Is it reasonable to ask if the Athenians, some few of whose characteristics have been outlined in these notes, would have flocked to hear, and have greatly enjoyed, a play replete with high moral teaching, and containing hymns that might have come out of a Church Hymnal? Now the Bacchae of Euripides, one of the most popular of Greek plays, and the Hippolytus of the same dramatist, have been translated by one great Greek scholar, Professor Gilbert Murray, in a manner that (at any rate, as regards the Bacchae) received the “hearty admiration and approval” of another great Greek scholar, Dr. Verrall. In this version, one after another of the debased Greek gods is called “God.” We also find such expressions as (note the capitals) “God’s grace,” “Virgin of God,” “Babe of God,” “God’s son,” and even “God’s true son” (who is Dionysus or Bacchus), “Spirit of God,” “Child of the Highest,” “Heaven,” “Purity,” “Saints” (who are the Maenads!), “righteous,” “divine,” “holy,” and so on.
Professor Murray is put in a difficulty when two or more gods are referred to. In some cases he becomes illogical (and reminds us of the Kaiser), as when Dionysus has to say “God and me.” In others he has to use the Greek name for one god, and then the words sound blasphemous, as when he speaks of Dionysus who was “born from the thigh of Zeus and now is God.” These instances are taken quite at random and there must be many others.
Take the following two lines as a short illustration of Professor Murray’s version:
Where a voice of living waters never ceaseth
In God’s quiet garden by the sea.
The original reads: “Where the ambrosial fountains stream forth by the couches of the palaces of Zeus,” or, to give them a more musical turn, Mr. A. S. Way’s version is:
Where the fountains ambrosial sunward are leaping
By the couches where Zeus in his halls lieth sleeping.
In Professor Murray’s two lines Zeus becomes “God,” “living waters” is taken from the Song of Solomon, and “God’s quiet garden” from Isaiah and Ezekiel. Such expressions, with their tender and beautiful associations, do not in the least convey the sense of the original. Used to describe the palace of a vicious, barbaric deity, they are a mistranslation. Also every one of the expressions referred to above is, wherever used, another mistranslation (although some may be necessitated by the limitation of language). Again there are other more pronounced mistranslations, some of which are pointed out by Verrall (Bacchants of Euripides). Thus where the very old man Cadmus, setting out on an unusual journey, merely says to his ancient comrade, “We have pleasantly forgotten that we are old” (Bacchae 184-9). Professor Murray interpolates a stage direction, “A mysterious strength and exaltation” (from the god Dionysus) “enters into him”—and he alters the words of Cadmus to conform with the miracle: