The Self-Tormentor
An old man who drove his son into the army over a poor foreign girl now punishes himself by working his own fields from dawn to dark, and will not be talked out of it by the neighbour who finds him at it. That neighbour, who declares himself a man and nothing human foreign to him, is promptly shown how little he knows of his own house, since the returned son is hidden next door and one slave is running two deceptions out of a single purse. Adapted from a comedy of Menander that has not survived; the line about nothing human being foreign has outlasted everything else in it.
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