[Footnote 44: For "armour wait," the first edition had "arms did wait."]
[Footnote 45: "Charger" is used in its old sense of a dish.]
[Footnote 46: Statius, to point the folly of the criminal ambition, goes on to represent, that the contest was only for naked unadorned dominion in a poverty-stricken kingdom,--a battle for which should cultivate the barren territory on the banks of a petty stream,--and for this empty privilege the brothers sacrificed everything which was of good report in life or death. Pope weakened the moral of Statius, and the lines which follow to the end of the paragraph are also very inferior in force to the original.]
Not all those realms could for such crimes suffice.
Pope might have done more to improve this prosaic couplet.]
[Footnote 48: Pope borrowed from the translation of Stephens:
How wast thou lost In thine own joys, proud tyrant then, when all About thee were thy slaves.]
[Footnote 49: It should be "discontented."--WARTON.]
[Footnote 50: This couplet was interpolated by Pope and seems to have been suggested by his hostility to the revolution of 1688. Nor does Statius call the populace "vile," or say that they are always "discontented," or that they are "still prone to change, though still the slaves of state." Neither does he say that they "are sure to hate the monarch, they have," but he says that their custom is to love his successor, which is a sentiment more in accordance with experience.]
[Footnote 51: "Exiled" because the king who was not reigning had to leave the country during his brother's year of power.]
[Footnote 52: The warriors who were the produce of the dragon's teeth sown by Cadmus fought among themselves till only five were left.]
[Footnote 53: "Unrivalled," as the context shows, is not here a term of commendation, but merely signifies that the monarch had no equal in rank or power.]
[Footnote 54: "Placido quatiens tamen omnia vultu," is the common reading. I believe it should be "nutu," with reference to the word "quatiens."--POPE.]
[Footnote 55: Pope was manifestly unable to extract any sense from the original. It is there said that Jupiter at his first entrance seats himself upon his starry throne, but that the other gods did not presume to sit down "protinus," that is, in immediate succession to Jupiter, and interpreting his example as a tacit license to do so, until, by a gentle wave of his hand, the supreme father signifies his express permission to take their seats. In Pope's translation, the whole picturesque solemnity of the celestial ritual melts into the vaguest generalities.--DE QUINCEY.