ABSTRACT
The first part of A Satyr on the modern Translators (1685) by Matthew Prior (1664–1721; see also infra, No. 36). The poem was provoked by the publication of Ovid’s Epistles, Miscellany Poems (1684), and Sylvae (1685), all miscellanies for which Dryden was responsible. ‘Let our translators know’, said Prior in a letter, ‘that Rome and Athens are our territories; that our Laureate might in good manners have left the version of Latin authors to those who had the happiness to understand them’ (Prior, Literary Works (1959), ed. H. B. Wright and M. K. Spears, ii. 823; for the complete text of the Satyr, which was published in Poems on Affairs of State (1697), see ibid., i. 19–24).
