Page:Prometheus Bound (Bevan 1902).djvu/135

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NOTES

Line 431. The description of the mourning of inanimate nature is usually connected with the reference to Atlas. It seems more naturally to follow on the description of the mourning of mankind for Prometheus. Hence Ribbeck was for transposing the last strophe and antistrophe. A more satisfactory method, suggested by the way in which Mr. W. Headlam deals with Supplices, 80 f., is to suppose that the part of the Chorus which sings the parenthesis referring to Atlas, is not the same as that which sang the passage before, and continues the theme of the mourning in βοᾷ δὲ πόντιος κλύδων κτλ.


Line 558. Tradition was rather hazy as to the wife of Prometheus. It was generally agreed that she was a daughter of Okeanos. Her name, here Hesione, is given by Herodotus in the form Asia, made familiar to the English by Shelley's Prometheus Unbound.


Line 574. For the reference in this passage (generally missed by commentators) see Introduction, page xxxv.


Line 636. See Introduction, page xxxiii.


Lines 706 f. The geography of Aeschylus is, of course, not the geography of the real world. Themiskyra, for instance, is on the Southern, and Salmydessos on the Western, shore of the Black Sea: the Caucasus is to the South-east, not to the North, of the Straits of Kertch (the Kimmerian or Meotic Bosporos). The general track of Io is from the Northern shores of Europe across Russia and the Caucasus into Central Asia (the Arimas-

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