sts
of Lupercus. _Catiline_ was the author of the conspiracy of B.C. 63.
Cicero, the famous orator, was consul for that year and frustrated
the plot. _Cato_ the younger died at Utica in 49 B.C. In the Roman
writers Catiline is always the proverbial scoundrel and Cato is
always taken as the model of rigid and exalted virtue.

LXXXVIII. At the battle of Actium, in B.C. 31, the fleet of Augustus
met those of Antony and Cleopatra, and owing to the desertion of the
Egyptians at the crisis of the fight, gained a complete victory over
them.

XC. The Cyclads were the western islands of the Greek archipelago.

XCIV. The Carians lived in the south of Asia Minor, the Gelonians
beyond the Danube, and the Morini on the North Sea, near where Ostend
now is. The Dahae were a tribe of Scythians, and the Leleges were
an ancient people spread over Asia Minor.

NOTES TO BOOK NINE

I. Iris, the rainbow-goddess, daughter of Thaumas, was the messenger
of the gods. Pilumnus was an ancient Latin god, and an ancestor of
Turnus.

XI. _Ida_ was the mountain in the Troad whence the wood for the fleet
was taken. _Berecyntia_. Cybele, the mother of the gods. Originally
a Phrygian goddess, the centre of whose worship was Mount Berecyntus.

XIV. The 'brother' is Pluto, god of the lower world. To swear by the
Styx was the most dread and binding oath; it was inviolable even by
the gods.

XVIII. The reference here is to the story of how Paris, son of Priam,
king of Troy, seized Helen, the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta,
and so caused the Trojan war. Menelaus and Agamemnon were the sons
of Atreus.

XXVIII. For Acestes see note on Book V. stanza vi.

XXXIII. Assaracus was an ancestor of the Trojan race, and his
household gods would of course be the tutelary spirits of the Trojan
royal family.

LII. _Latonia_. The daughter of Leto, and sister of Apollo, Diana,
who was identified with the Greek Artemis, the goddess of the woods
and of hunting.

LXXII. 'Jove's armour-bearer' is the eagle.

LXXV. The Symaethus was a river in Sicily.

LXXVII. The 'wily-worded Ithacan' is Ulysses, the hero of the
_Odyssey_.

LXXX. _Dindymus_ was a mountain in Phrygia, the seat of the worship
of Cybele.

LXXXVI. 'The Kid-star.' The 'kids' are two little stars which first
rise in the evening towards the end of September, during the
equinoctial gales.

LXXXVII. The _Athesis_ is the modern Adige. The _Padus_ is the Po.

LXXXIX. Sarpedon was a Lyci