Perde 2
[Textpart 3]
Don’t you hear, Clinia? Your mistress is close at hand.
CLINIA
Why yes, I do hear now at last, and I see and revive, Clitipho.
DROMO
No wonder; they are so encumbered; they are bringing a troop of female attendantsTroop of female attendants: The train and expenses of a courtesan of high station are admirably depicted in the speech of Lysiteles, in the Trinummus of Plautus, 1. 252. with them.
245
CLINIA
I’m undone! Whence come these female attendants?
SYRUS
We ought not to have left them; what a quantity of things they are bringing!
SYRUS
Jewels of gold, and clothes; it’s growing late too, and they don’t know the way. It was very foolish of us to leave them. Just go back, Dromo, and meet them. Make haste—why do you delay?
CLINIA
Woe unto wretched me!—from what high hopes am I fallen!
250
CLITIPHO
What’s the matter? Why, what is it that troubles you?
CLINIA
Do you ask what it is? Why, don’t you see? Attendants, jewels of gold, and clothes. her too, whom I left here with only one little servant girl. Whence do you suppose that they come?
CLITIPHO
Oh! now at last I understand you.
SYRUS
Good Gods! what a multitude there is! Our house will hardly hold them, I’m sure.
How much they will eat! how much they will drink! what will there be more wretched than our old gentleman? (Catching sight of CLINIA and CLITIPHO.) But look, I espy the persons I was wanting.
255
CLINIA
Oh Jupiter! Why, where is fidelity gone? While I, distractedly wandering, have abandoned my country for your sake, you, in the mean time, Antiphila, have been enriching yourself, and have forsaken me in these troubles, you for whose sake I am in extreme disgrace, and have been disobedient to my father;
on whose account I am now ashamed and grieved, that he who used to lecture me about the manners of these women, advised me in vain, and was not able to wean me away from her:—which, however, I shall now do; whereas when it might have been advantageous to me to do so, I was unwilling. There is no being more wretched than I.
260
SYRUS
He certainly has been misled by our words which we have been speaking here. (Aloud.) Clinia, you imagine your mistress quite different from what she really is.
For both her mode of life is the same, and her disposition toward you is the same as it always was; so far as we could form a judgment from the circumstances themselves.
265
CLINIA
How so, prithee? For nothing in the world could I rather wish for just now, than that I have suspected this without reason.
SYRUS
This, in the first place, then (that you may not be ignorant of any thing that concerns her); the old woman,
