I Ancient mock-epic or mock-heroic literature illustrates several important problems in the translation of Latin and Greek, but most importantly the problem of style and tone. The recently available option of searching in a computer database for words and phrases wherever they occur in Classical literature has given translators their first real opportunity to do the necessary research on style and tone within reasonable lengths of time; in the past, even when the best dictionaries and

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... es where at hand, hours of searching through them could in some cases be necessary to determine for certain the flavor of even a few words, so that for translation of all but the shortest works of literature thorough research was simply impractical. Technological shortcuts will probably contribute to the raising of translation standards and the production of texts accurate and attractive enough even for an academic marketplace where competition with the Classics has grown enormously during the past few decades. In writing my dissertation on humor in the Roman novelist Petronius,1 a dissertation in which style and tone were major concerns, I was fortunate enough to have access to all of Latin literature on computer disk,2 as wel1 as to the archives of the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, the comprehensive dictionary of Classical Latin, which now, about eighty years after work on it began, is complete up to the volume for the letter "P". With these resources, I was able to identify by examples some major translation pitfal1s and challenges. They illustrate some of the most problematic and at the same time most delightful features of Petronius, and also some general issues in reading and translating ancient literature, particularly in translating its humor, which is notoriously difficult to reproduce. The fragments of Petronius' novel The Satyricon contain the picaresque adventures of the narrator Encolpius (a Greek word for "crotch") and his companions in the South of Italy. The novel is set, and was probably written, around A.D. 60, during the reign of Nero. The story is raucous and farcical, but also elegantly written and highly learned. These qualities stand in especially stark contrast to each other in the fight scenes in the novel -Chapters 95.4-9, 108.3-13, 136.4-9 -where the style is what I would cal1 "mock epic" or "mock heroic". In this essay I discuss translation issues in terms of the practical problems I have encountered in translating the first of these scenes, the text of which I reproduce, along with my own translations, a basic and more finished one, in an appendix following the discussion. "Mock epic" and "mock heroic" are in reality only convenient shorthand terms for the style of this scene. The scene does contain lofty language of battle and conflict, but this S. Ruden, 1993.