But what business, woman, hast thee at our house? Why dost thee come running this way as often as we come to town? ASTAPHIUM I want to meet with your women. STRATILAX What women art thee talking to me about, when there’s not even a single woman-fly within the house?
 ASTAPHIUM What, does no woman live here? STRATILAX They’ve gone into the country, I say. Be off. ASTAPHIUM Why are you bawling out, you lunatic? STRATILAX 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. ASTAPHIUM For what reason, pray? STRATILAX 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. ASTAPHIUM I’ troth, it was by reason of your clamour that I coloured in my alarm. STRATILAX 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 Its colour with chalk : Chalk was much used by the Roman females for the purposes of a cosmetic. . Ye are scoundrelly jades. What’s the reason, abominable hussies, that this way ? I know more than thee think’st I know. ASTAPHIUM Prithee, what’s this that you know? STRATILAX How Strabax, my master’s son, is ruining himself at your house; how you are all enticing him to fraud and present-making. ASTAPHIUM 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. STRATILAX Indeed so. ASTAPHIUM In sober truth. Part of line 302b in the Latin. STRATILAX Aye, but that garden wall That garden wall : Maceria. This was a wall made of loose tiles or bricks, laid on each ether without mortar. 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. ASTAPHIUM The wall’s an old one; it isn’t wonderful if the bricks, being old, do tumble down. STRATILAX 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 The two grand points : Alciatus thinks that the two things here mentioned are yes and no. Turnebus thinks that they mean things human and divine. , if I don’t inform of these goings on of yours to my elder master. ASTAPHIUM Is he a savage as well? STRATILAX 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 Within this matting : In segestro. He seems to derive his metaphor from the usage in gardening of covering up trees with straw or bass matting, and of insects getting into the folds and hatching their eggs and swarming there. a whole swarm of misfortunes.