tion is intended to be within reach of everybody. It is so
designed that the entire set of volumes can go on a shelf twenty-seven
feet long, or even longer. The first edition will be an _edition de
luxe_ bound in vellum, or perhaps in buckskin, and sold at five hundred
dollars. It will be limited to five hundred copies and, of course, sold
only to the feeble minded. The next edition will be the Literary
Edition, sold to artists, authors, actors and contractors. After that
will come the Boarding House Edition, bound in board and paid for in the
same way.

My plan is to so transpose the classical writers as to give, not the
literal translation word for word, but what is really the modern
equivalent. Let me give an odd sample or two to show what I mean. Take
the passage in the First Book of Homer that describes Ajax the Greek
dashing into the battle in front of Troy. Here is the way it runs (as
nearly as I remember), in the usual word for word translation of the
classroom, as done by the very best professor, his spectacles glittering
with the literary rapture of it.

"Then he too Ajax on the one hand leaped (or
possibly jumped) into the fight wearing on the
other hand, yes certainly a steel corselet (or
possibly a bronze under tunic) and on his head
of course, yes without doubt he had a helmet
with a tossing plume taken from the mane (or
perhaps extracted from the tail) of some horse
which once fed along the banks of the Scamander
(and it sees the herd and raises its head and
paws the ground) and in his hand a shield worth
a hundred oxen and on his knees too especially
in particular greaves made by some cunning
artificer (or perhaps blacksmith) and he blows
the fire and it is hot. Thus Ajax leapt (or,
better, was propelled from behind), into the
fight."

Now that's grand stuff. There is no doubt of it. There's a wonderful
movement and force to it. You can almost see it move, it goes so fast.
But the modern reader can't get it. It won't mean to him what it meant
to the early Greek. The setting, the costume, the scene has all got to
be changed in order to let the reader have a real equivalent to judge
just how good the Greek verse is. In my translation I alter it just a
little, not much but just enough to give the passage a form that
reproduces the proper literary value of the verses, without