Pseudolus, or The Cheat (803c-865)

I’ll tell you. Because, in fact, directly people come to hire a cook,

no one enquires for him that’s the best and the highest priced: rather do they hire him that’s the lowest priced. Through this have I to-day been the only sitter in the market. Those wretched fellows are for a drachma a-piece; not any person is able to prevail on me to rise for less than a didrachm [*].

I don’t cook a dinner too, like other cooks, who bring me up seasoned meadows of grass upon their dishes; who turn the guests into oxen, and supply the grass. This herbage, too, do they further season with other herbs: put in coriander, fennel, garlick, orage;

they add, too, sorrel, cabbage, beet, and spinach. In this they dissolve a pound weight of asafoetida. The roguish mustard is pounded, which makes the eyes of those that pound it drop tears before they have pounded it. These fellows, when they cook dinners, when they do season them, season them,

not with seasonings, but with vampyre owls[*] which eat out the bowels of the guests while still alive. Through this, in fact, it is, that people here live such short lives, inasmuch as they heap up these herbs of this sort in their stomachs, dreadful to be mentioned, not only to be eaten.

Herbage which the cattle eat not, men eat themselves.

What do you say? Do you use divine seasonings, by which you can prolong the life of men, you, who find fault with these other seasonings?

I proclaim it boldly;

for those who shall eat of my victuals which I have seasoned will be able to exist two hundred years even.

For when I’ve put into the saucepan either cicilendrum, or cepolindrum, or mace [*], or saucaptis, the very dishes become warmed forthwith. These are sauces for fish, the cattle of Neptune;

the flesh of the earthly cattle I season with cicimandrum, hapalopsis, or cataractria.

Now may Jupiter and all the Divinities confound you with your sauces, and with all those lies of yours!

Do allow me to speak, please.

Speak, and go to very perdition.

When all the saucepans are hot, I open them all then does the odour fly towards heaven with its hand hanging down [*].

The odour with its hands hanging down?

I made a mistake without thinking.

How so?

With its feet hanging down, I meant to say. Jupiter dines on that odour every day.

If you happen not to go out to cook, pray what does Jupiter dine upon?

He goes to sleep without his dinner.

Go to very perdition. Is it for this reason that I’m to give you a didrachm to-day?

Well, I confess that I am a very high-priced cook; but I make the results of my labour to be seen for the price,

hired at which I go out.

In thieving, to wit.

And do you expect to meet with any cook except with the claws of a kite or of an eagle?

And do you expect to go anywhere to cook, and not to cook the dinner there with your claws tied up?

Now, therefore, you boy (to the BOY), who are my servant, I now give you notice to make haste to remove hence all my property; and to keep his eyes as well in your sight. Whichever way he shall look, do you look the same way as well. If he shall move in any direction, do you move as well.

If he shall put forth his hand, put you forth your hand as well. If he shall take anything of his own, do you suffer him to take it; if he shall take what’s mine, do you on the other side hold him fast. If he shall stoop to the ground, do you stoop there as well.

Likewise over your understrappers I shall appoint a single guard a-piece.