with phrases from the blacksmith’s forge.
There are men in Sparta hammering at it as well.
But if you offer me gold or silver or send your friends around, you won’t stop me announcing this to all Athenians.
Well, I’m going to the Council right away to inform them of the conspiracies involving all of you—those meetings you have in the city during the night, all your secret dealings with the Persians and their Great King and how you’re making hay with the Boeotians.
Ah, hay in Boeotia!
What’s the going rate for hay?
By Hercules, I’ll stretch that hide of yours!
Come on now! What sort of brain and heart do you possess? Now’s the time to show if you really hid that meat inside your butt crack way back when, the way you say you did. You’ve got to dash to the Council rooms—running all the way. That man is about to descend on them and slander every one of us, howling and kicking up a fuss.
I’m going. But first,
I’ll get rid of my tripe and sausages— I’ll leave them here.
Hang on! Rub some of this grease
on your neck and throat, so you can slide out from his false charges.
Excellent advice— spoken like a wrestling master.
All right. Now take this and swallow it!
What is it?
You’ll fight better when you’re stuffed with garlic. Hurry up! Get a move on!
That’s what I’m doing!
Remember now—bite the man, slander him, eat up his coxcomb. Don’t come back here
until you’ve gobbled his wattles.
Go and good luck! May you live up to my hopes, and may Zeus
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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