This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
Enter SCEPARNIO, with a spade on his shoulder.
SCEPARNIO
to himself . O ye immortal Gods, what a dreadful tempest has Neptune sent us this last night! The storm has unroofed the cottage. What need of words is there? It was no storm, but what Alcmena met with in Euripides1; it has so knocked all the tiles from off the roof; more light has it given us, and has added to our windows.
1 In Euridpids: He alludes to a Tragedy of Euripides so named, where a dreadful storm was so accurately represented that at length the Play became a proverbial expression for tempestuous weather. Madame Dacier observes, that it was not strange for Sceparnio to mention this, as he might often have seen it represented at Athens upon the stage. This notion is somewhat far-fetched, as it is not likely that Plautns troubled himself about such a fine point, or that the Audience was gifted with any such nicety of perception as to note his accuracy, even if he had. It has been suggested, and not at all improbably, that Plautus borrowed the Scene of the thunder and lightning in his Amphitryon from this Play of Euripides.
The Comedies of Plautus. Henry Thomas Riley. London. G. Bell and Sons. 1912.
NSF, NEH: Digital Libraries Initiative, Phase 2 provided support for entering this text.
This text was converted to electronic form by professional data entry and has been proofread to a medium level of accuracy.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.