Xenophon's words are:
As usual, Swift quotes from the Latin version. By the quotation he really means to satirize the pedantry of interpreting words in their literal rather than their natural sense. Xenophon's words are intended, of course, to express the wide human sympathy that runs through the Homeric poems. Swift satirizes the pedants (having Wotton and Bentley in his eye) by taking this in a literal sense, as if these poems were an encyclopaedia of information. This gave him just the opportunity he wished, for turning the enemy's flank at a point where his own side of the controversy was weakest. Some of the advocates of the Ancients—Temple amongst others—had made the absurd mistake of challenging comparison in the sphere of scientific discoveries and inventions. Swift knew how foolish such an argument was: and this passage is devoted to laughing out of court the ponderous pedantry with which Wotton had met the argument by an elaborate discursus upon all the sciences. The references to Homer are a parody of several passages in Wotton's Reflections', that, for instance, in which Wotton reproduces an extract from a mathematician of his acquaintance, of high repute as the friend of Newton and Bentley, Mr. John Craig, who writes:
If we take a short view of the Geometry of the Ancients, it appears that they considered no lines except straight lines, the circle and the conic sections. As for the spiral, the quadratrix, the conchoid, the cissoid, and a few others, they made little account of them,' etc., etc.
Wotton gravely introduces absurdities like this, as well as the facts that the Ancients did not invent telescopes and pendulum clocks, and did not even know how to make cyder as well as Evelyn would have taught them in his Pomona (cf. 'What can be more defective than Homer's dissertation upon tea? ' p. 143, 1. 21)—as relevant to the literary discussion upon the comparative value of classical and modern literature. Unfortunately Temple had led the way. But Swift's vision was too clear for such an error. In these two pages he dismisses it once for all, as ludicrously irrelevant.
'And if you insist on bringing in, as an element in the comparison, your boasted scientific achievements, take them,' he seems to say, 'for what they are worth—a bundle of whims and fancies taught you by Alchemists and Rosicrucian mystics, and a string of mechanical contrivances, represented by—a save-all!'