Page:Satires, Epistles, Art of Poetry of Horace - Coningsby (1874).djvu/26

xx 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 cæna 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,