5
Nor are we to omit in our reading those hints which, from some other words or phrases bordering on those that offend us, may help to rectify our apprehensions. But as physicians use cantharides, believing that, though their bodies be deadly poison, yet their feet and wings are medicinal and can even kill the poison of the flies themselves, so must we deal with poems. If any noun or verb near at hand may assist to the correction of any such saying, and preserve us from putting a bad construction upon it, we should take hold of it and employ it to assist a more favorable interpretation. As some do in reference to those verses of Homer,— Sorrows and tears most commonly are seen To be the Gods’ rewards to wretched men:— The Gods, who have no cause themselves to grieve, For wretched man a web of sorrow weave. Odyss. IV. 197; Il. XXIV. 526. For, they say, he says not of men simply, or of all men, that the Gods weave for them the fatal web of a sorrowful life; but he affirms it only of foolish and imprudent men, whom, because their vices make them such, he therefore calls wretched and miserable.
6
Another way whereby those passages which are suspicious in poets may be transferred to a better sense may be taken from the common use of words, which a young man ought indeed to be more exercised in than in the use of strange and obscure terms. For it will be a point of philology which it will not be unpleasant to him to understand, that when he meets with ῥιγεδανή in a poet, that word signifies an evil death; for the Macedonians use the word δάνος to signify death. So the Aeolians call victory gotten by patient endurance of hardships καμμονίη; and the Dryopians call daemons πόποι.
