3, 1–2 The mountains look on Marathon / And Marathon looks on the sea The village of Marathon stood on a small plain on the eastern seacoast of Attica, a little more than twenty miles from Athens. The plain was surrounded on three sides by hills.
3, 3 And musing there ] And (standing> there
3, 3–6 And musing there…/… a slave ‘… what then must be our feelings when standing on the tumulus of the two hundred Greeks who fell on Marathon’ (Byron’s note to CH II 89). Here the Greeks defeated a Persian army in 490 BC See also note to 12, 1–3 .
4, 1–6 A king sate on the rocky brow I… where were they? Aeschylus in the Persoe says that Xerxes watched the Battle of Salamis from a lofty mound near the sea.
5, 6 Degenerate into hands like mine Byron momentarily ascribes humility to an opportunist in order to emphasize the dearth of heroic materials afforded the poet in a country which refuses to resist foreign domination. See The Giaour 102–41, which contains several parallels to ‘The Isles of Greece’.
7, 6 To make a new Thermopylae A pass that led from Thessaly to Locris. In the fifth century BC it was on the Aegean coast, but is now six miles inland. Here in 480 bc Leónidas and three hundred Spartans withstood the repeated onslaughts of a huge Persian army under Xerxes. Finally a Greek in southern Thessaly showed the Persians a route that enabled them to attack Leonidas from the rear. Scorning flight, he and the three hundred were overwhelmed and slain.
10, 1–2 the Pyrrhic dance…/… the Pyrrhic phalanx For the Pyrrhic dance see note to Canto III 29, 7. The Pyrrhic phalanx, named for Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, was a close massing of troops, which won the Greeks many victories.
10, 5 Cadmus Cadmus, son of Agenor, king of Phoenicia, was reputed the first to introduce the use of letters into Greece.
11, 3–4 Anacreon…/ He served, but served Polycrates Anacreon, a lyric poet, fled to Abdera in Thrace when his birthplace, Teos, was captured by the Persians in 510 BC. From there he went to the island of Samos, ruled by the tyrant Polycrates.
12, 1–3 The tyrant of the Chersonese … That tyrant was Miltiades Early in the fifth century bc, Miltiades became tyrant of the Thracian Chersonesus, now the peninsula of the Dardanelles. He joined the Persian King Darius in a war against the Scythians, but later deserted the Persians and fled to Athens. Though charged with tyranny there, he was acquitted. When the Persians threatened Attica in 490 bc, Miltiades was chosen one of the ten generals to resist the invaders. He induced the Greeks to risk battle and defeated the enemy at Marathon.
13, 2 Suli’s rock On his 1809 trip through Albania Byron admired the warlike Suliotes. Suli was in the mountains of the Epirus district north-west of Jannina.
13, 2 Parga’s Parga is still a town on the Ionian seacoast.
13, 4 Doric The Dorians settled Sparta.
13, 6 ]
Heracleidan The Heraclidae, descendants of Hercules, conquered the Peloponnesus.
14, 1–4 Trust not for freedom to the Franks; … In native swords and native ranks The only hope of courage dwells For the Franks see note to Canto III 84, 1. Three years later in The Age of Bronze 298–9, when Byron repeated his warning, he thought of the Russians and the unreliable Alexander I: ‘Greeks only should free Greece, Not the barbarian, with his masque of peace.’ How could Greece expect freedom from an ‘Autocrat of bondage’ ?
14, 4 courage ] freedom
16, 1 Sunium s marbled steep Cape Sounion (also spelled Sunium), about thirty miles southeast of Athens, and the site of the ruins of a temple of Poseidon, was visited by Byron in 1809. A less common name for Sunium is Cape Colonna (or Kolona).
87, 6–7 feeling in a poet is the source / Of others’feeling; but they are such liars Socrates argued that Ion the rhapsodist (a reciter of poetry) falsely maintained that he used art and knowledge in reciting Homer. Plato concluded that Ion spoke the ‘beautiful words of Homer unconsciously under his inspiring influence’, i.e. that Homer’s emotion was the source of Ion’s emotion as he recited. Byron agreed with Plato that emotion was essential to poetry, but when he called the poet a liar, he departed from Plato’s scrutiny of Ion’s specific vaunt, and suggested his own version of poetic lying in line 8 of stanza 87 with the image of the dyer, which is not in the Ion .
87, 7 they are such liars See letter to Murray, 2 April 1817: ‘There should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric, and pure inventionis but the talent of a liar’ (LJ IV 91). Also: ‘If the essence ot poetry must be a lie, throw it to the dogs’ (LJ V 559).
88.1 But words are things See Journal, 16 November 1813: ‘And are not “words things”?’ (LJ II 319–20); also letter to Rogers, 1814?: ‘With him[Sheridan] the saying of Mirabeau, that “words are things”, is not to be taken literally’ (LJ III 80–90).
88, 4 ]
88, 7–8 ] Frail man when
89, 7 ] In digging < drains for a new water closet>
90, 5 what whist owes to Hoylt Edmund Hoyle’s Short Treatise on Whist was issued in 1742.
90, 8 Archdeacon Coxe William Coxe (1747–1828> compiled his Memoirs of John, Duke of Marlborough (1818–19).
91, 2 A little heavy ] A little
91, 5–8 his life falling into Johnson’s way /… the first Mrs Milton left his house Samuel Johnson in his Milton recorded that ‘the first wife left him indisgust, and was brought back only by terror’, and that he forced upon his daughters the irksome task of reading to him in languages they could notunderstand and would dictate poetry to them in the middle of the night But Johnson also denied the latter abuse because he said that Milton’s daughters had never been taught to Write (Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill (1905), 1 131, 138–9, 144–5). Hill in his notes cited evidence that Deborah Milton could read several foreign languages and that she and another sister could write. See note to Canto III 10, 3–4.
92, 2 Like Shakespeare’s stealing deer, Lord Bacon’s bribes See Appendix.
92, 3 Titus’ youth and Caesar’s earliest acts In the Lives of the Caesars Suetonius related an episode of Julius Caesar’s youthful cruelty. After he had been captured by pirates and ransomed, he in revenge captured them, had their throats cut and crucified them. Suetonius also declared that Caesar’s ‘intimacy with King Nicomedes’ of Bithynia exposed him to many insults, which the historian reported as if they were libellous, though Cicero insisted that the homosexual rumour was true. Suetonius acknowledged that Caesar ‘seduced many illustrious women’, including the wife of Pompey, and Servilia, who prostituted her daughter to him (The Deified Julius, sections 2, 4, 49–50, 74). Before Titus became emperor he was brutal and tyrannical as commander of the Praetorian Guard. He had many executed who aroused his suspicions. ‘Hardly anyone ever came to the throne with so evil a reputation.’ His avarice was well known, since he had accepted bribes to use his influence in legal cases that came before his father, the Emperor Vespasian. He was suspected of riotous living and ‘of unchastity because of his troops of catamites and eunuchs, and his notorious passion for queen Berenice’. But when he assumed office, ‘no fault was discovered in him’ (The Deified Titus, sections 6, 7, trans. J. C Rolfe (1924), 14–7, 64–9, 94–5; II 326–9).
92, 4 Doctor Currie Dr James Currie (1757–1805) in his edition of the Works of Robert Sums, with an Account of his Life (1800) represented Burns as an alcoholic.
92, 5 Cromwell’s pranks See Appendix.
93, 2 Pantisocracy See note to Preface to Cantos I and II, 117–18.
93, 4 his pedlar poems In The Excursion (1814), the Wanderer worked as a pedlar (I 322–86). Wordsworth defended the occupation: though ‘deemed debasing now’, it had ‘merited respect in simpler times’. Byron may also be referring to The Waggoner and Peter Bell (both 1819).
93.6] Flourished it’s sophistry for Aristocracy
Morning Post Coleridge contributed poems and articles to the Morning Post, 1797–1803.
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93, 8 Espoused two partners (milliners of Bath) The Flicker sisters returned with their mother from Bath to Bristol after the death of their impoverished father, Stephen Flicker. Coleridge was married to Sarah Flicker in October 1795, Southey to her sister Edith in November 1795. They were not milliners.
94, 2 Botany Bay A penal settlement established in 1787–8 on the eastern coast of New South Wales.
94, 7 drowsy ] heavy ] clumsy
the Excursion This first part of Wordsworth’s unfinished poem was published in 1814. ‘His performances since Lyrical Ballads are miserably inadequate to the ability which lurks within him: there is undoubtedly much natural talent spilt over the Excursion; but it is rain upon rocks – where it stands and stagnates, or rain upon sands – where it falls without fertilizing’ (Byron’s letter to Leigh Hunt, 30 October 1815, LJ III 239).
95 MS M indicates that Byron at first intended to place this stanza in the Dedication after stanza 4.
95, 3 But Wordsworth’s poem ] Will Wordsworth’s followers M
95. 4–8 Joanna Soutcote’s Shiloh…/…dropsies, taken for divinities See note to Preface to Cantos I and II, 24–5.
95, 5 which in this century ] which in the nineteenth age M
96, 4 While 1 soliloquize ] While I am chattering
96, 8 Ariosto One of Byron’s favourite Italian poets (1474–1533).
97, 1 longueurs tediousness, dullness.
97, 3 In that complete perfection ] In that sublime perfection
97, 4 An epic from Bob Southey every spring) From 1800 to 1820 he published a work almost annually; half a dozen were long verse narratives.
97, 7 Some fine examples ]
épopée epic.
97, 8 ]
97 ^ 98 After stanza 97 on a PM addendum leaf Byron cancelled the following stanza. The present transcription modernizes Byron’s spelling, capitalization and punctuation.
Of friends and opiate draughts. There’s love and wine,
Which shake so much the human brain and breast,
Must end in languor. Men won’t sleep like swine.
A happy lover and a welcome guest
Must sink at last into a swoon divine;
Full of deep raptures and of bumpers, they
Are somewhat sick and sorry the next day.>
98, 1 We learn from Horace, Homer sometimes sleeps Horace in Epistola ad Pisones, Ars Poetica 359, wrote ‘quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus ’(‘whenever good Homer nods’), trans. H. R. Fairclough (1926), 480–81. Pope, however, exonerated the ancient Greek: ‘Nor is it Homer Nods, but We that Dream.’ An Essay on Criticism, eds. E. Audra and A. Williams (1961), line 180.
98, 3 with what complacency / with what profundity
98, 4 his dear Waggoners See note to 93, 4.
98, 5–8 He wishes for ‘a boat ’…/…to set it well afloat
There’s something in a flying horse,
There’s something in a huge balloon;
But through the clouds I’ll never float
Until I have a little Boat,
Shaped like the crescent-moon.
(Peter Bell, Prologue 1–5)
99, 3 not beg the loan of ] not
Charles’s Wain The constellation called Charles’s (Charlemagne’s) Wagon is also known as the Big Dipper, the Great Bear or the Plough.
99, 4 Or pray Medea for a single dragon In the final scene of Euripides’ Medea, she fled in a chariot drawn by dragons, her children’s corpses beside her. See also Ovid, Metamorphoses VII 396–8, trans. F. J. Miller (1944), 370–71.
100, 5 Jack Cades Jack Cade led the rebellion of commoners against the misrule of Henry VI and his council in 1450. He entered London at the head of a mob and beheaded Baron Say and William Bridge. He was mortally wounded at Heath field the same year.
100, 6 Of sense and song above your graves may hiss ] Of sense & verse
100, 7–8 The ‘little boatman’ and his ‘Peter Bell’ Can sneer at him who drew’Aehitophel’! Byron was consistently scornful of Peter Bell. On the first page of a published copy of Wordsworth’s Peter Bell, Byron wrote a four stanza parody of it entitled Epilogue : the first stanza reads: ‘There’s something in a stupid ass, And something in a heavy dunce; But never since I went to school 1 heard or saw so damned a fool As William Wordsworth is for once. ‘The second stanza continues: ‘… And now I’ve seen so great a fool … I really wish that Peter Bell And he who wrote it were in hell, For writing nonsense for the nonce.’ Marchand (II, 873n.) quoted the first stanza from afacsimile in the catalogue of Samuel T. Freeman & Co., 10 December 1928, with some capitalization differences from the Coleridge version (Poetry VII 63–4)
To hurl these Fleet-ditch divers down their lakes> ]
That You were living – or I had your Rod
In ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’ (Poems, 1815), Wordsworth depreciates The Indian Emperor : ‘Dryden’s lines are vague, bombastic, and senseless; those of Pope, though he had Homer to guide him, are throughout false and contradictory. The verses of Dryden, once highly celebrated, are forgotten.’
101, 6 ] The
102, 5 ] While swung the signal from the sacred tower
103, 2 Ave Maria! ’Tis the hour of love James Kennedy quotes Byron: ‘I have known in Italy a person engaged in sin, and when the vesper-bell has rung, stop and repeat the Ave Maria, and then proceed in the sin: absolution cured all’ (Conversations on Religion with Lord Byron (1830), 150).
103, 7 strike The subject of the verb is ‘eyes’. Byron occasionally used this verb intransitively, meaning ‘seize the attention’. See II 5, 7; 122, 3; IV 85, 3; VI 52, 7. In III 95, 5, and X 61, 3, he supplied an object for the verb.
104, 1–2 ] Are not these pretty stanzas? – some folks say –
Downright in print – that I have no devotion –
104, 6–7 My altars are the mountains and the ocean /…from the great Whole
Not vainly did the early Persian make
His altar the high places, and the peak
Of earth-o’ergazing mountains.
(CH III 91, 1–3)
E. H. Coleridge compares S. T. Coleridge’s Lines to Nature, published in the Morning Herald (1815), which he thought were unknown to Byron: ‘So will I build my altar in the fields, / And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be.’
105, 1–106, 8 In the solitude Of the pine forest…… shadowed my mind’s eye Byron rode here while he was making his fair copy of Cantos III–IV inRavenna (late December 1819 and early January 1820). He later told Medwin:’I was never tired of my rides in the pine-forest; it breathes of the Decameron; it is poetical ground. Francesca lived, and Dante was exiled and died at Ravenna. There is something inspiring in such an air’ (Medwin, 25).
105, 5 the last Caesarean fortress Honorius, the last emperor of the West, retired to this fortress, where he died in 423.
105, 6–7 Boccaccio’s lore / And Drydens lay Dryden’s Theodore and Honorio is based on Boccaccio’s tale in the Decameron. Theodore (Boccaccio’s Onesti), proudly spurned by Honoria, contrives a vision for her of a woman pursued and torn by two dogs, urged on by a horseman (stanza 106, 5–6). This dream cured Honoria of pride (106, 7–8),
106, 1 The shrill cicalas cicadas, popularly called locusts.
106, 5–8 The spectre huntsman of Onesti’s line /… my mind’s eye See note to 105, 6–7.
107, 1–8 Oh Hesperus, thou bringest all good things /… to the mother’s breast Byron expands three lines of Sappho: ‘Evening, you bring back all that the shining morning scattered. You bring the sheep, you bring the goat, you bring the child ho
me to his Mother’ (a slightly modified version of P. M. Hill’s translation in The Poems of Sappho (1954), 40–41). Byron’s apostrophe to Hesperus seems to be taken from a separate oneline Sappho fragment on the evening star.
108 ‘This stanza was translated from Dante’s Purgatory’ (Byron, PM). A comparison with the prose translation by H. R. Huse reveals the extent of Byron’s emotional elaboration: ‘It was now the hour that turns homeward the longing of those at sea, and softens their hearts on the day when they have said good-by to their friends, and which pierces the new pilgrim’s heart with love, when he hears the distant bells which seem to mourn for the dying day’ (Dante, Purgatory VIII 1–6, trans. H. R. Huse (1954), 203).
108, 3 torn apart ]
109, 5 Some hands unseen strewed flowers upon his tomb Byron read about this tribute in Suetonius, The Lives of the Caesars. After Nero died, the public in Rome rejoiced. ‘Yet there were some who for a long time decorated his tomb with spring and summer flowers and now produced his statues on the rostra in the fringed toga…’ (Book VI, Nero, section 57, trans. J. C Rolfe (1914), II 184–5).
110, 2 ] And Wordsworth – both poetical buffoons.
110, 6–8 ‘wooden spoons’ /…we Cantabs please / To dub the last of honours in degrees The Cantabs (an abbreviation of Cantabrigienses or Cantabrigians, students of Cambridge); formerly presented the spoons to the lowest on the honours list in the mathematical tripos.
III, 8 From Aristotle passim . See Ποιητιχηζ See Aristotle on the Art of Poetry (ed. L. Cooper (1913), 78–84) on the principles of the construction of epic poetry. ‘The increase in bulk tends to the advantage of the Epic in grandeur, and in variety of interest for the hearer through diversity of incident in the episodes’ (80).
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