Quick thro' the father's heart these accents ran: And his breath lengthens, and his pulses beat; To this Ulysses: "As the gods shall please Thus having said, they trac'd the garden o'er, [proves? When the bold Cephalens the leaguer form'd, They commun'd thus; while homeward bent The swains, fatigu'd with labours of the day; And next his sons, a long succeeding train. Now flying fame the swift report had spread Big was his eye with tears, his heart with woes: has wrought, And mighty blessings to his country brought. Here ceas'd he, but indignant tears let fall Spoke when he ceas'd: dumb sorrow touch'd them all. T When from the palace to the wondering throng "Hear me, ye peers and elders of the land, His moderate words some better minds persuade: They part, and join him; but the number stay'd. They storm, they shout, with hasty frenzy fir'd, And second all Eupithes' rage inspir'd. They case their limbs in brass; to arms they run; The broad effulgence blazes in the Sun. Before the city, and in ample plain, They meet; Eupithes heads the frantic train. Fierce for his son, he breathes his threats in air; Fate hears them not, and Death attends him there. This pass'd on Earth, while in the realms above Minerva thus to cloud-compelling Jove: 64 May I presume to search thy secret soul? O power supreme! O ruler of the whole! Say, hast thou doom'd to this divided state, Or peaceful amity, or stern debate? Declare thy purpose; for thy will is fate." "Is not thy thought my own?" (the god replies, Who rolls the thunder o'er the vaulted skies) "Hath not long since thy knowing soul decreed, The chief's return should make the guilty bleed? "Tis done, and at thy will the Fates succeed. Yet hear the issue: since Ulysses' hand Has slain the suitors, Heaven shall bless the land. Now sat Ulysses at the rural feast, Old Dolius too his rusted arms put on ; "Behold, Telemachus! (nor fear the sight) Thy eyes, great father! on this battle cast, "The day that shows me, ere I close my eyes, "Son of Arcesius, reverend warrior, hear! Before the father and the conquering son [run. Descended from the gods! Ulysses, cease; Offend not Jore; obey, and give the peace." So Pallas spoke: the mandate from above The king obey'd. The virgin-seed of Jove, In Mentor's form, confirm'd the full accord, "And willing natious knew their lawful lord." governable, that Jupiter is forced to restrain it | duced it to one character and colouring, gone with his thunder. It is usual for orators to reserve over the several parts, and given to each their the strongest arguments for the conclusion, that finishing. they may leave them fresh upon the reader's memory; Homer uses the same conduct: he represents his hero in all his terrour, he shows him to be irresistible, and by this method leaves us fully possessed with a noble idea of his mag. nanimity. It has been already observed, that the end of the action of the Odyssey is the re-establishment of Ulysses in full peace and tranquillity; this is not effected, till the defeat of the suitors' friends: and, therefore, if the poet had concluded before this event, the Odyssey had been imperfect. It was necessary that the reader should not only be informed of the return of Ulysses to his country, and the punishment of the suitors, but of his reestablishment, by a peaceful possession of his regal authority; which is not executed, till these last disorders raised by Eupithes are settled by the victory of Ulysses; and, therefore, this is the natural conclusion of the action. This book opens with the morning, and ends before night, so that the whole story of the Odyssey is comprehended in the compass of one and forty days. Monsieur Dacier upon Aristotle remarks, that an epic poem ought not to be too long: we should be able to retain all the several parts of it at once in our memory: if we lose the idea of the beginning when we come to the concluson, it is an argument that it is of too large an extent, and its length destroys its beauty. What seems to favour this decision is, that the Eneid, Iliad, and Odyssey, are conformable to this rule of Aristotle; and every one of those poems may be read in the compass of a single day. I have now gone through the collections upon the Odyssey, and laid together what occurred most remarkable in this excellent poem. I am not so vain as to think these remarks free from faults, nor so disingenuous as not to confess them : all writers have occasion for indulgence, and those most who least acknowledge it. I have sometimes used Madam Dacier as she has done others, in transcribing some of her remarks without particularizing them; but, indeed, it was through inadvertency only that her name is sometimes omitted at the bottom of the note. If my performance has merit, either in these, or in my part of the translation, (namely, in the sixth, eleventh, and eighteenth books) it is but just to attribute it to the judgment and care of Mr. Pope, by whose band every sheet was corrected. His other, and much more able assistant, was Mr. Fenton, in the fourth and the twentieth books. It was our particular request, that our several parts might not be made known to the world till the end of it: and if they have had the good fortune not to be distinguished from his, we ought to be the less vain, since the resemblance proceeds much less from our diligence and study to copy his manner, than from his own daily revisal and correction. The most experienced painters will not wonder at this, who very well know, that no critic can pronounce even of the pieces of Raphael or Titian, which have, or which have not, been worked upon by those of their school; when the same master's hand has directed the execution of the whole, re I must not conclude without declaring our mutual satisfaction in Mr. Pope's acceptance of our best endeavours, which have contributed at least to his more speedy execution of this great undertaking. If ever my name be numbered with the learned, I must ascribe it to his friendship, in transmitting it to posterity by a participation in his labours. May the sense I have of this, and other instances of that friendship, be known as long as his name will cause mine to last: and may 1 to this end be permitted, at the conclusion of a work, which is a kind of monument of his partiality to me, to place the following lines, as an inscription memorial of it: ON THE ODYSSEY.. LET vulgar souls triumphal arches raise, A monument which worth alone can raise : If aught on Earth, when once this breath is fled, Thus when thy draughts, O Raphael! time And the bold figure from the canvas fades, coasts, And gloomy Pluto shakes with all his ghosts, Thus, like the radiant god who sheds the day, Proceed, great bard! awake th' harmonious Even I, the meanest of the Muses' train, Inflam'd by thee, attempt a nobler strain; Adventurous waken the Mæonian lyre, Tun'd by your hand, and sing as you inspire: So, arm'd by great Achilles for the fight, Patroclus conquer'd in Achilles' right: Like their's, our friendship! and I boast my name To thine united-For thy FRIENDSHIP'S FAME. This labour past, of heavenly subjects sing, While hovering angels listen on the wing, To hear from Earth, such heart-felt raptures rise, As, when they sing, suspended hold the skies: Or, nobly rising in fair virtue's cause, From thy own life transcribe th' unerring laws: Teach a bad world beneath thy sway to bend ;. To verse like thine fierce savages attend, And men more fierce: when Orpheus tunes the lay, Ev'n fiends relenting hear their rage away. POSTSCRIPT. BY MR. POPE. W. BROOME I CANNOT dismiss this work without a few observations on the character and style of it. Whoever reads the Odyssey with an eye to the Iliad, expecting to find it of the same character, or of the same sort of spirit, will be grievously deceived, and err against the first principle of criticism, which is, to consider the nature of the piece, and the intent of its author. The Odyssey is a moral and political work, instructive to all degrees of men, and filled with images, examples, and precepts of civil and domestic life. Homer is here a person, Qui didicit, patriæ quid debeat, & quid amicis, [hospes: Quo sit amore parens, quo frater amandus, & Qui quid sit pulchrum, quid turpe, quid utile, quid non, Plenius & melius Chrysippo & Crantore dicit. The Odyssey is the reverse of the Iliad, in moral, subject, manner, and style; to which it has no sort of relation, but as the story happens to follow in order of time, and as some of the same persons are actors in it. Yet from this incidental conOdyssey, Lib. XVI. nection many have been misled tó régard it as a continuation or second part, and thence to expect a parity of character inconsistent with its nature. It is no wonder that the common reader should fall into this mistake, when so great a critic as Longinus scems not wholly free from it; although what he has said has been generally understood to import a severer censure of the Odyssey than it I really does, if we consider the occasion on which it is introduced, and the circumstances to which it is confined. "The Odyssey" (says he)" is an instance, how natural it is to a great genius, when it begins to grow old and decline, to delight itself in narra tions and fables. For that Homer composed the Odyssey after the Iliad, many proofs may be given, &c. From hence, in my judgment, it proceeds, that as the Iliad was written while his spirit was in its greatest vigour, the whole structure of that work is dramatic and full of action; whereas the greater part of the Odyssey is employed in narration, which is the taste of old age: so that in this latter piece we may compare him to the setting Sun, which has still the same greatness, but not the same ardour, or force. He speaks not in the same strain: we see no more that sublime of the Iliad, which marches on with a constant pace, without ever being stopped, or retarded: there appears no more that hurry, and that strong tide of motions and passions, pouring one after another: there is no more the same fury, or the same volubility of diction, so suitable to action, and all along drawing in such innumerable images of nature. But Homer, like the ocean, is always great, even when he ebbs and retires; even when he is lowest, and loses himself most in narrations and incredible fictions: as instances of this, we cannot forget the description of tempests, the adventures of Ulysses with the Cyclops, and niany others. But, though all this be age, it is the age of Homer-And it may be said for the credit of these fictions, that they are beautiful dreams, or, I if you will, the dreams of Jupiter himself. spoke of the Odyssey only to show, that the greatest poets, when their genius wants strength and warmth for the pathetic, for the most part Homer has done in characterising the suitors, and employ themselves in painting the manners. This describing their way of life: which is properly branch of comedy, whose peculiar business is to represent the manners of men." We must first observe, it is the sublime of which Longinus is writing: that, and not the nature of Homer's poem, is his subject. After having highly extolled the fire and sublimity of the Iliad, he justly observes the Odyssey to have less of those qualities, and to turn more on the side of moral, and reflections on human life. Nor is it his business here to determine, whether the elevated spirit of the one, or the just moral of the other, be the greater excellence in itself. speaking, cannot well be meant of the general Secondly, that fire and fury, of which he is spirit and inspiration which is to run through a whole epic poem, but of that particular warmth and impetuosity necessary in some parts, to image or represent actions or passions, of haste, tumult, and violence. It is on occasion of citing some such particular passages in Homer, that Longinus breaks into this reflection; which seems to determine his meaning chiefly to that sense. Upon the whole, he affirms the Odyssey to have less sublimity and fire than the Iliad; but he does not say it wants the sublime, or wants fire. He affirms it to be narrative, but not that the narration is defective. He affirms it to abound in fictions, not that those fictions are ill invented, or ill executed. He affirms it to be nice and particular in painting the manners, but not that those manners are ill painted. If Homer has fully in these points accomplished his own design, and done all that the nature of his poem demanded or allowed, it still remains perfect in its kind, and as much a masterpiece as the Iliad. The amount of the passage is this; that in his own particular taste, and with respect to the subTime, Longinus preferred the Iliad: and because the Odyssey was less active and lofty, he judged it the work of the old age of Homer. If this opinion be true, it will only prove, that Homer's age might determine him in the choice of his subject, not that it affected him in the execution of it; and that which would be a very wrong instance to prove the decay of his imagination, is a very good one to evince the strength of his judgment. For had he (as Madam Dacier observes) composed the Odyssey in his youth and the Iliad in his age, both must in reason have been exactly the same as they now stand. To blame Homer for his choice of such a subject, as did not admit the same incidents and the same pomp of style as his former, is to take offence at too much variety, and to imagine, that when a man has written one good thing, he must ever after only copy himself. The Battle of Constantine, and the School of Athens, are both pieces of Raphael: shall we censure the School of Athens as faulty, because it has not the fury and fire of the other? or shall we say, that Raphael was grown grave and old, because he chose to represent the manners of old men and philosophers? There is all the silence, tranquility, and composure in the one, and all the warmth, hurry, and tumult in the other, which the subject of either required: both of them had been imperfect, if they had not been as they are. And let the poet or painter be young or old, who designs and performs in this manner, it proves him to have made the piece at a time of life when he was master not only of his art, but of his dis cretion. Aristotle makes no such distinction between the two poems: he constantly cites them with equal praise, and draws the rules and examples of epic writing equally from both. But it is rather to the Odyssey that Horace gives the preference, in the Epistle to Lollius, and in the Art of Poetry. It is remarkable how opposite his opinion is to that of Longinus: and that the particulars he chooses to extol, are those very fictions, and pictures of the manners, which the other seems least to approve. Those fables and manners are of the very essence of the work: but even without that regard, the fables themselves have both more invention and more instruction, and the manners more moral and example, than those of the Iliad. In some points (and those the most essential to the epic poem) the Odyssey is confessed to excel the liad; and principally in the great end of it, the moral. The conduct, turn, and disposition of the fable is also what the critics allow to be the better model for epic writers to follow: accordingly we find much more of the cast of this poem than of the other in the Eneid, and (what next to that is perhaps the greatest example) in the Telemachus. In the manners it is no way inferior: Longinus is so far from finding any defect in these, that he rather taxes Homer with painting them too minutely. As to the narrations, although they are more numerous as the occasions are more frequent, yet they carry no more the marks of old age, and are neither more prolix, nor more circumstantial, than the conversations and dialogues of the Iliad. Not to mention the length of those of Phoenix in the ninth book, and of Nestor in the eleventh (which may be thought in compliance to their characters), those of Glaucus in the sixth, of neas in the twentieth, and some others, must be allowed to exceed any in the whole Odyssey. And that the propriety of style, and the numbers, in the narrations of each are equal, will appear to any who compare them. To form a right judgment, whether the genius of Homer had suffered any decay; we must consider, in both his poems, such parts as are of a similiar nature, and will bear comparison. And it is certain we shall find in each the same vivacity and fecundity of invention, the same life and strength of imaging and colouring, the particular descriptions as highly painted, the figures as bold, the metaphors as animated, and the numbers as harmonious, and as various. The Odyssey is a perpetual source of poetry: the stream is not the less full, for being gentle; though it is true (when we speak only with regard to the sublime) that a river, foaming and thundering in cataracts from rocks and precipices, is what more strikes, amazes, and fills the mind, than the same body of water, flowing afterwards through peaceful vales and agreeable scenes of pasturage. The Odyssey (as I have before said) ought to be considered according to its own nature and design, not with an eye to the Iliad. To censure Homer, because it is unlike what it was never meant to resemble, is as if a gardener, who had purposely cultivated two beautiful trees of contrary natures, as a specimen of his skill in the several kinds, should be blamed for not bringing them into pairs; when in root, stem, leaf, and flower, each was so entirely different, that one must have been spoiled in the endeavour to match the other. Longinus, who saw this poem was "partly of the nature of comedy," ought not, for that very reason, to have considered it with a view to the Iliad. How little any such resemblance was the intention of Homer, may appear from hence, that, althrough the character of Ulysses was there already drawn, yet here he purposely turns to another side of it, and shows him not in that full light of glory, but in the shade of common life, with a mixture of such qualities as are requisite to all the lowest accidents of it, struggling with mis. fortunes, and on a level with the meanest of mankind. As for the other persons, none of them are above what we call the higher comedy: Calypso, though a goddess, is a character of intrigue; the suitors yet more approaching to it; the Phæaciam |