Page:The Dramas of Aeschylus (Swanwick).djvu/449

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Prometheus Bound.
379

Horse-mounted, single-eyed, around the stream
Who dwell of Pluto's gold-abounding flood.[1]
To these approach not; a far border-land
Thou next shalt reach, where dwells a swarthy race,
Near the sun's founts, whence is the Æthiop river.[2]
Along its banks proceed till thou attain
The mighty rapids, where from Bybline heights 830
Pure draughts of sacred water Neilos sends.
He to the land, three-cornered, thee shall guide,
Encircled by the Nile, where 'tis ordained,
Io, for thee and for thy sons to found
A far-off colony; Io, if aught of this
Seem dark to thee, or difficult to spell,

  1. The theory which identifies "the ford of Pluto" with the Tartessos of Spain (the Guadalquivir) seems also at variance with the express statement of the poet. My friend Professor Newman conjectures that this gold-flowing stream was the Ural. The gold of the Ural mountains is still celebrated. The Arimaspi, with the Grypes, were, moreover, the recognised inhabitants of this gold region.
  2. Io is told by Prometheus that she is to travel eastward till she comes to the river Æthiops, which she is to follow till it falls into the Nile. According to the geographical theories of the earliest Greeks, this condition was fulfilled by the Indus. Arrian (vi. 1) mentions that Alexander the Great, when preparing to sail down the Indus (having seen crocodiles in the river Indus, and in no other river except the Nile . . . ), seemed to himself to have discovered the sources of the Nile; as though the Nile, rising from some place in India, and flowing through much desert land, and thereby losing its name Indus, next . . . . flowed through inhabited land, being now called Nile by the Ethiopians of those parts, and afterwards by the Egyptians. Virgil, in the 4th Georgic, echoes the obsolete error.