Perde 5
[Textpart 1]
Then you have what you desire; for myself, I wish for what I could desire.
DEMAENETUS
Submit to it this one day, since I’ve given you the power to be with her for a year, and have procured for you the command of money in your amour.
ARGYRIPPUS
Well, by doing that, you have laid me under an obligation to you.
DEMAENETUS
Why then don’t you show yourself cheerful to me?
[Textpart 2]
Prithee, do you say that my husband is carousing here, together with my son?—and that he has carried to his mistress twenty minae of silver?—and that, with the knowledge of my son, his father is perpetrating this wickedness?
A PARASITE
Trust me in nothing henceforth, either divine or human,
Artemona, if you find me untruthful in this matter.
855
ARTEMONA
Wretched then am I, who have supposed that, beyond others, my husband was sober, decent, chaste, and especially fond of his wife.
A PARASITE
But now, henceforth, understand that he, before all men, is a person of the smallest worth—a drunkard, a good-for-nothing fellow, unchaste, and a contemner of his own wife.
ARTEMONA
I’ faith, if this wasn’t true, he would never be doing the things that he is now doing.
860
A PARASITE
Upon my word, I too always hitherto took him to be a decent person; but by this action he declares himself,—to be carousing, indeed, together with his son, and, a decrepit old man, toying with a mistress in his company.
ARTEMONA
For this it is, i’ faith, that he’s going out to dinner every day.
He says that he’s going to Archidemus, Chereas, Chaerestratus, Clinius, Chremes, Cratinus, Dinias, Demosthenes: while he’s thinking of debauchery, and public dens of infamy with his harlot.
865
A PARASITE
Why don’t you bid your maid-servants carry him off home upon their shoulders?
ARTEMONA
Do you only be quiet. By my troth, I’ll surely give him some trouble.
A PARASITE
I’m sure of it, that so it will befall him, so long, indeed, as you shall continue married to him.
ARTEMONA
I was fancying that this fellow was still giving attendance either in the senate or to his dependants: that for that reason it was, that, worn out with fatigue, he snored the whole night through. Wearied with his labours out of doors he comes home at night. Another’s farm he ploughs, his own he leaves untilled.
870
Both he himself is corrupted, and he corrupts his son as well.
875
A PARASITE
Do you only follow me this way, I’ll make you just now to fall upon the man himself in the very fact.
ARTEMONA
By heaven, there’s nothing that I could more wish for.
