ive us even a translation of the _Lysistrata_.

Were Aristophanes alive and publishing now, not only would his plays be
vetoed by the Censor for indelicacy, and boycotted by the libraries, he
would be in personal danger on another account; for a judge of the High
Court could surely be found to sentence the author of _The Birds_ to six
months' hard labour for blasphemy. Mr. Rogers, therefore, who made this
translation, not in the Athens of Plato, but in the London of
Podsnap--in 1878, to be exact--is not much to be blamed for having
allowed it to bear the mark of its age. Nevertheless, though pardonable,
his compromise is deplorable, since it robs this translation of
precisely that quality which gives to most of the others their high
importance. For Mr. Rogers is one of those who during the last
five-and-twenty years have been busy awakening us to a new sense of the
possibilities of life. His share in that task has been to express and
restate, in a form appreciable by the modern mind, some of the
adventures and discoveries of the Hellenic genius. He is one of those
scholars who, consciously or unconsciously, have joined hands with the
boldest spirits of the age, and, by showing what the Greeks thought and
felt, have revealed to us new worlds of thought and feeling. Now, to
write like the sociologists, the subject of the _Lysistrata_ is the
fundamental nature and necessity of the interdependence of the sexes.
But what Aristophanes thought and felt about the matter is just what we
shall not find in this translation. For instance, the scene between
Cinesias and Myrrhina is essential to a perfect understanding of the
play, but the latter part of it (ll. 905-60) is not so much as
paraphrased here. And so the spirit languishes; it could flourish only
in the body created for it by the poet, and that body has been
mutilated.

This version, then, fails to bring out the profound, comic conception
that gives unity and significance to the original; nevertheless, it has
something more than such literary interest as may be supposed to belong
to any work by Mr. Rogers. The comic poet offers matter worthy the
consideration of politicians and political controversialists, and this
the translator has rendered fearlessly and well. For the _Lysistrata_ is
a political play, and cannot be discussed profitably apart from its
political ideas and arguments. It can no more be treated as pure
literature than the poetry of Keats can be treated as a