not like good parties with my friends and steady drinking round the fire, blazing wood from well-dried logs cut up in summer time, cooking chick peas, roasting acorns, giving our Thracian girl a kiss, while the wife is in her bath.

Nothing’s more pleasant, once the sowing done,

than for god to send soft rain drizzling down and for a friend to say, “Since it’s like this, Comarchides, tell me what we should do.”

“Well, since the god is treating us so well, I’d like to have a drink. So come on, wife, warm up three measures of those chick peas, mix in some wheat with them, and give us figs. Get Sura to call Manes from the fields. Today it’s totally impossible to prune the vines or shovel up the mud. The ground is soaked right through. Get someone to fetch the thrush for me and those two finches. And there was fresh birth milk in the house

and four bits of hare, unless the weasel got off with some of them last evening. I don’t know what was making all that noise and rattling round in there. And so, my boy, serve us up three of them and then take one and give it to my father. And then ask Aeschinades for some myrtle branches, ones with berries, and since it’s on the way someone should invite Charinades.

So he can come and drink with us

to god who’s giving so much help assisting with our crops.

As soon as the cicada sings his own sweet song, I love to see

if those Lemnian vines of mine are ripe already, their nature makes them the very first to bloom and to look at the swelling figs, which, when they’re ripe, I love to eat and keep on eating while I say

“I do love these seasons.” And then I crush some thyme and stir a drink. Yes, I do get fat in summer time.

Much fatter than if I were looking at some god damned military officer with three helmet plumes and a crimson cloak, dazzling red, which he claims is real dye from Sardis. But if he ever has to fight in his red cloak, then he himself gets dyed the real Cyzicene yellow. He’s the first

to run away, shaking those plumes of his just like a brown and yellow horse-cock, while I stand there like someone watching a hunting net. And then when they get home, they act in an intolerable way. On the conscription list they scribble down

some of our names and scratch out others, back and forth two or three times at random. Tomorrow is set as the departure date, and this man’s purchased no provisions.

He had no idea he was moving out. Then he stops in front of Pandion’s statue, sees his name, and rushes off in distress, with a bitter glare at his misfortune. They do these things to us country people, less so to city folk, these very ones who before god and men threw away their shields. And if the gods are willing, I’ll still call them to account for it.

They’ve injured me with many slights.

Those men who act at home like lions are foxes when it comes to fights.

Oh, oh! What a crowd we’ve got coming here for the wedding dinner. Come on, dust off the tables with this thing. There’s nothing else it’s good for any more. And then pile up the cakes, the thrushes, plenty of the hare, and rolls of bread.

Where’s Trygaeus? Where is he?

I’m cooking thrushes.

O dearest Trygaeus, you’ve done us so much good by making Peace!

Before now no one would’ve paid an obol