in pagan mythology, the daughter of Melissus, king of Crete, and the nurse of Jupiter, whom she fed with goat's milk and honey. According to others, Amalthea was a goat, which Jupiter translated into the sky, with her two kids, and gave one of her horns to the daughters of Melissus, as a reward for the pains they had taken in attending him. This horn had the peculiar property of furnishing them with whatever they wished for; and was thence called the cornucopia, or horn of plenty.

AMALTHÆUS (Jerome, John Baptist, and Cornille), three celebrated Latin poets of Italy, who flourished in the 16th century. Their compositions were printed at Amsterdam in 1685. One of the prettiest pieces in that collection is an epigram on two children, whose beauty was very extraordinary, though each of them was deprived of an eye:

'Lumine Acon dextro, capta est Leonilla sinistro; Et poterat forma viuere uterque deos. Parve puer, lumen quod habes concede sorori; Sic tu cecus Amor, hic erit illa Venus.'