Pisthetaerus: A fine trade, truly!
Informer: … a hatcher of lawsuits. Hence I have great need of wings to prowl round the cities and drag them before justice.
Pisthetaerus: Would you do this better if you had wings?
Informer: No, but I should no longer fear the pirates; I should return with the cranes, loaded with a supply of lawsuits by way of ballast.
Pisthetaerus: So it seems, despite all your youthful vigour, you make it your trade to denounce strangers?
Informer: Well, and why not? I don’t know how to dig.
Pisthetaerus: But, by Zeus! there are honest ways of gaining a living at your age without all this infamous trickery.
Informer: My friend, I am asking you for wings, not for words.
Pisthetaerus: ’Tis just my words that give you wings.
Informer: And how can you give a man wings with your words?
Pisthetaerus: ’Tis thus that all first start.
Informer: All?
Pisthetaerus: Have you not often heard the father say to young men in the barbers’ shops, “It’s astonishing how Diitrephes’ advice has made my son fly to horse-riding.”—“Mine,” says another, “has flown towards tragic poetry on the wings of his imagination.”
Informer: So that words give wings?
Pisthetaerus: Undoubtedly; words give wings to the mind and make a man soar to heaven. Thus I hope that my wise words will give you wings to fly to some less degrading trade.
Informer: But I do not want to.
Pisthetaerus: What do you reckon on doing then?
Informer: I won’t belie my breeding; from generation to generation we have lived by informing. Quick, therefore, give me quickly some light, swift hawk or kestrel wings, so that I may summon the islanders, sustain the accusation here, and haste back there again on flying pinions.
Pisthetaerus: I see. In this way the stranger will be condemned even before he appears.
Informer: That’s just it.
Pisthetaerus: And while he is on his way here by sea, you will be flying to the islands to despoil him of his property.
Informer: You’ve hit it, precisely; I must whirl hither and thither like a perfect humming-top.
Pisthetaerus: I catch the idea. Wait, i’ faith, I’ve got some fine Corcyraean wings. How do you like them?
Informer: Oh! woe is me! Why, ’tis a whip!
Pisthetaerus: No, no; these are the wings, I tell you, that set the top a-spinning.