And yet it is idle, no doubt, and superfluous to deal frankly with you by way of education; for in the first place you yourself could never improve in response to my censure, any more than a tumble-bug could be persuaded not to roll those balls of his any longer, when once he has become used to them.

On the habits of the tumble-bug, or dung-beetle, soe the beginning of the Peace of Aristophanes.

In the second place, I do not believe that anyone exists who still is ignorant of your brazen performances and of the sins that you, an old man, have committed against yourself. You are not to that extent secure or unobserved in your iniquity. There is no need of anyone to strip away your lion’s skin that you may be revealed a donkey, unless perhaps someone has just come to us from the Hyperboreans, or is sufficiently Cymaean

Cf. Runaways, 13.

not to know, as soon as he sees you, that you are the most unbridled of all asses, without waiting to hear you bray. Your doings have been noised abroad so long a time, so far ahead of me, so universally and so repeatedly; and you have no slight reputation for them, surpassing Ariphrades, surpassing the Sybarite Hemitheon, surpassing the notorious Chian, Bastas, that adept in similar matters.

Ariphrades was an Athenian whom Aristophanes pilloried for perverted relations with women, The Sybarite Hemitheon (or Minthon; see the critical note) is alluded to as the author of an obscene book in the Ignorant Book-Collector, 23 (III, 203) and perhaps also in Ovid (Trist., II, 417: qui composuit nuper Sybaritica), but the name is not given there. Bastas was a nickname applied to Democritus of Chios, a musician, by Eupolis in the Baptae (Fr. 81 Kock).

Nevertheless, I must speak of them, even if I shall seem to be telling stale news, in order that I may not bear the blame of being the only one who does not know about them. But no!

We must callin one of Menander’s Prologues, Exposure, a god devoted to Truth and Frankness, by no means the least notable of the characters that appear on the stage, disliked only by you and your sort, who fear his tongue because he knows everything and tells in plain language all that he knows about you.

We do not know the play in which Exposure appeared as prologue and have no other information in the matter.

It would indeed be delightful if he should prove willing to oblige us by coming forward and telling the spectators the entire argument of the play.

Come then, Exposure, best of prologues and divinities, take care to inform the audience plainly that we have not resorted to this public utterance gratuitously, or in a quarrelsome spirit, or, as the proverb has it, with unwashen feet,

Zenobius, I, 95: “going up to the roof with unwashed feet”; unexplained by the paroemiographers or Suidas. It must have to do with the use of the roof as a sleeping-place,

but to vindicate a grievance of our own as well as those of the public, hating the man for his depravity. Say only this, and present a clear exposition, and then, giving us your blessing, take yourself off, and leave the rest to us, for we shall copy you and expose the greater part of his career so thoroughly that in point of truth and frankness you can find no fault with us. But do not sing my praises to them, Exposure dear, and do not prematurely pour out the bald truth about these traits of his; for it is not fitting, as you are a god, that the words which describe matters so abominable should come upon your lips.