Perde 4
[Textpart 3]
Touch me; I’ll dash you down on the ground just in such fashion as I’m in the habit of doing with a polypus fish With a polypus fish: The polypus not being eatable, the fishermen would throw it violently on the ground on finding it in the nets.. Would you like to fight?
1010
TRACHALIO
What need is there? Nay, in preference, divide the booty.
GRIPUS
You can’t get anything from here but harm to yourself, so don’t expect it. I’m taking myself off.
TRACHALIO
But I’ll turn aside your ship from that direction, that you mayn’t be off anywhere—stop.
GRIPUS
If you are the helmsman of this ship, I’ll be the pilot.
Let go of the rope now, you villain.
1015
TRACHALIO
I will let go; do you let go of the wallet.
1015
GRIPUS
I’ faith, you shall never this day become a scrap the more wealthy from this.
TRACHALIO
You cannot convince me by repeatedly denying, unless either a part is given me, or it is referred to arbitration, or it is placed in safe keeping.
GRIPUS
What, that which I got out of the sea—?
TRACHALIO
But I spied it out from the shore.
GRIPUS
—With my own pains and labour, and net and boat.
1020
TRACHALIO
If now the owner, whose property it is, were to come, how am I, who espied from afar that you had taken this, a bit the less the thief than yourself?
1020
TRACHALIO
Stop, you whip-knave; just let me learn of you by what reasoning I am not the sharer, and yet the thief.
GRIPUS
I don’t know; neither do I know these city laws of yours,
only that I affirm that this is mine.
1025
TRACHALIO
And I, too, say that it is mine.
1025
GRIPUS
Stay now; I’ve discovered by what method you may be neither thief nor sharer.
TRACHALIO
By what method?
