[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 prone 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 gods 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 passage, for he had the assistance 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 assembly 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
assistants, the Cyclopes, as they plied their trade. The circumstance
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 gods 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
title to the distinction. It was one of the localities which contended
for the renown of having given her birth, and was, with Argos, the
principal seat of her worship. 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 worship 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.]
[Footnote 78: To Argos, of which Danaus had been king, whence the
Argives were also called Danai.]
[Footnote 79: Atreus, king of Mycenae, murdered the two sons of his
brother Thyestes, and feasted their father with dishes made of their
flesh.]
[Footnote 80: Bacchus forced the Theban women to assemble, and give
loose to the wild rites by which he was celebrated. It was on this
occasion that Pentheus was massacred by his mother.]
[Footnote 81: Nisus was king of Megara when it was besieged by Minos.
The king's daughter, Scylla, conceived a passion for Minos, and to
ensure him the victory she plucked from her father's head a purple hair
upon which depended the preservation of himself and the city.]
[Footnote 82: Statius says that when Polynices was in the middle of the
isthmus of Corinth he could hear the waves beat against both its shores.
"This," remarked Pope, "could hardly be; for the isthmus of Corinth is
full five miles over," and he calls the introduction of the circumstance
"a geographical error." It was his own geography that was at fault. The
width of the isthmus is only three miles and a half. Pope spoilt the
incident when he transferred it to the Scironian rock. Sciron was a
robber and murderer, who compelled his victims to wash his feet upon the
cliff, and while they were engaged in the operation he kicked them over
into the sea.]
[Footnote 83: "We have scarcely in our language eight more beautiful
lines than these, down to human care," ver. 481.--WARTON.]
[Footnote 84: Pope owed some happy expressions to the translation of
Stephens:
The silent world does view
Her airy chariot pearled with drops of dew.]
[Footnote 85: He again borrowed from Stephens:
And nodding through the air brings down in haste
A sweet forgetfulness of labour passed.]
[Footnote 86: A very faulty expression; as also below, verse
501,--"rolls a deluge on."--WARTON.
He copied Dryden's Virg. AEn. iv. 638:
As when the winds their airy quarrel try.
He was indebted to a second couplet in the same translation, AEn. ii.
565:
Thus, when the rival winds their quarrel try,
Contending for the kingdom of the sky.]
[Footnote 87: "Showers" is an inappropriate word to denote the deluge of
rain which flooded the earth, and "swept herds, and hinds, and houses to
the main."]
[Footnote 88: The Inachus, and the Erasinus were rivers in the plain of
Argos.]
[Footnote 89: The waters of the Lerna were infected by the venom from
the serpent Hydra, which Hercules slew.]
[Footnote 90: The storm, by blowing down trees or branches, made an
opening in the dense foliage through which the sun had never
penetrated.]
[Footnote 91: In the first edition:
The prince with wonder did the waste behold,
While from torn rocks the massy fragments rolled.]
[Footnote 92: Dryden's Virg. AEn. ii. 413:
The shepherd climbs the cliff, and sees from far
The wasteful ravage of the wat'ry war.]
[Footnote 93: Dryden's Virg. Geor. i. 652: