On the Theogony. 89 



rebellion of the Titan gods, the brethren of Saturn, against his offspring, 

 Jupiter and his brethren. 



6. lapetus espoused Clyraene, (or, according to Apollodorus, Asia,) the 

 daughter of Ocean, (1. 507,) the first of their children was Atlas, doomed 

 to support the heavens in the extreme west, near the Hesperides ; a tale 

 for which we need probably look for no more recondite solution than the 

 simple supposition, that it repeats the language of the mariners who navi- 

 gated the Mediterranean, the only sea known to our poet, and naturally 

 represented the peaks of the chain of mountains which skirted the south- 

 western horizon, beyond the extreme boundary of their voyages, and seemed 

 to support the heavens where they considered the earth as ending. The 

 brethren of Atlas were, Menoetius, of whom we know nothing beyond his 

 being here mentioned as an opponent of Jupiter's, and by him cast into 

 Tartarus, together with the Titans, and Prometheus, and Epimetheus, 

 whose legends we shall hereafter have to examine. 



But here we may well close our present article, intending to conclude 

 our survey of the Theogony in a future number j for the point at which 

 we have now arrived marks one of the great divisions of this poem, and the 

 remaining portion is distinguished by the greatest diversity of character. 

 Hitherto, after the introductory addresses to the Muses, we have been 

 entirely engaged in somewhat dry and unpoetical genealogical tables, with 

 little or nothing of sustained narrative, such as will be found to occupy 

 almost all the rest of the poem. The fables of Prometheus and the wars 

 of the Titans and Typhoeus against Jove, are subjects, therefore, which will 

 demand rather poetical criticism than mythological illustration. Heyne 

 has justly remarked on the superior delicacy and beauty of the fables which 

 follow the exaltation of Jove to the throne of Olympus, and which seem to 

 be more jjurely the offspring of Greek invention. The obligations of our 

 own Milton also to much of this portion of the Theogony, will form a very 

 interesting subject for our examination. 



I cannot better conclude these intricate, and, it may be feared, often 

 unsatisfactory mythological discussions, than by quoting a passage in the 

 Phaedrus of Plato, in which Socrates is introduced as saying of such en- 

 quiries : — " I might otherwise esteem such subjects interesting, but that 

 they require an excess of ingenuity and labor in tlie student, and seldom 

 repay him with success ; which needs no otlier argument but that a neces- 

 sity will be imposed upon him to give a correct explanation of the Hippo- 

 Centaurs and ChimBcra, and a crowd of the like objects will flow in on 

 him; the Gorgons and Pegasus, with a multitude of similar inexplicable 

 natures, devised by the forgers of prodigies ; in which, if anyone, sceptical 

 as to the vulgar creed of their real existence, should proceed to seek a 

 more probable allegorical sense, applying himself to them as to a rustic 

 body of philosophy, he will need indeed much of leisure — but this leisure 

 for such investigations is entirely wanting to myself." 



