lift his hand against the force of Jove?
Once in your cause I felt his matchless might,
Hurl’d headlong down from the ethereal height; 34
Toss’d all the day in rapid circles round,
Nor till the sun descended touch’d the ground.
Breathless I fell, in giddy motion lost;
The Sinthians raised me on the Lemnian coast; 35
He said, and to her hands the goblet heaved,
Which, with a smile, the white-arm’d queen received
Then, to the rest he fill’d; and in his turn,
Each to his lips applied the nectar’d urn,
Vulcan with awkward grace his office plies,
And unextinguish’d laughter shakes the skies.
Thus the blest gods the genial day prolong,
In feasts ambrosial, and celestial song. 36
Apollo tuned the lyre; the Muses round
With voice alternate aid the silver sound.
Meantime the radiant sun to mortal sight
Descending swift, roll’d down the rapid light:
Then to their starry domes the gods depart,
The shining monuments of Vulcan’s art:
Jove on his couch reclined his awful head,
And Juno slumber’d on the golden bed.
1 The following argument of the Iliad, corrected in a few particulars, is translated from Bitaube, and is, perhaps, the neatest summary that has ever been drawn up:—“A hero, injured by his general, and animated with a noble resentment, retires to his tent; and for a season withdraws himself and his troops from the war. During this interval, victory abandons the army, which for nine years has been occupied in a great enterprise, upon the successful termination of which the honour of their country depends. The general, at length opening his eyes to the fault which he had committed, deputes the principal officers of his army to the incensed hero, with commission to make compensation for the injury, and to tender magnificent presents. The hero, according to the proud obstinacy of his character, persists in his animosity; the army is again defeated, and is on the verge of entire destruction. This inexorable man has a friend; this friend weeps before him, and asks for the hero’s arms, and for permission to go to the war in his stead. The eloquence of friendship prevails more than the intercession of the ambassadors or the gifts of the general. He lends his armour to his friend, but commands him not to engage with the chief of the enemy’s army, because he reserves to himself the honour of that combat, and because he also fears for his friend’s life. The prohibition is forgotten; the friend listens to nothing but his courage; his corpse is brought back to the hero, and the hero’s arms become the prize of the conqueror. Then the hero, given up to the most lively despair, prepares to fight; he receives from a divinity new armour, is reconciled with his general and, thirsting for glory and revenge, enacts prodigies of valour, recovers the victory, slays the enemy’s chief, honours his friend with superb funeral rites, and exercises a cruel vengeance on the body of his destroyer; but finally appeased by the tears and prayers of the father of the slain warrior, restores to the old man the corpse of his son, which he buries with due solemnities.’— Coleridge, p. 177, sqq.
2 Vultures: Pope is more accurate than the poet he translates, for Homer writes “a prey to dogs and to all kinds of birds. But all kinds of birds are not carnivorous.
3 i.e. during the whole time of their striving the will of Jove was being gradually accomplished.
4 Compare Milton’s “Paradise Lost” i. 6
“Sing, heavenly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Horeb, or of Sinai, didst inspire That shepherd.”
5 Latona’s son: i.e. Apollo.
6 King of men: Agamemnon.
7 Brother kings: Menelaus and Agamemnon.
8 Smintheus an epithet taken from sminthos, the Phrygian name for a mouse, was applied to Apollo for having put an end to a plague of mice which had harassed that territory. Strabo, however, says, that when the Teucri were migrating from Crete, they were told by an oracle to settle in that place, where they should not be attacked by the original inhabitants of the land, and that, having halted for the night, a number of field-mice came and gnawed away the leathern straps of their baggage, and thongs of their armour. In fulfilment of the oracle, they settled on the spot, and raised a temple to Sminthean Apollo. Grote, “History of Greece,” i. p. 68, remarks that the “worship of Sminthean Apollo, in various parts of the Troad and its neighboring territory, dates before the earliest period of Aeolian colonization.”
9 Cilla, a town of Troas near Thebe, so called from Cillus, a sister of Hippodamia, slain by OEnomaus.
10 A mistake. It should be,
“If e’er I roofed thy graceful fane,”
for the custom of decorating temples with garlands was of later date.
11 Bent was his bow “The Apollo of Homer, it must be borne in mind, is a different character from the deity of the same name in the later classical pantheon. Throughout both poems, all deaths from unforeseen or invisible causes, the ravages of pestilence, the fate of the young child or promising adult, cut off in the germ of infancy or flower of youth, of the old man dropping peacefully into the grave, or of the reckless sinner suddenly checked in his career of crime, are ascribed to the arrows of Apollo or Diana. The oracular functions of the god rose naturally out of the above fundamental attributes, for who could more appropriately impart to mortals what little foreknowledge Fate permitted of her decrees than the agent of her most awful dispensations? The close union of the arts of prophecy and song explains his additional office of god of music, while the arrows with which he and his sister were armed, symbols of sudden death in every age, no less naturally procured him that of god of archery. Of any connection between Apollo and the Sun, whatever may have existed in the more esoteric doctrine of the Greek sanctuaries, there is no trace in either Iliad or Odyssey.”— Mure, “History of Greek Literature,” vol. i. p. 478, sq.
12 It has frequently been observed, that most pestilences begin with animals, and that Homer had this fact in mind.
13 Convened to council. The public assembly in the heroic times is well characterized by Grote, vol. ii. p 92. “It is an assembly for talk. Communication and discussion to a certain extent by the chiefs in person, of the people as listeners and sympathizers — often for eloquence, and sometimes for quarrel — but here its ostensible purposes end.”
14 Old Jacob Duport, whose “Gnomologia Homerica” is full of curious and useful things, quotes several passages of the ancients, in which reference is made to these words of Homer, in maintenance of the belief that dreams had a divine origin and an import in which men were interested.
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