Page:Divine Comedy (Longfellow 1867) v1.djvu/349

Rh mouth of the vast half-stupid speaker. It is like a babble of the gigantic infancy of the world."

77., the " mighty hunter before the Lord," who built the , which, according to the Italian popular tradition, was so high that whoever mounted to the top of it could hear the angels sing.

Cory, Ancient Fragments, 51, gives this extract from the Sibylline Oracles:—

94. Odyssey, XI., Buckley's Tr.: "God-like Otus and far-famed Ephialtes; whom the faithful earth nourished, the tallest and far the most beautiful, at least after illustrious Orion. For at nine years old they were also nine cubits in width, and in height they were nine fathoms. Who even threatened the immortals that they would set up a strife of impetuous war in Olympus. They attempted to place Ossa upon Olympus, and upon Ossa leafy Pelion, that heaven might be accessible. And they would have accomplished it, if they had reached the measure of youth; but the son of Jove, whom fair-haired Latona bore, destroyed them both, before the down flowered under their temples and thickened upon their cheeks with a flowering beard."

98. The giant with a hundred hands. Æneid, X.: "Ægæon, who, they say, had a hundred arms and a hundred hands, and flashed fire from fifty mouths and breasts; when against the thunderbolts of Jove he on so many equal bucklers clashed; unsheathed so many swords."

He is supposed to have been a famous pirate, and the fable of the hundred hands arose from the hundred sailors that manned his ship.

100. The giant is here unbound, because he had not been at "the mighty war" against the gods.

115. The valley of the Bagrada, one of whose branches flows by Zama, the scene of Scipio's great victory over, by which he gained his greatest renown and his title of Africanus.

Among the neighboring hills, according to Lucan, Pharsalia, IV., the giant Antæus had his cave. Speaking of Curio's voyage, he says:—