"I will tell of the sixth, a man most prudent and in valor the best, the seer, the mighty Amphiaraus. . . . . And through his mouth he gives utterance to this speech . . . . . 'I, for my part, in very truth shall fatten this soil, seer as I am, buried beneath a hostile earth.'"
Statius, Thebaid, VIII. 47, Lewis's Tr.:—
"Bought of my treacherous wife for cursed gold,
And in the list of Argive chiefs enrolled,
Resigned to fate I sought the Theban plain;
Whence flock the shades that scarce thy realm contain;
When, how my soul yet dreads! an earthquake came,
Big with destruction, and my trembling frame,
Rapt from the midst of gaping thousands, hurled
To night eternal in thy nether world."
40. The Theban soothsayer. Ovid, Met., III., Addison's Tr.:—
"It happen'd once, within a shady wood,
Two twisted snakes he in conjunction view'd,
When with his staff their slimy folds he broke,
And lost his manhood at the fatal stroke.
But, after seven revolving years, he view'd
The self-same serpents in the self-same wood:
'And if,' says he, 'such virtue in you lie,
That he who dares your slimy folds untie
Must change his kind, a second stroke I'll try.'
Again he struck the snakes, and stood again
New-sex'd, and straight recovered into man.
·····
When Juno fired,
More than so trivial an affair required,
Deprived him, in her fury, of his sight,
And left him groping round in sudden night.
But Jove (for so it is in heav'n decreed
That no one god repeal another's deed)
Irradiates all his soul with inward light,
And with the prophet's art relieves the want of sight."
45. His beard. The word "plumes" is used by old English writers in this sense. Ford, Lady's Trial:—
"Now the down
Of softness is exchanged for plumes of age."
See also [[../../Volume 2/Canto 1|Purg. I.]] 42.
46. An Etrurian soothsayer. Lucan, Pharsalia, I., Rowe's Tr.:—
"Of these the chief, for learning famed and age,
Aruns by name, a venerable sage,
At Luna lived."
Ruskin, Modern Painters, III. p. 246, says:—
"But in no part of the poem do we find allusion to mountains in any other than a stern light; nor the slightest evidence that Dante cared to look at them. From that hill of San Miniato, whose steps he knew so well, the eye commands, at the farther extremity of the Val d' Arno, the whole purple range of the mountains of Carrara, peaked and mighty, seen always against the sunset light in silent outline, the chief forms that rule the scene as twilight fades away. By this vision Dante seems to have been wholly unmoved, and, but for Lucan's mention of Aruns at Luna, would seemingly not have spoken of the Carrara hills in the whole course of his poem: when he does allude to them, he speaks of their white marble, and their command of stars and sea, but has evidently no regard for the hills themselves. There is not a single phrase or syllable throughout the poem
