e, tended by a priest who was a runaway slave.
He gained his office by slaying his predecessor and held it only so
long as he could escape a similar fate. Cf. stanza ciii.

'Velia's fountains,' a lake in the Umbrian hills beyond Reate.

LXXXVII. Agylla was the original name of Caere.

XC. Homole and Othrys were mountains in Thessaly.

XCI. The Anio flows through the hills near Tibur, and joins the Tiber
close to 'Antemnae's tower-girt height.' Cf. stanza lxxxiv.

Anagnia was the largest town of the Hernici, and Amasenus was a river
of Latium.

XCIII. All these places were close to each other in Etruria, a few
miles north of Rome.

XCIV. It is probable that this passage was left unfinished by Virgil.
The simile is taken from Homer, and used here in two different ways,
the poet evidently postponing his final decision as to which he would
adopt, until he revised the poem.

XCV. Clausus, according to a legend preserved by Livy, was a Sabine
who left his own countrymen and joined the Romans. For this he was
rewarded by a gift of land on the Anio. He was regarded as the ancestor
of the Claudian family.

XCVI. The name of the Allia was ill-omened because it was on the banks
of this stream that the Gauls under Brennus inflicted a crushing
defeat on the Romans in 390 B.C.

XCVIII. The Oscans were one of the old non-Latin tribes of Italy.
Some fragments of their language still remain.

CIII. The legend was that Hippolytus, the son of Theseus, king of
Athens, was loved by his step-mother Phaedra. Hippolytus rejected
her love, and she killed herself, leaving a writing accusing him of
having tempted her. Theseus in his wrath besought Poseidon to slay
his son, and the latter sent a monster from the sea, which terrified
the horses of Hippolytus so that they ran away and killed their master.
Aesculapius raised him to life, however, and Diana concealed him in
the grove of Aricia under the name of Virbius. The Virbius in the
text is the son of this Hippolytus, also called Virbius.

CVI. Io, the daughter of Inachus, king of Argos, was loved by Jupiter,
and turned by him into a white cow in order to escape the jealousy
of Juno. The latter, however, set Argus with the hundred eyes to watch
her.

NOTES TO BOOK EIGHT

I. Both here and in Book VII. stanza lxxxvii. Mezentius is called
the 'scorner of the gods.' The meaning of this allusion is not known.
Perhaps it refers to his claiming for himself the first-fruits due