at all, and if he is a dexterous writer, like Pope or Johnson, he is sure to be able to introduce a number of small equivalents, some of them perhaps actual improvements on the original, while he is at liberty to throw into the shade those points of which he despairs of being able to make anything.  A translator has three courses open to him, to translate more or less verbally, so as to run the risk of being unintelligible to a reader unacquainted with the original, to generalize what is special, and to borrow something of the imitator’s licence, introducing a modern speciality in place of an ancient.  Here, as I have found on other occasions of the kind, to be allowed a choice of evils is itself a matter for self-congratulation.  To be shut up entirely to one or other of these resources would be a serious misfortune:  to be able to employ them (should it seem advisable) successively is no inconsiderable relief.  The last of the three no doubt requires to be used very sparingly indeed, or one great object of translating a classic, the laying open of ancient life and thought to a modern reader, will be wantonly sacrificed.  No one now-a-days would dream of going as far in this direction as Dryden and some of the translators of his period, talking e.g. about “the new Lord Mayor” and “the Louvre of the sky.”  But there are occasionally minor points—­very minor ones, I admit—­where a modern equivalent is allowable, if not absolutely necessary.  Without transforming bodily a Roman caena into an English dinner, one may sometimes effect with advantage a trifling change in the less important dishes:  a boar must not appear as a baron of beef, but a scarus may perhaps be turned, as I have turned it, into a sardine.  In money again it would surely be needless pedantry in the translator of a satirist to talk of sestertia rather than pounds.  I fear I have not always been at the pains to make the English sum even roughly equivalent to the Roman, but have from time to time introduced a particular English sum arbitrarily, if it appeared to suit the context or even the metre.  Thus, where Philip gives or lends Mena fourteen sestertia that he may buy a farm, I have not startled the modern agricultural reader by talking about a hundred and twenty pounds, but have ventured to turn the sestertia into so many hundreds.  On the whole, however, while I certainly cannot recommend any one to try to distil Latin antiquities from my translation as they are sometimes distilled from the original, I hope that I have not been unfaithful to the antique spirit, but have reflected with sufficient accuracy the broad features of Roman life.