debtor both to the Greeks and to the Barbarians.’ (116)

And Pope in making Dulness the goddess of the unconscious is 
contrasting her with Minerva, goddess of alert intellect and wit. 
It is not Minerva but her obverse complement, the owl, that the 
printed book has conferred on Western man. “However ill-fitting 
their heroic garb,” Williams remarks (p. 59), “one at last finds 
the dunces invested with uncivilizing powers of epic 
proportions.”

     Supported by the Gutenberg technology, the power of the 
dunces to shape and befog the human intellect is unlimited. 
Pope’s efforts to clarify this basic point have been in vain. His 
intense concern with the pattern  of action in his armed horde 
of nobodies has been mistaken for personal spite. Pope was 
entirely concerned with the formalistic pattern  and penetrative