Never mind! you can stool, if you want, in my house.
YOUNG MAN: Oh! I fear doing more than I want to; but I offer you two good securities.
SECOND OLD WOMAN: I don't require them.
THIRD OLD WOMAN: Hi! friend, where are you off to with that woman?
YOUNG MAN: I am not going with her, but am being dragged by force. Oh! whoever you are, may heaven bless you for having had pity on me in my dire misfortune. (_Turns round and sees the Third Old Woman._) Oh Heracles! oh Heracles! oh Pan! Oh ye Corybantes! oh ye Dioscuri! Why, she is still more awful! Oh! what a monster! great gods! Are you an ape plastered with white lead, or the ghost of some old hag returned from the dark borderlands of death?
No jesting! Follow me.
SECOND OLD WOMAN: No, come this way.
THIRD OLD WOMAN: I will never let you go.
SECOND OLD WOMAN: Nor will I.
YOUNG MAN: But you will rend me asunder, you cursed wretches.
SECOND OLD WOMAN: 'Tis I he must go with according to the law.
THIRD OLD WOMAN: Not if an uglier old woman than yourself appears.
YOUNG MAN: But if you kill me at the outset, how shall I afterwards go to find this beautiful girl of mine?
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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