This is the first of the series of three Comedies--'The Acharnians,'
'Peace' and 'Lysistrata'--produced at intervals of years, the sixth,
tenth and twenty-first of the Peloponnesian War, and impressing on the
Athenian people the miseries and disasters due to it and to the
scoundrels who by their selfish and reckless policy had provoked it, the
consequent ruin of industry and, above all, agriculture, and the urgency
of asking Peace. In date it is the earliest play brought out by the
author in his own name and his first work of serious importance. It was
acted at the Lenaean Festival, in January, 426 B.C., and gained the first
prize, Cratinus being second.
Its diatribes against the War and fierce criticism of the general policy
of the War party so enraged Cleon that, as already mentioned, he
endeavoured to ruin the author, who in 'The Knights' retorted by a direct
and savage personal attack on the leader of the democracy. The plot is of
the simplest. Dicaeopolis, an Athenian citizen, but a native of Acharnae,
one of the agricultural _demes_ and one which had especially suffered in
the Lacedaemonian invasions, sick and tired of the ill-success and
miseries of the War, makes up his mind, if he fails to induce the people
to adopt his policy of "peace at any price," to conclude a private and
particular peace of his own to cover himself, his family, and his estate.
The Athenians, momentarily elated by victory and over-persuaded by the
demagogues of the day--Cleon and his henchmen, refuse to hear of such a
thing as coming to terms. Accordingly Dicaeopolis dispatches an envoy to
Sparta on his own account, who comes back presently with a selection of
specimen treaties in his pocket. The old man tastes and tries, special
terms are arranged, and the play concludes with a riotous and uproarious
rustic feast in honour of the blessings of Peace and Plenty. Incidentally
excellent fun is poked at Euripides and his dramatic methods, which
supply matter for so much witty badinage in several others of our
author's pieces.
Other specially comic incidents are: the scene where the two young
daughters of the famished Megarian are sold in the market at Athens as
sucking-pigs--a scene in which the convenient similarity of the Greek
words signifying a pig and the 'pudendum muliebre' respectively is
utilized in a whole string of ingenious and suggestive 'double entendres'
and ludicrous jokes; another where the Informer, or Market-Spy, is packed
up in a crate as crockery and carried off home by the Boeotian buyer.
The drama takes its title from the Chorus, composed of old men of
Acharnae.
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