The Works of Alexander Pope Part 15

[Footnote 3: A second legend ascribed the building of the city to the wonder-working music of Amphion, which caused the stones to pile themselves together. Both legends were subsequently blended, and Cadmus had the credit of the upper part of the city, and Amphion of the lower.]

[Footnote 4: Juno visited Athamas, king of Thebes, with madness, and in his frenzy he shot his own son, Learchus, whom he took for a young lion.

Upon this his wife, Ino, who was a daughter of Cadmus, fled with her second son, Melicertes, and threw herself and her boy into the sea.]

[Footnote 5: Domitian. The panegyric on this timid and cruel tyrant was disgraceful flattery. The boasted victories over the Dacian's were in reality defeats. They compelled the emperor to sue for an inglorious peace which was only purchased by the promise of an immediate ransom and an annual tribute. Most of his pretended triumphs were of a similar character, and led Pliny the younger to remark, that they were always the token of some advantage obtained by the enemies of Rome.]

[Footnote 6: During the contest between Vespasian and Vitellius for the empire, Domitian, at the age of eighteen, took refuge in the temple of the Capitol to escape from the fury of the soldiers opposed to his father. It was self-preservation and not daring which impelled him, and when the temple of Jupiter was set on fire he again fled, and hid himself until the party of Vespasian prevailed.]

[Footnote 7: This line is very obscure. There is nothing corresponding to it in the Latin.]

[Footnote 8: From the translation of Stephens:

The time may come when a divinor rage.]

[Footnote 9: Pope is closer to Stephens than to the original:

funeral flames Divided, like the souls they carry.

The rival brothers ultimately engaged in single combat, and both fell.

The body of Polynices was placed by mistake upon the funeral pile of Eteocles, and the flames rose upwards in diverging currents.]

[Footnote 10: Stephens's translation:

When Dirce blushed, being stained with Grecian blood.]

[Footnote 11: The dirce ran on one side of Thebes, the Ismenus on the other, and they afterwards united in a common stream. Both were mere watercourses, which were only filled by the rains of winter.]

[Footnote 12: The Thebans are subsequently represented by Statius as driven into the Ismenus by the Greeks, and the hosts which were killed or drowned were carried by the river into the sea.]

[Footnote 13: What hero, that is, of the famous seven who went up against Thebes to dispossess Eteocles for violating the compact to reign alternately with Polynices. The five persons whom Statius enumerates as joining with Polynices and Adrastus, king of Argos, are Tydeus, Amphiaraus, Hippomedon, Parthenopaeus, and Capaneus.]

[Footnote 14: When Tydeus had received his death-wound from a javelin hurled by Menalippus, he gathered up his failing strength, and flung a dart by which he mortally wounded Menalippus in turn. Full of revengeful spite Tydeus begged that the head of Menalippus might be brought to him.

He grasped it with his dying hand, gazed at it with malignant joy, gnawed it in his frenzy, and refused to relinquish his hold. This was "the rage of Tydeus," which Statius says the Greeks themselves condemned as exceeding the recognised lat.i.tude of hate.]

[Footnote 15: The prophet was Amphiaraus, who predicted that all who took part in the expedition, except Adrastus, would be destroyed. The earth opened while Amphiaraus was fighting, and swallowed up him and his chariot. Statius paints him sinking calmly into the yawning gulf, without dropping his weapons or the reins, and with his eyes fixed on the heavens.]

[Footnote 16: Hippomedon is made by Statius the hero of the conflict in the river Ismenus, where he at last succ.u.mbs to the G.o.d of the river.

The piles of dead formed a dike, which turned back the waters.]

[Footnote 17: Parthenopaeus.--POPE.]

[Footnote 18: He declared that Jupiter himself should not keep him from ascending the walls of Thebes. Jupiter punished his defiance by setting him on fire with lightning on the scaling ladder, and he was burnt to death.]

[Footnote 19: Oedipus did not strike his wounds. He struck the ground, which was the usage in invoking the infernal deities, since their kingdom was in the bowels of the earth.]

[Footnote 20: One of the three princ.i.p.al furies or avengers of crime, who inhabited the world of condemned spirits.]

[Footnote 21: The great difference between raising horror and terror is perceived and felt from the reserved manner in which Sophocles speaks of the dreadful incest of Oedipus, and from the manner in which Statius has enlarged and dwelt upon it, in which he has been very unnaturally and injudiciously imitated by Dryden and Lee, who introduce this most unfortunate prince not only describing but arguing on the dreadful crime he had committed.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 22: Laius, king of Thebes, warned by the oracle that he would be killed by his own offspring, exposed his son Oedipus on Mount Cithaeron. The infant was found by a shepherd, and carried to Polybus, king of Corinth, who adopted him. Arrived at man's estate, he too was informed by the oracle that he would take the life of his father, and commit incest with his mother. Believing that the king and queen who brought him up were his parents, he determined not to go back to Corinth, and in attempting to avert his destiny, he fulfilled it. As he journeyed towards Thebes he met his real father, Laius, and slew him in a conflict which grew out of a dispute with his charioteer.]

[Footnote 23: Or the temple at Delphi, where Oedipus went to consult the oracle.]

[Footnote 24: The Sphinx sat upon a rock near Thebes propounding a riddle to every one who pa.s.sed by, and destroying all who were unable to explain it. The Thebans proclaimed that whoever would rid the kingdom of this scourge should marry the widow of Laius, and succeed to the vacant throne. Oedipus, by solving the riddle, drove the Sphinx to commit suicide, and in accepting the reward, he unconsciously verified the remainder of the oracle.]

[Footnote 25: Oedipus behaves with the fury of a bl.u.s.tering bully, instead of that patient submission and pathetic remorse which are so suited to his condition.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 26: In the first edition he had written

Which shall o'er long posterity prevail.

The more forcible phrase which he subst.i.tuted for "long posterity," was from Dryden's Virg. aen. iii. 132:

And children's children shall the crown sustain.]

[Footnote 27: This couplet follows closely the translation of Stephens:

Put on that diadem besmeared with gore Which from my father's head these fingers tore.]

[Footnote 28: Dryden's Virg. aen. iii. 78:

Broke ev'ry bond of nature and of truth]

[Footnote 29: Pope uses "preventing" in the then common but now obsolete sense of "antic.i.p.ating."]

[Footnote 30: A river in the lower world.]

[Footnote 31: Great is the force and the spirit of these lines down to verse 183; and indeed they are a surprising effort in a writer so young as when he translated them. See particularly lines 150 to 160.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 32: The entrance to the infernal regions was said to be through a cave in the Taenarian promontory, which formed the southern extremity of Greece.]

[Footnote 33: Pope has judiciously tamed the bombast image "caligantes animarum examine campos," "the plains darkened with a swarm of ghosts."

"Lucentes equos," he translates, "fair glories," omitting the image entirely. To mount Atlas he has added an idea which makes the pa.s.sage more ridiculous than sublime. It is poorly expressed in the original; in the translation it is ludicrous; "and shook the heavens _and G.o.ds he bore_." There are many images which if indistinctly seen are sublime; if particularised they become quite the contrary. However, the translation is certainly wonderful, when the age of the author is considered. It shows his powers of metrical language, at so early a period of his poetical studies, though it is very unfaithful in particular pa.s.sages.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 34: Pope's acquaintance with Latin prosody, from his confined education, was probably very small, or he would not have used Mal[=e]a, instead of Mal[)e]a, with the line of Statius before him.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 35: "Well-known," because the Fury had before visited the Theban palace to instigate the crimes and pa.s.sions of which it had been the scene. The haste with which she goes, and her preference for the terrestrial journey, even over the haunts of her own Tartarus, indicate the signal malevolence of the mission. Hence the delight she takes in it.]

[Footnote 36: The original is more forcible and less extravagant. The sunken eyes of the Fury glared with a light like that of red-hot iron--_ferrea lux_.]

[Footnote 37: This expression, which is not in Statius, is common with Dryden, as in his Virg. aen. x. 582:

And from Strymonius hewed his better hand.]

[Footnote 38: Statius depicts the frenzied virulence of the Fury, by saying that she lashed the air with the serpent. Pope has marred the description by representing the las.h.i.+ng of the air as the act of the serpent itself.]

[Footnote 39: After Ino had drowned herself and her son Melicertes, they became marine divinities, and their names were changed to Leucothea and Palaemon. Statius is more picturesque than Pope. When the apparition of the Fury announced terrible evils to come, the sea was stirred to its depths. On the outburst of the tempest, Palaemon was sailing about on the back of a dolphin, and it was then that his mother s.n.a.t.c.hed him up in her alarm, and pressed him to her bosom. To convey an idea of the tremendous nature of the storm, Statius says that the Corinthian isthmus could hardly resist the violence of the waves which dashed against each of its sh.o.r.es. This circ.u.mstance is justly styled by Pope "most extravagantly hyperbolical," but a translator should not have omitted it.]