The Debate
Σωκράτης
1105 τί δῆτα; πότερα τοῦτον ἀπάγεσθαι λαβὼν
βούλει τὸν υἱόν, διδάσκω σοι λέγειν;
Στρεψιάδης
δίδασκε καὶ κόλαζε καὶ μέμνησʼ ὅπως
εὖ μοι στομώσεις αὐτόν, ἐπὶ μὲν θάτερα
οἷον δικιδίοις, τὴν δʼ ἑτέραν αὐτοῦ γνάθον
1110 στόμωσον οἵαν ἐς τὰ μείζω πράγματα.
Σωκράτης
ἀμέλει κομιεῖ τοῦτον σοφιστὴν δεξιόν.
Φειδιππίδης
ὠχρὸν μὲν οὖν οἶμαί γε καὶ κακοδαίμονα.
1110–1119
WORSE ARGUMENT

Don’t worry. You’ll get back a person skilled in sophistry.

PHEIDIPPIDES

Someone miserably pale, I figure.

CHORUS LEADER

All right. Go in. I think you may regret this later on.

[Worse Argument and Pheidippides go into the Thinkery, while Strepsiades returns into his own house.]
CHORUS LEADER

We’d like to tell the judges here the benefits they’ll get, if they help this chorus, as by right they should. First, if you want to plough your lands in season,

we’ll rain first on you and on the others later. Then we’ll protect your fruit, your growing vines, so neither drought nor too much rain will damage them.

Translation by Ian Johnston, Vancouver Island University
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An open-access project
Hall 1906
OCT
Hall & Geldart, OCT, 1906 · 1906
The Editor

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.

About This Edition

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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