The Decision
Χορός
μακάριός γʼ ἀνὴρ ἔχων
ξύνεσιν ἠκριβωμένην.
πάρα δὲ πολλοῖσιν μαθεῖν.
1485 ὅδε γὰρ εὖ φρονεῖν δοκήσας
πάλιν ἄπεισιν οἴκαδʼ αὖ,
ἐπʼ ἀγαθῷ μὲν τοῖς πολίταις,
ἐπʼ ἀγαθῷ δὲ τοῖς ἑαυτοῦ
ξυγγενέσι τε καὶ φίλοισι,
1490 διὰ τὸ συνετὸς εἶναι.
χαρίεν οὖν μὴ Σωκράτει
παρακαθήμενον λαλεῖν,
ἀποβαλόντα μουσικὴν
τά τε μέγιστα παραλιπόντα
1495 τῆς τραγῳδικῆς τέχνης.
τὸ δʼ ἐπὶ σεμνοῖσιν λόγοισι
καὶ σκαριφησμοῖσι λήρων
διατριβὴν ἀργὸν ποιεῖσθαι,
παραφρονοῦντος ἀνδρός.
1490–1499

So to be truly civilized, don’t sit by Socrates and chat or cast the Muses’ work aside, forgetting the most vital skills of writing tragedies. Wasting time with pompous words, while idly scratching verbal bits—

that suits a man who’s lost his wits

PLUTO

So now, farewell, Aeschylus—go,

Translation by Ian Johnston, Vancouver Island University
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An open-access project
Hall 1907
OCT
Hall & Geldart, OCT, 1907 · 1907
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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