Até the goddess of destruction, already mentioned ([p. 53]), and whose name has been naturalized in English by the authority of Shakespere. In Homer ατη appears (1) as an infatuation of mind leading to perdition; (2) as that perdition effected; (3) as an allegorical personage, eldest born of Jove, the cause of that infatuation of mind and consequent perdition (Il. XIX. v. 91). In the tragedians, Ἄτη is more habitually clothed with a distinct and prominent personality.
“A haughty heart.”
In a passage hopelessly corrupt, and where no two editors agree in the reading, I have necessarily been reduced to the expedient of translating with a certain degree of looseness from the text of the MSS. as given by Well. Through this text, broken and disjointed as it is, the meaning glimmers with a light sufficient to guide the reader, who wishes only to arrive at the idea, without aspiring at the reconstitution of the lost grammatical form of the text; and it is a satisfaction to think that all the translators, from Pot. to Con., however they may vary in single phrases, give substantially the same idea, and in a great measure the same phrase. This idea, a most important one in the Greek system of morals, is well expressed by Sym. in his note on this place—“The Chorus here moralizes and dwells on the consequences to succeeding generations of the crimes of their predecessors. He traces, as it were, a moral succession, handed down from father to son, where one transgression begets another as its inevitable result. The first parent stock was ‘ὕβρις’ a spirit of insolence or insubordination, breaking out into acts of outrage, the forerunner of every calamity in a Grecian republic, against which the philosophers and tragedians largely declaimed. They denounced it as well from a principle of policy as a sentiment of religion. In short, the poet treats here of the moral concatenation of cause and effect, the consequence to the descendants of their progenitors’ misconduct, operating either by the force of example or of hereditary disposition, which in the mind of the Chorus produces the effect of an irresistible fatality.”—I may mention that I have retained the original word δάιμων in its English form “demon,” this being, according to my feeling, one of the few places where the one can be used for the other without substituting a modern, and, therefore, a false idea.
“Fawn with watery love.”
ῦδαρεῖ σάινειν φιλότητι. This is one of those bold dramatic touches which mark the hand of a Shakespere, or an Æschylus, and, by transmuting or diluting which, the translator, in my opinion, commits a capital sin. Harf., with his squeamish sensibility, has slurred over the whole passage, and even Fr., like all Germans, an advocate for close translation, gives the rapid generality of “trügend;” Med., from carelessness, I hope, and not from principle, has sinned in the same way, and Kennedy likewise; but I am happy in having both Con. and Sym. for my companions, when I retain a simile which is as characteristic of my author as a crooked beak is of an eagle. This note may serve for not a few similar cases, where the nice critic will do well to consult the Greek author before he blames the English translator.
“He might have boasted of a triple coil.”
I consider it quite legitimate in a translator, where critical doctors differ, and where decision is difficult or impossible, to embody in his version the ideas of both parties, where that can be done naturally, and without forcing, as in the present instance. It seems to me on the one hand that την κάτω γὰρ ὀυ λέγω has more pregnancy of expression when applied to the dead Geryon, than when interpreted of the earth; and, on the other hand, I cannot think with Sym. that the expression τρίμοιρον χλαῖναν, when applied to the earth, is “rank nonsense.” There are many phrases in Æschylus that, if translated literally, sound very like nonsense in English. The parenthetic clause “of him below I speak not,” is added from a superstitious feeling, to avoid the bad omen of speaking of a living person as dead. So Well. and Sym., and this appears the most natural qualification in the circumstances.