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A Literal Translation, with Notes.
Studies
Aristophanes in Print
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96 pages - You are on Page 5
EUELPIDES. Oh dear! oh dear!
PISTHETAERUS. Aye, aye, my friend, 'tis indeed the road of "oh dears" we are following.
EUELPIDES. That Philocrates, the bird-seller, played us a scurvy trick, when he pretended these two guides could help us to find Tereus,[177] the Epops, who is a bird, without being born of one. He has indeed sold us this jay, a true son of Tharelides,[178] for an obolus, and this crow for three, but what can they do? Why, nothing whatever but bite and scratch!--What's the matter with you then, that you keep opening your beak? Do you want us to fling ourselves headlong down these rocks? There is no road that way.
PISTHETAERUS. Not even the vestige of a track in any direction.
EUELPIDES. And what does the crow say about the road to follow?
PISTHETAERUS. By Zeus, it no longer croaks the same thing it did.
EUELPIDES. And which way does it tell us to go now?
PISTHETAERUS. It says that, by dint of gnawing, it will devour my fingers.
[177] A king of Thrace, a son of Ares, who married Procne, the daughter of Pandion, King of Athens, whom he had assisted against the Megarians. He violated his sister-in-law, Philomela, and then cut out her tongue; she nevertheless managed to convey to her sister how she had been treated. They both agreed to kill Itys, whom Procne had born to Tereus, and dished up the limbs of his own son to the father; at the end of the meal Philomela appeared and threw the child's head upon the table. Tereus rushed with drawn sword upon the princesses, but all the actors in this terrible scene were metamorphised. Tereus became an Epops (hoopoe), Procne a swallow, Philomela a nightingale, and Itys a goldfinch. According to Anacreon and Apollodorus it was Procne who became the nightingale and Philomela the swallow, and this is the version of the tradition followed by Aristophanes.
[178] An Athenian who had some resemblance to a jay--so says the Scholiast, at any rate.
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