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INTRODUCTION
xi

echoes, or whether fairly successful and adequate or the contrary, if they possess an independent literary quality, have the merit of guiding the sympathetic and ambitious reader to the original. It is to be hoped that this will be the outcome for many readers of these pages.

In the present volume the attempt has been made, and in my opinion happily made, to group together a considerable number of representative passages, each of distinct intrinsic interest, from Greek poetry and prose, mainly of the classical age, in the best available translations; the translations, so far as possible, come from the hands of acknowledged masters of English speech. The selections from each author are accompanied by brief biographical sketches and other notes in which the place of the author in Greek literature is sketched, and other pertinent information is given.

We have here representation of nearly all the classes of extant Greek poetry. Three memorable passages from the Iliad which recount scenes in the life of Hector and the mourning for him (in Bryant's translation), followed by one book of the Odyssey—Odysseus and Polyphemus—(in Worsley's version) open the volume and give us a glimpse of epic poetry. What we call lyric poetry is represented in selections from Tyrtaeus and Archilochus, in three interesting specimens of Scolia, and in entire poems or fragments of Alcaeus, Sappho, Simonides of Ceos, and Pindar. Then follow Mrs. Browning's Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus and Plumptre's Antigone of Sophocles, each entire. These, with selections from the Mad Heracles and nearly the whole of the Alcestis of Euripides, in Mr. Browning's transcripts, stand for Greek tra-