By heaven's great both-foot-halting God a several roof had built. 587 Great both-foot-halting God—Vulcan. 590 COMMENTARIUS. INCE I dissent from all other translators, and interpreters, that SINCE ever assayed exposition of this miraculous poem, especially where the divine rapture is most exempt from capacity in grammarians merely, and grammatical critics, and where the inward sense or soul of the sacred muse is only within eye-shot of a poetical spirit's inspection (lest I be prejudiced with opinion, to dissent, of ignorance, or singularity) I am bound, by this brief comment, to show I understand how all other extants understand; my reasons why I reject them; and how I receive my author. In which labour, if, where all others find discords and dissonances, I prove him entirely harmonious and proportionate; if, where they often alter and fly his original, I at all parts stand fast, and observe it; if, where they mix their most pitiful castigations with his praises, I render him without touch, and beyond admiration, (though truth in her very nakedness sits in so deep a pit, that from Gades to Aurora, and Ganges, few eyes can sound her) I hope yet those few here will so discover and confirm her, that, the date being out of her darkness in this morning of our Homer, he shall now gird his temples with the sun, and be confessed (against his good friend) nunquam dormitare. But how all translators, censors, or interpreters, have slept, and been dead to his true understanding, I hope it will neither cast shadow of arrogance in me to affirm, nor of difficulty in you to believe, if you please to suspend censure, and diminution, till your impartial conference of their pains and mine be admitted. For induction and preparative to which patience, and persuasion, trouble yourselves but to know this. This never-enough-glorified poet (to vary and quicken his eternal poem) hath inspired his chief persons with different spirits, most ingenious and inimitable characters, which not understood, how are their speeches, being one by another as conveniently and necessarily known as the instrument by the sound? If a translator or interpreter of a ridiculous and cowardly-described person (being deceived in his character) so violates, and vitiates, the original, to make his speech grave, and him valiant, can the negligence and numbness of such an interpreter or translator be less than the sleep and death I am bold to sprinkle upon him? Or could I do less than affirm and enforce this, being so happily discovered? This, therefore (in his due place) approved and explained, let me hope my other assumpts will prove as conspicuous. This first and second book I have wholly translated again; the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth, books deferring still imperfect, being all Englished so long since, and my late hand (overcome with labour) not yet rested enough to refine them. Nor are the wealthy veins of this holy ground so amply discovered in my first twelve labours as my last; not having competent time, nor my profit in his mysteries being so ample, as when driving through his thirteenth and last books, I drew the main depth, and saw the round coming of this silver bow of our Phoebus; the clear scope and contexture of his work; the full and most beautiful figures of his persons. To those last twelve, then, I must refer you, for all the chief worth of my clear discoveries; and in the mean space I entreat your acceptance of some few new touches in the first. Not perplexing you in first or last with anything handled in any other interpreter, further than I must conscionably make congression with such as have diminished, mangled, and maimed, my most worthily most tendered author. 3. "Aidì πρoïayev. didns (being compounded ex å privativa, and ɛidw, video) signifies locus tenebricosus, or, according to Virgil, sine luce domus; and therefore (different from others) I so convert it. 4. Κύνεσσιν, οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι (Διός, &c.) is the vulgar reading, which I read κύνεσσιν οἰωνοῖσί τε (πᾶσι Διὸς δὲ τελείετο βαλή), because πᾶσι referred to núveσow, &c., is redundant and idle; to the miseries of the Greeks by Jove's counsel, grave, and sententious. 5. 'E§ § dù tà πpŵτa, &c., ex quo quidem primum: 'E§ 3 dù tà πρῶτα, &c., ex quo. Here our common readers would have tempore understood, because Bouλn (to which they think the poet must otherwise have reference) is the feminine gender. But Homer understands Jove; as in Tau, verse 273, he expounds himself in these words:-άná mobi Zeùs, &c., which Pindarus Thebanus, in his epitome of these Iliads, rightly observes in these verses : "Conficiebat enim summi sententia Regis, Ex quo contulerant discordi pectore pugnas 21. Επευφήμησαν ̓Αχαιοί, comprobarunt Græci all others turn it; but since iπevonμéw signifies properly, fausta acclamatione do significationem approbationis, I therefore accordingly convert it, because the other intimates a comprobation of all the Greeks by word, which was not so, but only by inarticulate acclamations or shouts. 37. ́AμqıbéCnnas' àμqıС‹Cάw* signifies properly circumambulo, and only metaphoricè, protego, or tueor, as it is always in this place translated; which suffers alteration with me, since our usual phrase of walking the round in towns of garrison, for the defence of it, fits so well the property of the original. 197. Πρὸ γὰρ ἧκε θεὰ λευκώλενος Ἥρη. Præmiserat enim Dea alba ulnis Juno. Why Juno should send Pallas is a thing not noted by any; I therefore answer, because Juno is Goddess of state. The allegory, therefore, in the prosopopoeia both of Juno and Pallas, is, that Achilles, for respect to the state there present, the rather used that discretion and restraint of his anger. So in divers other places, when state is represented, Juno procures it; as in the eighteenth book, for the state of Patroclus's fetching off, Juno commands the sun to go down before his time, &c. These tears 360. Ως φάτο δακρυχέων: sic dixit lachrymans, &c. are called, by our commentators, unworthy, and fitter for children or women than such a hero as Achilles; and therefore Plato is cited in iii. Chapman meant aμpißáw, the obsolete, or radical, form of appißaivo. de Repub. where he saith, 'Opas àpa, &c. Meritò igitur clarorum virorum ploratus è medio tolleremus, &c. To answer which, and justify the fitness of tears generally (as they may be occasioned) in the greatest and most renowned men (omitting examples of Virgil's Æneas, Alexander the Great, &c.,) I oppose against Plato only one precedent of great and most perfect humanity (to Whom infinitely above all other we must prostrate our imitations) that shed tears, viz., our All-perfect and Almighty Saviour, Who wept for Lazarus. This, then, leaving the fitness of great men's tears, generally, utterly unanswerable, these particular tears of unvented anger in Achilles are in him most natural; tears being the highest effects of greatest and most fiery spirits, either when their abilities cannot perform to their wills, or that they are restrained of revenge, being injured; out of other considerations, as now the consideration of the state and gravity of the counsel and public good of the army-curbed Achilles. Who can deny that there are tears of manliness and magnanimity, as well as womanish and pusillanimous? So Diomed wept for curst heart, when Apollo struck his scourge from him, and hindered his horse-race, having been warned by Pallas before not to resist the deities; and so his great spirits being curbed of revenge for the wrong he received then. So when not-enough-vented anger was not to be expressed enough by that tear-starting affection in courageous and fierce men, our most accomplished expressor helps the illustration in a simile of his fervour, in most fervent-spirited fowls, resembling the wrathful fight of Sarpedon and Patroclus to two vultures fighting, and crying on a rock; which thus I have afterwards Englished, and here for example inserted : "Down jump'd he from his chariot; down leap'd his foe as light; Fly on each other, strike, and truss, part, meet, and then stick by, Wherein you see that crying in these eagerly-fought fowls (which is like in angry men) is so far from softness or faintness, that to the su tears |