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But what luck! here I see Sopolis the physician drawing near. Come now, suppose we put you in his hands, have a consultation with him about your complaint, and find some cure for you. The man is clever, and often before now, taking charge of people like yourself, half crazed and full of drivel, he has relieved them with his doses of medicine. —Good-day to you, Sopolis. Do take charge of Lexiphanes here, who is my friend, as you know, and at present has on him a nonsensical, outlandish distemper affecting his speech which is likely to be the death of him outright. Do save him in one way or another.
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LEXIPHANES Not me, Sopolis, but this man Lycinus, who is patently maggoty and thinks that well-furnished heads want wits, and imposes silence and a truce of the tongue upon us in the style of the son of Mnesarchus, the Samian.Pythagoras; in Philosophies for Sale, 3 (II, 454) Lucian alludes to the five years of silence which he imposed on his pupils. _ But I protest, by bashless Athena and by mighty Heracles, slayer of ferines, I shan’t bother even a flock or a doit about him! In fact I abominate meeting him at all, and I am fit to snort when I hear him pass such censure. Any- how, I am this moment going off to my comrade Cleinias’s because I am informed that for some time now his wife is irregularAs applied to a woman ἧς ἐπεσχημένα τὰ γυναικεῖα, ἀκάθαρτος is accredited in Athen., 98, to “this word-chasing sophist"; i.e. Pompeianus, according to Casaubon. Cf. 97 f. and out of sorts by reason of wanting issue, so that he no longer even knows her; she is unapproachable and uncultivated.
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SOPOLIS What ails him, Lycinus?
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LYCINUS Just that, Sopolis! Can’t you hear how he talks? Abandoning us, who converse with him now, he talks to us from a thousand years ago, distorting his language, making these preposterous combinations, and taking himself very seriously in the matter, as if it were a great thing for him to use an alien idiom and debase the established currency of speech.
