s.
Ah! you offer to enlighten us without a lamp!(1)

f(1) A play upon (a) word which both means 'to light' and 'to denounce.'

INFORMER
What! I may not denounce our enemies?

DICAEOPOLIS
Have a care for yourself, if you don't go off pretty quick to denounce
elsewhere.

MEGARIAN
What a plague to Athens!

DICAEOPOLIS
Be reassured, Megarian. Here is the price for your two swine,
the garlic and the salt. Farewell and much happiness!

MEGARIAN
Ah! we never have that amongst us.

DICAEOPOLIS
Well! may the inopportune wish apply to myself.

MEGARIAN
Farewell, dear little sows, and seek, far from your father, to
munch your bread with salt, if they give you any.

CHORUS
Here is a man truly happy. See how everything succeeds to his
wish. Peacefully seated in his market, he will earn his living; woe to
Ctesias,(1) and all other informers who dare to enter there! You will not
be cheated as to the value of wares, you will not again see Prepis(2)
wiping his foul rump, nor will Cleonymus(3) jostle you; you will take your
walks, clothed in a fine tunic, without meeting Hyperbolus(4) and his
unceasing quibblings, without being accosted on the public place by
any importunate fellow, neither by Cratinus,(5) shaven in the fashion
of the debauchees, nor by this musician, who plagues us with his silly
improvisations, Artemo, with his arm-pits stinking as foul as a goat,
like his father before him. You will not be the butt of the villainous
Pauson's(6) jeers, nor of Lysistratus,(7) the disgrace
of the Cholargian deme, who is the incarnation of all the vices,
and endures cold and hunger more than thirty days in the month.

f(1) An informer (sycophant), otherwise unknown.

f(2) A debauchee of vile habits; a pathic.

f(3) Mentioned above; he was as proud as he was cowardly.

f(4) An Athenian general, quarrelsome and litigious, and an Informer
into the bargain.

f(5) A comic poet of vile habits.

f(6) A painter.

f(7) A debauchee, a gambler, and always in extreme poverty.

A BOEOTIAN
By Heracles! my shoulder is quite black and blue. Ismenias, put
the penny-royal down there very gently, and all of you, musicians
from Thebes, pipe with your bone flutes into a dog's rump.(1)

f(1) This kind of flute had a bellows, made of dog-skin, much like
the bagpipes of to-day.

DICAEOPOLIS
Enough, enough, get you gone. Rascally hornets, away with you!
Whence has sprung t