Good evening and thank you for joining me for another boring books for bedtime.

I hope tonight selection provides all the boredom your busy brain needs to quiet down and let you get

some sleep.

So find a comfortable spot, adjust your volume, take a nice deep breath in, let it out slowly, and off we go.

Tonight let's relax with a classic of literary and dramatic convention written almost 2,400 years ago and since which very little has changed.

The characters of Theophrastus, a translation with introduction by Charles E. Bennett and William A Hammond,

Professors in Cornell University, copyright

1902 by Longmans Green and Co. London, New York, and Bombay.

Let's begin.

To Thomas Day Seymour, in profound esteem. Preface. This translation of the characters of Theophrastus is

intended not for the narrow circle of classical philologists,

but for the larger body of cultivated persons who have an interest in the past.

Within the last century only three English translations of the characters have appeared, one by Howell,, 1824, another by Isaac Taylor, London 1836, the third by Professor Jeb, London 1870.

All of these have long been out of print, a fact that seemed to justify the preparation of the

present work.

The text followed has been in the main, that of the edition published in Leipzig in 1897.

A few coarse passages have been omitted and occasionally a phrase necessary to the understanding of the context has been inserted.

Apart from this, the translators have aimed to render the original with as much precision and

fidelity as is consistent with English idiom.

Charles E. Bennett and William A Hammond, Ithaca, New York, August 1992.

1992.

Introduction Introduction

...