Perde 2
[Textpart 2]
Don’t be touching me.
STRATILAX
I, touch thee? So help me my weeding-hoe, I’d rather i’ the country for me to be harnessed like an ox with crumpled horns, and with it spend the livelong night upon the straw, than that a hundred nights with thee, with a dinner apiece, were given me for nothing!
But what business, woman, hast thee at our house? Why dost thee come running this way as often as we come to town?
ASTAPHIUM
I want to meet with your women.
STRATILAX
What women art thee talking to me about, when there’s not even a single woman-fly within the house?
ASTAPHIUM
What, does no woman live here?
285
STRATILAX
They’ve gone into the country, I say. Be off.
285
ASTAPHIUM
Why are you bawling out, you lunatic?
STRATILAX
If thee doesn’t make haste to get away from this with prodigious speed, I’ll forthwith be separating even from thy brains those falsified, daintily arranged, corkscrew curls of thine, with all their grease as well.
ASTAPHIUM
For what reason, pray?
STRATILAX
Why, because thee hast even presumed to approach our door anointed up with thine unguents, and because thee hast those cheeks so nicely, painted pink.
ASTAPHIUM
I’ troth, it was by reason of your clamour that I coloured in my alarm.
STRATILAX
And is it so? Thee coloured? As though, hussy, thee really hadst left to thy skin the power of receiving any colour. Redden up thy cheeks, thee hast given all thy skin its colour with chalkIts colour with chalk: Chalk was much used by the Roman females for the purposes of a cosmetic..
Ye are scoundrelly jades.
295
What’s the reason, abominable hussies, that this way ?
295
I know more than thee think’st I know.
ASTAPHIUM
Prithee, what’s this that you know?
STRATILAX
How Strabax, my master’s son, is ruining himself at your house; how you are all enticing him to fraud and present-making.
ASTAPHIUM
If you appeared in your senses, I’d tell you. You’re uttering abuse only;
not a person is in the habit of being ruined here at our house; they waste their property; when they’ve wasted their property, they may go bare thence, if they choose. I don’t know this young man of yours.
300
