If you think I’m a dolt, then beneath your long hair you’ve got no brain at all. I am fully aware that I act like a fool— I like drinking each day, and I raise up a thief for political sway, with this purpose in mind—
when he’s stuffed himself fat, then I lift up my hand and knock him down flat.
What you do then is good, and your style, as you say, in these things is profound, if you use a sly way to keep raising these men like our victims of state. They grow great on the Pnyx,
so you won’t have to wait. Then you take one who’s fat, if you need to eat meat, set him up as an offering and have something to eat.
Look at me—I am smart. I deceive all those men who think they’re so clever and can fool me again. I’m on watch for them all,
and my eye always looks though I don’t seem to see, when they’re acting like crooks. Then I make them throw up what they’ve stolen from folk— on the voting urn top they all puke when I poke.
Get the devil out of my way!
Shove off!
Demos, for a long, long time I’ve been here sitting ready, really keen to serve you.
And I’ve been ready for ages and ages— ten, twelve, a thousand—an infinite time.
I’ve been waiting thirty thousand ages, fed up with you both for an eternity.
You know what you should do?
I will if you tell me.
Send me and him out from a starting line, so we can race to see who serves you best— under the same conditions.
That we must do.
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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