378
Prometheus Bound.
Shun thou their downward rush, lest, unaware,
In wintry tempest thou be rudely caught.]
The roaring sea-wave skirt thou then until
Kisthene's[1] Gorgoneian plains thou reach,
Where dwell the Phorkides,[2] maids grey with eld,
Three, swan-shaped, of one common eye possessed,
One common tooth, whom neither with his beams
The sun beholdeth, nor the nightly moon;
And near them dwell their winged sisters three,
Gorgons, with snaky locks, of men abhorred;
Whom mortal may not look upon and live.
This for thy warning I relate to thee; 820
List now another spectacle of dread.
The unbarking hounds of Zeus, sharp-mouthed, beware,—
The Griffins; and the Arimaspian[3] host,
- ↑ Kisthene, The character and situation of this legendary region vary according to the theory entertained as to the direction of Io's wanderings. Mr. Paley, to whose note I must refer for the grounds of his hypothesis, identifies it with Mont Blanc. This seems, however, directly to contradict the poet's statement that Io, after crossing the Kimmerian Bosporos, travelled eastward on Asiatic ground.
- ↑ The swan-shaped daughters of Phorkys are resolved by modern mythologists into the weird and dusky clouds never illumined by the light of the sun; while their more terrible sisters, the Gorgons, are the hideous storm-clouds, that rush with fury across the sky.—Cox's Mythology, ii. 287. These legendary beings are placed by Hesiod in the far west (Theog. 274).
- ↑ The Arimaspi are placed by Herodotus to the east of his Scythia, which was the region north of the Euxine, bounded probably by the Tanais on the east (Herod. iv 13–27).
