This cannot be my ring. It looks as if the seal’s been changed, unless I’m going blind.
Let me have a look. What was your seal?
A fig leaf stuffed with beef fat.
That’s not what’s here.
Not a fig leaf? What is it, then?
A sea gull with its mouth wide open—making a speech perched high up on a rock.
O that’s dreadful!
What’s the matter?
Put that ring away! Out of my sight! It’s not my signet ring. It must belong to that Cleonymus.
I’ll give you this one. You can be my steward.
Master, don’t do that yet, I implore you.
Not before you’ve heard my oracles.
And mine, as well.
If you believe this man, you’ll be flayed into a leather bottle.
And if you trust him, your prick will be sliced and cut down to a twig.
My oracles state that you are to govern every land with a crown of roses.
And mine predict you will wear an embroidered purple robe with a crown and, standing in a gold chariot, you’ll pursue Smicythos and his husband in the courts.
Well then, get the oracles,
so that Demos here can listen to them.
All right.
And you get yours, as well.
I’ll get them.
By god, we’ll do it. Nothing’s stopping us.
How very sweet will be the light of day for those who visit here and those who stay if Cleon is destroyed—though I did hear some crotchety old geezers speaking near the list of law suits by the market gate
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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