Hecate, having no brothers to
support her claim, might have been slighted.]

[Footnote 1618: The goddess of the hearth (the Roman "Vesta"), and so of
the house. Cp. "Homeric Hymns" v.22 ff.; xxxix.1 ff.]

[Footnote 1619: The variant reading 'of his father' (sc. Heaven) rests
on inferior MS. authority and is probably an alteration due to the
difficulty stated by a Scholiast: 'How could Zeus, being not yet
begotten, plot against his father?' The phrase is, however, part of the
prophecy. The whole line may well be spurious, and is rejected by Heyne,
Wolf, Gaisford and Guyet.]

[Footnote 1620: Pausanias (x. 24.6) saw near the tomb of Neoptolemus 'a
stone of no great size', which the Delphians anointed every day with
oil, and which he says was supposed to be the stone given to Cronos.]

[Footnote 1621: A Scholiast explains: 'Either because they (men) sprang
from the Melian nymphs (cp. l. 187); or because, when they were born
(?), they cast themselves under the ash-trees, that is, the trees.' The
reference may be to the origin of men from ash-trees: cp. "Works and
Days", l. 145 and note.]

[Footnote 1622: sc. Atlas, the Shu of Egyptian mythology: cp. note on
line 177.]

[Footnote 1623: Oceanus is here regarded as a continuous stream
enclosing the earth and the seas, and so as flowing back upon himself.]

[Footnote 1624: The conception of Oceanus is here different: he has nine
streams which encircle the earth and then flow out into the 'main' which
appears to be the waste of waters on which, according to early Greek and
Hebrew cosmology, the disk-like earth floated.]

[Footnote 1625: i.e. the threshold is of 'native' metal, and not
artificial.]

[Footnote 1626: According to Homer Typhoeus was overwhelmed by Zeus
amongst the Arimi in Cilicia. Pindar represents him as buried under
Aetna, and Tzetzes reads Aetna in this passage.]

[Footnote 1627: The epithet (which means literally 'well-bored') seems
to refer to the spout of the crucible.]

[Footnote 1628: The fire god. There is no reference to volcanic action:
iron was smelted on Mount Ida; cp. "Epigrams of Homer", ix. 2-4.]

[Footnote 1629: i.e. Athena, who was born 'on the banks of the river
Trito' (cp. l. 929l)]

[Footnote 1630: Restored by Peppmuller. The nineteen following lines
from another recension of lines 889-900, 924-9 are quoted by Chrysippus
(in Galen).]

[Footnote 1631: sc. the aegis. Line 929s is probably spurious, since it
disagrees with l. 929q