316 STRAITS OF THERMOPYLiE. 
CHAP, powerfully bespeaks its nature; for it is sul- 
VIII. 
Fetid 
gaseous 
exhalation: 
^ phuretted hydrogen. Having before alluded 
to the accuracy with which Sophocles adapted 
the scenery of the Trachinice to real appearances 
by SopHo- around the Sinus Maliaciis, it may be worthy of 
^^^^ remark, that even this trivial circumstance, of 
the gaseous ebullition through crevices of the 
earth at Thermopylae, did not escape his obser- 
vation. He makes a curious use of it, in the 
scene between Dejanira and the Chorus; when 
he causes the former to relate, that some of the 
wool stained with the blood of the Centaur 
Nessus, falling upon the Trachinian Plain, in a 
place where the sun's rays were the most fierce, 
there boiled up from the earth ' frothy bubbles. 
The audience who were present during its re- 
presentation, and who were well acquainted 
with all that was worthy of observation in the 
Plain of Trachinia, must have regarded with a 
high degree of satisfaction the appropriation 
of its physical phaenomena to an interesting 
story; because it was interweaving facts, 
whereof many of them had been witnesses, with 
the machinery of a fable, which, as a popular 
superstition, was of course listened to by them 
(1) — 'E/s Ss ysjj, fiViv 
vrao'JKitT , a,\ia.Z,icv(ri (^nfi^iaai; a^^ii. 
Sophoclis Trachinicc, ver. TOl. vol.1, p. 252. cA. Brtinck. 
