[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 lashing 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 snatched 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 shores. This circumstance is justly styled by Pope "most
extravagantly hyperbolical," but a translator should not have omitted
it.]
[Footnote 40: A great image, and highly improved from the original,
"assueta 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
astonishing, 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.