Page:Comedies of Aristophanes (Hickie 1853) vol1.djvu/189

1353—1372.

. Well now, I will tell yon from what we first began to rail at one another. After we had feasted, as you know, I first bade him take a lyre, and sing a song of Simonides, "The Shearing of the Ram." But he immediately said it was old-fashioned to play on the lyre, and sing while drinking, like a woman grinding parched barley.

. For ought you not then immediately to be beaten and trampled on, bidding me sing, just as if you were entertaining cicadæ?

. He expressed, however, such opinions then too within, as he does now; and he asserted that Simonides was a bad poet. I bore it at first, with difficulty, indeed, yet nevertheless I bore it. And then I bade him at least take a myrtle-wreath and recite to me some portion of Æschylus; and then he immediately said, "Shall I consider Æschylus the first among the poets, full of empty sound, unpolished, bombastic, using rugged words?" And hereupon you can't think how my heart panted. But, nevertheless, I restrained my passion, and said, "At least recite some passage of the more modern poets, of whatever kind these clever things be." And he immediately sang a passage of Euripides, how a brother, O averter of ill! debauched his uterine sister. And