bring it from your own home, don’t lose your trouble in asking for it. But here, at our house, there’s great confusion, and a large establishment— furniture, gold, garments, silver vessels. If anything’s lost here (as I know that you can easily You can easily : Facile, easily, seems a preferable reading to facere. If the latter reading is adopted, there are three consecutive verbs in the infinitive mood, which, even in the (occasionally) uncouth language of Plautus, sounds very uneuphoniously, Facere abstinere posse. keep hands off—if nothing’s in your way), they may say, The cooks have stolen it; seize them, bind them, beat them, thrust them in the dungeon In the dungeon : Puteus here signifies the black hole or dungeon underground (called also ergastulum ), where the refractory slaves were put in confinement. . Nothing of that sort will happen to you, inasmuch as there will be nothing for you to steal. Follow me this way. LYCONIDES I follow. STROBILUS (knocking at the door of EUCLIO’S house.) Ho, there Staphyla, come out and open the door. STAPHYLA (from within.) Who calls there? STROBILUS Strobilus. (Enter STAPHYLA.) STAPHYLA What do you want? STROBILUS For you to take in these cooks, and this music-girl, and these provisions for the wedding. Megadorus bade me take these things to Euclio. STAPHYLA Are you about to make this wedding, Strobilus, in honor of Ceres In honor of Ceres : The old woman probably alludes to the Thesmophoria, where abstinence from wine was especially practised, and which were celebrated in a state of fasting and purification. Her question here tends to confirm the suspicion that she was more fond of the merum than the mixtum, reference to which has already been made ?