The Works of Alexander Pope Part 16

[Footnote 40: A great image, and highly improved from the original, "a.s.sueta nube."--WARTON.

The first edition had a feeble prosaic line in place of the image which Warton admired:

Headlong from thence the fury urged her flight, And at the Theban palace did alight.]

[Footnote 41: "Ruptaeque vices" in the original, which Pope translates, "and all the ties of nature broke," but by _vices_ is indicated the alternate reign of the two brothers, as ratified by mutual oaths, and subsequently violated by Eteocles.--DE QUINCEY.]

[Footnote 42: The felicities of this translation are at times perfectly astonis.h.i.+ng, and it would be scarcely possible to express more nervously or amply the words,--

jurisque secundi Ambitus impatiens, et summo dulcius unum Stare loco,--

than by Pope's couplet, which most judiciously, by reversing the two clauses, gains the power of fusing them into connection.--DE QUINCEY.]

[Footnote 43: "Bound" is an improper verb as applied to "steers"; besides the simile is not exactly understood. There is nothing about "reins" or "bounding" in the original. What is meant is that the steers do not draw even. Pope confounded the image of the young bullocks with that of a horse, and he therefore introduces "reins" and "bounding."--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 44: For "armour wait," the first edition had "arms did wait."]

[Footnote 45: "Charger" is used in its old sense of a dish.]

[Footnote 46: Statius, to point the folly of the criminal ambition, goes on to represent, that the contest was only for naked unadorned dominion in a poverty-stricken kingdom,--a battle for which should cultivate the barren territory on the banks of a petty stream,--and for this empty privilege the brothers sacrificed everything which was of good report in life or death. Pope weakened the moral of Statius, and the lines which follow to the end of the paragraph are also very inferior in force to the original.]

[Footnote 47: In the first edition,

Not all those realms could for such crimes suffice.

Pope might have done more to improve this prosaic couplet.]

[Footnote 48: Pope borrowed from the translation of Stephens:

How wast thou lost In thine own joys, proud tyrant then, when all About thee were thy slaves.]

[Footnote 49: It should be "discontented."--WARTON.]

[Footnote 50: This couplet was interpolated by Pope and seems to have been suggested by his hostility to the revolution of 1688. Nor does Statius call the populace "vile," or say that they are always "discontented," or that they are "still p.r.o.ne to change, though still the slaves of state." Neither does he say that they "are sure to hate the monarch, they have," but he says that their custom is to love his successor, which is a sentiment more in accordance with experience.]

[Footnote 51: "Exiled" because the king who was not reigning had to leave the country during his brother's year of power.]

[Footnote 52: The warriors who were the produce of the dragon's teeth sown by Cadmus fought among themselves till only five were left.]

[Footnote 53: "Unrivalled," as the context shows, is not here a term of commendation, but merely signifies that the monarch had no equal in rank or power.]

[Footnote 54: "Placido quatiens tamen omnia vultu," is the common reading. I believe it should be "nutu," with reference to the word "quatiens."--POPE.]

[Footnote 55: Pope was manifestly unable to extract any sense from the original. It is there said that Jupiter at his first entrance seats himself upon his starry throne, but that the other G.o.ds did not presume to sit down "protinus," that is, in immediate succession to Jupiter, and interpreting his example as a tacit license to do so, until, by a gentle wave of his hand, the supreme father signifies his express permission to take their seats. In Pope's translation, the whole picturesque solemnity of the celestial ritual melts into the vaguest generalities.--DE QUINCEY.

De Quincey was mistaken in his inference that Pope was unable to understand the pa.s.sage, for he had the a.s.sistance of the translation of Stephens, which gives the meaning correctly:

Anon He sets him down on his bespangled throne.

The rest stand and expect: not one presumed To sit till leave was beckoned.]

[Footnote 56: The winds would have been inconvenient members of a deliberative a.s.sembly if they had taken to howling, whistling, and sighing. Nevertheless their propensity to blow was so inveterate that, in Statius, they are only kept quiet by their fear of Jove.]

[Footnote 57: Our author is perpetually grasping at the wonderful and the vast, but most frequently falls gradually from the terrible to the contemptible.--WARTON.

By "our author" Warton meant Statius, and the expression, he criticised as hyberbolical was the "eluded rage of Jove,"--an exaggeration for which Pope alone was responsible.]

[Footnote 58: Hiera, one of the aeolian islands in the neighbourhood of Sicily, was supposed to be the workshop of Vulcan. The island was volcanic, and the underground noises were ascribed to Vulcan, and his a.s.sistants, the Cyclopes, as they plied their trade. The circ.u.mstance that the fires of the aeolian forge were exhausted was doubtless introduced by Statius because in his day the eruptions had ceased in Hiera.]

[Footnote 59: Agave, the daughter of Cadmus. Her son Pentheus appeared among the women who were celebrating the Bacchic revelries on Mount Cithaeron, and his mother, mistaking him in her frenzy for a wild beast, like a wild beast tore him to pieces.]

[Footnote 60: There is no mention of "the direful banquet" in the original. "The savage hunter" alludes to Athamas chasing and slaying his son under the delusion that he was a lion.]

[Footnote 61: The king of Argos.]

[Footnote 62: Tantalus, king of Argos, invited the G.o.ds to a banquet, and served up the boiled flesh of his own son, Pelops.]

[Footnote 63: Phoroneus was commonly reputed to have been the founder of the city of Argos.]

[Footnote 64: Juno employed Argus to keep guard over Io, transformed by Jupiter into a cow. Mercury, being sent by Jupiter to rescue Io, lulled Argus to sleep by melodious airs on the flute, and then cut off his head.]

[Footnote 65: An oracle announced to Acrisius, king of Argos, that he would die by the hands of his grandson. The king endeavoured to escape his fate by imprisoning his daughter, Danae, in a brazen tower, but Jupiter obtained access to her in the shape of a shower of gold, and she became the mother of Perseus, who fulfilled the prediction, according to the established legendary usage.]

[Footnote 66: The force of this taunt is weakened in Pope's translation by the change from the second person to the third, as though the invectives of Juno had not been addressed to Jupiter himself.]

[Footnote 67: Jupiter visited Semele, the daughter of Cadmus, in all the majesty of the thunderer, and she was consumed by the lightning.]

[Footnote 68: Homer makes Juno say that there are three cities pre-eminently dear to her--Argos, Sparta, and Mycenae. Samos had no less t.i.tle to the distinction. It was one of the localities which contended for the renown of having given her birth, and was, with Argos, the princ.i.p.al seat of her wors.h.i.+p. Virgil ranks Samos second among the places she delighted to honour.]

[Footnote 69: The river Alpheus, which takes its rise in Arcadia, loses itself underground in parts of its course, and again reappears. This suggested the fiction that it ran in a subterranean channel, below the bottom of the sea, to the fountain of Arethusa in Sicily, where it once more emerged to day. Pope had less regard to the text of Statius than to Dryden's translation of Virgil's lines on the same legend in Ecl. x. 5:

So may thy silver streams beneath the tide, Unmixed with briny seas, securely glide.]

[Footnote 70: The Arcadians celebrated the wors.h.i.+p of Jupiter with human sacrifices.]

[Footnote 71: He was king of Pisa in Elis, where was the celebrated Olympia, with its temple of Jupiter. Oenomaus had ascertained from an oracle that he would perish by the agency of his son-in-law, and he was anxious, in self-defence, to keep his daughter, Hippodamia, from marrying. As he possessed the swiftest horses in the world he required her suitors to contend with him in a chariot-race, which allowed them no chance of success. The prize of victory was to be his daughter; the penalty of defeat was death, and the bones which laid unburied in the neighbourhood of Jupiter's temple were those of the lovers of Hippodamia.]

[Footnote 72: The Cretans claimed to possess both the birth-place and burial-place of Jupiter.]

[Footnote 73: "Derived from Jove," inasmuch as Perseus, one of the kings of Argos, was the son of Jupiter and Danae.]

[Footnote 74: Eteocles and Polynices.--POPE.]

[Footnote 75: Mercury, so called because he was born upon Mount Cyllene.]

[Footnote 76: Eteocles.]

[Footnote 77: Stephens's translation:

This were such a day He'd spend an age to see 't.]