purpose is rather to explain the way in which this translation endeavours to deal with the textual problem.
In the first place, wherever, as in the opening speech, gaps of uncertain extent, of whole lines or paragraphs, are found or strongly suspected, no attempt has been made to supply them. Except as an exercise of private ingenuity, such attempts would be reprehensible in a translator, even if he possessed the Æschylean scholarship of Paley or Conington, and the genius and versification of Marlowe.
Where, however, as in l. 369, we know by the structure of the metre that only a few syllables are lost, the case is different. It seems idle to leave a vacant space in the English where the Greek is, by consideration of the context, pretty clear; and in such cases I have followed the explanation, and sometimes translated the conjecture, of Conington or others.
Secondly, wherever, as in the chorus above specified, it is known, by metrical laws and by the unintelligible text, that the original has been in some way corrupted, I have followed a plan which may need excuse. To reproduce Æschylus in an unintelligible form is a sin against Æschylus himself. Whatever he may actually have written, one thing is certain; it was intelligible, it was metrical. We may note, also, that in many places where the text is indubitably corrupt, ungrammatical and unmetrical, the thought and meaning are pretty clear. Such, e.g., is the case in ll, 415–417, ὅταν—καλῶς. In such cases I have followed the apparent cue of the context, after consulting the best commentators. πρὸς τὸ φανεῖσθαί μοι καλῶς is not Æschylus' Greek for "to the new dawn of gladness." But we know from the metre that the Greek is corrupt; the words as they stand are probably a gloss, explaining, in inferior Greek, some metaphor representing hope or joy as a dawn—a metaphor very familiar to all readers of Æschylus (cf. Agam. ll. 101, 253, 1182, etc.) very suitable to the context, and very closely indicated by the gloss. I do not conceive it to be any part of a translator's duty to render literally Greek words which are known, with absolute certainty, to be wrong. Yet to elucidate by means of the context and other comparisons, is, I am well aware, "a dim and perilous way." All I can say is that I have never done so except in three or four cases where it seemed absolutely inevitable; and that, in those cases, care and pains have not been spared to do it as well as, to me, was possible.
