able to transfer it to a band for the eyes. At the same time usage is always capricious in things of this sort: and the gloss in Hesychius, unless χλιδὼν has been repeated by accident, seems to imply that αἴγλη was used in the Tereus of Sophocles for a bracelet, while Epicharmus gave the same name to a band for the leg. It is enough to know that the general meaning of αἴγλη is established by express testimony on the authority of Sophocles.
The explanation we have given of αἴγλη affects that of the epithet εὐαής. For when we have Sleep set before us in a personal shape and attitude, laying his band over the eyes of the sufferer, and according to the wish of the chorus keeping it fixed there, we cannot let the epithet εὐαής retain the general signification of εὐμενής, benevolent, which is given to it in the Scholia, and has only been adopted for want of a better. Its proper sense, εὔπνους, εὐήνεμος, leniter spirans, will now involuntarily remind us of winged Sleep, Virgil's volucris Somnus. In representations of Sleep which exhibit him as he is here conceived, as the dispenser of slumber, we find wings, of the butterfly or the eagle[1] on his shoulders, and his temples are sometimes fledged as well as his shoulders, and sometimes they alone. Zoega, who in his Bassirilievi Tav. 93 has treated the various conceptions of sleep with a diligence that nothing escapes, and at the same time with the most luminous discrimination, and in the most pleasing order, adduces the works of this class at p. 207—210. He is inclined to consider what have been taken for butterfly's wings as those of the bat, and hence to refer them to night: I should rather believe that they contain an allusion to the ordinary conception of Psyche, and intimate that the soul continues to stir even in sleep. Elsewhere, in a dissertation not yet printed on the winged deities (in answer to Winkelman), Zoega explains the wings of Sleep generally, like those of Night, from the property of covering and concealing. Goethe, in his Iphigenia, attributes shadowing wings to the dim state of uncertainty:
- ↑ Those of the eagle probably refer to the universal dominion of Sleep, who is πανδαμάτωρ, and therefore has Πασιθέα for his consort.
