger; that the wheat on which the Hellenes lived gave greater strength to limbs and sinew than the “byblos fruit” on which the Egyptian soldiers and sailors habitually lived. Some writers, however, have seen in the last line, rendered—

a proverb like the English,

260.  The words recall the vision of the “seven well-favoured kine and fat-fleshed,” which “came out of the river,” as Pharaoh dreamed (Gen. xli. 1, 2), and which were associated so closely with the fertility which it ordinarily produced through the whole extent of the valley of the Nile.

261.  Two dangerous low headlands seem to have been known by this name, one on the coast of Kilikia, the other on that of the Thrakian Chersonese.

262.  No traces of ships of this structure are found in Egyptian art; but, if the reading be right, it implies the existence of boats of some kind, so built that they could be steered from either end.

263.  Hermes, the guardian deity of heralds, is here described by the epithet which marked him out as being also the patron of detectives. Every stranger arriving in a Greek port had to place himself under a proxenos or patron of some kind. The herald, having no proxenos among the citizens, appeals to his patron deity.

264.  The words refer to the custom of nailing decrees, proclamations, treaties, and the like, engraved on metal or marble, upon the walls of temples or public buildings. Traces of the same idea may possibly be found in the promise to Eliakim that he shall be “as a nail in a sure place” (Isa. xxii. 23), in the thanksgiving of Ezra that God had given His people “a nail in his holy place” (Ezra ix. 8).

265.  As before, the bread of the Hellenes was praised to the disparagement of the “byblos fruit” of Egypt, so here their wine to that of the Egyptian beer, which was the ordinary drink of the lower classes.