AGATHON. Try them on. Now that you have all you need, let me be taken
inside.[567]
EURIPIDES. You look for all the world like a woman. But when you talk,
take good care to give your voice a woman's tone.
MNESILOCHUS. I'll try my best.
EURIPIDES. Come, get yourself to the temple.
MNESILOCHUS. No, by Apollo, not unless you swear to me ...
EURIPIDES. What?
MNESILOCHUS. ... that, if anything untoward happen to me, you will leave
nothing undone to save me.
EURIPIDES Very well! I swear it by the Ether, the dwelling-place of the
king of the gods.[568]
MNESILOCHUS. Why not rather swear it by the disciples of
Hippocrates?[569]
EURIPIDES. Come, I swear it by all the gods, both great and small.
MNESILOCHUS. Remember, 'tis the heart, and not the tongue, that has
sworn;[570] for the oaths of the tongue concern me but little.
EURIPIDES. Hurry yourself! The signal for the meeting has just been
displayed on the Temple of Demeter. Farewell. [_Exit._
MNESILOCHUS. Here, Thratta, follow me.[571] Look, Thratta, at the cloud
of smoke that arises from all these lighted torches. Ah! beautiful
Thesmophorae![572] grant me your favours, protect me, both within the
temple and on my way back! Come, Thratta, put down the basket and take
out the cake, which I wish to offer to the two goddesses. Mighty
divinity, oh, Demeter, and thou, Persephoné, grant that I may be able to
offer you many sacrifices; above all things, grant that I may not be
recognized. Would that my young daughter might marry a man as rich as he
is foolish and silly, so that she may have nothing to do but amuse
herself. But where can a place be found for hearing well? Be off,
Thratta, be off; slaves have no right to be present at this
gathering.[573]
HERALD. Silence! Silence! Pray to the Thesmophorae, Demeter and Cora;
pray to Plutus,[574] Calligenia,[575] Curotrophos,[576] the Earth, Hermes
and the Graces, that all may happen for the best at this gathering, both
for the greatest advantage of Athens and for our own personal happiness!
May the award be given her, who, by both deeds and words, has most
deserved it from the Athenian people and from the women! Address these
prayers to heaven and demand happiness for yourselves. Io Paean! Io
Paean! Let us rejoice!
CHORUS. May the gods deign to accept our vows and our prayers! Oh!
almighty Zeus, and thou, god with the golden lyre,[577] who reignest on
sacred Delos, and thou, oh, invincible virgin, Pallas, with the eyes of
azure and the spear of gold, who protectest our illustrious city, and
thou, the daughter of the beautiful Latona, the queen of the
forests,[578] who art adored under many names, hasten hither at my call.
Come, thou mighty Posidon, king of the Ocean, leave thy stormy whirlpools
of Nereus; come goddesses of the seas, come, ye nymphs, who wander on the
mountains. Let us unite our voices to the sounds of the golden lyre, and
may wisdom preside at the gathering of the noble matrons of Athens.
HERALD. Address your prayers to the gods and goddesses of Olympus, of
Delphi, Delos and all other places; if there be a man who is plotting
against the womenfolk or who, to injure them, is proposing peace to
Euripides and the Medes, or who aspires to usurping the tyranny, plots
the return of a tyrant, or unmasks a supposititious child; or if there be
a slave who, a confidential party to a wife's intrigues, reveals them
secretly to her husband, or who, entrusted with a message, does not
deliver the same faithfully; if there be a lover who fulfils naught of
what he has promised a woman, whom he has abused on the strength of his
lies, if there be an old woman who seduces the lover of a maiden by dint
of her presents and treacherously receives him in her house; if there be
a host or hostess who sells false measure, pray the gods that they will
overwhelm them with their wrath, both them and their families, and that
they may reserve all their favours for you.
CHORUS. Let us ask the fulfilment of these wishes both for the city and
for the people, and may the wisest of us cause her opinion to be
accepted. But woe to those women who break their oaths, who speculate on
the public misfortune, who seek to alter the laws and the decrees, who
reveal our secrets to the foe and admit the Medes into our territory so
that they may devastate it! I declare them both impious and criminal. Oh!
almighty Zeus! see to it that the gods protect us, albeit we are but
women!
HERALD. Hearken, all of you! this is the decree passed by the Senate of
the Women under the presidency of Timoclea and at the suggestion of
Sostrata; it is signed by Lysilla, the secretary: "There will be a
gathering of the people on the morning of the third day of the
Thesmophoria, which is a day of rest for us; the principal business there
shall be the punishment that it is meet to inflict upon Euripides for the
insults with which he has loaded us." Now who asks to speak?
FIRST WOMAN. I do.
HERALD. First put on this garland, and then speak. Silence! let all be
quiet! Pay attention! for here she is spitting as orators generally do
before they begin; no doubt she has much to say.
FIRST WOMAN. If I have asked to speak, may the goddesses bear me witness,
it was not for sake of ostentation. But I have long been pained to see us
women insulted by this Euripides, this son of the green-stuff woman,[579]
who loads us with every kind of indignity. Has he not hit us enough,
calumniated us sufficiently, wherever there are spectators, tragedians,
and a chorus? Does he not style us gay, lecherous, drunken, traitorous,
boastful? Does he not repeat that we are all vice, that we are the curse
of our husbands? So that, directly they come back from the theatre, they
look at us doubtfully and go searching every nook, fearing there may be
some hidden lover. We can do nothing as we used to, so many are the false
ideas which he has instilled into our husbands. Is a woman weaving a
garland for herself? 'Tis because she is in love.[580] Does she let some
vase drop while going or returning to the house? her husband asks her in
whose honour she has broken it, "It can only be for that Corinthian
stranger."[581] Is a maiden unwell? Straightway her brother says, "That
is a colour that does not please me."[582] And if a childless woman
wishes to substitute one, the deceit can no longer be a secret, for the
neighbours will insist on being present at her delivery. Formerly the old
men married young girls, but they have been so calumniated that none
think of them now, thanks to the verse: "A woman is the tyrant of the old
man who marries her."[583] Again, it is because of Euripides that we are
incessantly watched, that we are shut up behind bolts and bars, and that
dogs are kept to frighten off the gallants. Let that pass; but formerly
it was we who had the care of the food, who fetched the flour from the
storeroom, the oil and the wine; we can do it no more. Our husbands now
carry little Spartan keys on their persons, made with three notches and
full of malice and spite.[584] Formerly it sufficed to purchase a ring
marked with the same sign for three obols, to open the most securely
sealed-up door;[585] but now this pestilent Euripides has taught men to
hang seals of worm-eaten wood about their necks.[586] My opinion,
therefore, is that we should rid ourselves of our enemy by poison or by
any other means, provided he dies. That is what I announce publicly; as
to certain points, which I wish to keep secret, I propose to record them
on the secretary's minutes.
CHORUS. Never have I listened to a cleverer or more eloquent woman.
Everything she says is true; she has examined the matter from all sides
and has weighed up every detail. Her arguments are close, varied, and
happily chosen. I believe that Xenocles himself, the son of Carcinus,
would seem to talk mere nonsense, if placed beside her.
SECOND WOMAN. I have only a very few words to add, for the last speaker
has covered the various points of the indictment; allow me only to tell
you what happened to me. My husband died at Cyprus, leaving me five
children, whom I had great trouble to bring up by weaving chaplets on the
myrtle market. Anyhow, I lived as well as I could until this wretch had
persuaded the spectators by his tragedies that there were no gods; since
then I have not sold as many chaplets by half. I charge you therefore and
exhort you all to punish him, for does he not deserve it in a thousand
respects, he who loads you with troubles, who is as coarse toward you as
the green-stuff upon which his mother reared him? But I must back to the
market to weave my chaplets; I have twenty to deliver yet.
CHORUS. This is even more animated and more trenchant than the first
speech; all she has just said is full of good sense and to the point; it
is clever, clear and well calculated to convince. Yes! we must have
striking vengeance on the insults of Euripides.
MNESILOCHUS. Oh, women! I am not astonished at these outbursts of fiery
rage; how could your bile not get inflamed against Euripides, who has
spoken so ill of you? As for myself, I hate the man, I swear it by my
children; 'twould be madness not to hate him! Yet, let us reflect a
little; we are alone and our words will not be repeated outside. Why be
so bent on his ruin? Because he has known and shown up two or three of
our faults, when we have a thousand? As for myself, not to speak of other
women, I have more than one great sin upon my conscience, but this is the
blackest of them. I had been married three days and my husband was asleep
by my side; I had a lover, who had seduced me when I was seven years old;
impelled by his passion, he came scratching at the door; I understood at
once he was there and was going down noiselessly. "Where are you going?"
asked my husband. "I am suffering terribly with colic," I told him, "and
am going to the closet." "Go," he replied, and started pounding together
juniper berries, aniseed, and sage.[587] As for myself, I moistened the
door-hinge[588] and went to find my lover, who embraced me,
half-reclining upon Apollo's altar[589] and holding on to the sacred
laurel with one hand. Well now! Consider! that is a thing of which
Euripides has never spoken. And when we bestow our favours on slaves and
muleteers for want of better, does he mention this? And when we eat
garlic early in the morning after a night of wantonness, so that our
husband, who has been keeping guard upon the city wall, may be reassured
by the smell and suspect nothing,[590] has Euripides ever breathed a word
of this? Tell me. Neither has he spoken of the woman who spreads open a
large cloak before her husband's eyes to make him admire it in full
daylight to conceal her lover by so doing and afford him the means of
making his escape. I know another, who for ten whole days pretended to be
suffering the pains of labour until she had secured a child; the husband
hurried in all directions to buy drugs to hasten her deliverance, and
meanwhile an old woman brought the infant in a stew-pot; to prevent its
crying she had stopped up its mouth with honey. With a sign she told the
wife that she was bringing a child for her, who at once began exclaiming,
"Go away, friend, go away, I think I am going to be delivered; I can feel
him kicking his heels in the belly ... of the stew-pot."[591] The husband
goes off full of joy, and the old wretch quickly picks the honey out of
the child's mouth, which sets a-crying; then she seizes the babe, runs to
the father and tells him with a smile on her face, "'Tis a lion, a lion,
that is born to you; 'tis your very image. Everything about it is like
you, even to its little tool, which is all twisty like a fir-cone." Are
these not our everyday tricks? Why certainly, by Artemis, and we are
angry with Euripides, who assuredly treats us no worse than we deserve!
CHORUS. Great gods! where has she unearthed all that? What country gave
birth to such an audacious woman? Oh! you wretch! I should not have
thought ever a one of us could have spoken in public with such impudence.
'Tis clear, however, that we must expect everything and, as the old
proverb says, must look beneath every stone, lest it conceal some
orator[592] ready to sting us. There is but one thing in the world worse
than a shameless woman, and that's another woman.
THIRD WOMAN. By Aglaurus![593] you have lost your wits, friends! You must
be bewitched to suffer this plague to belch forth insults against us all.
Is there no one has any spirit at all? If not, we and our maid-servants
will punish her. Run and fetch coals and let's depilate her cunt in
proper style, to teach her not to speak ill of her sex.
MNESILOCHUS. Oh! no! have mercy, friends. Have we not the right to speak
frankly at this gathering? And because I have uttered what I thought
right in favour of Euripides, do you want to depilate me for my trouble?
THIRD WOMAN. What! we ought not to punish you, who alone have dared to
defend the man who has done us so much harm, whom it pleases to put all
the vile women that ever were upon the stage, who only shows us
Melanippés Phaedras? But of Penelopé he has never said a word, because
she was reputed chaste and good.
MNESILOCHUS. I know the reason. 'Tis because not a single Penelopé exists
among the women of to-day, but all without exception are Phaedras.
THIRD WOMAN. Women, you hear how this creature still dares to speak of us
all.
MNESILOCHUS. And, 'faith, I have not said all that I know. Do you want
any more?
THIRD WOMAN. You cannot tell us any more; you have emptied your bag.
MNESILOCHUS. Why, I have not told the thousandth part of what we women
do. Have I said how we use the hollow handles of our brooms to draw up
wine unbeknown to our husbands.
THIRD WOMAN. The cursed jade!
MNESILOCHUS. And how we give meats to our lovers at the feast of the
Apaturia and then accuse the cat....
THIRD WOMAN. She's mad!
MNESILOCHUS. ... Have I mentioned the woman who killed her husband with a
hatchet? Of another, who caused hers to lose his reason with her potions?
And of the Acharnian woman ...
THIRD WOMAN. Die, you bitch!