out being obliged to turn out of doors. And—a point on which the old gentleman makes very particular inquiries—his fee shall be paid him every day as usual. On these terms, with the approval of the Chorus, the domestic truce is concluded.
It seems doubtful, however, whether the household will supply sufficient business for the court. They are thinking of beginning with an unlucky Thracian slave-girl who has burnt a sauce-pan, when most opportunely one of the other slaves rushes on the stage in hot pursuit of the house-dog Labes, who has run off with a piece of Sicilian cheese.[1] The son determines to bring this as the first case before his father, and a mock trial ensues, in which all the appliances and forms of a regular court of justice are absurdly travestied. Another dog appears in the character of prosecutor, and he is allowed to bring the accusation forward through Xanthias, one of the slaves. The indictment is drawn in due form, and the counsel for the prosecution urges in aggravation that the prisoner had refused to give the other dog, his client, a share of it. Philocleon, with a contempt for the ordinary formalities of law which would greatly shock the modern profession, is very much disposed to convict the delinquent Labes at once, on the evidence of his own senses: he stinks of cheese disgustingly, in the very nostrils of the court, at this present moment. But his son recalls him to a sense of the proprieties,
- ↑ There is a political allusion here to the conduct of Laches, (whose name is slightly modified), an Athenian admiral accused at the time of taking bribes in Sicily.
