SOURCE: “The Battle of the Books and the Shield of Achilles,” in Eighteenth-Century Life, Vol. 9, No. 1, October 1984, pp. 33-61.

[In the following essay, Levine examines the debate between ancients and moderns in Great Britain and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, focusing particularly on the two sides' differing assessments of Homer.]

The conventional notion that the beginning of modern times was ushered in by the “revival of antiquity” contains an evident paradox. How was it that the Renaissance humanists, who had deliberately tried to imitate and restore the culture of the distant past, could make so decisive a step into the future? The answer, I suppose, is that they did so inadvertently and despite themselves. They had merely meant to revive the classical ideal of eloquence and make that ideal live again through imitation. What they soon discovered, however, was that to accomplish that task it was necessary first to locate, compare, and decipher ancient manuscripts, to recover forgotten languages, to elucidate the meaning of obscure passages and so on—in a word: to invent the techniques of modern scholarship, or what they preferred to call “philology.” Along the way they also discovered the value of ancient objects and so invented modern archaeology, or what they liked to call “antiquities.” But just as they were successful in this grand new enterprise and began to reconstitute the shape of antique culture more fully and exactly than had ever been done before, they turned up an unexpected difficulty: the more they learned about the classical authors and their surroundings, the more distant and exotic, and thus the less immediately relevant to the modern world, some of them appeared to be. Pliny the Younger might seem the perfect English country gentleman and Quintilian the familiar grammar school headmaster; but what, for example, was one to do with the Homer of the Iliad, whose values and heroic manners were so unlike—perhaps even antithetical to—those of modern Christian Europe?

Needless to say, this difficulty appeared only gradually with the slow and steady advancement of learning. One obvious touchstone was the famous “quarrel between the ancients and the moderns,” which began in the Renaissance and came to a climax at the end of the seventeenth century in the celebrated French querelle and in the English “battle of the books.” The outlines of that long story are undoubtedly familiar: how the humanists, who began the fracas by upholding everything classical against everything modern, were forced to relinquish bit by bit each of the various fields of science and art until the proponents of progress and modernity were left alone and triumphant. But the quarrel was complex, embracing the whole map of learning, and many of its details and even some of its leading themes remain obscure.¹ What is sometimes forgotten is how stubbornly and successfully the “ancients” resisted modernity, particularly in the arts and literature, long after they had given up on science and philosophy. What is even more frequently overlooked is how the classicists themselves divided over the quarrel, some of them continuing to defend the authority and precedence of the ancients as models for imitation, others discovering in the new classical scholarship fresh arguments for freedom and for competence and invention of the moderns. Indeed, when the quarrel resumed in England in the 1690s, it shifted almost at once from a general comparison of the whole of ancient and modern culture to a single overriding question. Once the redoubtable Richard Bentley joined forces with William Wotton in defense of the moderns by showing the full powers of modern scholarship in 1697, all attention turned to the claims of philology and antiquities. For two generations and more this became the nub of the contest.

Bentley had tried to expose the ancient Greek Epistles of Phalaris as fraudulent despite (or rather because) Sir William Temple, in urging the cause of the ancients, had pronounced extravagantly on the merit and authenticity of the letters. Bentley was right, of course, yet he was answered at once by a formidable combination of Oxford wits. Temple, with his young secretary, Jonathan Swift, and most of the polite world, preferred to believe that judgment in such matters belonged more appropriately to a statesman like himself, who had read and written letters to kings, than to a scholar and pedant like Bentley, who knew nothing but the cloister. No matter that the “ancients” had forgotten most of their slender Greek and knew little or nothing of the textual criticism and philological learning that Bentley commanded better than anyone else in Europe and that permitted him to see at a glance the many anachronisms that undermined the fraudulent letters. The Epistles of Phalaris continued to be upheld as genuine for over half a century.

The issues in the new quarrel were thus plain. Was critical judgment to be left to those like Temple, who wanted to employ the arts and literature directly in their lives through the imitation of classical models? Or was it to be turned over to those who did not need it and therefore could hardly be expected to appreciate it, to scholars like Bentley, whose style and manners were rude and unpolished and who were as willing to struggle over a trifle by Manilius as over the epics of Homer?² Were the philologists to be allowed to subordinate original texts beneath a mountain of critical commentary and controversial remarks, marginalia, footnotes, appendices, and indexes? And were they—worse yet, with their eternal corrections and emendations—to be left alone to undermine the authority and perfection of the ancient authors? How much, indeed, did it really matter whether the letters of Phalaris had been written by a Greek prince at the beginning of history or by a playful sophist long afterward?

The “battle of the books” raised these questions but did not settle them. It raised them in the squabble about Phalaris, and it raised them as soon as hostilities resumed. It is sometimes thought that the quarrel ended with the decisive intervention of Jonathan Swift, whose wicked satires, A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books, first appeared in 1704 and were revised in 1710. These two little works remain the most memorable, if not the most reliable, accounts of that affair even today. But Swift's works were too partisan to be helpful, and his relentless flogging of Wotton and Bentley failed to settle any issues, though he certainly called attention to the pivotal role of modern philology in the argument. It was left to Swift's young friend, Alexander Pope, to take up the problem and renew it for another generation. Pope had no special desire to enter the controversy, but in 1713, when he decided to publish a translation of Homer, he could hardly avoid it. His motives were more opportunistic than ideological; he accepted a publisher's contract and made a small fortune. But Homer was by all accounts the greatest of the ancients, the prince of poets; his claims to preeminence thus represented the true crux of the argument. If Homer's work could be discredited, then all the other classical authors stood at risk. From childhood Pope had thrown in his lot with the ancients and had learned to write poetry by translating and imitating the classics. He had always admired Homer; in 1713 the time was ripe to defend his classical mentors and to make the old poet directly accessible once again.³

The time seemed ripe because the debate over Homer had reached a fresh climax, if not in England then certainly in France, where the querelle had been recently and bitterly renewed.⁴ At the turn of the eighteenth century the English reading public was surprisingly well informed about literary matters across the Channel; translators and reviewers brought swift acquaintance with the French quarrel even to those who could not or would not read it in the original. In such a manner Temple had been provoked by Bernard de Fontenelle and Wotton influenced by Charles Perrault, and even Swift may have drawn his inspiration from the satire of françois de Callières.⁵ From the outset the French had provoked controversy over Homer, first by invidious comparisons with Virgil, then with their own recent epic poetry, and finally (and most outrageously) with their own increasingly rational aesthetic standards.⁶ The confidence of French modernity far exceeded anything to be found in England, where neither Wotton nor Bentley had dared to deny the preeminence of Homer or of classical poetry in general, however much they prized the achievement in science and scholarship. The provocation from overseas was thus too much to overlook.

The time was ripe for Pope's Homer in another way. While the French moderns were upbraiding Homer for his faults, scholars throughout Europe were studying the historical and critical problems that still obscured the text. Who in fact was Homer? When had the Iliad and the Odyssey been written and the Trojan Wars been fought? How reliable were the manuscripts, and what was the meaning of their more obscure passages? Little by little philologists increased their learning, delved into the language and customs of early Greece, collated the texts and tried to fathom their meaning. Whole treatises were written to treat the finer points, the poems were edited and reedited and the commentary grew steadily more voluminous. Meanwhile, antiquaries added their efforts. Asia Minor was too remote to investigate directly, but a number of monuments came to light and were examined minutely: a bust and a sculptured apotheosis of Homer, as well as some early medals and inscriptions. Words were thus joined with objects in an effort to illuminate the ancient poems, and the interest and appetite for Homer continued to grow.

Thus Pope and his publishers chose the right moment to bring forth a new translation of the Iliad.⁷ A large audience had been aroused, although its interests were diverse and its critical sensibilities divided. Unfortunately there is not space here to describe the whole of that large background: the many different episodes in the querelle, beginning with Charles Perrault's challenge to Homer in 1687 and continuing through two generations of thrust and counterthrust, or the swift development of Greek philology, from the early days of Joseph Scaliger and Isaac Casaubon through the innumerable compilations brought together by the Dutchman Jacob Gronovius, to the comprehensive antiquarian manuals of John Potter and Basil Kennett and the magnificent critical edition of the Iliad (1711) by Joshua Barnes on the eve of Pope's translation.⁸ If the young poet did not know all these works when he first embarked on his long labor, he discovered them soon enough and was forced to pick his way between the poles of controversy in the impossible effort to satisfy all his readers about both his taste and his learning.

Pope's translation cost him more effort and took much longer than he had expected; it appeared eventually in six volumes from 1715 to 1720. The poetry was difficult enough but the surprise was the prose, which turned out (as Addison had warned) to be as bulky and as formidable.⁹ The work carried with it an air of learning, with its long introductory life of the poet, its voluble commentary and learned essays, its pictures and its maps. Modern editors have usually suppressed this paraphernalia in order to leave the poetry unadorned, understandably because Pope failed—not in the translation, which was immensely successful, but in his learning, which was not.¹⁰ Yet the commentary is worth retrieving for a moment if only to see just how Pope tried to come to terms with the controversy that raged about him.

This is not easy to do: the labor of five years, scattered over six volumes, is difficult to assess. It may be helpful, therefore, to describe Pope's dilemma by concentrating on one short but pivotal passage in the eighteenth book of the Iliad in which Homer describes the shield of Achilles. Thetis, it will be remembered, had Vulcan forge new armor for Achilles, and Homer carries on at great length describing his hero's marvelous shield with its elaborately inlaid facade. To the French moderns this description was puzzling to say the least. Not only did the passage appear digressive and tedious, but the description seemed inadequate and implausible. When, therefore, Perrault addressed the French Academy in 1687, he seized upon the shield in particular to criticize Homer. He had already found the epic heroes of the Iliad cruel and capricious compared to the refined modern French, and he had not the slightest doubt that if Homer had had the good luck to be born in modern times he would have done a better job. It was incredible, Perrault maintained, that any artist should think of fitting onto a single object a picture of the whole universe, nor was such a depiction plausible. “This famous Buckler in a nicer Age,” Perrault concluded, “had juster been and less engraved.”¹¹ Homer's allegorical excesses were here, as elsewhere, deplorable; Horace was too polite when he admitted that Homer had only sometimes nodded.

This was too much for the “ancients”—among them Boileau, Racine, and Bishop Huet—who denounced the brash modern and turned the meeting into a brawl.¹² Perrault returned the insults in 1692 with his fourth Paralèlle on ancient and modern learning, in which he tried to pick apart the Iliad for its deficient story, badly drawn characters, immoral gods, and inept similes. Despite traditional assertions, he also found Homer to be a bad astronomer, geometer, and naturalist. Only time, he insisted, could bring about politesse and good taste. One character in his dialogue even wondered which was the more miserable, the poet or his heroes!¹³ He promised to say more about the shield of Achilles at another time. Meanwhile, Boileau replied by unmasking Perrault's ignorance: Perrault's modernity was all prejudice since he knew not a scrap of Greek and had to rely entirely on a translation for his criticism. “'Tis as if a Man born Blind, shou'd run about the Streets crying, Gentlemen, I know the Sun that you see seems very Beautiful, but I, who never saw it, declare to you that 'tis very Ugly.”¹⁴ He, at least, saw no weakness anywhere in the Iliad: no flaws in its heroes, no coarseness in its expression. The antagonists were eventually reconciled, but kept to their separate opinions.

Perrault never got back to the shield, perhaps because of a new rebuff from yet another “ancient,” André Dacier. According to Boileau, Dacier “was not only a Man of very great Learning, but also very Polite,” a combination, he hastened to add, only rarely found together.¹⁵ In fact, Richard Bentley was not much impressed with Dacier's Greek—and it is doubtful that he thought much better of Boileau's—but Dacier's erudition was certainly superior to Perrault's.¹⁶ In 1692 the young scholar published a translation and commentary on Aristolte's Poetics that made his reputation. In the course of this work, Dacier defended Homer, his learning (including his astronomy), and his indelicate language, which Dacier was sure could be excused by changed circumstances.¹⁷ Bad translations had misled some readers but the many parallels to the Old Testament which he and others discovered should, he thought, persuade everyone else of Homer's virtues. There was left only the shield.

Dacier had no doubt that the eighteenth book, far from being digressive, was the very crown of the poem. For centuries it had inspired the admiration of both the polite and the learned. That some moderns had raised doubts about the sound and movement of the figures astonished him. It was as though to explain a painting by Raphael or Poussin one could avoid describing the animation or speech of the figures. The critics were confusing the shield itself with Homer's description of it. One had only to remember Pliny's commentary on ancient art to see how such expressions were normally employed. If Perrault complained that Homer described two cities speaking two different languages and two orators pleading simultaneously on the shield, the fault lay entirely with the translations, for there was nothing in the Greek to justify criticism. As for the shield's place in the poem's design, had Perrault but read the ancient commentators, the monumental Eustathius, for example, he would have found only praise for its composition. To have represented the whole universe in so small a compass with so few figures, and to have described all the works of war and peace with such brevity, proved the work to be not only great poetry but great philosophy as well. Finally, the age-old comparison with Virgil could only work to Homer's advantage. The Roman shield in the eighth book of the Aeneid that directly imitated Homer was a supreme acknowledgment of the genius of the original. It too was a wonderful work, with its vivid depiction of the descendents of Troy creating the majesty of ancient Rome. But if one were to set the two shields side by side there could be but one verdict. “L'un paraît l'ouvrage d'un Dieu, et l'autre l'ouvrage d'un homme.”¹⁸

For a short time at the end of the seventeenth century there was a lull in the querelle, and the debate over Homer was allowed to simmer.¹⁹ Then in 1711 a woman resumed the contest. The insults to Homer had rankled in her scholar's heart, and she had long nursed her reply. She understood that what was most needed to stifle the moderns was a fresh and accurate translation of Homer from the original with an apologetic commentary. Only in a modern language could the poet hope to triumph over the otherwise invincible ignorance of the critics; only with an exact text could they be answered in every point. Anne Le Fèvre, Madame Dacier, devoted wife of André, combined learning and spirit with the infinite patience that was required for the undertaking.²⁰ Although few embers seemed left from the original quarrel when her version of the Iliad appeared, Madame Dacier's translation stirred them instantly to life. “It has ever been my Ambition …,” she wrote, “to present our Age with such a Translation of Homer, as, by preserving the main Beauties of that Noble Poet, might recover the great Part of Mankind from the disadvantageous Prejudice infus'd into them by the monstrous Copies that have been made of him.”²¹ Pope read her work attentively in both French and English and used it for his own.

In evaluating Madame Dacier's work, some have preferred her long and provocative preface to the translation itself.²² Madame Dacier understood fully the difficulties of her undertaking. She had listened patiently to the barrage of criticism leveled against her favorite and saw that some modern readers would have trouble accepting the heroic world of Homer, so she set out unflinchingly to defend it. Popular romance, she believed, had so dulled contemporary sensibilities as to leave the audience satisfied only with the frivolities of courtly love. “What Hope is there,” she exclaimed, “that our Age can be brought to relish these austere Poems, which, under the Veil of an ingenious Fable, contain profitable Instructions, and which do not present our Curiosity with any of those Adventures, commonly reckon'd moving and engaging, for no other Reason, but because they turn upon Love?” (Iliad, 1:iii-iv). Madame Dacier was determined to understand Homer as the ancients had, as the highest source of wisdom and inspiration excepting only the Bible. If this meant that one had to penetrate the allegory, a certain hurdle for the modern reader, here at least was a solution to the philosophical problem of Homer's gods, so annoying to a Christian sensibility. Madame Dacier supposed them, as had many of the ancients, to be entirely allegorical, and she believed (with a nod to the idea of a perennial wisdom) that they might be perfectly reconciled with sound divinity. Like the Englishman Joshua Barnes and others, she supposed, for example, that the teaching of the Phoenix could easily be reconciled with the widsom of Solomon.²³ Her English translator thought this a particularly brilliant stroke.

In the same way, Madame Dacier defended the manners and mores of the Homeric heroes. If they gave offense to the moderns, it was simply because they were so manifestly superior to the present. “The Gilding, that defaces our Age, and which ought to be taken off, is its Luxury and Effeminacy, which most certainly beget a general Corruption in our Souls” (Iliad, 1:xxii). This modest lady, devoted wife and mother, was determined to shame her most bellicose contemporaries. The rest of Madame Dacier's preface is an essay on the difficulty of translation. “The more perfect an Original is in Grandeur and Sublimity, the more it loses in being copy'd.” She would make no effort to recapture the style and diction of the original, which were inimitable and must be lost; she preferred the precision of prose. If the result was not exactly Homer “alive and animated” it was closer than any previous translation (Iliad, 2:xxiv, xxxi). Unfortunately, this gave away too much to the opposition, for the moderns were still being asked to accept on faith what they had decried out of ignorance: Homer's merit as a poet. There was still plenty of room for Pope.

Meanwhile Madame Dacier surrounded her translation with an introductory life of Homer and a copious commentary, just as Pope was to do afterward. The life tried to take account of the latest scholarship in order to solve the awkward problems of Homer's biography. Unfortunately, Madame Dacier was compelled to rely on a work long ascribed to Herodotus, despite an accumulation of modern doubts about its authorship. Like many scholars, she was unwilling to give up the only extensive source of information that existed, however suspicious, for fear of facing what would otherwise have been almost total ignorance. She was able to add a few details: from Huet, that Homer had studied in Egypt; from her scholar-father,²⁴ that he was an Aeolian; and on her own, a calculation that Homer had lived about 250 years after the fall of Troy (Iliad, 1:19). It was with some relief, therefore, that she turned to the archaeological evidence that proclaimed Homer's reputation in antiquity: some ancient medals, a tabula iliaca recently described by Raffaele Fabretti,²⁵ and most important, the Apotheosis of Homer, a marble relief discovered in the seventeenth century, now in the British Museum. She was especially pleased with the latter, which she had engraved as an illustration, though she left off Zeus and the muses. On the whole she was content to follow the recent explication of the Apotheosis by Gisbertus Cuperus, a Dutchman who had identified most of the figures, except that she questioned his reading of the two little animals at the base of Homer's Throne, which Cuperus thought must be the mice of the Batrachomyomachia. Madame Dacier preferred to believe that they were really two rats gnawing away at Homer's reputation: “those vile Authors, who not being able to attain to any Reputation themselves, have endeavor'd to revenge that Contempt upon such Works as are in greatest Esteem; and who, whilst Time and the Whole Earth are crowning Homer, have made it their Business to cry him down” (Iliad, 1:29). Madame Dacier did not like to mince words; her life of Homer concluded with several more pages of invective against those who had presumed to challenge the verdict of the ages, the new Zoiluses of her own time.

Apart from this, Madame Dacier did not burden her readers with much erudition, and her notes deliberately avoided the usual classical commentary. She offered no textual criticism and few outside references; instead she concentrated everything on proving the moral and aesthetic excellence of Homer. Despite her considerable learning, she was thus closer in spirit to the “ancients” such as Temple, Swift, and Boileau than to Joshua Barnes or Bentley, content to expound upon “the principal Beauties of this Poem” (Iliad, 5:136), so that her readers might come fully to appreciate them. Her learning, when it appeared, was genuine, but it was prejudiced and uncritical. In a curious way, Pope, who certainly lacked her Greek, understood her weakness.

What then did Madame Dacier make of the shield of Achilles? Inevitably, she found it nothing less than “the most beautiful Episode and the greatest Ornament that Poetry ever employ'd” (Iliad, 4:130). Those who criticized it were completely ignorant of the nature of epic poetry. Among the long roll call of authorities that she enlisted to substantiate her claim, she singled out one above all: Damo, daughter of Pythagoras, who had written a profound and copious commentary upon it, unfortunately lost. Closer at hand there was, of course, her husband, Monsieur Dacier; Madame Dacier was content to recommend his work and to scatter his arguments throughout her notes. Here, certainly, was fuel to renew the controversy.

There is space to note only the two most ambitious retorts of the moderns. The first was a rival translation of the Iliad (1714) by yet another academician, Antoine Houdar de La Motte, who boldly altered (or as he thought, “improved”), the original; which he abridged, rearranged, and versified—in a word, modernized.²⁷ He prefaced it with an ode in which the ghost of Homer urged upon himself a new translation, humbly pleading that the Iliad be corrected and amended of its copious faults. La Motte followed this with a discourse in which he directly answered Madame Dacier by relating most of Perrault's arguments about the grossness of the gods and heroes, the longueur of the descriptions, the monotony of the battles, and so on.²⁸ La Motte defended his obligation to transform and correct the original, to embellish what he thought beautiful and to omit the rest. Ignorance of Greek did not embarrass him; his touchstone was “reason,” by which he seems to have meant some combination of Cartesian philosophy and the common sense convictions of his time. He thus attempted to rid the Iliad of its tedious passages, to divest the gods and heroes of their bad manners, to abridge or suppress the endless speeches, to minimize the repetitions and to cut out the marvelous and improbable. In this way, Homer's twenty-four books became twelve, and the Iliad was adjusted to contemporary taste. In the process, the poetry vanished.

Needless to say, La Motte no more approved the shield of Achilles than he did anything else in the poem, and he accorded it the same treatment.²⁹ He thought the shield defective in precisely the way that Perrault had indicated. There were too many scenes crowded upon it, and the figures were shown in a movement impossible in a work of art. Homer had exaggerated even the powers of a god. There was but one obvious solution: to reduce the variety of scenes and substitute a few static tableaux. La Motte settled upon three scenes: the wedding of Thetis and Peleus, the judgment of Paris, and the abduction of Helen. It was an audacious performance, for the “ancients,” exasperating beyond measure.³⁰

Yet even La Motte could be outdone; the Abbé Jean Terrasson was willing to press the claims of reason against Homer even more fervently. Terrasson knew more about Greek but even less about poetry than La Motte. For him, the method of Descartes was everything, reason and geometry almost identical. “The Greeks knew how to speak,” he wrote in a philosophical work, “the Latins knew how to think, but the French know how to reason.”³¹ Time had brought about improvement, but to insure progress in literature it was necessary to depose Aristotle.

In 1717 Terrasson brought out two volumes of polemic, nearly a thousand pages against the Iliad, most of which found its way into English translation as Critical Dissertations on Homer's Iliad.³² The work was a vast summary of all that had been urged against Homer in the name of reason. Authority was banished, and with it, the Daciers' arguments about the applause of the ages and Homer's reputation in antiquity. For the abbé, it was the philosopher and not the historian who best knew how to read the past; it was the philosopher “who makes the true System of the Human Mind his principal Study and Application [and who] knows how to transport himself into the remotest and earliest Ages of the World.” He saw that the defenders of Homer had erred in making the ancient virtues timeless and their qualities perfect, but he insisted as adamantly upon the reverse: that is to say, on applying his own modern values to the past, even more deliberately heedless of circumstance. Homer had, in effect, failed for Terrasson because he did not know Descartes; Homer had lived in a barbarous age of darkness and ignorance. Should he not be excused, then, since he had done the best that he could for his time? Terrasson would not allow it. Common sense, if not mathematical reasoning, was always available to the human mind, and Homer could have done much better, even within the limits of his own time. “I have observed several Particulars,” Terrasson declared, “in which it had been easy for Homer to have corrected the false Taste of his Age, by the easiest and simplest Dictates of Common Sense, and natural Morality”; the poet had a “confus'd and irregular imagination, and in whatever Age he had liv'd, the Fault would have appear'd more or less” (1:1xi).

Inevitably, a point of reference was Achilles' shield. Terrasson objected to that “terrible Number and Multitude of Objects, in so narrow and limited a Compass, whatever Dimensions are given the Buckler of Achilles” (2:259-60). The shield was a fantastic, “Gothic” notion. The Daciers' interpretation of the shield as a representation of the entire universe in one picture was contrary to the rules of both perspective and painting. Using the rule of tangents, Terrasson showed that a spectator would have to be far above the highest mountain to obtain the perspective required to encompass the whole earth. Needless to say, the abbé was appalled by Homer's astronomy and astonished at the movement of the figures. His objection to one of the scenes on the shield, “the extravagant Comparison of a circular Dance with the Swiftness of a Potter's Wheel,” shows his method: he would not, he said, enlarge upon the bad effect that that velocity would have upon the eyes of the spectators, nor of the physical error of Madame Dacier in remarking that the weight of the matter diminished with the velocity. He wrote:

I shall only observe it is absolutely impossible, that without a successive Motion of the Figures, the Dance shou'd sometimes turn round like a Potter's Wheel, and sometimes open, to make so many Windings; for whenever it opens, the circular Motion must of Necessity stop. Nor can it happen that one Part should continually turn round while the other opens.

The scene was impossible as described; it was easy to see that “Homer is destroy'd by Reason” (2:274-79).

Perhaps so; Terrasson's work sold well and raised a great clamor. But the “ancients” would not be silenced, and the Daciers replied at once: Madame against La Motte, Monsieur against Terrasson.³³ Others joined in on both sides, and satire followed once more.³⁴ If a reconciliation of sorts was again arranged, the issues remained unresolved. In England the Free-Thinker thought that most of its readers would incline toward Madame Dacier's view, but pronounced the battle a draw: both parties had shown themselves equally blind, the one to the defects, the other to the beauties, of Homer.³⁵ On the whole, Pope and the duke of Buckingham agreed with this when they exchanged opinions about the matter a year or two later.³⁶

Amidst this debate, one small work appeared that might easily have been overlooked, except that it made an original contribution to the argument and came to the attention of Pope. The author was Jean Boivin le Cadet, librarian to the king of France and a member of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres.³⁷ He had already made a small reputation as a defender of Homer in several papers delivered to the academy and could not sit by when La Motte's challenge appeared in 1714, even though he did not relish controversy. Boivin's work concentrated largely on the shield, which he defended with all the traditional arguments plus one of his own. He saw that critics might be answered if it could be shown exactly how Homer's design might fit on the shield, and so he sketched out just how this might have been done, using twelve compartments around a central boss.³⁸ He fit each scene into place and engaged the artist, Nicolas Vleughels, to engrave it for his frontispiece. The result, it is fair to say, looked very persuasive to his contemporaries, and Pope did not hesitate to appropriate it, with much else, for his own.

With all of this, then, we can perhaps understand just how and why it was that the young poet thought he had to embellish his translation of Homer with so much prose and why he believed he must take up a position in the querelle and come to grips with the criticism and the scholarship of the moderns. At first Pope thought he could avoid the controversy. “There are indeed,” he wrote to Joseph Addison in 1714, “a sort of underlying auxiliars to the difficulty of work, call'd Commentators and Critics, who wou'd frighten many people by their number and bulk, and perplex our progress under pretense of fortifying their author.” Not Pope, however: “I think there may be found a method of coming at the main works by a more speedy and gallant way than by mining under ground, that is, by using the Poetical Engines, Wings, and flying over their heads.”³⁹ There seemed little other recourse for someone whose Greek was suspect and whose learning was deficient.⁴⁰ Eventually, however, Pope turned to friends for help. “You are a Generous Author,” he wrote to Thomas Parnell, who was persuaded to contribute a life of Homer, “I a Hackney Scribler, You are a Grecian & bred at a University, I a poor Englishman of my own Educating.” When his assistant suddenly vanished for Ireland, Pope's despair was genuine: “The Minute I lost you Eustathius with nine hundred pages, and nine thousand Contractions of the Greek Character Arose to my View—Spondanus. … Dacier's three Volumes, Barnes's two, Valterie's three, Cuperus half in Greek. … All these Rush'd upon my Soul at once & whelm'd me under a Fitt of the Head Ach, I curs'd them all Religiously, Damnd my best friends among the rest, & even blasphem'd Homer himself.”⁴¹

Fortunately, there were others to help, such as William Broome, one of Madame Dacier's translators, who read Eustathius for Pope though he was instructed to attend only to material about the beauties of Homer and to ignore anything about geography, history, or grammar.⁴² Pope translated swiftly: forty or fifty lines a day, using earlier translations and whatever Greek he could muster, and enjoyed himself at it. But the prose was another matter. “I am wrapt up in dull Critical Learning,” he complained to Parnell, “& have the Headake every Evening.” Even his dreams were troubled, and he worried that he would never finish.⁴³ The heavily scored manuscript of the preface, now in the British Library, still shows his labor as he tried to assimilate the arguments of Madame Dacier, Perrault, La Motte and others.⁴⁴ On the whole, he followed Madame Dacier, though he tried hard to dissociate himself from her inflexible defense of everything Homeric. He was willing to allow the poet an occasional lapse and in a modest and surreptitious way to improve the work in his own translation, insisting all the while on the superiority of the original. In everything he tried to steer a middle way between a “meer Modern Wit who can like nothing that is not Modern, and a Pedant nothing that is not Greek.” His main task, he thought, was to display the beauty of the poem, and he believed that his own poetic talent was largely sufficient for the task, despite—or perhaps because of—his scholarly ignorance.⁴⁵

Yet there were many learned matters that proved impossible to avoid if one were to understand Homer's meaning and correctly translate the text. Pope was caught, like all the “ancients,” on the horns of the modern dilemma. He thoroughly disliked scholarly learning, yet he was compelled to fall back upon it. It seemed necessary to him to know something about the methods of plowing and harvesting in Homer's time, how the dead were buried and what the ancients thought about the afterlife, the numbers of the contending forces, the forms of political life (did the Greeks know absolute monarchy?), the ways that time and money were measured, something about sacrifices and oracles, and more about their military affairs—their tactics, their fortifications, and, of course, their armor. Even the aesthetic value of the poem seemed to depend on these details, for Pope adopted the notion that Homer had written the poem long after the event, and (like every good poet) adapted his descriptions to the historical character of the actors and events that he described. If Homer's heroes were occasionally cruel or boorish, Homer was not necessarily endorsing them; he simply meant to portray them as they had been.⁴⁶ But who was this Homer: when had he written, and when had the Trojan War occurred?

Pope's notes and disquisitions were therefore full of philological and antiquarian matter, though he tried to fix his attention elsewhere. The biography prefixed to the work was drawn up largely by Parnell, and only the press of time seems to have prevented Pope from including essays on the theology, the morality, and the oratory of Homer.⁴⁷ He did include a long tract defending Homer's catalog of ships and another “On Homer's Battels,” both replete with maps and accompanied by learned explication and antiquarian lore. Inevitably, the most ambitious piece of prose in the book was entitled “Observations on the Shield of Achilles.”⁴⁸ Not surprisingly, Pope defended the piece as integral to the poem, believing with Boivin and the Daciers that the shield was—or at any rate could have been—genuine.

There is little point in repeating here Pope's summary of his French sources, which were almost literally translated; to their arguments he was eager to add only one of his own. The shield, Pope noticed, had been described by Homer both as sculpture and as painting. The outlines of the figures were engraved, but the rest was inlaid with various colored metals. Pope wished to show what everyone else had overlooked: that Homer's description was “in all respects conformable” to the pictorial art. He accepted Boivin's arguments for the shield's design, even appropriating Vleughel's engraving for his own, though the manuscript shows that he tried to work out the design for himself.⁴⁹ It remained only to demonstrate how the shield of Achilles had been exactly like a master painting.

Pope thought he could do this because he subscribed to the age-old doctrine of poetry as speaking picture.⁵⁰ Homer's descriptive powers, Pope insisted, must necessarily have been those of a great draughtsman, a natural poet-painter. The shield of Achilles could thus be compared with Raphael's Cartoons and praised not only for its invention, composition, and expression, but also for its characterization and contrast, for its “aerial perspective,” and for its observance of the classical unities of time, place, and action. From this point of view the Abbé Terrasson's objections must “fall to the ground.” Pope had clearly benefited in learning to paint from his friend Charles Jervas in 1713—the artist, incidentally, whose bust of Homer adorned Pope's frontispiece.⁵¹ Moreover, Pope assured his readers that he was careful to secure the advice of the best painters and connoisseurs of his time, particularly Sir Godfrey Kneller, who supported him enthusiastically.⁵² Those who had raised the objection, on the authority of Pliny, that painting was still primitive in Homer's time were surely wrong; had not Homer described many statutes, carvings, ornaments, and tapestries in a way that carried obvious conviction? Since Homer always confined himself “to the Customs of the Times wherof he wrote,” it was impossible to doubt that painting and sculpture must have been highly advanced then. If the argument was more than a little circular, the shaft graves at Mycenae unearthed two centuries later seemed to bear Pope out—or at least the Abbé Fraguier, from whom Pope borrowed this observation.⁵³

Not everyone, needless to say, was pleased with Pope's performance, either the poetry or the prose. Once again there is not space to do more than hint at the proportions of the controversy. Even before Pope's work appeared detractors had begun their venomous work, casting aspersions on the enterprise from behind the safety of their pseudonyms: the High German Doctor, Aesop at the Bear Garden, the Grumbler, Nichedymus Ninnyhammer (author of Homer in a Nut Shell), and most wicked of all, Sir Iliad Doggrel and his Homerides.⁵⁴ Pope, they insinuated, had been won to Homer by greed; Pope was a papist; Pope knew no Greek; the Iliad was a fraud. They even threatened a new collaborative work: Homer Defended: Being a Detection of the Many Errors Committed by Mr. Pope, in His Pretended Translation of Homer.⁵⁵ But it was left to Pope's old enemy, John Dennis, to carry out the task. In Remarks upon Mr. Pope's Translation of Homer (1717), he proceeded to expose Pope's weakness in Greek, although he obscured his arguments with his invective; Pope had “undertaken to translate Homer from Greek, of which he does not know one word, into English, which he understands almost as little.”⁵⁶ Pope and Parnell together replied with scorn and satire, perhaps most effectively by comparing their modern enemies with the ancient critic Zoilus, all moved by envy, rather than distinguished by love of truth or beauty.⁵⁷

This was harder to do with some of the other complainants, such as Madame Dacier. She too was offended by Pope's translation when it was called to her attention.⁵⁸ Fortunately, she knew only the preface, which had just appeared in French; but even so, she objected strenuously both to Pope's equivocations about Homer and to his unacknowledged borrowing from her work. Pope replied that this was unfair; he was really on her side, although she had fallen into something of the same error as her opponents in overstating her case. Pope sided with the “ancients” but, unlike Madame Dacier, he believed that the world had mended its manners since the days of heroic simplicity in such things as “putting whole nations to the sword, condemning Kings and their families to perpetual slavery, and a few others.”⁵⁹ Pope tried his best to be diplomatic, but Madame Dacier rightly saw that he had been tainted by the modern infection. What she would have replied we can only guess; she died before she could read Pope's words.

But Pope had even more to fear from the scholarship of the moderns than from the prejudices of either faction.⁶⁰ In the end, it was Richard Bentley and modern philology that seemed to threaten the most. There is a well-known story that tells how the two men once met at Dr. Mead's. Pope asked the formidable scholar what he thought of his translation. Bentley appeared not to hear, but was pressed for his judgment. “It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope,” he responded at last, “but you must not call it Homer.”⁶¹ When Pope struck back in later years, Bentley's nephew replied for him:

You are grown very angry, it seems, at Dr. Bentley of late. Is it because he said (to your Face, I have been told) that your Homer was miserable stuff? That it might be called Homer Modernized or something to that effect; but that there were little or no Vestiges of all of the old Grecian? Dr. Bentley said right. Hundreds have said the same behind your back. For Homer translated, first in English, secondly in Rhyme, thirdly not from the Original, but fourthly from a French Translation and that in prose and by a Woman too, how the Devil should it be Homer? As for the Greek Language, everybody that knows it and has compared your Version with the Original, as I have done in many Places, must know that you know nothing of it. I my self am satisfied … that you can barely construe Latin.⁶²

Bentley had had his own designs on Homer (a critical edition of the text), and his own ideas about Homer, each of which might well have redirected the controversy. He was dissatisfied with the state of the original text and wished to correct and amend it by consulting the rich manuscript tradition.⁶³ In a casual passage in one of his works, Bentley described Homer as a simple and careless rhapsodist, singing for a living in a primitive society long since passed.⁶⁴ Pope, on the contrary, imagined the ancient Greek as a learned poet like Virgil or Milton (or perhaps himself), deliberately composing an epic according to classical rules for a patron in a literate society substantially like his own.⁶⁵ Bentley neither developed his thoughts not completed his edition, though he did make one astonishing contribution to the understanding of the poetry by retrieving the lost consonant known as the digamma, thus making sense of Homer's meter.⁶⁶ Pope inevitably missed the point and made fun of the digamma in the Dunciad; indeed, he spent a good part of his declining days satirizing his old enemy as though he could thus forestall the dangers of pedantic scholarship. Bentley was not an antiquary, and he never spoke about the shield, but Pope was obviously vulnerable. In his imagination Pope conceived of the shield as anachronistically as anything else in the Iliad: painted like a Raphael according to the laws of vanishing point perspective, with all the compositional techniques of modern Europe. Pope believed that Homer had understood the art of painting perfectly and that he had represented in poetry exactly what the shield might have been in the days of ancient Troy.⁶⁷

To carry our story further would require describing the whole evolution of modern Greek philology and archaeology through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to our own time, showing how Bentley's intuitions were largely confirmed and how they gradually undermined, though never quite completely, the faith of the “ancients” in Homer and the shield.⁶⁸ Gotthold Ephraim Lessing delivered a famous blow when he tried to dissolve the venerable union of poetry and painting and expressly challenged the descriptions of Achilles' shield by Boivin and Pope. Poetry, he maintained in the Laokoön (1766), deals with action in time; sculpture and painting, with bodies in space. The descriptions of the one are therefore incompatible with the other. Homer had meant to concentrate attention on the forging of the shield, rather than on its depictions, and that is what gives us pleasure. It seemed to Lessing that the moderns had been right, therefore, to think Boivin's rendering inadequate. As for Pope, it was ridiculous to imagine Homer painting by the rules of eighteenth-century art; Lessing thought that the newfound antiquities at Herculaneum were proof enough that even after a thousand years the ancients had known nothing of modern perspective.⁶⁹

And so, little by little the anachronisms in Pope's version of the Iliad began to emerge, though it was only much later in the century, with the visit to Troy of Robert Wood, the discovery of the Venetian codex by Villoisin, and Wolf's invention of the “Homeric problem” that they became fully obvious. Richard Payne Knight, who was one of the first Englishmen to come to grips with the new Germanic scholarship, tried hard to steer a middle way. On the one hand, he continued to defend Homer as a “transcendent genius” and the prince of poets; on the other, he saw the necessity of rescuing the text from what he called “the varnishes of criticks, grammarians, and transcribers.”⁷⁰ Knight tried his hand at a new edition of the Iliad, in which he systematically employed Bentley's digamma, and he was even willing to allow that the Odyssey was an inferior poem by a later poet. In the introduction to his Analytical Essay on the Greek Alphabet (1791), he drew the usual distinction between the two kinds of critics: those whose chief office was “pointing out the beauties, and detecting the faults of literary composition” and those who “undertake the more laborious task of washing away the rust and canker of time, and bringing back those forms and colours … to their original purity and brightness.”⁷¹ He placed himself unequivocally with the latter, that is to say, with the “index-makers and antiquaries.” Yet even so he could not agree with the philologists Wolf and Heyne that the Iliad was patchwork, nor, as they insisted, that the description of the shield of Achilles was the later interpolation of a Greek grammarian.⁷²

Nevertheless despite the efforts of Knight and others, modern philology marched on in the nineteenth century and shattered all confidence both in the biography of the poet and in the integrity of the poem, while further widening the distance between the poem and contemporary life. When at last, with Heinrich Schliemann, the worm appeared to turn, and the historical reality of the Homeric events seemed once more to be confirmed, the landscape had altered irretrievably. With the excavations at Troy and Mycenae the remains of Homeric culture, including some tantalizing bits of armor—though no shields—could be glimpsed directly for the first time.⁷³ It now seemed possible to return to the poem and to try again to determine just what the historical substratum was in this apparently cumulative work. A new effort to reconstruct the shield was thus begun.⁷⁴ But neither Homer, nor Troy, nor the Iliad itself would ever look again quite the way they had to Alexander Pope and his friends.

Meanwhile, for generation after generation the shield continued to capture the imagination of scholars as well as poets and painters. A few years after Pope, the Comte de Caylus, renowned collector and antiquary, resumed the traditional comparison between Homer and his rivals and reprinted Boivin's design along with a reconstruction of imitations by Hesiod and Virgil.⁷⁵ In England a new translation of the Aeneid respectfully proclaimed the superiority of the Roman shield over the Greek and offered a fresh engraving to back it up.⁷⁶ With the new century, the English artist Flaxman, who had already illustrated the Iliad, chose the shield of Achilles as the subject of his masterpiece. And by 1854, William Watkis Lloyd, the dilettante historian, was ready to devote a whole book to the subject, complete with foldout plan.⁷⁷ Gladstone, it is true, returned to the design of Boivin in an essay in the Contemporary Review (1874), though he criticized Pope's translation and offered one of his own.⁷⁸ But it was the Germans who tried to reconstitute the shield in the light of the new archaeology, and the standard English works on Greek sculpture by A. S. Murray and E. A. Gardner reflect their efforts. Homer, Murray insisted, “could not have conceived the thought of a god executing a piece of imitative art, had no imitative art existed without his knowledge.” He offered still another new design, this time worked up from some real objects of Homer's period.⁷⁹

In the absence of the object itself a definitive solution to the problem was hardly possible, and it is not surprising that the doubts of Lessing and the moderns were heard again. “The shield of Achilles is a masterpiece,” we have been told lately, “for which we must not expect to find material parallels in any age … the description is too poetical in character for it to be reliably related to any particular style or system of iconography. As well try to assign to its precise period the Grecian urn of Keats's ode.”⁸⁰ And from another recent scholar: “Certainly the poet had in mind a typical contemporary shield with all its decorations set in. … But the choice of themes and composition of the whole are exclusively his achievement. Achilles' shield is a creation certainly conceived in Homer's imagination alone.”⁸¹

Yet who can say for sure? In history the a priori imagination is not enough, or Pope and Lessing might have settled the issue long ago. It is not hard to conceive of new evidence: an inlaid Mycenaean shield, perhaps, that might bear on the historical question and even help to settle it.⁸² But it is surely another matter with the aesthetic question, with our appreciation of the shield of Achilles as a work of art. Both the “ancients” and the moderns thought that its historical reality was important and did what they could to find out about it. Modern scholarship remains committed to the task as though it would make some difference to the poem, though most modern poetic theory would seem to doubt it. In history, issues are sometimes settled; in criticism, less obviously so. I suspect that the merit and the meaning of Homer's shield of Achilles will remain an issue whatever the progress of archaeology and scholarship. One thing alone is clear: Pope and the “ancients” were right to see that the Iliad could not survive the thrusts of modern scholarship as a contemporary poem, that is to say, a poem with a direct and immediate practical relevance. Today the distance between the “ancients” and the moderns has grown too great ever to read the Iliad the way Pope understood and translated it or to visualize the shield of Achilles with Boivin. “It is the unlikeness of the Greeks to ourselves,” writes W. H. Auden, “the gulf between the kind of assumptions they made, the kind of questions they asked and our own that strikes us more than anything else.”⁸³ The immediate value of the classics and their service as models to life have grown obscure. To that extent, we have, I am afraid, become the victims as well as the beneficiaries of contemporary historical scholarship and the modern sense of the past. And to that extent, the “ancients” in the “battle of the books” were undoubtedly right to fear and to distrust their learned contemporaries, however much we may regret their own anachronistic misunderstanding of the classics.

Notes

1. I have made some suggestions and tried to revise the older views of R. F. Jones and others in “Ancients, Moderns and History: The Continuity of English Historical Writing in the Later Seventeenth Century,” Studies in Change and Revolution: Aspects of English Intellectual History, 1640-1800, ed. Paul J. Korshin (Mensten: Scolar Press, 1972), pp. 43-75; “Ancients and Moderns Reconsidered,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 15 (1981-82): 72-89; and Dr. Woodward's Shield: History, Science, and Satire in Augustan England (Berkeley: University of California, 1977).

2. “If you prefer Aeschylus to Manilius,” wrote A. E. Housman to Arthur Platt, “you are no true scholar; you must be deeply tainted with literature,” The Letters of A. E. Housman, ed. Henry Maas (London: Hart-Davis, 1971), p. 144. Both Bentley and Housman edited Manilius. Housman thought Bentley “the greatest scholar that England or perhaps Europe ever bred,” though he never developed a true appreciation of poetry; see Housman's Selected Prose, ed. John Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1961), p. 12.

3. In “On False Criticks,” an anonymous contribution to the Guardian (25 Mar. 1713), Pope wrote, “Nature being still the same, it is impossible for any Modern Writer to paint her otherwise than the Ancients have done,” in Prose Works of Alexander Pope, ed. Norman Ault (Oxford: Blackwell, 1936), 1:88-92, quote on p. 90. See also Pope's Essay on Criticism in the Twickenham edn. of The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, 10 vols. (London and New Haven: Methuen and Yale University, 1961-69), 3:ii, 476-78, hereafter cited as Pope, Poems; the pref. to The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope (London, 1717); and in general, Austin Warren, Alexander Pope as Critic and Humanist, Princeton Studies in English, no. 1 (Princeton, 1929); and Geroge Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934).

4. See Hippolyte Rigault, Histoire de la querelle des anciens et des modernes (Paris, 1856); Hubert Gillot, La querelle des anciens et des modernes en France (Paris, 1914); and, especially, Noémi Hepp, Homère en France au xvii^e siècle (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1968). There is a good selection of texts with useful introductions in Werner Krauss and Hans Kortun, eds., Antike und Moderne in der Literaturdiskussion des 18. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1966) and a recent discussion in Bernard Magne, Crise de la littérature française sous Louis XIV: humanisme et nationalisme, 2 vols. (Lille: Atelier Reproductions, 1976). For the classical background, see Félix Buffière, Les mythes d'Homère et la pensée grecque (Paris: Sociétés d'éditions, “Les belles lettres,” 1956), pp. 9-31.

5. François de Callières, Histoire poëtique de la guerre nouvellement declarée entre les anciens et les modernes (Paris: Pierre Aboüin, 1688), trans. into English in 1725. Wotton accused Swift of plagiarism in his Defense of the Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (London, 1705), but Swift has been defended by A. C. Guthkelch in, “‘The Tale of a Tub Revers'd’ and ‘Characters and Criticisms upon the Ancient and Modern Orators, etc.’” Library, 3rd ser., 4 (1913), 281-84; and in his edn. of A Tale of a Tub (London: Chatto and Windus, 1908), pp. xliv-xlv, liii-liv.

6. For the 16th-century background, see Noémi Hepp, “Homère en France au xvi^e siècle,” Atti dell'Accademia delle scienze di Torino, 96 (1961-62): 389-508. The invidious comparison with Virgil begins with Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices libri septem (Lyons: August Buck, 1561), and continues through works such as René Rapin, Comparaison des poëmes d'Homère et de Virgile, 3rd edn. (1664), trans. John Davies, Observations on the Poems of Homer and Virgil (London, 1672), and Jean Regnauld de Segrais, Traduction de l'Énéide, 2 vols. (Paris, 1668-81). It was recalled in England by Henry Felton, A Dissertation on Reading the Classics and Forming a Just Style (London: J. Bowyer, 1713), pp. 20, 24; and Joseph Trapp, The Aeneis of Virgil, Translated into Blank Verse, 2 vols. (London, 1718-20).

7. Proposals were issued in the autumn of 1713. For this and what follows, see in addition to Sherburn, Early Career of Pope, the introductions to the Iliad in Pope, Poems, vols. 7 and 8; Reginald H. Griffith, Alexander Pope: A Bibliography (Austin: University of Texas, 1922); Hans-Joachim Zimmermann, Alexander Popes Noten zu Homer: Eine Manuskript und Quellenstudie (Heidelberg: C. Winter Universitätsverlag, 1966). Two other translations of the Iliad were begun about this time by Richard Fiddes and Thomas Tickell but were eclipsed by Pope's work.

8. The scope of Greek philological learning can best be gleaned from Johann Albert Fabricius, Bibliotheca Graeca, 3 vols. (Hamburg: C. Liebezeit, 1705-07); the extent of Homeric learning, from Ludolf Kuster, Historia Critica Homeri, (Frankfurt: J. Meyer, 1696). For the French background to Pope, see Émile Audra, L'Influence française dans l'oeuvre de Pope (Paris: H. Champion, 1931).

9. George Sherburn, ed., The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956), 1:196, hereafter cited as Pope, Correspondence. Samuel Johnson thought that the prose was needed to satisfy subscribers, who would otherwise have had to rest content with little pamphlets: Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (London: Clarendon, 1905), 3:115, 240, hereafter cited as Johnson, Lives.

10. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that of his fellow wits, Swift thought that the notes and essays were more successful than the translation, and Dr. Arbuthnot believed that it was Pope's scholarship that placed his work above its rivals: Pope, Correspondence, 1:301-02, 305.

11. Perrault's poem, Le siècle de Louis le Grand (Paris, 1687) was trans. by Martin Bladen in Characters and Criticisms upon the Ancient and Modern Orators (London, 1725), pp. 181-211; esp. see pp. 188-89.

12. See Charles Perrault, Mémoires de ma vie: Voyage à Bordeaux (1669), ed. Paul Bonnefon (Paris: Renouard, 1909), pp. 136ff. Antoine Furetière, Receuil des factums, ed. M. Charles Asselineau (Paris: Poulet-Malassis et De Braise, 1858-59), 1:302-03; Paul Bonnefon, “Charles Perrault littérateur et académicien: l'opposition a Boileau,” Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, 12 (1905): 549-610. The incident has been reconsidered from a Marxist point of view by Hans Kortum, Charles Perrault und Nicholas Boileau (Berlin: Rutten & Loening, 1966) and in the anthology, n. 4 above.

13. Perrault, Parallèle des anciens et des modernes en ce qui regarde les arts et les sciences (Amsterdam, 1693), p. 52, rep. with a valuable introduction by Hans Robert Jauss (Munich: Eidos, 1964).

14. A Treatise of the Sublime from the Greek of Longinus with Critical Reflexions (1693), in Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux, Works, trans. Pierre Desmaizeaux (London, 1712), 2:115.

15. Ibid., 2:8.

16. James Henry Monk, The Life of Richard Bentley, 2nd edn. (London: J. G. & F. Rivington, 1833), 1:311-12. Boileau thought that too much learning was a dangerous thing: Works, 2:106-07.

17. Dacier, La poetique d'Aristote (Paris, 1692), trans. as Aristotle's Art of Poetry (London: D. Brown & W. Turner, 1705).

18. Ibid., p. 497.

19. See the summary of the quarrel in the anonymous Verdicts of the Learned concerning Virgil and Homer's Heroic Poems (London: J. Hartley, 1697), which leaned toward the moderns.

20. See Enrica Malcovati, Madame Dacier: Una gentildonna filologa del gran secolo (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1952); Arnaldo Pizzorusso, “Antichi e Moderni nella polemica di Madame Dacier,” in Pizzorusso, ed., Teorie letterarie in Francia (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1968), pp. 16-55; Fern Farnham, Madame Dacier: Scholar and Humanist (Monterey, Calif.: Angel, 1976).

21. Madame Dacier, L'Iliade d'Homère, traduite en françois, avec des remarques (Paris: Rigaud, 1711), trans. John Ozell, The Iliad of Homer, 5 vols. (London, 1712), l:i, hereafter cited in the text as Iliad.

22. Malcovati, p. 61.

23. So, for example, James Duport, Homeri poetarum omnium seculorum facile principis Gnomologia (Cambridge: John Field, 1660) and Edmund Dickinson, Delphi Phoenicizantes (Oxford: Ric. Davis, 1655), where Moses and Joshua are described as Bacchus and Hercules. In general, for the compatibility of Homer with Christianity, see the long list of authors in Hepp, Homère en France, 319-33.

24. Tannegui Le Fèvre, professor of Greek and author of Les Poètes grecs (Saumur: Lerpiniere, 1664), with an interesting article on Homer. Le Fèvre had educated his daughter himself; he described his method in a small tract, Englished as A Compendious Way of Teaching Ancient and Modern Languages, trans. Jenkin Thomas Philipps (London, 1721).

25. These were pictorial representations of the Trojan War probably devised in antiquity for the use of schoolboys. Raffael Fabretti's discussion appears as an appendix to his De Columna Traiani Syntagma (Rome, 1683), 315-84. See also Laurentius Begerus, Bellum et Excidium Trojanum ex Antiquitatum Reliquiis, Tabula (Berlin, 1699).

26. Cuperus, Apotheosis vel Consecratio Homeri (Amsterdam, 1683); cf. [Johann Carl] Schott, Explication nouvelle de l'apotheose d'Homère, representation sur un marbre ancien (Amsterdam: Jean Boom, 1714). For Cuperus, see Levine, Dr. Woodward's Shield, pp. 173ff.; for the apotheosis, see Roger Packman Hinks, Myth and Allegory in Ancient Art, Studies of the Warburg Institute, no. 6 (London, 1939); and Gisela M. A. Richter, The Portraits of the Greeks (London; Phaidon, 1965), 1:54.

27. For La Motte, see Abbé Trublet, Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de la vie et des ouvrages de M. de Fontenelle (Amsterdam: Mark Michel Rey, 1759), pp. 330-414; Hepp, Homère en France, pp. 661-88; and Paul Dupont, Un poète-philosophe au commencement du dix-huitième siècle: Houdar de La Motte (Paris: Hachette, 1898).

28. “Discours sur Homère,” Les paradoxes littéraires de La Motte; ou, Discours écrits par cet académicien sur les principaux genres des poëmes, ed. B[ernard] Jullien (Paris: Hachette, 1859), pp. 181-268.

29. Ibid., pp. 264-65.

30. For some approving reviews, however, see Hepp, Homère en France, pp. 688-89.

31. Terrasson, La philosophie applicable à tous les objets de l'esprit et de la raison (Paris: Prault & Fils, 1754), p. 21.

32. Terrasson, Dissertation critique sur l'Iliade d'Homère, ou … on cherche les regles d'une poëtique fondée sur la raison (Paris, 1715; 2nd edn. with adds., 1716), trans. F[rancis] Brerewood as A Discourse of Ancient and Modern Learning (London, 1716) and more completely in two volumes as Critical Dissertations on Homer's Iliad (London, 1745).

33. André Dacier, Le Manuel d'Epictéte et les commentaire de Simplicius (Paris, 1715), 2:preface; Madame Dacier, Des Causes de la corruption du goust (Paris, 1714); Antoine Houdar de La Motte, Réflexions sur la critique (Paris: DuPuis, 1715).

34. See, for example, Jean Hardouin, Apologie d'Homère, ou l'on explique le veritable dessein de sa Iliade, et sa theomythologie (Paris: Rigaud, 1716), trans. into English in 1717 and answered by Madame Dacier, Homère défendu contre l'Apologie du R. P. Hardouin (Paris, 1716). The satire is by Saint-Hyacinthe, Le chef d'oeuvre d'un inconnu (The Hague, 1714). See also Étienne Fourmont, Examen pacifique de la querelle de Madame Dacier et de Monsieur de la Motte, sur Homère (Paris, 1716).

35. Free-Thinker, 1 (1722): 119-26.

36. Pope, Correspondence, 1:485-87.

37. See the éloges to Boivin and his brother in the Histoire de l'Académie Royale des Inscriptions avec les Mémoires de Littérature, 5 (1725): 433-42; 6 (1726): 376-85; Christophe Allard, “Deux Normands membres de l'Académie des Inscriptions aux xviii^e siècle: Louis et Jean Boivin,” Précis analytique des Travaux de l'Académie de Rouen (Rouen, 1890), pp. 219-58; and Hepp, Homère en France, pp. 568-72, 584-88. In 1707 Boivin delivered an account of the quarrel over Homer to the Royal Academy of Inscriptions, which was later printed in Histoire de l'Académie Royale des Inscriptions, 1 (1717): 176-79.

38. Boivin, Apologie d'Homère, et Bouclier d'Achille (Paris: François Jouenne, 1715), esp. pp. 234-41. It is summarized and approved in Bernard de Montfaucon's authoritative Antiquité expliquée, trans. into English as Antiquity Explained and Represented in Sculptures (London: J. Tonson and J. Watts, 1721-55); 4:28-30.

39. Pope, Correspondence, 1:208-09.

40. For some opinions about Pope's Greek, see Johnson, Lives, 3:113; Pope, Poems, 6:lxxxiii; Douglas M. Knight, Pope and the Heroic Tradition: A Critical Study of His Iliad, Yale Studies in English, vol. 117 (New Haven, 1951), pp. 111-13.

41. Ibid., 1:226, 225. Pope reviewed many of these works in a cancelled passage of his preface to the Iliad, BM Add. Ms. 4807, f.8^v.

42. Pope, Correspondence, 1:270-71; 2:40-41, 499-500.

    Pope came off clean with Homer; but they say
    Broome went before, and kindly swept the way.

    Henley's distich appears in Johnson, Lives, 1:81.

43. Pope, Correspondence, 1:253; Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, Collected from Conversation, ed. James M. Osborn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), 1:83-85.

44. BM Add. Ms. 4807, ff. 2-15; rep. in Pope, Poems, 10:409-44; see Douglas Knight, “The Development of Pope's Iliad Preface: A Study of the Manuscript,” Modern Language Quarterly, 16 (1955): 237-47.

45. Pope, Poems, 7:23; 82-83n.

46. Ibid., 7:13-14.

47. Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters, 1:83-84. A previous life that may have helped appeared in Basil Kennett, The Lives and Characters of the Ancient Grecian Poets (London: A. Swall, 1697), pp. 1-43.

48. Pope, Poems, 8:358-70. See Fern Farnham, “Achilles' Shield: Some Observations on Pope's Iliad,” PMLA, 84 (1969): 1571-81.

49. BM Add. Ms. 4808, f. 81^v; Pope also drew a diagram to show how the buckler was fastened to the arm by three rings.

50. Pope, Poems, 8:32, 246; and the “poetical index” under “description of images,” “painting, sculpture, etc.,” 598-603, 614, 615. See Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictoralism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1958) pp. 229-33; Reuben Arthur Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959; rep. London: Oxford University, 1968), pp. 131-32; Rensselaer W. Lee. “Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting,” Art Bulletin, 22 (1940): 198-269.

51. Pope, Correspondence, 1:376-77; Pope, Poems, 2:237n.

52. Pope, Poems, 6:212-23.

53. A cancelled passage in Pope's ms gives a list of Homeric effigies still extant, possibly drawn up by Pope himself: BM Add. Ms. 4807, f. 15. Fraguier's essay, “De l'ancienneté de la peinture,” appeared in the Histoire de l'Académie Royale des Inscriptions, 1 (1717): 75-89 esp. 83-84.

54. See J. V. Guerinot, Pamphlet Attacks on Alexander Pope, 1711-1744: A Descriptive Bibliography (New York: New York University, 1969); and Norman Ault, “Pope and Addison,” Review of English Studies, 17 (1941): 428-51. For the conspirators behind the Homerides, see The Letters of Thomas Burnet to George Duckett, 1712-1722, ed. David Nichol Smith (Oxford: Roxburghe Club, 1914). Pope drew up his own list in The Dunciad, Variorum: Poems, 5:207-12.

55. Sherburn, p. 174.

56. The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward N. Hooker (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1939-43), 2:ll5ff.; Hooker, “Pope and Dennis,” ELH, 7 (1940):188-98.

57. See Thomas Parnell, trans. Homer's Battle of the Frogs and Mice. With the Remarks of Zoilus. To Which is Prefix'd the Life of Said Zoilus (London: Bernard Lintot, 1717); Pope, Correspondence, 1:333, 284-85, 291-93, 299, 395.

58. See the pref. to Madame Dacier, L'Odyssée d'Homère traduit en français (Paris, 1719), 3:i-viii; this was trans. as Madame Dacier's Remarks upon Mr. Pope's Account of Homer Made English (London, 1724).

59. Pope, Poems, 10:392-97, quotation on p. 394. Pope believed also that Madame Dacier had been too zealous in defending Homer's theology: 6:402, 112. For Pope's surreptitious modernizing of the text, see Pamela Poynter Schwandt, “Pope's Transformation of Homer's Similes,” Studies in Philology, 76 (1979): 387-417. She has promised some further work along these lines.

60. When Spence raised the question of anachronisms in the translation—e.g., ship's crew, longitude, doubling the cape, architraves, colanders, etc.—Pope replied, “These are great faults; pray don't point 'em out but spare your servant,” in S. W. Singer, “Pope's Revision of Spence's Essay on the Odyssey,” Notes and Queries, n.s., (1850): 396.

61. Pope, Poems, 4:344. The story may be apochryphal; for some variant versions, see the Gentleman's Magazine (Oct. 1773): 499; and Joseph Warton, Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 4th edn. (London: J. Dodsley, 1782), 2:234. Dr. Johnson believed that Pope's Iliad was “the greatest work of its kind that has ever been produced” but as he wrote elsewhere, “Pope's version of Homer is not Homerical … it wants his awful simplicity, his artless grandeur, his unaffected majesty.” In short, “Pope wrote for his own age and his own nation,” Johnson, Lives, 3:238.

62. Bentley, A Letter to Mr. Pope, Occasioned by Sober Advice from Horace, & c. (London: T. Cooper, 1735), p. 14. Sober Advice, from Horace, to the Young Gentlemen about Town (1743) is printed in Pope, Poems, 4:71-89. Pope denied authorship and tried to escape from Bentley's censure; see Pope, Correspondence, 3:446, 451.

63. The Correspondence of Richard Bentley, ed. C. Wordsworth (London: J. Murray, 1842) 2:668-73; Cambridge under Queen Anne, ed. J. E. B. Mayor (Cambridge: Deighton, Bell, and Co., 1911), p. 135-37.

64. Bentley, Remarks upon a Discourse of Free-Thinking in a Letter to F. H. D. D. (London: J. Morphew, 1713), p. 18. Perrault had also hinted at something like this, borrowing from the yet unpublished speculations of the Abbé d'Aubignac, whose work appeared posthumously as Conjectures académiques, ou dissertation sur l'Iliade (Paris: François Fournier, 1715). Neither Frenchman, however, could boast Bentley's Greek; see H. L. Lorimer, “Homer and the Art of Writing: A Sketch of Opinion between 1713 and 1939,” American Journal of Archaeology, 52 (1948): 12n.

65. Pope, Poems, 7:111, 236, 271, 389-90; 8:98, 118.

66. Monk, Bentley, 1:361-77; R. C. Jebb, Richard Bentley (London: Macmillan, 1882), p. 145-54; J. L. Myres, Homer and His Critics, ed. Dorothea Gray (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), pp. 49-53. A visitor in 1735 reported Bentley as saying that Aristarchus, Demetrius, and all Bentley's predecessors “were all dunces who know nothing of the Digamma which he himself restored the use of, after it had been lost 2000 years,” Samuel Blackwell to Roger Gale, 2 Oct. 1735, in William Stukeley, The Family Memoirs …, Surtees Society (Durham: Andrews & Co., 1883), pp. 25-28.

67. The prevailing opinion was that Homer had been a faithful recorder; see for example Pope's friend Temple Stanyan, The Grecian History (London, 1707), 1:35.

68. Something of the story may be gleaned from Donald Madison Foerster, Homer in English Criticism: The Historical Approach in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University, 1947); and Georg Finsler, Homer in der Neuzeit von Dante bis Goethe (Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1912). Less helpful is Kirsti Simonsuuri, Homer's Original Genius: Eighteenth-Century Notices of the Early Greek Epic (1688-1798) (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1979).

69. Lessing, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Karl Lachmann, rev. edn. Franz Muncker (Stuttgart: G. J. Göschen, 1886-1924). vol. 9; see Hugo Blümner, Lessings Laokoön (Berlin: Weidmann, 1880), pp. 1-140.

70. Knight, Specimens of Antient Sculpture (1809), l: xii-xiii, quoted in Michael Clarke and Nicholas Penny, eds., The Arrogant Connoisseur: Richard Payne Knight, 1751-1824 (Manchester: Manchester University, 1982), p. 8; Knight, An Analytical Essay on the Greek Alphabet (London: J. Nichols, 1791), p. 23. For Knight, see Frank J. Messmann, Richard Payne Knight: The Twilight of Virtuosity (The Hague: Mouton, 1974); M. L. Clarke, Greek Studies in England, 1700-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1945), pp. 140-42.

71. Knight, Analytical Essay, p. 2.

72. Porson treated Knight's views respectfully in the Monthly Review, rep. in Museum Criticum; or, Cambridge Classical Researches (Cambridge: J. Murray, 1826), 1:489-509. For the German background, see the fine essay by Anthony Grafton, “Prolegomena to Friedrich August Wolf,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 44 (1981): 101-29.

73. Carl Schuchhardt, Schliemann's Excavations: An Archaeological and Historical Study, trans. Eugenie Sellers (London: Macmillan, 1891), pp. 229-32.

74. See, for example, A. J. Evans, “The Minoan and Mycenaean Element in Hellenic Life,” Journal of Hellenic Studies, 32 (1912): 277-97; Walter Leaf and M. A. Bayfield, The Iliad of Homer (London: Macmillan, 1888), 2:249-50; 2nd edn. (1902), 2:app. I, 602-14. Also see John Linton Myres, Who Were the Greeks? (Berkeley: University of California, 1930: rep. New York: Biblo and Tanner, 1967), pp. 517-25, fig. 21.

75. Histoire de l'Académie Royale des Inscriptions, 27 (1761): 21-33. For Caylus, see Samuel Rocheblave, Essai sur le Comte de Caylus: l'homme, l'artiste, l'antiquaire (Paris: Hachette, 1889).

76. William Whitehead, “Observations on the Shield of Aeneas,” The Works of Virgil, ed. Joseph Warton (London: R. Dodsley, 1763), 3:457-92.

77. Lloyd, On the Homeric Design of the Shield of Achilles (London: Williams and Norgate, 1854). For Flaxman, see David Irwin, John Flaxman, 1755-1826: Sculptor, Illustrator, Designer (New York: Rizzoli, 1979)

78. W. E. Gladstone, “The Shield of Achilles,” Contemporary Review, 23 (1873-74): 329-44; the translation is dated 1867. For Gladstone's view of Pope see, “The Reply of Achilles to the Envoys of Agamemnon,” ibid., p. 842. For Gladstone and Homer, see Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University, 1981). pp. 161ff.

79. A. S. Murray, A History of Greek Sculpture (London: J. Murray, 1880-83), 1:44-61; Ernest Arthur Gardner, A Handbook of Greek Sculpture (London: Macmillan, 1897), pp. 69-72. Cf. Walter Copland Perry, Greek and Roman Sculpture: A Popular Introduction to the History of Greek and Roman Sculpture (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1882), pp. 36-39.

80. Frank H. Stubbings, “Arms and Armour,” A Companion to Homer, ed. Alan J. B. Wace and Frank H. Stubbings (London: Macmillan, 1962), p. 512-13—a view that derives from Carl Robert, Studien zur Ilias (Berlin: Weidmann, 1901), pp. 14ff.

81. Johannes Th. Kakridis, Homer Revisited (Lund: Gleerup, 1971), p. 108. See also T. B. L. Webster, From Mycenae to Homer, 2nd edn. (New York: Norton, 1964), p. 214.

82. Hilda Lockhart Lorimer, Homer and the Monuments (London: Macmillan, 1950), pp. 132-335; D. H. F. Gray, “Metal-Working in Homer,” Journal of Hellenic Studies, 74 (1954): 1-15; Anthony M. Snodgrass, Early Greek Armour and Weapons: From the End of the Bronze Age to 600 B.C. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University, 1964), p. 214. Some comparable objects from Homer's period have in fact turned up in recent times and are illustrated in works by Schadewaldt (1959) and Fittschen (1973); see Malcolm M. Willcock, A Companion to the Iliad (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1976), pp. 209-14.

83. W. H. Auden, ed., The Portable Greek Reader (1948; rep. New York: Viking, 1955), p. 16. See Turner, p. 8.