THE Dunciad in Four Books works hard to fanfare the arrival of the new hero, Bays, or Colley Cibber. An important new addition in 1743 is Aristarchus's disquisition ‘On the Hero of the Poem’. He quotes Cibber while relating the opinion of ‘carpers objecting to the clear title of our hero’. Their problem is that he was not, like Achilles and Aeneas, ‘Goddess-born’ (though the poem makes it clear that he is, like a Hanoverian king, adopted), but a player, and, in Cibber's phrase, ‘never even a hero on the stage’ (1743, p. 83). In answer, Aristarchus brings in two advocates for the theory that heroes are self-made, not begotten:

There are at least three layers to peel apart here. Firstly, this is an ironic comment on Cibber's brazen forehead, the false modesty dishonestly covering his self-importance. Like many of the dunces, Cibber thinks that he is propelling himself when he is really plummeting into oblivion. Second, ironically granting Cibber such historical agency comically (but still effectively) absolves Pope of the crime of malicious, particular satire. This momentarily effaces Pope's agency, obscuring his intending hand. As Pope himself puts it elsewhere, ‘Fools rush into my Head and so I write’: Cibber puts himself in Pope's poem, or simply finds himself there, having rushed into the vacuum created by Dulness and the convenient evacuation of Tibbald.