The hardy warriors whom Boeotia bred,
Penelius, Leitus, Prothoenor, led:
With these Arcesilaus and Clonius stand,
Equal in arms, and equal in command.
These head the troops that rocky Aulis yields,
And Eteon's hills, and Hyrie's watery fields,
And Schoenos, Scholos, Graea near the main,
And Mycalessia's ample piny plain;
Those who in Peteon or Ilesion dwell,
Or Harma where Apollo's prophet fell;
Heleon and Hyle, which the springs o'erflow;
And Medeon lofty, and Ocalea low;
Or in the meads of Haliartus stray,
Or Thespia sacred to the god of day:
Onchestus, Neptune's celebrated groves;
Copae, and Thisbe, famed for silver doves;
For flocks Erythrae, Glissa for the vine;
Platea green, and Nysa the divine;
And they whom Thebe's well–built walls inclose,
Where Myde, Eutresis, Corone, rose;
And Arne rich, with purple harvests crown'd;
And Anthedon, Boeotia's utmost bound.
Full fifty ships they send, and each conveys
Twice sixty warriors through the foaming seas.[102]
To these succeed Aspledon's martial train,
Who plough the spacious Orchomenian plain.
Two valiant brothers rule the undaunted throng,
Ialmen and Ascalaphus the strong:
Sons of Astyoche, the heavenly fair,
Whose virgin charms subdued the god of war:
(In Actor's court as she retired to rest,
The strength of Mars the blushing maid compress'd)
Their troops in thirty sable vessels sweep,
With equal oars, the hoarse–resounding deep.
The Phocians next in forty barks repair;
Epistrophus and Schedius head the war:
From those rich regions where Cephisus leads
His silver current through the flowery meads;
From Panopea, Chrysa the divine,
Where Anemoria's stately turrets shine,
Where Pytho, Daulis, Cyparissus stood,
And fair Lilaea views the rising flood.
These, ranged in order on the floating tide,
Close, on the left, the bold Boeotians' side.
Fierce Ajax led the Locrian squadrons on,
Ajax the less, Oileus' valiant son;
Skill'd to direct the flying dart aright;
Swift in pursuit, and active in the fight.
Him, as their chief, the chosen troops attend,
Which Bessa, Thronus, and rich Cynos send;
Opus, Calliarus, and Scarphe's bands;
And those who dwell where pleasing Augia stands,
And where Boagrius floats the lowly lands,
Or in fair Tarphe's sylvan seats reside:
In forty vessels cut the yielding tide.
Euboea next her martial sons prepares,
And sends the brave Abantes to the wars:
Breathing revenge, in arms they take their way
From Chalcis' walls, and strong Eretria;
The Isteian fields for generous vines renown'd,
The fair Caristos, and the Styrian ground;
Where Dios from her towers o'erlooks the plain,
And high Cerinthus views the neighbouring main.
Down their broad shoulders falls a length of hair;
Their hands dismiss not the long lance in air;
But with protended spears in fighting fields
Pierce the tough corslets and the brazen shields.
Twice twenty ships transport the warlike bands,
Which bold Elphenor, fierce in arms, commands.
Full fifty more from Athens stem the main,
Led by Menestheus through the liquid plain.
(Athens the fair, where great Erectheus sway'd,
That owed his nurture to the blue–eyed maid,
But from the teeming furrow took his birth,
The mighty offspring of the foodful earth.
Him Pallas placed amidst her wealthy fane,
Adored with sacrifice and oxen slain;
Where, as the years revolve, her altars blaze,
And all the tribes resound the goddess' praise.)
No chief like thee, Menestheus! Greece could yield,
To marshal armies in the dusty field,
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—Scamander, or Scamandros, was a river of Troas, rising, according to Strabo, on the highest part of Mount Ida, in the same hill with the Granicus and the OEdipus, and falling into the sea at Sigaeum; everything tends to identify it with Mendere, as Wood, Rennell, and others maintain; the Mendere is 40 miles long, 300 feet broad, deep in the time of flood, nearly dry in the summer. Dr. Clarke successfully combats the opinion of those who make the Scamander to have arisen from the springs of Bounabarshy, and traces the source of the river to the highest mountain in the chain of Ida, now Kusdaghy; receives the Simois in its course; towards its mouth it is very muddy, and flows through marshes. Between the Scamander and Simois, Homer's Troy is supposed to have stood: this river, according to Homer, was called Xanthus by the gods, Scamander by men. The waters of the Scamander had the singular property of giving a beautiful colour to the hair or wool of such animals as bathed in them; hence the three goddesses, Minerva, Juno, and Venus, bathed there before they appeared before Paris to obtain the golden apple: the name Xanthus, "yellow," was given to the Scamander, from the peculiar colour of its waters, still applicable to the Mendere, the yellow colour of whose waters attracts the attention of travellers.
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It should be "his chest like Neptune." The torso of Neptune, in the "Elgin Marbles," No. 103, (vol. ii. p. 26,) is remarkable for its breadth and massiveness of development.
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"Say first, for heav'n hides nothing from thy view."
—"Paradise Lost," i. 27.
"Ma di' tu, Musa, come i primi danni
Mandassero a Cristiani, e di quai parti:
Tu 'l sai; ma di tant' opra a noi si lunge
Debil aura di fama appena giunge."
—"Gier. Lib." iv. 19.
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"The Catalogue is, perhaps, the portion of the poem in favour of which a claim to separate authorship has been most plausibly urged. Although the example of Homer has since rendered some such formal enumeration of the forces engaged, a common practice in epic poems descriptive of great warlike adventures, still so minute a statistical detail can neither be considered as imperatively required, nor perhaps such as would, in ordinary cases, suggest itself to the mind of a poet. Yet there is scarcely any portion of the Iliad where both historical and internal evidence are more clearly in favour of a connection from the remotest period, with the remainder of the work. The composition of the Catalogue, whensoever it may have taken place, necessarily presumes its author's acquaintance with a previously existing Iliad. It were impossible otherwise to account for the harmony observable in the recurrence of so vast a number of proper names, most of them historically unimportant, and not a few altogether fictitious: or of so many geographical and genealogical details as are condensed in these few hundred lines, and incidentally scattered over the thousands which follow: equally inexplicable were the pointed allusions occurring in this episode to events narrated in the previous and subsequent text, several of which could hardly be of traditional notoriety, but through the medium of the Iliad."—Mure, "Language and Literature of Greece," vol. i. p. 263.
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—Twice Sixty: "Thucydides observes that the Boeotian vessels, which carried one hundred and twenty men each, were probably meant to be the largest in the fleet, and those of Philoctetes, carrying fifty each, the smallest. The average would be eighty–five, and Thucydides supposes the troops to have rowed and navigated themselves; and that very few, besides the chiefs, went as mere passengers or landsmen. In short, we have in the Homeric descriptions the complete picture of an Indian or African war canoe, many of which are considerably larger than the largest scale assigned to those of the Greeks. If the total number of the Greek ships be taken at twelve hundred, according to Thucydides, although in point of fact there are only eleven hundred and eighty–six in the Catalogue, the amount of the army, upon the foregoing average, will be about a hundred and two thousand men. The historian considers this a small force as representing all Greece. Bryant, comparing it with the allied army at Platae, thinks it so large as to prove the entire falsehood of the whole story; and his reasonings and calculations are, for their curiosity, well worth a careful perusal."—Coleridge, p. 211, sq.
