Perde 4
[Textpart 3]
This must be seen to, I say,
SYRUS
that your friend’s business as well is placed in a state of security. For if you now go away from us, and leave Bacchis here, our old man will immediately come to know that she is Clitipho’s mistress; if you take her away with you, it will be concealed just as much as it has been hitherto concealed.
695
CLINIA
But still, Syrus, nothing can make more against my marriage than this;
for with what face am I to address my father about it? You understand what I mean?
700
CLINIA
What can I say? What excuse can I make?
SYRUS
Nay, I don’t want you to dissemble; tell him the whole case just as it really is.
CLINIA
What is it you say ?
SYRUS
I bid you do this; tell him that you are in love with her, and want her for a wife: that this Bacchis is Clitipho’s mistress.
CLINIA
You require a thing that is fair and reasonable, and easy to be done.
And I suppose, then, you would have me request my father to keep it a secret from your old man.
705
SYRUS
On the contrary; to tell him directly the matter just as it is.
CLINIA
What? Are you quite in your senses or sober? Why, you were for ruining him outright. For how could he be in a state of security ? Tell me that.
SYRUS
For my part, I yield the palm to this device. Here I do pride myself exultingly, in having in myself such exquisite resources, and power of address so great, as to deceive them both by telling the truth: so that when your old man tells ours that she is his son’s mistress, he’ll still not believe him.
CLINIA
But yet, by these means you again cut off all hopes of my marriage; for as long as Chremes believes that she is my mistress, he’ll not give me his daughter.
Perhaps you care little what becomes of me, so long as you provide for him.
715
SYRUS
What the plague, do you suppose I want this pretense to be kept up for an age ? ’Tis but for a single day, only till I have secured the money: you be quiet; I ask no more.
CLINIA
Is that sufficient? If his father should come to know of it, pray, what then?
SYRUS
What if I have recourse to those who say, What now if the sky were to fall?If the sky were to fall: He means those who create unnecessary difficulties in their imagination. Colman quotes the following remark from Patrick: There is a remarkable passage in Arrian’s Account of Alexander, lib. iv., where he tells us that some ambassadors from the Celtae, being asked by Alexander what in the world they dreaded most, answered, That they feared lest the sky should fall [upon them]. Alexander, who expected to hear himself named, was surprised at an answer which signified that they thought themselves beyond the reach of all human power, plainly implying that nothing could hurt them, unless he would suppose impossibilities, or a total destruction of nature. Aristotle, in his Physics, B. iv., informs us that it was the early notion of ignorant nations that the sky was supported on the shoulders of Atlas, and that when he let go of it, it would fall.
CLINIA
I’m afraid to go about it.
720
