Translations. – One can estimate the degree of an age’s historical sense from the way it makes translations and seeks to absorb past ages and books. The French of Corneille’s age19 as well as those of the Revolution seized Roman antiquity in a way we no longer dare to – thanks to our higher historical sense. And Roman antiquity itself: how violently and yet naively it laid its hand on everything good and lofty in the older Greek antiquity! How they translated things into the Roman present! How deliberately and insouciantly they brushed the dust off the wings of that butterfly called ‘The-Twinkling-of-an-Eye’! In this way Horace translated Alcaeus or Archilochus20 now and then, as did Propertius with Callimachus and Philetas (poets of the same rank as Theocritus,21if we may judge): what did they care that the real creator had experienced this and that and written the signs of it into his poem! As poets they were averse to the antiquarian inquisitiveness that precedes the sense for history; as poets, they did not accept these utterly personal things and names and all those things that serve as the mask and costume of a city, coast, century. Rather they quickly replaced them with what was contemporary and Roman. They seem to ask us: ‘Should we not make new for ourselves what is old and put ourselves into it? Should we not be allowed to breathe our soul into their dead body? For it is dead, after all: how ugly everything dead is!’ They did not know the pleasure of a sense for history; what was past and alien was embarrassing to them; and as Romans, they saw it as an incentive for a Roman conquest. In fact at that time one conquered by translating – not merely by leaving out the historical, but also by adding allusions to the present and, above all, crossing out the name of the poet and replacing it with one’s own – not with any sense of theft but with the very best conscience of the *imperium Romanum.*22