Pope mocks the privileged aristocracy by elevating the trivial details of their life to the status of great importance rather than describing grand causes and grand battles. Pope makes this clear at the very beginning of the poem when he states “What mighty contests rise from trivial things.”Pope imitates a classical epic in a humorous way. Instead of the clashing of swords and human bones, the silk of the ladies’ dresses rustle and the whale-bones that make up their corsets crack. Instead of the Greek gods battling one another, the so-called heroes and heroines fight over a piece of hair. Recall that Pope’s purpose in writing tgh rape of a lock was to reconcile two families who were having a genuine feud over the cutting of a lock of hair.