The parents of Nemesis were Jupiter and Necessity; or, according to others, Nox and Oceanus. She was the goddess that rewarded virtue, and punished vice; and she taught men their duty, so that she received her name from the distribution that she made to every body. Jupiter enjoyed her, as the story says, in the shape of a goose; cand afterward she brought forth an egg, which she gave to a shepherd whom she met, to be carried to Leda. Leda laid up the egg in a box, and Helena was soon after produced of that egg. But others give us quite different accounts of the matter. The Romans certainly sacrificed to this goddess, when they went to war; whereby they signified that they never took up arms unless in a just cause. She is called by another name, Adrastea, from Adrastus, a king of the Argives, who first built an altar to her; or perhaps from the difficulty of escaping from her: because no guilty person can flee from the punishment due to his crime, though Justice sometimes overtakes him late. She has indeed wings, but does not always use them; but then the slower her foot is, the harder is her hand. Rhamnusia is another name of this goddess, from Rhamnus, a town in Atticus, where she had a temple, in which there was a statue of her made of one stone, ten cubits high; she held the bough of an apple-tree in her hand, and had a crown upon her head, in which many images of deer were engraven. She had also a wheel, which denoted her swiftness when she avenges. a Pausan. in Arcad. • Από το ἑκάστε ἐπινεμήσεως, à distri butione quæ unicuique sit. Plato de Legibus Dial. c Appollod. 1. 3. Bibdoth. d Ab a non et disponu fugio, quod videlicit nemo nocens effugere queat poenam suis sceleribus debitam. e Pausan. in Attic. Ad scelerum pœnas ultrix venit ira tonantis, Th' avenging goddess, t' our desires unbent, Claudian. CHAPTER XI. THE GODS OF THE WOODS, AND THE RURAL GODS, SECT. 1.- -PAN. HIS NAMES. We are now come to the second part of the right hand wall, which exhibits the images of the gods and goddesses of the woods. Here you may see the gods Pan, Silvanus, the Fauni, the Satyri, Silenus, Priapus, Aristaus, and Terminus. And there you see the goddesses, Diana, Pales, Flora, Feronia, Pomona, and an innumerable company of Nymphs. P. What gods do you show me? Do you call those cornuted monsters, gods, who are half men, and half beasts, hairy, and shaggy with goats' feet and horses' tails? M. Why not, since they have attained to that honour? First, let us examine the prince of them all, Pan. هر Pan is called by that name, either, as some tell us, abecause he was the son of Penelope by all her wooers; or, because he exhilarated the minds of all the gods with the music of the pipe, which he invented; and by the harmony of the cithern, upon which he played skilfully as soon as he was born. Or perhaps he is called Pan, because he governs the affairs of the universal world by his mind, as he represents it by his body, as we shall see by and by. The Latins called him Inuus and Incubus, the nightmare; dbecause he uses carnality with all creatures. And at Rome he was worshipped, and called Lupercus and Lyceus. To his honour a temple was built A way omne, quod ex omnium procorum congressu cum Penelope sit natus. Samius. bHom. in Hymn. CPhur. nut. d Ab ineundo passim cum omnibus animalibus. Serv. in Æn. e Justin. 1. 43. at the foot of the Palatine hill, and festivals called Lupercalia were instituted, in which his priests, the Lu herci, ran about the streets naked. SECT. 2. -THE DESCENT OF PAN. His descent is uncertain; but the common opinion is, that he was born of Mercury and Penelope. aFor when Mercury fell violently in love with her, and tried in vain to move her, at last, by changing himself into a very white goat, he obtained his desire, and begat Pan of her, when she kept the sheep of her father Icarius, in the mount Taygetus. Pan, after he was born, bwas lapt up in the skin of a hare, and carried to heaven. But why do I here detain you with words? Look upon the image of him. : SECT. 3.THE IMAGE OF PAN. P. Is that Pan? that horned half goat, that resembles a beast rather than a man, much less a god; whom I see described with a smiling ruddy face, and two horns his nose is flat, his beard comes down to his breast, his skin is spotted, and he has the tail, thighs, legs, and feet of a goat; his head is crowned or girt about with pine, and he holds a crooked staff in one hand, and in the other a pipe of uneven reeds, with the music of which he can cheer even the gods themselves. O ridiculous deity, fit only to terrify boys! M. Believe me, he has frighted the men too: for when the Gauls, under Brennus their leader, made an irruption into Greece, and were just about to plunder the city Delphi, Pan in the night frightened them so much, that they all betook themselves to flight, when nobody pursued them. Whence we proverbially say, |