III The Timepiece
Nugo. What need have you to know the time? If you wish to do anything, while there is opportunity, there is the time for it. But where is your watch (horologium viatorium)?
Grac. I let it fall lately, when I was escaping the dog belonging to the gardener, whose plums I had plucked.
Turd. From the window I saw you running, but I could not see where you fled because the view was blocked by the fruit garden, which my mother has planted there, against the will of my father, and in spite of his many protests. But my mother, indeed, in the beginning was persistent in getting her own way, so that it could scarcely be borne.
Nugo. What is amiss with you? You are becoming silent.
Turd. I was weeping and said nothing, for what should I otherwise do when my dearest ones disagree? To be sure my mother ordered me to stand by her as she called lustily; but I had not the heart to mutter a word against my father. Therefore I was sent to school four days running without breakfast by my enraged mother, and she swore I was not her son, but had been changed by the nurse, for which she would have the nurse summoned before the Praetor capitalis.
Nugo. Who is the Praetor capitalis? Hasn’t every Praetor got a head on?
Turd. How am I to know? So she said.
Grac. Look there! Who are those people with mantles, and armour for the legs.