In his Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation Umberto Eco suggested that ‘only by being literally unfaithful can a translator be truly faithful to the source text’. If this sounds like some sort of literary equivalent of a libertine's charter it reaches positively Casanovate proportions when applied first to drama, and, beyond that, to Greek drama. Eco's argument is not new. It had received a clear exposition in Hilaire Belloc's 1931 Taylorian Lecture ‘On translation’. Belloc offered a number of formulae relating to knowledge of the source and target languages before coining a particularly useful phrase:

This was echoed by Theodore Savory when he pointed out in The Art of Translation that more than half of what had been written about translation (1957) concerned turning Greek and Latin into English and reminded his readers of the two distinct camps, the ‘Hellenizers’ and the ‘Modernizers’.

Controversy over Greek tragedy and comedy is largely lodged within these three positions, finding a means of ‘negotiation’, to use the word as Eco does, between the stylisations demanded by a text for masked actors and the range of dramatic devices which these first playwrights were in the process of investigating; translating Belloc's ‘atmosphere of the word’; and Savory's ‘Hellenizing’ or ‘Modernizing’.