congratulation. To be shut up entirely to one or other of these
resources would be a serious misfortune: to be able to employ them
(should it seem advisable) successively is no inconsiderable relief.
The last of the three no doubt requires to be used very sparingly
indeed, or one great object of translating a classic, the laying
open of ancient life and thought to a modern reader, will be
wantonly sacrificed. No one now-a-days would dream of going as far
in this direction as Dryden and some of the translators of his
period, talking e.g. about "the new Lord Mayor" and "the Louvre of
the sky." But there are occasionally minor points--very minor ones,
I admit--where a modern equivalent is allowable, if not absolutely
necessary. Without transforming bodily a Roman caena into an English
dinner, one may sometimes effect with advantage a trifling change in
the less important dishes: a boar must not appear as a baron of
beef, but a scarus may perhaps be turned, as I have turned it, into
a sardine. In money again it would surely be needless pedantry in
the translator of a satirist to talk of sestertia rather than
pounds. I fear I have not always been at the pains to make the
English sum even roughly equivalent to the Roman, but have from time
to time introduced a particular English sum arbitrarily, if it
appeared to suit the context or even the metre. Thus, where Philip
gives or lends Mena fourteen sestertia that he may buy a farm, I
have not startled the modern agricultural reader by talking about a
hundred and twenty pounds, but have ventured to turn the sestertia
into so many hundreds. On the whole, however, while I certainly
cannot recommend any one to try to distil Latin antiquities from my
translation as they are sometimes distilled from the original, I
hope that I have not been unfaithful to the antique spirit, but have
reflected with sufficient accuracy the broad features of Roman life.