Perde 2
[Textpart 3]
Young man, stay and listen.
LAMPADISCUS
What, are you calling to me, woman?
LAMPADISCUS
What’s the matter? For I’m fully engaged.
MELAENIS
Who lives there?
LAMPADISCUS
Demipho, my master.
MELAENIS
It is he, I suppose, that has betrothed his daughter with such great wealth to Alcesimarchus?
600
LAMPADISCUS
It is he himself.
MELAENIS
How now, you? What other daughter, then, are you people now in search of?
LAMPADISCUS
I’ll tell you; not his daughter by his wife, but his wife’s daughter.
MELAENIS
What’s the meaning of that speech?
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LAMPADISCUS
By a former woman, I say, my master had a daughter born.
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MELAENIS
Surely, just now you said you were in search of the daughter of her who has been talking here.
LAMPADISCUS
Her daughter I am in search of.
MELAENIS
In what way then, pray, is she a former woman, who is now his wife?
LAMPADISCUS
Woman, whoever you are, you weary me with your prating.
The middle woman The middle woman: Medioxumam. The middle woman, although his first wife, and the mother of the daughter whom he had betrothed to Alcesimarchus; he having had Phanostrata the first, as a woman (when he ravished her), but not as a wife until after the death of his first wife. whom he had for a wife, of her this maiden was born that’s being given to Alcesimarchus. That wife is dead. Do you understand now?
MELAENIS
I understand that quite well; but it’s this knotty point I’m enquiring about, how
the first can be the last, the last be the first.
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LAMPADISCUS
The fact is this; this woman he ravished before he took her home as his wife; before that she was pregnant, and before that she gave birth to a daughter: after she gave birth to her, she ordered the infant to be exposed; I myself exposed her; another woman took her away;
