No More Learning

you shall have flour-cakes all piping hot.

SAUSAGE-SELLER. I will give you cakes too, and nice cooked fish; you will
only have to eat.

DEMOS. Very well, mind you keep your promises. To whichever of you twain
shall treat me best I hand over the reins of state.

CLEON. I will be first.

SAUSAGE-SELLER. No, no, _I_ will.

CHORUS. Demos, you are our all-powerful sovereign lord; all tremble
before you, yet you are led by the nose. You love to be flattered and
fooled; you listen to the orators with gaping mouth and your mind is led
astray.

DEMOS. 'Tis rather you who have no brains, if you think me so foolish as
all that; it is with a purpose that I play this idiot's role, for I love
to drink the lifelong day, and so it pleases me to keep a thief for my
minister.
When he has thoroughly gorged himself, then I overthrow and
crush him.

CHORUS. What profound wisdom! If it be really so, why! all is for the
best. Your ministers, then, are your victims, whom you nourish and feed
up expressly in the Pnyx, so that, the day your dinner is ready, you may
immolate the fattest and eat him.

DEMOS. Look, see how I play with them, while all the time they think
themselves such adepts at cheating me. I have my eye on them when they
thieve, but I do not appear to be seeing them; then I thrust a judgment
down their throat as it were a feather, and force them to vomit up all
they have robbed from me.

CLEON. Oh! the rascal!

SAUSAGE-SELLER. Oh! the scoundrel!

CLEON.