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76 like ‘‘Yet it is more complicated than that.’’ Mr. Bogel turns a breezy line of Byron ’s—‘‘But verse is more in fashion—so here goes!’’—into a conundrum: it is ‘‘an energetic launching into the verse-writing project, but also a commentary ontheephemerality of the present.’’ The confusing effect of such overingenuity combines with Mr. Bogel’s opaque style to render the book less inviting than it should be. For example: ‘‘In consequence, it is certainly possible to imagine the Augustans exploiting at once the satiric potential and the penchant for political quietism that the Miltonic example offered, thereby reinforcing the difference between the established order and the deluded and inevitably parodic rebel as well as the difference between the Miltonic precedent and the subsequent tradition of satire.’’ Most troubling is Mr. Bogel’s failure to acknowledge the labors of those who have prepared the way. True, they are Swiftians, not all of them ‘‘formalists.’’ True, Swift is a ‘‘singular’’ writer. Among them, however, they anticipate most of Mr. Bogel’s theoretical ideas: the satirist satirized, satire of the reader, the ‘‘doubleness’’ of satire, the spuriousness of ‘‘personae,’’ the absence of satiric norms. The slighted precursors include, at the very least, W. B. C. Watkins in Perilous Balance (1939), Henry W. Sams in ‘‘Swift’s Satire of the Second Person,’’(1959), Irvin Ehrenpreisin‘‘Personae’’(1963) and in his discussion of An Argument against Abolishing Christianity (1967; Vol. II of the biography), W. B. Carnochan in Lemuel Gulliver’s Mirror for Man (1968) and in ‘‘Swift’s Tale: On Satire, Negation, and the Uses of Irony’’(1971), and C. J. Rawson in Gulliver and the Gentle Reader (1973). Nora F. Crow Smith College A HOMERIC ALLUSION IN SWIFT’S A MODEST PROPOSAL Robert E. Jungman In his short analysis of the first paragraph of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, Martin Price observes that one of Swift’s favorite satiric techniques involves ‘‘the play on the emptiness of stale terms’’ by the essay’s speaker, an author who clearly likes ‘‘refined jargon.’’ A good example of this jargon occurs when the persona uses the phrase ‘‘this great town’’to set up the later reference near the end of the first paragraph to a ‘‘dear Native Country.’’ This ‘‘dear Native Country’’ is the homeland that Irish children must desert in order to find a living later as mercenaries or indenturedservants, unless, of course, they choose to stay in Ireland to become thieves.1 That such a homeland could be called ‘‘dear’’ by the speaker is a good example of Swift’s vivid and most obvious irony. A further dimension of irony in ‘‘dear Native Country’’ is perhaps not so obvious. As Irish children grow up, says the narrator, they must ‘‘either turn Thieves for want of Work; or leave their dear Native Country, to fight for the Pretender in Spain, or sell 1 Martin Price, Swift’s Rhetorical Art: A Study in Structure and Meaning (New Haven: Yale, 1953; repr.Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois, 1953), p. 72. 77 themselves to the Barbadoes.’’2 Here, the juxtaposition of ‘‘dear Native Country’’and ‘‘to fight for the Pretender in Spain’’ is not accidental. Normally, one should be fighting for one’s native country, not leaving it to fight elsewhere. Fromtheclassicalperiodon,thestandardheroicidealhasbeentodiefighting in defense of one’s country, like Hector at Troy. The locus classicus of this concept is Horace’s ‘‘dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,’’ which he took from Greek sources like Homer and Tyrtaeus. Swift, however, does not mention dying, but rather leaving one’s native land to fight overseas for someone else, a situation described exactly in Homer’s Iliad, when Athena rouses the Greeks to battle at Troy: ˆ ’ ␧␯ ␦` ␧ ␴␪‘ ␧␯␱␵ ’ ␻␳␴␧␯ ‘ ␧␬´ ␣␱␶␻¸ ’⬘ ␬␣␳␦␫␩ ␣␭␭␩␬␶␱␯ ␲␱␭␧␮␫␨␧␫␯ ’ ␩␦` ␧ ␮ ´ ␣␹␧␴␪␣␫. ’⬘ ␶␱ˆ ␫␴␫ ␦ ⬘ ␣␾␣␳ ␲´ ␱␭␧␮␱␵ ␥␭␷␬´ ␫␯␯ ␥´ ␧␯␧␶⬘ ´ ␩` ␧ ␯‘ ␧⑀␴␪␣␫ ’ ␧␯ ␯␮␷␴` ␫ ␥␭␣␾␷␳ ˆ ␩␴␫ ␾␫␥␩␯ ’ ␧␵ ␲␣␶␳␫␦␣ ␥␣ˆ ␫␣␯. and in the heart of each man she roused strength to war and to battle without ceasing. And to them forthwith war became sweeter than to return in their hollow ships to their dear native land.3 Swift reverses the fighting/returning sequence of Homer’s phrasing, but the Greek is nevertheless an exact equivalent of Swift’s words. There is thus not only a sharp similarity in ideas between the Greek and English texts, but a close...

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