NOTE ON TRANSLATION

In producing this translation, I have made use of both John Burnet’s edition of the Greek, first published in 1907 for Oxford Classical Libraries, and that of Joseph Souilhé, first published in 1931 by Belle Lettres for their Guillaume Budé series. The latter is the more complete, in that its collation and critical apparatus include some manuscripts to which Burnet does not refer, but here and there Burnet includes a variant left out by Souilhé. I have also referred regularly to the digital images of the original manuscripts made available online by the libraries in which they reside.

In cases of substantive disagreement between manuscript readings, I have generally tried to translate according to the main text of the oldest and best manuscripts—especially Parisinus Graecus 1807 and Vaticanus Graecus 1 (Bekker’s A and O, respectively)—avoiding the emendations of later scribes and scholars when reasonable and above all when justified by the principle of lectio difficilior potior. I have used the footnotes to record important manuscript variants as much as considerations of conciseness and ease of reading would allow. Whenever I have transliterated Greek words in footnotes or in the interpretive essay, I have employed the ē and ō symbols for eta and omega, and represented theta, phi, chi, and psi as “th,” “ph,” “ch,” and “ps,” respectively. When the second person plural is employed in the Greek, I have usually written “you [pl]” in the translation, lest the plural be mistaken for a singular.

My guiding principle in rendering the text into English has been to enable the reader who does not possess knowledge of ancient Greek to come as close as possible to the precise and literal meaning of the text. This often requires a sacrifice of fluidity and gracefulness in the English; the reader will have to navigate many long and complex sentences and learn to think about the text’s subject matter in terms of categories and ideas belonging to a worldview rather distant from our own. But all this has been done for the sake of ensuring that the original author’s careful choice of words and composition of sentences are respected and preserved in translation. I feel certain that the resulting translation, among other advantages, can be trusted more than any of its predecessors to translate key terms consistently: words related to dikē are always given by some form of “justice,” words related to phusis by some form of “nature,” and so on. I have indicated in footnotes where context has compelled me to deviate from this principle of consistency in regard to words I consider significant within the Letters.

For all that I believe my translation constitutes an improvement on past attempts, I must acknowledge my debt to the fine translations to which I have referred continuously in the course of my work. First and foremost, I have learned a great deal from the translation of J. Harward (1932), who provides copious footnotes on difficult points in the grammar and syntax of the Greek. I have also benefited from the English translations of Glenn R. Morrow (1962), L. A. Post (1925), and R. G. Bury (1929), as well as the French translations of Joseph Souilhé (1931) and Luc Brisson (1993).