The Birds

EUELPIDES (TO HIS JAY)[1]
Do you think I should walk straight for yon tree?

[1] Euelpides is holding a jay and Pisthetaerus a crow; they are the guides who are to lead them to the kingdom of the birds.

PISTHETAERUS (TO HIS CROW)
Cursed beast, what are you croaking to me?...to retrace my steps?

EUELPIDES
Why, you wretch, we are wandering at random, we are exerting ourselves only to return to the same spot; 'tis labour lost.

PISTHETAERUS
To think that I should trust to this crow, which has made me cover more than a thousand furlongs!

EUELPIDES
And that I to this jay, which has torn every nail from my fingers!

PISTHETAERUS
If only I knew where we were....

EUELPIDES
Could you find your country again from here?

PISTHETAERUS
No, I feel quite sure I could not, any more than could Execestides[1] find his.

[1] A stranger who wanted to pass as an Athenian, although coming originally for a far-away barbarian country.

EUELPIDES
Oh dear! oh dear!

PISTHETAERUS
Aye, aye, my friend, 'tis indeed the road of "oh dears" we are following.

EUELPIDES
That Philocrates, the bird-seller, played us a scurvy trick, when he pretended these two guides could help us to find Tereus,[1] the Epops, who is a bird, without being born of one. He has indeed sold us this jay, a true son of Tharelides,[2] for an obolus, and this crow for three, but what can they do? Why, nothing whatever but bite and scratch! --What's the matter with you then, that you keep opening your beak? Do you want us to fling ourselves headlong down these rocks? There is no road that way.

[1] A king of Thrace, a son of Ares, who married Procne, the daughter of Pandion, King of Athens, whom he had assisted against the Megarians. He violated his sister-in-law, Philomela, and then cut out her tongue; she nevertheless managed to convey to her sister how she had been treated. They both agreed to kill Itys, whom Procne had borne to Tereus, and dished up the limbs of his own son to the father; at the end of the meal Philomela appeared and threw the child's head upon the table. Tereus rushed with drawn sword upon the princesses, but all the actors in this terrible scene were metamorph[o]sed. Tereus became an Epops (hoopoe), Procne a swallow, Philomela a nightingale, and Itys a goldfinch. According to Anacreon and Apollodorus it was Procne who became the nightingale and Philomela the swallow, and this is the version of the tradition followed by Aristophanes.

[2] An Athenian who had some resemblance to a jay--so says the scholiast, at any rate.

PISTHETAERUS
Not even the vestige of a track in any direction.

EUELPIDES
And what does the crow say about the road to follow?

PISTHETAERUS
By Zeus, it no longer croaks the same thing it did.

EUELPIDES
And which way does it