The Eleven Comedies Vol 1 Part 53

[394] An island of the Saronic Gulf, lying between Magara and Attica. It was separated by a narrow strait-scene of the naval battle of Salamis, in which the Athenians defeated Xerxes-only from the Attic coast, and was subject to Athens.

[395] A deme, or township, of Attica, lying five or six miles north of Athens. The Acharnians were throughout the most extreme partisans of the warlike party during the Peloponnesian struggle. See 'The Acharnians.'

[396] The precise reference is uncertain, and where the joke exactly comes in. The Scholiast says Theagenes was a rich, miserly and superst.i.tious citizen, who never undertook any enterprise without first consulting an image of Hecate, the distributor of honour and wealth according to popular belief; and his wife would naturally follow her husband's example.

[397] A deme of Attica, a small and insignificant community-a 'Little Pedlington' in fact.

[398] In allusion to the gymnastic training which was de rigueur at Sparta for the women no less than the men, and in particular to the dance of the Lacedaemonian girls, in which the performer was expected to kick the fundament with the heels-always a standing joke among the Athenians against their rivals and enemies the Spartans.

[399] The allusion, of course, is to the 'garden of love,' the female parts, which it was the custom with the Greek women, as it is with the ladies of the harem in Turkey to this day, to depilate scrupulously, with the idea of making themselves more attractive to men.

[400] Corinth was notorious in the Ancient world for its prost.i.tutes and general dissoluteness.

[401] An Athenian general strongly suspected of treachery; Aristophanes pretends his own soldiers have to see that he does not desert to the enemy.

[402] A town and fortress on the west coast of Messenia, south-east part of Peloponnese, at the northern extremity of the bay of Sphacteria-the scene by the by of the modern naval battle of Navarino-in Lacedaemonian territory; it had been seized by the Athenian fleet, and was still in their possession at the date, 412 B.C., of the representation of the 'Lysistrata,' though two years later, in the twenty-second year of the War, it was recovered by Sparta.

[403] The Athenian women, rightly or wrongly, had the reputation of being over fond of wine. Aristophanes, here and elsewhere, makes many jests on this weakness of theirs.

[404] The lofty range of hills overlooking Sparta from the west.

[405] In the original "we are nothing but Poseidon and a boat"; the allusion is to a play of Sophocles, now lost, but familiar to Aristophanes' audience, ent.i.tled 'Tyro,' in which the heroine, Tyro, appears with Poseidon, the sea-G.o.d, at the beginning of the tragedy, and at the close with the two boys she had had by him, whom she exposes in an open boat.

[406] "By the two G.o.ddesses,"-a woman's oath, which recurs constantly in this play; the two G.o.ddesses are always Demeter and Proserpine.

[407] One of the Cyclades, between Naxos and Cos, celebrated, like the latter, for its manufacture of fine, almost transparent silks, worn in Greece, and later at Rome, by women of loose character.

[408] The proverb, quoted by Pherecrates, is properly spoken of those who go out of their way to do a thing already done-"to kill a dead horse," but here apparently is twisted by Aristophanes into an allusion to the leathern 'G.o.demiche' mentioned a little above; if the worst comes to the worst, we must use artificial means. Pherecrates was a comic playwright, a contemporary of Aristophanes.

[409] Literally "our Scythian woman." At Athens, policemen and ushers in the courts were generally Scythians; so the revolting women must have their Scythian "Usheress" too.

[410] In allusion to the oath which the seven allied champions before Thebes take upon a buckler, in Aeschylus' tragedy of 'The Seven against Thebes,' v. 42.

[411] A volcanic island in the northern part of the Aegaean, celebrated for its vineyards.

[412] The old men are carrying f.a.ggots and fire to burn down the gates of the Acropolis, and supply comic material by their panting and wheezing as they climb the steep approaches to the fortress and puff and blow at their fires. Aristophanes gives them names, purely fancy ones-Draces, Strymodorus, Philurgus, Laches.

[413] Cleomenes, King of Sparta, had in the preceding century commanded a Lacedaemonian expedition against Athens. At the invitation of the Alcmaeonidae, enemies of the sons of Peisistratus, he seized the Acropolis, but after an obstinately contested siege was forced to capitulate and retire.

[414] Lemnos was proverbial with the Greeks for chronic misfortune and a succession of horrors and disasters. Can any good thing come out of Lemnos?

[415] That is, a friend of the Athenian people; Samos had just before the date of the play re-established the democracy and renewed the old alliance with Athens.

[416] A second Chorus enters-of women who are hurrying up with water to extinguish the fire just started by the Chorus of old men. Nicodice, Calyce, Critylle, Rhodippe, are fancy names the poet gives to different members of the band. Another, Stratyllis, has been stopped by the old men on her way to rejoin her companions.

[417] Bupalus was a celebrated contemporary sculptor, a native of Clazomenae. The satiric poet Hipponax, who was extremely ugly, having been portrayed by Bupalus as even more unsightly-looking than the reality, composed against the artist so scurrilous an invective that the latter hung himself in despair. Apparently Aristophanes alludes here to a verse in which Hipponax threatened to beat Bupalus.

[418] The Heliasts at Athens were the body of citizens chosen by lot to act as jurymen (or, more strictly speaking, as judges and jurymen, the Dicast, or so-called Judge, being merely President of the Court, the majority of the Heliasts p.r.o.nouncing sentence) in the Heliaia, or High Court, where all offences liable to public prosecution were tried. They were 6000 in number, divided into ten panels of 500 each, a thousand being held in reserve to supply occasional vacancies. Each Heliast was paid three obols for each day's attendance in court.

[419] Women only celebrated the festivals of Adonis. These rites were not performed in public, but on the terraces and flat roofs of the houses.

[420] The a.s.sembly, or Ecclesia, was the General Parliament of the Athenian people, in which every adult citizen had a vote. It met on the Pnyx hill, where the a.s.sembled Ecclesiasts were addressed from the Bema, or speaking-block.

[421] An orator and statesman who had first proposed the disastrous Sicilian Expedition, of 415-413 B.C. This was on the first day of the festival of Adonis-ever afterwards regarded by the Athenians as a day of ill omen.

[422] An island in the Ionian Sea, on the west of Greece, near Cephalenia, and an ally of Athens during the Peloponnesian War.

[423] Cholozyges, a nickname for Demostratus.

[424] The State treasure was kept in the Acropolis, which the women had seized.

[425] The second (mythical) king of Athens, successor of Cecrops.

[426] The leader of the Revolution which resulted in the temporary overthrow of the Democracy at Athens (413, 412 B.C.), and the establishment of the Oligarchy of the Four Hundred.

[427] Priests of Cybele, who indulged in wild, frenzied dances, to the accompaniment of the clashing of cymbals, in their celebrations in honour of the G.o.ddess.

[428] Captain of a cavalry division; they were chosen from amongst the Hippeis, or 'Knights' at Athens.

[429] In allusion to a play of Euripides, now lost, with this t.i.tle. Tereus was son of Ares and king of the Thracians in Daulis.

[430] An allusion to the disastrous Sicilian Expedition (415-413 B.C.), in which many thousands of Athenian citizens perished.

[431] The dead were laid out at Athens before the house door.

[432] An offering made to the Manes of the deceased on the third day after the funeral.

[433] Hippias and Hipparchus, the two sons of Pisistratus, known as the Pisistratidae, became Tyrants of Athens upon their father's death in 527 B.C. In 514 the latter was a.s.sa.s.sinated by the conspirators, Harmodius and Aristogiton, who took the opportunity of the Panathenaic festival and concealed their daggers in myrtle wreaths. They were put to death, but four years later the surviving Tyrant Hippias was expelled, and the young and n.o.ble martyrs to liberty were ever after held in the highest honour by their fellow-citizens. Their statues stood in the Agora or Public Market-Square.

[434] That is, the three obols paid for attendance as a Heliast at the High Court.

[435] See above, under note 3 [433. Transcriber.].

[436] The origin of the name was this: in ancient days a tame bear consecrated to Artemis, the huntress G.o.ddess, it seems, devoured a young girl, whose brothers killed the offender. Artemis was angered and sent a terrible pestilence upon the city, which only ceased when, by direction of the oracle, a company of maidens was dedicated to the deity, to act the part of she-bears in the festivities held annually in her honour at the Brauronia, her festival so named from the deme of Brauron in Attica.

[437] The Basket-Bearers, Canephoroi, at Athens were the maidens who, clad in flowing robes, carried in baskets on their heads the sacred implements and paraphernalia in procession at the celebrations in honour of Demeter, Dionysus and Athene.

[438] A treasure formed by voluntary contributions at the time of the Persian Wars; by Aristophanes' day it had all been dissipated, through the influence of successive demagogues, in distributions and gifts to the public under various pretexts.

[439] A town and fortress of Southern Attica, in the neighbourhood of Marathon, occupied by the Alcmaeonidae-the n.o.ble family or clan at Athens banished from the city in 595 B.C., restored 560, but again expelled by Pisistratus-in the course of their contest with that Tyrant. Returning to Athens on the death of Hippias (510 B.C.), they united with the democracy, and the then head of the family, Cleisthenes, gave a new const.i.tution to the city.

[440] Queen of Halicarna.s.sus, in Caria; an ally of the Persian King Xerxes in his invasion of Greece; she fought gallantly at the battle of Salamis.

[441] A double entendre-with allusion to the posture in s.e.xual intercourse known among the Greeks as [Greek: hippos], in Latin 'equus,' the horse, where the woman mounts the man in reversal of the ordinary position.

[442] Micon, a famous Athenian painter, decorated the walls of the Poecile Stoa, or Painted Porch, at Athens with a series of frescoes representing the battles of the Amazons with Theseus and the Athenians.

[443] To avenge itself on the eagle, the beetle threw the former's eggs out of the nest and broke them. See the Fables of Aesop.