extract, unless otherwise stated, are those given by Pope
himself to the books from which the extracts have been
taken.
from the preface
50 The line of Homeric Greek is Iliad, II, 780.
59 vivida vis animi from the Latin of Lucretius meaning
the lively force of the mind.
67 Lucan and Statius writers of Latin epic coming after
Virgil.
89–90the ‘soul of poetry’ Aristotle, Poetics, VI, 19.
105–6 ‘Everything in it has manners’ Aristotle, Poetics,
XXIV, 13–14.
122 Longinus the Greek rhetorician referred to in An
Essay on Criticism (ll. 675–80) to whom was
attributed the treatise Peri Hypsous, On the Sublime,
in which Homer is frequently cited to illustrate the
sublime in conception and style. Pope wrote a mock
treatise satirizing bad poets called the Peri Bathous,
Or Martinus Scriblerus His Treatise of the Art of
Sinking in Poetry (1727).
156 ‘living words’ Aristotle, Rhetoric, III, xi.
226 [Virgil’s Jupiter] laying plans for empires See his
dignified speech at Aeneid, I, 257–96.
from the second book of the IliadThe speech is by Agamemnon, leader of the Greek
expedition against Troy and brother of Menelaus whose wife
Helen had been abducted by the Trojan Paris from Sparta,
thus occasioning the war. In the ninth year of the siege of
Troy, the Greeks are weary and have been showing an
inclination to return. Lines 452–69 and 520–71 of the
complete version.
23 the blue-eyed virgin Minerva, daughter of Jupiter, a
warrior goddess and ardent supporter of the Greek
cause.