Aeschines

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

Name /T1076/T1076_FM 03/29/00 05:12AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 11 # 11 TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE The present volume has benefited enormously from the aid of several colleagues and friends. Two debts in particular need to be acknowledged . The series editor, Michael Gagarin, offered countless corrections and improvements, and his guidance has made its presence felt on every page, especially in the area of idiom, where his intervention has resulted in a more fluent version; in almost all cases I have, and probably in all cases I should have, accepted his suggestions. I am also grateful for his permission to offer a relatively full apparatus of footnotes, necessary in my opinion in a writer as under-researched as Aeschines, whose readers lack even the limited support available for the other orators, since the most recent published commentary material (where there is any) dates to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I hope that the convenience of having the material at hand will compensate the reader for any distraction caused. The other eminence grise behind the volume is Edward Harris, who generously undertook to comment on the historical introductions and notes and made free with his impressive knowledge of the period. The resultant exchange of e-mail messages has been a source of both entertainment and instruction. His fingerprints are most visible in my note on the meetings of 18 and 19 Elaphebolion at Aeschines 2.66, a subject that continues to perplex me; but scattered throughout the book are paragraphs and notes where his intervention has brought about adjustment . He is, of course, innocent of any misconception I may have introduced in responding to his comments. I have from time to time thrown questions informally at my learned colleague Lene Rubinstein and have always emerged wiser for her responses . I have also had the opportunity over the past few years to Name /T1076/T1076_FM 03/29/00 05:12AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 12 # 12 discuss Aeschines with Athanasios Efstathiou, whose Royal Holloway doctoral dissertation, now nearing completion, is a commentary on Aeschines 2. It was the stimulus of supervising his research that induced me to volunteer to cover Aeschines for the series. I owe a special debt to the British Academy Humanities Research Board (now triumphantly reborn as the Arts and HumanitiesResearch Board) and the Leverhulme Trust for a British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship in 1996–1997. Though the Fellowship was devoted to a new edition of Lysias, I was able to while away odd moments pleasantly in the task of translating Aeschines, a diversion necessary if I was to maintain a broader perspective amid the minutiae of philology, codicology, and papyrology. Thanks are also due to the staff at the University of Texas Press for their promptness and efficiency, and especially to Sherry Wert for her accurate, thoughtful, and helpful copyediting. And I should at long last acknowledge my debt to the person who over so many years and through so many projects has done more than anyone to keep me sane amid the competing demands of modern academic life: my wife, Pauline. I don’t deserve her, but it would be a grim world if we all got what we deserved. — c. c. xii aeschines ...