Thus spoke the Earth; nor, indeed, could she any longer endure the vapor, nor say more; and she withdrew her face within herself, and the caverns neighboring to the shades below.
[Footnote 1: _Ægeon._--Ver. 10. Homer makes him to be the same with Briareus. According to another account, which Ovid here follows, he was a sea God, the son of Oceanus and Terra.]
[Footnote 2: _Doris._--Ver. 11. She was the daughter of Oceanus, the wife of Nereus, and the mother of the fifty Nereids.]
[Footnote 3: _Tethys._--Ver. 69. She was the daughter of Cœlus and Terra, and the wife of Oceanus. Her name is here used to signify the ocean itself.]
[Footnote 4: _Are carried round._--Ver. 70. Clarke thus renders this line,--“Add, too, that the heaven was whisked round with a continual rolling.”]
[Footnote 5: _Wild beasts._--Ver. 78. The signs of the Zodiac.]
[Footnote 6: _Hæmonian._--Ver. 81. Or Thessalian. He here alludes to the Thessalian Chiron, the Centaur, who, according to Ovid and other writers, was placed in the Zodiac as the Constellation Sagittarius: while others say that Crotus, or Croto, the son of Eupheme, the nurse of the Muses, was thus honored.]
[Footnote 7: _Through the five direct circles._--Ver. 129. There is some obscurity in this passage, arising from the mode of expression. Phœbus here counsels Phaëton what track to follow, and tells him to pursue his way by an oblique path, and not directly in the plane of the equator. This last is what he calls ‘directos via quinque per arcus.’ These five arcs, or circles, are the five parallel circles by which astronomers distinguish the heavens, namely, the two polar circles, the two tropics, and the equinoctial. The latter runs exactly in the middle, between the other two circles, so that the expression must be understood to mean, ‘pursue not your way directly through that circle which is the middlemost of the five, but observe the track that cuts it obliquely.’]
[Footnote 8: _The chariot give bounds._--Ver. 165-6. Clarke thus renders these lines.--‘Thus does the chariot give jumps into the air without its usual weight, and is kicked up on high, and is like one empty.’]
[Footnote 9: _They say, too._--Ver. 176-7. The following is Clarke’s translation of these two lines,--‘They say, too, that you, Boötes, scowered off in a mighty bustle, although you were but slow, and thy cart hindered thee.’]