Advance at distance, while I pass the plain The care to shun the blast of sland'rous tongues; Lest malice, prone the virtuous to defame, She added not, but waving as she wheel'd, Daughter of Jove! whose arms in thunder wield 442 Or that not mystic, where the sapient king Held dalliance with his fair Egyptian spouse. And Solomon made affinity with Pharaoh, king of Egypt, and took Pharaoh's daughter, and brought her into the city of David, until he had made an end of building his own house, and the wall of Jerusalem round about. Only the people sacrificed in high places, because there was no house built unto the name of the Lord until those days. 1 Kings, iii. 1, 2. Solomon made also an house for Pharaoh's daughter, her whom he had taken to wife. All these were of costly stones (according to the measures of hewed stones, sawed with saws) within and without, even from the foundation unto the coping, and on the outside toward the great court. And the foundation was of costly stones; even great stones; stones of ten cubits, and stones of eight cubits. And above were costly stones (after the measures of hewed stones) and cedars. And the great court round about was with three rows of hewed stones, and a row of cedar beams, both for the inner court of the house of the Lord, and for the porch of the house. 1 Kings, vii. 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. We find the close of Solomon's life disgraced by an idolatrous love of the heathen, which has been considered by some writers as the cause of his declension from the paths of religion. We read of his unhappy fall, and we are told that it was followed by severe judgments upon his family and 505 kingdom. Nathan the prophet was commissioned to reprove him for his odious apostacy, and to denounce this heavy judgment upon him, that his kingdom should be divided into two parts, the greatest portion of which should be, given to his servant. This message is supposed to have convinced Solomon of his sin, and to have wrought in him a thorough repentance. It is certain that he became a sincere penitent at last; for the book of Ecclesiastes, in which he so pathetically describes the vanity and vexation of all worldly pursuits, was evidently written at the close of his life; says he, "Fear God, and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.' never since of serpent kind Lovelier, not those that in Illyria chanq'd Illyria, the son of Cadmus, who was king of Illyricum, a country in the north of Europe, since called Sclavonia. 506 Hermione and Cadmus, Hermione was the daughter of Mars and Venus, and wife of Cadmus, the son of Agenor, king of Phænicia. He was ordered by his father to go in search of his sister Europa, who had been hid by Jupiter. As his search proved fruitless, he consulted the oracle of Apollo, who ordered him to build a city where he should see a young heifer stop in the grass, and call the country Boeotia. He found the heifer according to the directions of the oracle; and as he wished to thank the gods by a sacrifice, he sent his companions to fetch a neighbouring grove. The waters were sacred to Mars, and guarded by a water from 1 dragon who devoured all the Phænician attendants. Cadmus, tired of their delay, sought the place, and found the monster feeding on them: he attacked the monster, and, by the assistance of Minerva, overcame it, and sowed the teeth in a plain, upon which armed men suddenly rose up from the ground: he threw a stone in the midst of them; and they instantly turned their arms one against the other, till all perished except five, who assisted him in building his city. Some explain the dragon's fable, by supposing, that it was a king of the country that Cadmus conquered by war; and the armed men rising from the field, is no more than men armed with brass, according to the ambiguous signification of a Phænician word. Cadmus was the first who introduced the use of letters in Greece. The fable says, that Juno so persecuted Hermione, Cadmus, and their children, that they retired into Illyricum, loaded with grief and infirm with age: they intreated the gods to remove them from the misfortunes of life, and they were immediately changed into serpents. 'or the God In Epidaurus; A town at the north of Angolia, in Pelopennesus, chiefly dedicated to the worship of Esculapius, who, they say, was much skilled in the art of curing diseases, which he learnt from his father Apollo, and was worshipped as a god after death. Esculapius is represented as a venerable old man, with a phial of medicine in one hand, and grasping a staff, with a serpent bound round it, in the other. The serpent was the symbol of medicine 508 and of the gods who presided over it, as Apollo and Esculapius. Serpents were anciently worshipped in Egypt and many other parts of the world. Many of the heathens thought there was something divine in the nature of serpents; and, that deities, or good genii, who were made use of, as the instruments of delivering and honouring those that were the peculiar favourites of the gods, often appeared in that shape: hence idols were often made with serpents near them ; and there have been astonishing instances of religious worship paid to that kind of animal. nor to which transform'd Ammonian Jove, or Capitoline was seen, Capitoline, a sir-name of Jupiter, from his temple on the mount of that name. Ammonian or Hammonian; that is, of Ham, the son of Noah, who had Africa for his share. In the hot sandy deserts of Lybia, a temple and oracle were erected to his memory, which the Greeks called Jupiter Hammon. 309 He with Olympias, The A town in Peleponnesus, where Jupiter had a temple, with a celebrated statue fifty cubits high, reckoned one of the wonders of the world. Olympic games were celebrated in its neighbourhood. 510 Scipio the height of Rome. Scipio, a branch of the Cornelian family at Rome. His speech to the Romans : On this day, tribunes and Roman citizens, I gained a signal victory in Africa, over Hannibal and the Carthagenians. Since, then, such a day |
