The critic, in his search for distant proofs, often omits the most material one immediately at hand. Had Madame Dacier attended to the episode of the souls of the suitors, the world had never seen her ingenuity in these mythological conjectures; nor had Mr. Pope any need to bring the case of Patroclus or Elpenor to overthrow her system. Amphimedon, one of the suitors, in the very episode which gave birth to Dacier's conjecture, tells his story very articulately to the shade of Agamemnon, though he had not received the funereal rites:—
"Our mangled bodies, now deform'd with gore,
Cold and neglected spread the marble floor:
No friend to bathe our wounds! or tears to shed
O'er the pale corse! the honours of the dead."
Odys. xxiv.
On the whole, the defence of Pope is almost as idle as the conjectures of Dacier. The plain truth is, poetry delights in personification; everything in it, as Aristotle says of the Iliad, has manners; poetry must therefore personify according to our ideas. Thus in Milton:—
"Tears, such as angels weep, burst forth."
And thus in Homer, while the suitors are conducted to hell:—
"Trembling, the spectres glide, and plaintive vent
Thin, hollow screams, along the deep descent:"
and, unfettered with mythological distinctions, either shriek or articulately talk, according to the most poetical view of their supposed circumstances.
[434] Exod. xiv. 29.
[435] Noah.
[436] Venus.