APPENDIX.
Those unacquainted with the original of this play may yet possibly detect in the translation, here and there, something of an alien element—alien, I mean, in a special degree, to the spirit of Greek tragedy. I may briefly explain to such readers the origin of this deficiency.
The play is "confessedly the most difficult of the tragedies that have come down to us from Grecian antiquity" (Con., Choeph., Pref., p. i); and the difficulties are not, as elsewhere in Æschylus, mainly owing to a certain abruptness of style and profundity of thought. These qualities are abundantly present in this play; but its difficulty is immensely increased by the condition of the text, which is mutilated in several places, and corrupt, beyond hope of certain restoration, in many others.
The worst case of all is that of the chorus, ll. 784–837; where Conington suspects that the text of the MSS. has been "extensively tampered with, so as entirely to obliterate the original reading." But the same kind of obscurity besets the translator in many other passages. Let the reader imagine a person, well acquainted with French, dictating a play in that language to a scribe only partially acquainted with it—able, that is, to spell any word that he recognizes, but unable to follow intelligently the thought of whole passages, unless they are abundantly clear and very deliberately dictated; let him imagine such a scribe losing the cue given by the metre or the "strophe," and copying words or syllables imperfectly heard; then let him imagine the result, as a piece of French literature, and he will have, mutatis mutandis, a fairly accurate idea of the condition, in several places, of the text of The Libation-Bearers.
I would guard myself from giving an opinion that such is the origin of these famous corruptions. A knowledge of the conditions under which MSS. were transcribed, if accessible at all, is not so to me at this time. (I would, however, remark that Conington—App. II, p. 166—to some extent endorses a friend's suggestion that dictation is the source of many corruptions in the Greek dramatists.) But my present
