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Chorus
singing
Demos, you are our all-powerful sovereign lord; all tremble before you, [1115] 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 [1120] is led astray.
Demos
singing
It's 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, [1125] for I love to drink the livelong day, and so it pleases me to keep a thief for my minister. When he has thoroughly gorged himself, [1130] then I overthrow and crush him.
Chorus
singing
What profound wisdom! If it be really so, why! all is for the best. [1135] Your ministers, then, are your victims, whom you nourish and feed up expressly in the Pnyx, so that, the day your dinner is ready, [1140] you may immolate the fattest and eat him.
Demos
singing
Look, see how I play with them, while all the time they think themselves such adepts at cheating me. [1145] I have my eye on them when they thieve, but I do not appear to be seeing them; then [1150] I thrust a judgment down their throat as it were a feather, and force them to vomit up all they have robbed from me.
Aristophanes. Knights. The Complete Greek Drama, vol. 2. Eugene O'Neill, Jr. New York. Random House. 1938.
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