imitate these effects in Homer are remarkably
varied.
198 So when a peasant Pope comments: ‘This changing of
the character is very beautiful: no poet ever knew like
Homer to pass from the vehement and the nervous to
the gentle and agreeable; such transitions when
properly made give a singular pleasure, as when in
music a master passes from the rough to the tender’
(line 289).
228 By Phoebus’ darts Later literature records that
Achilles was killed by an arrow from the Trojan Paris
which pierced his heel, his one point of vulnerability.
Thetis had dipped her infant son in the waters of Styx
(in Hades) to make him invulnerable but evidently
forgot about the heel by which she held him.
230 Oh! had I died Pope comments: ‘Nothing is more
agreeable than this wish to the heroic character of
Achilles: glory is his prevailing passion; he grieves not
that he must die, but that he should die unlike a man
of honour’ (line 321).
307 ignipotent literally, powerful through fire.
THE ODYSSEY OF HOMERFor his translation of the Odyssey published in six volumes
between 1723 and 1726, Pope used two collaborators,
William Broome and Elijah Fenton, who between them
translated twelve books which were then revised by Pope. The
extract here is wholly translated by Pope.
from the tenth book of the OdysseyNewly released from his seven-year imprisonment on the
island of the goddess Calypso, Ulysses is shipwrecked as he
makes his way home to Ithaca from which he left nineteen
years earlier to fight in the Trojan War. He lands at Scheria,
an island inhabited by the Phaeacians, and is welcomed by
Alcinous, their king. In an after-dinner speech he tells the
Phaeacians the story of his wanderings after the fall of Troy.
Lines 157–8, 163–80, 232–581 of the complete version.