Chapter Al Rakim to Amalthea of A by Brewer's Readers Handbook

to invent some novelties wherewith to delight us. Thus came y^e bookes of Amadis into light among us in this last age.—Francis de la Noue: Discourses, 87 (1587).

Amaimon , one of the principal devils. Asmodeus is one of his lieutenants. Shakespeare twice refers to him, in 1 Henry IV. act ii. sc. 4, and in The Merry Wives of Windsor, act ii. sc. 2.

Amalahta, son of Erillyab the deposed queen of the Hoamen , an Indian tribe settled on the south of the Missouri. He is described as a brutal savage, wily, deceitful, and cruel. Amalahta wished to marry the princess Goervyl, Madoc’s sister, and even seized her by force, but was killed in his flight.—Southey: Madoc, ii. 16 (1805).

Amalthæa, the sibyl who offered to sell to Tarquin nine books of prophetic oracles. When the king refused to give her the price demanded, she went away, burnt three of them, and returning to the king, demanded the same price for the remaining six. Again the king declined the purchase. The sibyl, after burning three more of the volumes, demanded the original sum for the remaining three. Tarquin paid the money, and Amalthæa was never more seen. Aulus Gellius says that Amalthæa burnt the books in the king’s presence. Pliny affirms that the original number of volumes was only three, two of which the sibyl burnt, and the third was purchased by king Tarquin.

Amalthea, mistress of Ammon and mother of Bacchus. Ammon hid his mistress in the island Nysa (in Africa), in order to elude the vigilance and jealousy of his wife Rhea. This account (given by Diodorus Siculus, bk. iii., and by sir Walter Raleigh in his History of the World, I. vi. 5) differs from the ordinary story, which makes Semelê the mother of Bacelhus, and Rhea his nurse. (Ammon is Ham or Cham, the son of Noah, founder of the African race.)

… that Nyseian ile,
Girt with the river Triton, where old Cham
(Whom Gentiless Ammon call, and Libyan Jove)
Hid Amalthea and her florid son,
Young Bacchus, from his stepdame Rhea’s eye.
   —Milton: Paradise Lost, iv. 275 (1665).