part of the line in which Homer placed them. We have
so many short words in English, and so few of the con-
nective particles which are lavishly used by Homer, that
often when I reached the end of the Greek line I found
myself only in the middle of my line in English. This
difficulty of subduing the thought -- by compression or
expansion of phrase -- to the limits it must fill would
alone have been sufficient to deter me from attempting
a translation in hexameters. I therefore fell back upon
blank-verse, which has been the vehicle of some of the
noblest poetry in our language;both because it seemed
to me by the flexibility of its construction best suited to
a narrative poem, and because, while it enabled me to
give the sense of my author more perfectly than any
other form of verse, it allowed me also to avoid in a
greater degree the appearance of constraint which is too
apt to belong to a translation.

"I make no apology for employing in my version the
names Jupiter, Juno, Venus, and others of Latin origin,
for Zeus, Here, Aphrodite, and other Greek names of
the deities of whom Homer speaks.The names which
I have adopted have been naturalized in our language
for centuries, and some of them, as Mercury, Vulcan,
and Dian, have even been provided with English ter-
minations.I was translating from Greek into English,
and I therefore translated the names of the gods, as
well as the other parts of the poem."

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