Truculentus, or The Churl (281-311)

But what business, woman, hast thee at our house? Why dost thee come running this way as often as we come to town?

I want to meet with your women.

What women art thee talking to me about, when there’s not even a single woman-fly within the house?

What, does no woman live here?

They’ve gone into the country, I say. Be off.

Why are you bawling out, you lunatic?

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.

For what reason, pray?

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.

I’ troth, it was by reason of your clamour that I coloured in my alarm.

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 chalk[*].

Ye are scoundrelly jades.

What’s the reason, abominable hussies, that this way ⋯?

I know more than thee think’st I know.

Prithee, what’s this that you know?

How Strabax, my master’s son, is ruining himself at your house; how you are all enticing him to fraud and present-making.

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.

Indeed so.

In sober truth.[*]

Aye, but that garden wall[*] that’s in our garden says so, which is becoming every night less by a brick, over which he travels to your house on the road to destruction.

The wall’s an old one; it isn’t wonderful if the bricks, being old, do tumble down.

And says thee, hussy, that old bricks do tumble down? By my fakes, may never any mortal man henceforth trust me upon the two grand points[*], if I don’t inform of these goings on of yours to my elder master.

Is he a savage as well?

Why, he didn’t get his money by enriching harlots, but by thriftiness,

and living hard; which now, however, is being carried off to you, abominable jades. (Takes her by the shoulders and shakes her.) There’s for thee, six-clawed hussy; a wretched life to both of ye. Am I to keep mum about these matters? But, lookye now, I’ll be off to the Forum at once and tell these goings on to the old gentleman, that he mayn’t somehow be cherishing within this matting[*] a whole swarm of misfortunes.