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Rogers to give
THE LYSISTRATA 101
us even a translation of the
Lysistrata.
Were Aristophanes alive and publishing
now, not only would his plays be vetoed by
the Censor for indelicacy, and boycotted by
the libraries, he would be in personal danger
on another account ;
for a judge of the High
Court could surely be found to sentence the
author of The Birds to six months' hard
labour for blasphemy. Mr. Rogers, therefore,
who made this translation, not in the Athens
of Plato, but in the London of Podsnap in
1878, to be exact is not much to be blamed
for having allowed it to bear the mark of its
age. Nevertheless, though pardonable, his
compromise is translation of
deplorable, since it robs this
precisely that quality which
gives to most of the others their high importance.
For Mr. Rogers is one of those who
during the last five-and-twenty years have
been busy awakening us to a new sense of the
possibilities of life. His share in that task
has been to express and restate, in a form
appreciable by the modern mind, some of the
adventures and discoveries of the Hellenic
genius. He is one of those scholars who, consciously
or unconsciously, have joined hands
with the boldest spirits
of the age, and, by
showing what the Greeks thought and felt,
have revealed to us new worlds of thought