Mansus. English translation. Back to Latin text. Open Latin text in new window.
Introduction. Milton titled this collection of Latin and Greek verses, "Sylvarum," or "of the woods," indicating the variety of metrical forms included, even a variety of languages, since two are in Greek. The metrical forms employed here include iambics, hexameters and various kinds of Horatian modes, including alcaic stanzas. Milton arranged the poems in a roughly chronological order according to their dates of composition, probably to emphasize his progress as a poet from his earliest attempts to his more mature poems.
Milton visited Giovanni Battista Manso, a wealthy patron of the arts and humanist academies, in Naples in November 1638. "During my stay," Milton recalled, Manso "gave me singular proofs of his regard; he himself conducted me round the city, and to the palace of the viceroy; and more than once paid me a visit at my lodgings." Naples was the southernmost point of Milton's journey; in late December, "melancholy intelligence . . . of civil commotions in England" led Milton to curtail his original plans and turn back north. "I thought it base," he wrote, "to be traveling for amusement abroad, while my fellow-citizens were fighting for liberty at home" (Second Defense of the English People). Before leaving Italy, however, Milton spent another two months in Rome and two more in Florence. Manso welcomed Milton, introduced him to his friends in the Accademia degli Oziosi which met at his home, and even contributed some commendatory verses that Milton published in his first collection of poems in 1645. According to Milton, he would have done even more for him if Milton had not been so outspoken in his contempt for Roman Catholicism.
The translation follows that of Walter MacKellar with a few changes based on consulting The Columbia Milton and Merritt Y. Hughes.
adsit. Both 1645 and 1673 have "ad sit" here; Shawcross and Flannagan correct this to "adsit" (in Flannagan xviii).
Giovanni Battista Manso. Manso was a wealthy patron of arts and letters in Naples, and Italy more widely. He probably hosted Torquato Tasso at his villa near Naples, where it is said Tasso completed his revisions of Gerusalemme Liberata, entitled Gerusalemme Conquistata.
Manso honored the present author. In November 1638, Milton traveled south to Naples, where he was befriended by Manso who contributed, along with many other distinguished Italians, a few commendatory verses to Milton's 1645 Poems.
Pierides. Mt. Pierus, along with Mt. Olympus, was an early seat of the worship of Orpheus and the muses. The muses were sometimes called the Pierides, a name given also to nine daughters of the legendary King Pierus of Macedonia. Hesiod's Theogony 52-59 imagines the muses born to Zeus by Mnemosyne on Mount Pierus in Macedonia.
Gallus and Etruscan Maecenas. Virgil's Eclogue 10 laments the passing of Cornelius Gallus, the first Roman elegist, and his Eclogue 6 describes him as honored by the Muses on Mount Helicon. Milton echoes Virgil's tenth eclogue in Lycidas 10 and 190-93. Horace salutes his patron Maecenas in a similar manner in Odes 1.1.
great Tasso. Torquato Tasso was probably a guest of Manso's at his villa near Naples between 1588 and 1594. He may even have finished Jerusalem Conquered, a rewriting of Jerusalem Delivered, while a guest there. Tasso wrote and dedicated a discourse on friendship to Manso. Manso also wrote a biography of Tasso.
Marino. Giambattista Marino (1569-1625) also had been a close friend of Manso. No biography of Marino, composed by Manso, has ever surfaced.
Ausonian nymphs. Italian nymphs; Ausonia is another name for Italy.
Minerva. A Roman goddess, regarded as the patron of handicrafts and the arts, and later also of wisdom and prowess in war, identified from an early period with the Greek Athena.
eloquent one born on high Mycale. Herodotus, the historian, and according to tradition, the biographer of Homer, was said to have been born at Aeolis in Asia Minor, near Mycale.
Tityrus. As in Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar (February Eclogue 92, June 81, and December 4), Tityrus a named borrowed from Virgil's pastoral Eclogues as a poetic name for Chaucer. "During the decade of the 1370s, Chaucer was at various times on diplomatic missions in Flanders, France, and Italy. Probably his first Italian journey (December 1372 to May 1373) was for negotiations with the Genoese concerning an English port for their commerce, and with the Florentines concerning loans for Edward III. His next Italian journey occupied May 28 to September 19, 1378, when he was a member of a mission to Milan concerning military matters" (Encyclopaedia Britannica).
sevenfold Triones. The plowing oxen which, according to legend, pulled Charles's Wain, or the Big Dipper constellation, also known as Ursa Major, across the northern night sky, driven by Boötes.
Druid race. Milton would have been familiar with Julius Caesar's description of the Druids as peaceful poets and priests in his Gallic Wars 6.14. Herod
Corinedian Loxo. Milton appears to be fusing or interweaving the legendary ancient Bristish hero Corineus (after whom Cornwall was named), with Herodotus's story in his Histories 4.35 of the Hyperborean virgins, Arge and Opis, and an account in Callimachus's Hymn to Delos 291-94 of Oupis, Loxo, and Hecaërge, maidens from the north who brought tributes to Delos.
Caledonian paint. Julius Caesar, in his Gallic Wars 5.14, reported that the ancient Britons, also called Caledonians or even Picts, painted their faces and bodies with woad, a bluish sort of plant dye.
fortunate old man. The poem echoes Virgil's "Fortunate senex! ergo tua rura manebunt" in Eclogue 1.46.
Marino. Giambattista Marino (1569-1625) was an Italian poet. His florid, highly elaborated style, called Marinismo, which was akin to euphuism, was much admired and imitated in his time. He had a strong influence on writing in all European literature. Among his principal works is Adone (1623), a long narrative poem. His name sometimes appears as Marini. Milton believed Mano wrote a biography of Marino.
Cynthius. Phoebus Apollo, born on Mt. Cynthius, is sometimes called by the name of his birthplace on Delos.
King Pheretiades. According to Apollodorus's Library 3.10.4, Apollo was banished from heaven for a time for killing the Cyclopes and tended flocks for Admetus, King of Pherae in Thessaly.
great Alcides. Heracle or Hercules. Euripides's Alcestis 569-96 re-tells the story of Admetus and Hercules to which Milton refers again in his Sonnet 23.
Chiron. Homer called Chiron (or Cheiron) the "most righteous of the centaurs" in the Iliad 11.831. Ovid's Metamorphoses 2.630 tells that Apollo entrusted the care of his son, Aesculapius, to Chiron in a cave in Thessaly.
ilex. The holm-oak or evergreen oak (Quercus Ilex).
Trachinian cliff. A cliff in Thessaly. The poem invokes the Orphic power of poetry and song to move animals and even inanimate objects; see also Ad Patrem.
Arthur. When Milton began jotting down ideas for a British epic poem, among the twenty-eight topics he recorded in what we now call the Trinity MS was an ancient British history focusing on Arthur. In Paradise Lost 9.25-45, the Miltonic narrator blames his late start on the epic poem on his being "not sedulous by Nature" to sing of wars, a theme he has come reluctantly and gradually to deem less heroic than "Patience and Heroic Martyrdom."
invincible Table. Arthur's famous Round Table.
Paphian myrtle. Myrtle was believed to have originated on Venus's isle of Paphos, and laurel from the home of the muses on Mt. Parnassus.
rosy light. Or, more simply put, a blush (purpureo suffundar lumine). Milton drew on several classical sources for his sense that the inward beauty of chaste virtue made its most characteristic outward appearance in the form of a blush. For other examples, see Epitaphium Damonis 212 and Paradise Lost 8.619. Classical examples of the rosy blush divide themselves between the lascivious blush of remembered lust in Ovid's Amores 1.4.22, the blush of modesty in Amores 1.3.14, Cupid's bright wings in Ovid's Remedia Amoris 701, and Diana's cheeks in Metamorphorphoses 3.184. See also Venus's "purple buskins" of a Tyrian virgin in Virgil's Aeneid 1.338 and the rosy glow of youth Venus bestows upon Aeneas in Aeneid 1.590-91, which Milton also alludes to in Paradise Lost 4.300-303. On the blush topos in Plato, see A.W. Price, "Plato, Zeno, and the Object of Love," 179.