ABSTRACT
‘The Arrival of Ulysses in Ithaca’ was first published on 29 December 1713. While there is no direct evidence for the period of composition, TE (I.358–60) plausibly suggests that Pope began his translation of this passage from book XIII of the Odyssey in 1707–8, during the period in which he composed the ‘Episode of Sarpedon’. He was evidently looking at the Odyssey in 1709, when he sent Cromwell a version of his lines ‘Argus’ (not published until 1727), on the subject of Odysseus’s dog (Odyssey, XVII), which recognises the returning King before dying (to Cromwell, 19 October 1709; Corr., I.74). The letter from Trumbull to Bridges of 31 October 1709, cited by TE and indicating that Pope has temporarily suspended work on Homer because of headaches, accords more directly with that known piece of translation than with the present piece, but it could refer to any of the early versions. In any event, Pope evidently completed work on the poem before 5 October 1713, when he received fifteen guineas from Jacob Tonson (junior) for it, together with ‘The Wife of Bath Her Prologue’; see further Corr., I.191–2, for a letter of agreement from Tonson to Pope on the same date. Both poems were first published in Steele’s Poetical Miscellanies (see Headnote to ‘The Wife of Bath Her Prologue’); the present poem occupies pp. 120–34.
