the earliest records in regard to emasculation we must go back to
mythological relations. In the old legendary lore of ancient Scandinavia
or of Germany, the loves and hatreds of their semi-mythological heroes
and heroines space over many romantic incidents before reaching a
culmination. The swiftly flowing Rhine, with its precipitous banks,
eddies, and rapids; the broad and more majestic Danube or Elb; the broad
meadows and Druidical groves on its hilly slopes and stretches of dark
and gloomy forest,--all conspired to people the fancy with elfs, gnomes,
fairies, and goblins, who were more or less intermingled in all the
episodes that engaged their semi-mythological heroes. This helped to
fill in all their deeds with entertaining incidents; their halls and
castles were made necessary accessories by the rigors of the climate, as
well as were the beery feasts and carousals with the inspiration of
monotonous song also rendered necessaries by the same element; hence, we
have various incidents, either entertaining or exciting, connected with
their legendary tales, acting like periods of intermission between their
love scenes, spites, hatreds, murders, and general cremations. From such
material and such opportunities it was comparatively easy for Wagner to
construct the thrilling and interesting incidents that compose his opera
on the legend of the Nibelungenlied.

The Grecian landscape and topography does not permit of such richness of
romantic incidents or details, any more than the love-making of the
unfortunate spider who is devoured by his spidery Cleopatra at the end
of his first sexual embrace could furnish any incidents for one of
Amelie Rives's spirited novels; so that neither minstrel nor bard have
recorded the details of the first emasculating tragedy, which from all
accounts was a kind of an Olympian Donnybrook-fair sort of a
paricidal-ending tragedy.

Unfortunately, Homer was not there to describe the event, or we might
have had a Wagnerian opera with its Plutonic music to illustrate all its
incidents; or even a Virgil could have made it into interesting verses;
but, as it is, we must content ourselves with the laconic recitals that
have been handed down by tradition, and, as all the Greek performances
of those days were marked by an intense decisiveness, with an utter lack
of circumlocution, it is probable that there was not much to relate
beyond the bare facts.

In Smith's "Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biog