now that I have no need to fight.
And grant my truce of thirty years
will be good for us and bring success.
Come, my girl, bear the basket gracefully
and with a demure face. Happy the man
who will wed you and beget a litter
of weasel pups, who at the break of dawn
fart just as much as you do. Let’s be off—
but take care that someone in the crowd 32o
does not grab your jewels and bite them off.
Xanthias, hold the phallus fully upright
behind the basket carrier. I’ll follow,
singing the Phallic hymn. And you, my wife,
you can watch us from the roof. Off we go!
Phales, my partner in ecstatic joys
honouring Bacchus with drink all night long,
you seducer of wives and tender young boys,
six years have passed since I last sang your song!
How happy I am to be home at my farm,
now free from all worries or going to fight,
and Lamachus, too, with his call to arms,
thanks to that treaty that made all things right.
Phales, dear Phales, what bliss if I could
creep up on Thratta, that beautiful maid,
Strymodorus’s girl, who works in his wood,
as she’s stealing boughs from a Phelleus glade.
I’d grab her two arms, throw her down double quick,
and harvest her cherry with my throbbing prick.
O Phales, dear Phales, come drinking tonight.
Tomorrow at dawn if our heads feel all right,
with a goblet of wine my truce you’ll invoke,
and my shield I will hang by the hearth in the smoke.
That’s him—the man we’re after. He’s the one!
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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