Notes
1.
Concerning other vernal customs of striking the earth,
see Pausanias VIII, 15:3, and an interpretation of that passage by Nilsson
(1957:478 and plate 39, figs. 1 and 2). See further Nilsson (1961:53-4).
Considered in this light, the burial of Samson at the end of Judges 16
may have been something more than a merely prosaic detail in the
original oral tradition.
2.
For lists of Centaurs' names and a categorization
of them as ὀνόματα ἐπώνομα, see Roscher (II.1, col. 1072-74).
3.
The story of Nessos is in Apollodorus, Bibliotheca
II, 151-52 (7, 5-6).
4.
Apollodorus, Bibliotheca II, 74-76 (5, 1) (the lion);
II, 77-80 (5, 2) (the hydra); II, 83-87 (5,4) (the boar); II, 94-95 (5, 7)
(the bull); Diodorus Siculus IV.11.3-12 (the lion, boar, and hydra);
IV.13.4 (the bull).
5.
Apollodorus, Bibliotheca II, 92-93 (5, 6); Apollonius
Rhodius, Argonautica II, vv. 1052-57; Diodorus Siculus IV.13.2;
Pausanias 8, 22,4.
6.
The Heraclidae, though very numerous, share with their
eponym a common unhappy destiny of dispossession dem Haus aus,
demonstrating yet further the general principle that in the absence
of an inheritable oikos lineage is irrelevant. Bastards, exiles,
colonists, and adventurers whose whole lives passed in the service of
others in lands not their own, the Sons of Herakles were just such
descendants as Samson might have begotten on Delilah, or the whore
of Gaza, or others of those women's kind; for the failure of the Old
Testament narrator to disclose what illegitimate offspring the ruttish
Samson begat does not mean that he got none in the original tradition.
7.
Hyginus, 35-36, states the tradition concisely.
8.
Pausanias, 10.29.7; Hyginus, 32; Diodorus Siculus, 4.31.1.
Observe the juxtaposition of the would-be husband's chthonic sojourn with
the destruction of the wife whom he cannot keep, as in the Samson saga.
9.
A general discussion of the mythic tradition relating
to Orion is in Fontenrose. Except where noted, the account given here
follows Palaephatus, LI (V).
*