First Episode
Χορός
ἥδιστον φάος ἡμέρας
ἔσται τοῖσι παροῦσι καὶ
975 τοῖσι δεῦρʼ ἀφικνουμένοις,
ἢν Κλέων ἀπόληται.
καίτοι πρεσβυτέρων τινῶν
οἵων ἀργαλεωτάτων
ἐν τῷ δείγματι τῶν δικῶν
980 ἤκουσʼ ἀντιλεγόντων,
ὡς εἰ μὴ ʼγένεθʼ οὗτος ἐν
τῇ πόλει μέγας, οὐκ ἂν ἤστην
σκεύη δύο χρησίμω,
δοῖδυξ οὐδὲ τορύνη.
985 ἀλλὰ καὶ τόδʼ ἔγωγε θαυμάζω
τῆς ὑομουσίας
αὐτοῦ· φασὶ γὰρ αὐτὸν οἱ
παῖδες οἳ ξυνεφοίτων,
τὴν Δωριστὶ μόνην ἂν ἁρμόττεσθαι
980–989

who claimed if he had not become so great the city would lack two useful boons

our pounding pestles and our stirring spoons. I’m amazed in music he is such a swine. His class mates at school say all the time he’d tune his strings in the Dorian way,

990 θαμὰ τὴν λύραν,
ἄλλην δʼ οὐκ ἐθέλειν μαθεῖν·
κᾆτα τὸν κιθαριστὴν
ὀργισθέντʼ ἀπάγειν κελεύειν,
ὡς ἁρμονίαν παῖς
995 οὗτος οὐ δύναται μαθεῖν
ἢν μὴ Δωροδοκιστί.
990–999

unwilling to find out how he might play a different mode. His teacher grew stern and sent him away, “This boy will not learn. The Dorian style is all he will play, and when he does he expects you to pay.”

PAPHLAGONIAN [coming from the house with a pile of scrolls]

Here, look at this lot. I haven’t brought out

all of them.

SAUSAGE SELLER [with an even bigger pile of scrolls]

I can’t carry all of mine. By god, I need to take a shit!

DEMOS

What is this?

PAPHLAGONIAN

Oracles.

DEMOS

All of them?

PAPHLAGONIAN

Are you surprised? By god, I’ve got a chest jammed full of them.

Translation by Ian Johnston, Vancouver Island University
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An open-access project
Hall 1906
OCT
Hall & Geldart, OCT, 1906 · 1906
The Editor

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.

About This Edition

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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