Pope prided himself on his freedom from patronage and his financial independence, secured primarily by the profit from his translation of Homer's Iliad. In 1976 David Foxon estimated that the value of Pope's Homer to the poet, translated into the financial values of that year, was about ?200,000. Throughout his career, Pope satirized the poverty of "Grub-street" writers who wrote for patronage and profit. Pope thus put forth an image of himself as a gentleman-poet free from the pressures of the literary marketplace.