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"Any citizen above fifty years old may speak any citizen not disqualified may speak." Then I rise: a great murmur of curiosity while I am mounting the stand. CALLIDEMUS. Of curiosity! yes, and of something else too. SPEUSIPPUS. Never fear. CALLIDEMUS. I shall choke with rage.

See Aristophanes; Plutus, 602. SPEUSIPPUS. Why, thou unreasonable old man! Thou most shameless of fathers! CALLIDEMUS. Ungrateful wretch; dare you talk so? Are you not afraid of the thunders of Jupiter? SPEUSIPPUS. Jupiter thunder! nonsense! Anaxagoras says, that thunder is only an explosion produced by CALLIDEMUS. He does! Would that it had fallen on his head for his pains!

SPEUSIPPUS. Oh! that mass of barbarous absurdities, the Prometheus. But I have framed it anew upon the model of Euripides. By Bacchus, I shall make Sophocles and Agathon look about them. You would not know the play again. CALLIDEMUS. By Jupiter, I believe not. SPEUSIPPUS. I have omitted the whole of the absurd dialogue between Vulcan and Strength, at the beginning.

Enter CALLIDEMUS and SPEUSIPPUS; CALLIDEMUS. So, you young reprobate! You must be a man of wit, forsooth, and a man of quality! You must spend as if you were as rich as Nicias, and prate as if you were as wise as Pericles! You must dangle after sophists and pretty women! And I must pay for all! I must sup on thyme and onions, while you are swallowing thrushes and hares!

"Coelus begat Saturn and Briareus Cottus and Creius and Iapetus, Gyges and Hyperion, Phoebe, Tethys, Thea and Rhea and Mnemosyne. Then Saturn wedded Rhea, and begat Pluto and Neptune, Jupiter and Juno." CALLIDEMUS. Very beautiful, and very natural; and, as you say, very like Euripides. SPEUSIPPUS. You are sneering. Really, father, you do not understand these things.

All trumped up by Aristophanes! CALLIDEMUS. By Pallas, if he is in the habit of putting shoes on his fleas, he is kinder to them than to himself. But listen to me, boy; if you go on in this way, you will be ruined. There is an argument for you. Go to your Socrates and your Melesigenes, and tell them to refute that. Ruined! Do you hear? SPEUSIPPUS. Ruined! CALLIDEMUS. Ay, by Jupiter!

You have succeeded, I grant, to his impudence, for which, if there be justice in Tartarus, he is now soaking up to the eyes in his own tanpickle. But the Paphlagonian had parts. SPEUSIPPUS. And you mean to imply CALLIDEMUS. Not I. You are a Pericles in embryo, doubtless. Well: and when are you to make your first speech? O Pallas!

It may be very pleasant to live at other people's expense; but not very pleasant, I should think, to hear the pestle give its last bang against the mortar, when the cold dose is ready. Pah! SPEUSIPPUS. Hemlock? Orestes! folly! I aim at nobler objects. What say you to politics, the general assembly? CALLIDEMUS. You an orator! oh no! no! Cleon was worth twenty such fools as you.

You had not those advantages in your youth CALLIDEMUS. Which I have been fool enough to let you have. No; in my early days, lying had not been dignified into a science, nor politics degraded into a trade. I wrestled, and read Homer's battles, instead of dressing my hair, and reciting lectures in verse out of Euripides.

CALLIDEMUS. That may be, on the whole, an improvement. The play will then open with that grand soliloquy of Prometheus, when he is chained to the rock. "Oh! ye eternal heavens! ye rushing winds! Ye fountains of great streams! Ye ocean waves, That in ten thousand sparkling dimples wreathe Your azure smiles! All-generating earth! All-seeing sun! On you, on you, I call."