Amphitryon, or Jupiter in Disguise (574-608)

This fellow’s drunk, as I imagine.

What, I?

Yes—you there.

I wish I were so.

You are wishing for that which is fact; where have you been drinking?

Nowhere, indeed.

What is this, that is the matter with the fellow?

Really I have told you ten times over. I am both at home now, I say (do you mark me?), and I, Sosia, am with you likewise. Don’t I appear, master, to have told you quite distinctly, and quite circumstantially, that this is so.

Avaunt,

get away with you from me.

What’s the matter?

A pestilence possesses you.

But why do you say so to me? I really am quite well and in perfect health, Amphitryon.

But I’ll make you this very day, just as you have deserved, not to be quite so well, and to be miserable instead of your perfect health, if I return home.

Follow me, you who in this fashion are making sport of your master with your crack-brained talk; you, who, since you have neglected to perform what your master ordered, are now come even of your own accord to laugh at your master. Things which neither can happen, and which no one ever yet heard of in talk, you are telling of, you villain; on your back I’ll take care and make those lies to tell this very day.

Amphitryon, this is the most wretched of wretchedness to a good servant, who is telling the truth to his master, if that same truth is overpowered by violence.

Discuss it with me by proofs. Why, how the plague can such a thing happen, for you now to be both here and at home? That I want to be told.

I really am both here and there; this any person has a right to wonder at; nor, Amphitryon, does this seem more. strange to you than to myself.

In what way?

In no degree, I say, is this more strange to you than to myself; nor, so may the Deities love me, did I at first credit Sosia—me myself, until that Sosia, I myself, made me to believe me myself. In order did he relate everything, as each thing came to pass, when we sojourned with the enemy;

and then besides, he has carried off my figure together with my name. Not even is milk more like to milk than is that I myself like to me myself. For when some time since, before daybreak, you sent me from the harbour home before you—

What then?

I had been standing a long time at the door before I had got there.

Plague on it, what nonsense! Are you quite in your senses?

I’m just as you see me.

Some mischief, I know not what, has befallen this fellow from an evil hand [*] since he left me.

I confess it; for I have been most shockingly bruised with his fists.

Who has been beating you?

I myself, who am now at home, beat me myself.

Take you care to say nothing but what I shall ask you. Now, do you answer me. First of all, who this Sosia is, of that I want to be informed.