My computer still does not allow me to send an e-mail to my daughter

I went to bed, slept for an hour. When I woke up, I read a bit of Bacchae, lines 847-861. It's a gripping bit; Dionysus tells the Chorus what he is to do with Pentheus, the Lord of Thebes, who is determined to exterminate Dionysus, and Dionysius' orgiastic religion in Thebes. I wanted to put here the translation of these lines, for Ian Johnston prefaces his translation with the words 'Students, teachers, artists, and members of the general public may download and distribute this document without permission and without charge.' But nothing with Euripides' Bacchae is simple.

Johnston translates the introductory line 'My women! that man’s now entangled in our net.' But instead of referring to it as line 848 - as it stands in the Oxford edition - he refers to it as line 1040. Johnston explains the discrepancy in his short introduction: 'Note that in the following text the normal line numbers refer to this text [i.e. to the translation] and the ones in square brackets refer to the lines in the Greek text.' As it happens 'the normal line numbers' appear in the text only episodically - thus in our short piece the normal line number reappears once again, this time it is number 1050. The lines in square brackets appear twice as well, notably [850] and [860]. It may be aesthetically pleasing, but one must go to the Oxford text to realise that line indicated as 1040 corresponds to the line [848], and that the line indicated as 1050 corresponds to the line [855] in the original. Furthermore, the line indicated by Johnston as [860] - 'son of Zeus, born in full divinity,' makes the desired sense only as part of lines [859-861]: 'He’ll come to acknowledge Dionysus, son of Zeus, born in full divinity, most fearful and yet most kind to men.'

Since similar problems bedevil every line of this short piece of Bacchae, after long and painful deliberation I have decided to forget about it.

I began my deliberations on this piece of Bacchae at 8.45, now it's 12.23. From time to time I tried again and again to send my e-mail, to no avail.