save our city with your noble thoughts, and educate our fools—we have so many. Take this sword, hand it to Cleophon. Present this rope to tax collector Myrmex and his colleague Nicomachos— this hemlock give to Archenomos. Tell them to come here fast without delay. If they don’t come soon, then, by Apollo,
I’ll brand and cripple them, then ship them down at full speed underground with Adeimantos, Leucolophos's son.
That I'll do. As for my chair of honour, give it to Sophocles to keep safe for me in case I ever come back here. He’s the one whose talent I would put in second place. Bear in mind—the rogue right there, this clown,
this liar, will never occupy my chair, not even by mistake.
Let your torches shine,
your sacred torches light the way for him, escort him on his way—and praise his fame with his own songs and dances.
First, all you spirits underneath the ground, let’s bid our poet here a fond farewell, as he goes upward to the light. To the city grant worthy thoughts of every excellence.
Then we could put an end to our great pain, the harmful clash of arms Let Cleophon— and all those keen to fight—war on their enemy
in their ancestral fields, on their own property.
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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