Pam. What means this?
My mother leave her home? It must not be.
La. Why not?
Pam. Because I am not yet resolved
As to my wife.
La. You bring her back, of course.
Pam. I wish it—it is hard to give her up;
But I must do that which I feel is best.
She and my mother will be friends—apart.
La. You can't tell that. Besides, what matters it?
Your mother will be gone. (Turns away from his son,
who tries to interrupt him.) We're getting old—
We're only troublesome to younger folk;
We'd best be moving on. (Turning again to Pamphilus
with a smile.) In short, my boy,
We're only "the old man and woman," now.
But everything is made right in the end. Philumena goes back to her husband a wife without reproach, and we are allowed to hope that Laches did not wait for Sostrata's death to repent of his injustice to her character. The dramatist had not altogether lost his pains, if he had done something to qualify the vulgar notion of a "mother-in-law." The play appears to have met with no success when first brought out, for it has come down to us with a "second prologue," written for what seems to have been its third representation, in which the author takes the opportunity to remark on its previous failures. He attributes these in both cases to the more powerful attractions of the rope-dancers and the gladiators. On the second occasion the audience were so impatient for the appearance of these latter, that they would not even sit out the comedy.
