But we’re so pleased to hear your proclamation— it’s not like those which tell us to come out with rations for three days.
Be careful now in case Cerberus howls and yelps down there, the way he did when he was here on earth, and makes it hard for us to save the goddess.
No one will take her back from us again, if we can once lay hands on her.
Hip hip hurrah!
You men, if you don’t stop those cheers of yours you’ll be the death of me. War will charge out and his two feet will stomp on everything.
Well, let him make trouble and shake things up!
Let him walk over everything! Today, we’re not going to stop our celebrations.
Why seek danger? Men, what’s got into you? Your dancing’s going to wreck a splendid plan!
But I’m not the one who likes this dancing. It’s my legs—they keep hopping on their own from sheer delight. I’m not moving them.
But that’s enough now. Come on, stop dancing.
Stop it!
All right. Look, I’ve stopped.
You say so, but you haven’t stopped at all.
Well, let me dance one more turn and then I’m done.
Just one, and then you’ll have to stop—no more dancing.
If it helps you, we won’t dance any more.
But look, you still haven’t stopped!
Yes, by Zeus, I kick out my right leg like this—that’s it!
All right, I’ll let you get away with that, if you don’t keep on trying to piss me off.
Well, I must have my left leg dance as well.
I’m rid of my shield—that makes me so glad, I fart and laugh, more than if I’d shed old age.
Don’t rejoice right now. You don’t know for sure, at least not yet. But when we’ve got the goddess, then you can shout and laugh and celebrate. At that point you can sail or stay at home
or fuck or sleep, watch holy festivals, play cottabos, or live like Sybarites, and keep on yelling out “Hurray! Hurray!”
How I long to see that day at last!
I’ve endured a lot, even mattresses allotted by the gods to Phormio. You’ll no longer find me as a juryman bitter and bad tempered, nor, I think,
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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