promote as far
as I could theological studies--and God immortal, how miserably they
have been corrupted by sophistical nonsensicalities!--I did not wish to
give the impression that I was attempting forthwith to learn the
potter's art on a winejar[37] (as the Greek adage goes) and rushing in
with unwashen feet, as they say, on so vast an undertaking; so I decided
to begin by testing how far I had profited by my studies in both
languages, and that in a material difficult indeed, but not sacred; so
that the difficulty of the undertaking might be useful for practice and
at the same time if I made any mistakes these mistakes should involve
only the risk of my talent and leave the Holy Scriptures undamaged. And
so I endeavoured to render in Latin two tragedies of Euripides, the
_Hecuba_ and the _Iphigeneia in Aulis_, in the hope that perchance some
god might favour so bold a venture with fair breezes. Then, seeing that
a specimen of the work begun found favour with persons excellently well
versed in both tongues (assuredly England by now possesses several of
these, if I may acknowledge the truth without envy, men deserving of the
admiration even of all Italy in any branch of learning), I brought the
work to a finish, with the good help of the Muses, within a few short
months. At what a cost in exertion, those will best feel who enter the
same lists.

Why so? Because the mere task of putting real Greek into real Latin is
such that it requires an extraordinary artist, and not only a man with a
rich store of scholarship in both languages at his fingertips, but one
exceedingly alert and observant; so that for several centuries now none
has appeared whose efforts in this field were unanimously approved by
scholars. It is surely easy then to conjecture what a heavy task it has
proved to render verse in verse, particularly verse so varied and
unfamiliar, and to do this from a writer not merely so remote in time,
and withal a tragedian, but also marvellously concise, taut and
unadorned, in whom there is nothing otiose, nothing which it would not
be a crime to alter or remove; and besides, one who treats rhetorical
topics so frequently and so acutely that he appears to be everywhere
declaiming. Add to all this the choruses, which through I know not what
striving after effect are so obscure that they need not so much a
translator as an Oedipus or priest of Apollo to interpret them. In
addition there is the corrupt state of the manuscr