we will make our streets fill up with the smell of smoking sacrifice?
I have boiled Demos, made him young again for you and transformed something ugly into something beautiful.
And so, you fountain of marvellous schemes, where is he now?
He lives in ancient Athens, that city crowned with violets.
How can we see him? What style of clothing is he wearing? What sort of man has he become?
He has become what he was earlier, when he lived alongside Aristides and Miltiades. But you yourselves can see— for I already hear doors opening in the Propylaea. Shout out with joy,
as ancient Athens now comes into view, that wonderful place, so often praised in hymns, the place where celebrated Demos dwells.
Splendid, envied Athens, crowned with violets, show us the king of all the land of Greece.
Gaze upon this man, with the cicada in his hair, glorious in his ancient robes, anointed with myrrh and smelling now, not of mussel shells, but offerings of peace.
Hail king of the Greeks. We rejoice with you.
What you do is worthy of the city and of our trophy raised at Marathon.
Come here, Agoracritus, dearest of men. What great things you have done, by boiling me!
I did? My friend, if you do not understand the kind of person you were previously and what sort of things you did, you would think I was a god.
Tell me—what did I do before? What was I like?
Well, for a start, when someone announced in the assembly, “O Demos,
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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