For nearly a hundred and fifty years after Paradise Lost first appeared in 1667, epic poetry in England had largely gone missing. Alexander Pope's grand translation of the Iliad offered a vision of the kinds of heroic ideals in eighteenth-century thinking that we associate with the term “neoclassical.” The elegant rhyming couplets of his translation represented his century's notion of the appropriate metrical form for an epic poem, hence the designation of this form as heroic couplets. But long ago, E. M. W. Tillyard nailed what was missing from Pope's effort at an epic vision. The speeches of Pope's Homeric heroes are polished and aristocratic pronouncements, with phrasing that is exquisitely balanced and sentiments that are self-consciously dignified. Take the dying words of the Trojan ally Sarpedon, as he urges his comrade Glaucus to prevent the Greeks from dishonoring his corpse:

Pope wrote detailed footnotes to his translation, and his comment on this passage from Book 16 is revealing. “If we conceive this said by the expiring Hero, his dying Looks fix’d on his wounded disconsolate Friend, the Spear remaining in his Body, and the Victor standing by in a kind of Extasy surveying his Conquest; these Circumstances will form a very moving Picture.”

Pope's “moving picture” is quite different in texture and intent from the “living pictures” that animate Gibbon's history of the Roman empire. The historian wanted to leaven the conceptual treatment of massive forces at work with microscopic views into individual lives whose examples would ground the concepts in lived experience. Pope's heroes are displayed to picturesque effect, and they speak with an authority and a noblesse oblige designed to impress the multitude. The noble rhetoric that we encounter in his Iliad “ does speak for the ruling classes,” Tillyard wrote, but that wasn't sufficient in the era that saw the rise of the middle-class genre of the novel.