I.16 The Pegasides = the Muses.
I.57 The set of nested transparent spheres, on which the sun, moon, and planets ride around in the Ptolemaic geocentric scheme of astronomy, are assumed to be equidistant from each other.
I.67 God has set a barrier of liquid sky, here if not more generally identified as Olympus, between the heavenly spheres and the earth to protect them from damage by such earthly influences as cloud and sea. Thus far, he has considered this barrier from the viewpoint of the heavens. Now he shifts his attention to the earth, on its other side. Hence altera fronte, which marks the shift of perspective.
I.121 The Meander was an ore-bearing river in Asia Minor.
I.126 Adversis nec non concurrere flammis would seem to be a poetic description of such astronomical phenomena as conjunctions and maybe eclipses.
I.156 Delius (“the God of Delos”) = Apollo, the sun.
I.190 “In his bones,” not “with bones”: the peacock is a very omnivorous bird and may occasionally eat bones, but they are scarcely its standard diet, and anyway this line is written under the influence of Ovid, Metamorphoses II.410, et accepti caluere sub ossibus ignes.
I.191 The Cayster was a river in Asia Minor, famous for its swans.
I.197ff. A description of the ostrich (since it buries its eggs in sand, Ramsay assumed it was a shore-dwelling bird).
I.286 Ceres = wheat, Lyaeus = wine.
I.299 Not the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but, more philosophically, the tree of what we learn through our senses (capable of misrepresenting the truth and being misinterpreted) rather than what we learn by reason.
II.44 Ramsay’s use of manes is curious, both here and at II.222. In classical Latin this word designates the spirits of the dead, which is inappropriate to both passages here. Rather, the word seems to indicate the spirits of heaven, more or less to be equated with angels.
II.51 Literally, his mind is “needy” because it constantly needs new knowledge and understanding (to make this clear, I have translated this word as “questing”).
II.92 In antiquity purple dye came from the Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon.
II.101ff. Ramsay enumerates the four rivers arising within the Garden of Eden: the Tigris, Euphrates, and Gihon (Genesis 2:11) and the Pishon (Ecclesiasticus 24:25).
II.161 The Ripaeus or Riphaeus was a fabulous mountain range in the extreme north, later equated with Scythia.
II.254 A wealthy Greek island in the Aegean.
II.258 Women who spin wool with a distaff and spindle constantly wet the thread with their fingers. Evidently Ramsay knew of women who simply used their mouths for this purpose, and who occasionally cut their lips in the process.
II.260 See the note on II.92.
III.3 Cerasta is an evident neologism from Gk. κεράστης.
III.9 Calling Adam a filius terrae is literally accurate, but this is also a proverbial expression to describe an ill-bred upstart (Erasmus, Adagiorum Chiliandes I.viii.86).
III.123 Cynthius = Apollo, the sun.
III.149 Ramsay doubtless found the verb oppetere at Horace, Sermones I.ix.70. But it seems intrinsically unlikely that he understood its true meaning, “to fart in the face of“ (in the context of this serious and heavily moralizing poem, I would not dare translate it literally).
III.215 The Cimmerians were a Central Asian people of antiquity who alleged lived so far north that (at least in winter) thay enjoyed no sunlight. Hence "Cimmerian darkness" became proverbial.
III.217 Marpesian: referring to a pass in the Caucasus, proverbial for its flint-hard rock. It was here Alexander the Great afterwards built gates and named them the Caspian Gates.
III.272 The Eumenides and the Erynnes both = the Furies.
III.307 In classical Latin, a pararius was an intermediary in a financial transaction. Here the word designates a go-between in arranging a marriage.
III.333 In antiquity Thessaly was notorious for its witches, who dealt in poisons.
IV.30 Although, for reasons of poetic convenience, Ramsay routinely refers to heaven as Olympus, here the use of this word has a special literary effect: it manages to associate Adam’s rebellion against God with the hubristic war against the Olympian waged by the heaven-storming Giants in Greek mythology.
IV.137 Pharian = Egyptian (Pharos is the Canopic island upon which Alexandria was subsequently built).
IV.185 Two gold-bearing rivers in antiquity, the former in Spain, the latter in Asia Minor.
IV.221 Meliboean = Thessalian (Ramsay appears to have been under the mistaken impression that the river Maeander was in Thessaly rather than Asia Minor). The reference is to the purple “Greek key” trim that civic magistrates wore on their togas as a badge of office.
IV.226 I. e., the allegation was that Jesus did not observe the dietary restrictions of the Jewish Law.
IV.301 The corona (translated here as “encirclement”) designates siegeworks attackers would construct to encircle a besieged city.
IV.331 Ausonian = Italian (i. e. Roman).
IV.381f. The imagery is taken from the Roman business world: a praes is someone who stands surety for a loan, and tabulae novae indicate the slate of debt has been wiped clean.
IV.388 The significance of velatis manibus is not quite clear. Maybe the idea is that God’s Person is so awful and sacrosanct that He cannot be touched with bare hands, so Mercy is obliged to wear gloves in order to clutch him in the manner of a Graeco-Roman suppliant.
IV.488 Hastam does not seem like the mot juste here, and one suspects it is a corruption introduced under the influence of hostem at the end of the preceding line.
IV.537 Assuming it is not a textual corruption, I do not know what agricultural implement is meant by an occa, since this is a word that does not appear in lexicons.
IV.575 It is not impossible that achores is the right reading, if we suppose this is a neologism based on Hebrew word for “trouble”: there would be nothing surprising in discovering that a learned Presbyterian divine knew some Hebrew. But since this would be an isolated example of a Hebraicism in Ramsay’s poem, the word lies under suspicion of being a corruption, and that he actually wrote ichores.
IV.596 Lybistidis (i. e., Libystidis) = African. The logic is that Africa teems with wild beasts, a bear is a wild beast, therefore Africa has bears.
IV.601 He means all the messianic prophecies and other elements in the Old Testament which Christians regarded as prefiguring Christ.
IV.603 It is unclear how Ramsay came up with this figure of forty generations: according to the genealogy at the beginning of Matthew, Christ came forty-two generations after Abraham. But Abraham himself was born ten generations after Noah (Genesis 11:10 - 26).