Oh! oh! you debauched old dotard! you desire and, meseems, you love pretty baggages; but, by Apollo, it shall not be with impunity!
PHILOCLEON: Ah! you would be very glad to eat a lawsuit in vinegar, you would.
BDELYCLEON: 'Tis a rascally trick to steal the flute-girl away from the other guests.
PHILOCLEON: What flute-girl? Are you distraught, as if you had just returned from Pluto?
BDELYCLEON: By Zeus! But here is the Dardanian wench in person.
Nonsense. This is a torch that I have lit in the public square in honour of the gods.
BDELYCLEON: Is this a torch?
PHILOCLEON: A torch? Certainly. Do you not see it is of several different colours?
BDELYCLEON: And what is that black part in the middle?
PHILOCLEON: 'Tis the pitch running out while it burns.
BDELYCLEON: And there, on the other side, surely that is a girl's bottom?
PHILOCLEON: No. 'Tis a small bit of the torch, that projects.
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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