ith thick hair and beard,
and with lightnings in his hand and an eagle by his side. These
lightnings or thunderbolts were forged by his crooked son Vulcan
(Hephaestion), the god of fire, the smith and armourer of Olympus, whose
smithies were in the volcanoes (so called from his name), and whose
workmen were the Cyclops or Round Eyes--giants, each with one eye in the
middle of his forehead. Once, indeed, Jupiter had needed his bolts, for
the Titans, a horrible race of monstrous giants, of whom the worst was
Briareus, who had a hundred hands, had tried, by piling up mountains one
upon the other, to scale heaven and throw him down; but when Jupiter was
hardest pressed, a dreadful pain in his head caused him to bid Vulcan to
strike it with his hammer. Then out darted Heavenly Wisdom, his
beautiful daughter Pallas Athene or Minerva, fully armed, with piercing,
shining eyes, and by her counsels he cast down the Titans, and heaped
their own mountains, Etna and Ossa and Pelion, on them to keep them down;
and whenever there was an earthquake, it was thought to be caused by one
of these giants struggling to get free, though perhaps there was some
remembrance of the tower of Babel in the story. Pallas, this glorious
daughter of Jupiter, was wise, brave, and strong, and she was also the
goddess of women's works--of all spinning, weaving, and sewing.

Jupiter's wife, the queen of heaven or the air, was Juno--in Greek,
Hera--the white-armed, ox-eyed, stately lady, whose bird was the peacock.
Do you know how the peacock got the eyes in his tail? They once belonged
to Argus, a shepherd with a hundred eyes, whom Juno had set to watch a
cow named Io, who was really a lady, much hated by her. Argus watched
till Mercury (Hermes) came and lulled him to sleep with soft music, and
then drove Io away. Juno was so angry, that she caused all the eyes to
be taken from Argus and put into her peacock's tail.

Mercury has a planet called after him too, a very small one, so close to
the sun that we only see it just after sunset or before sunrise. I
believe Mercury or Hermes really meant the morning breeze. The story
went that he was born early in the morning in a cave, and after he had
slept a little while in his cradle, he came forth, and, finding the shell
of a tortoise with some strings of the inwards stretched across it, he at
once began to play on it, and thus formed the first lyre. He was so
swift that he was the messenger of Jupiter,