and ordered me to offer you one drachma for some thrushes and three drachmas
for an eel from lake Copais.
DICAEOPOLIS Who is he, this Lamachus who wants to buy an eel?
SERVANT OF LAMACHUS The terrible bearer of a bull’s eye shield, who likes to brandish his Gorgon’s head and the three plumes covering his helmet.
DICAEOPOLIS No, he’ll not get anything, not even if he offers me his shield. Let him shake those plumes of his above some salted fish.
If he comes here and starts to make a fuss, I’ll appeal to the the clerks of the market.
But now, I’ll take these goods for myself and go back home, ‘flying on the wings
of a blackbird and a thrush.’
CHORUS You see, all you citizens of Athens, you see how prudent and intelligent this man is. Thanks to a truce he made, he has imported all these goods we find
useful in the home and pleasant to eat hot.
All the finest things come to him on their own.
I will never welcome into my house
the god of war, nor will he ever sing that song “Harmodius” in my presence,
Frederick William Hall (1865–1948) was a classical scholar and Fellow of St John's College, Oxford. Together with William Martin Geldart, he produced the Oxford Classical Text of several authors. Hall was a careful editor known for his thorough collation of manuscripts and his conservative approach to textual criticism.
The Hall–Geldart editions in the Oxford Classical Texts series provide reliable critical texts with selective apparatus criticus. The OCT series, established in 1894 as the Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis, aims to present the best available Greek and Latin texts in a format suitable for both scholarly use and teaching. Each volume provides a clean text with the most significant manuscript variants recorded at the foot of each page.
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