e Divinity among the Gods, restored him, as he
confessed that he had done wrong, {to his former state}, and annulled
his given promise, and the favour that was granted: "And that thou mayst
not remain overlaid with thy gold, so unhappily desired, go," said he,
"to the river adjoining to great Sardis,[10] and trace thy way, meeting
the waters as they fall from the height of the mountain, until thou
comest to the rise of the stream. And plunge thy head beneath the
bubbling spring, where it bursts forth most abundantly, and at once
purge thy body, at once thy crime." The king placed himself beneath the
waters prescribed; the golden virtue tinged the river, and departed from
the human body into the stream. And even now, the fields, receiving the
ore of this ancient vein {of gold}, are hard, growing of pallid colour,
from their clods imbibing the gold.

[Footnote 8: _Eumolpus._--Ver. 93. There were three celebrated
persons of antiquity named Eumolpus. The first was a Thracian, the
son of Neptune and Chione, who lived in the time of Erectheus,
king of Athens, against whom he led the people of Eleusis, and who
established the Eleusinian mysteries. Some of his posterity
settling at Athens, the Eumolpus here named was born there. He was
the son of Musaeus and the disciple of Orpheus. The third Eumolpus
is supposed to have lived between the times of the two already
named.]

[Footnote 9: _Berecynthian hero._--Ver. 106. Midas is so called
from mount Berecynthus in Phrygia.]

[Footnote 10: _Sardis._--Ver. 137. The city of Sardis was the
capital of Lydia, where Croesus had his palace. The river Pactolus
flowed through it.]

EXPLANATION.

The ancients divided the Divinities into several classes, and in the
last class, which Ovid calls the populace, or commonalty of the
Gods, were the Satyrs and Sileni. The latter, according to
Pausanias, were no other than Satyrs of advanced age. There seems,
however, to have been one among them, to whom the name of Silenus
was especially given, and to him the present story relates.
According to Pindar and Pausanias he was born at Malea, in Laconia;
while Theopompus, quoted by AElian, represents him as being the son
of a Nymph. He was inferior to the higher Divinities, but superior
to man, in not being subject to mortality. He was represented as
bald, flat-nosed, and red-faced, a perfect specimen of a drunken old