But any mortal who dishonours us as gods should bear in mind the evils we will bring him. From his land he’ll get no wine or other harvest. When his olive trees and fresh young vines are budding, we’ll let fire with our sling shots, to smash and break them. If we see him making bricks, we’ll send down rain, we’ll shatter roofing tiles with our round hailstones.
If ever there’s a wedding for his relatives, or friends, or for himself, we’ll rain all through the night, so he’d rather live in Egypt than judge us wrong.
Five more days, then four, three, two—and then the day comes I dread more than all the rest. It makes me shake with fear—the day that stands between the Old Moon and the New—the day when any man I happen to owe money to swears on oath he’ll put down his deposit, take me to court. He says he’ll finish me,
do me in. When I make a modest plea for something fair, “My dear man, don’t demand this payment now, postpone this one for me, discharge that one,” they say the way things are they’ll never be repaid—then they go at me,
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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