These remarks are made to shew that my metres were not selected, as it
might appear, at hap-hazard. Metre is not so unimportant as to justify
that. For the rest, I have used Briggs's edition[F] (_Poetae Bucolici
Graeci_), and have never, that I am aware of, taken refuge in any various
reading where I could make any sense at all of the text as given by him.
Sometimes I have been content to put down what I felt was a wrong
rendering rather than omit; but only in cases where the original was
plainly corrupt, and all suggested emendations seemed to me hopelessly
wide of the mark. What, for instance, may be the true meaning of
[Greek: bolbhost tist kochlhiast] in the fourteenth Idyll I have no
idea. It is not very important. And no doubt the sense of the last two
lines of the "_Death of Adonis_" is very unlikely to be what I have made
it. But no suggestion that I met with seemed to me satisfactory or even
plausible: and in this and a few similar cases I have put down what
suited the context. Occasionally also, as in the Idyll here printed
last--the one lately discovered by Bergk, which I elucidated by the
light of Fritzsche's conjectures--I have availed myself of an opinion
which Professor Conington somewhere expresses, to the effect that, where
two interpretations are tenable, it is lawful to accept for the purposes
of translation the one you might reject as a commentator. [Greek:
tetootaiost] has I dare say nothing whatever to do with 'quartan fever.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25