Aristophanes: The Complete Plays

by Aristophanes

for he’s a good dog and chases the wolves away.

  LOVECLEON: I’ll say he is! He’s a thief and a plotter.

  HATECLEON: Not at all:

  he’s top of his class and keeps the sheep at bay.

  LOVECLEON: What good is that if he’s a cheese gobbler?

  HATECLEON: Well, he fights for you and guards your door.

  He’s the best of dogs, and even if he was a robber,

  forgive him, for he never learned to play the lyre.333

  LOVECLEON: I wish he’d never learned to read or write;

  then we would be spared his phony syntax.

  HATECLEON: Very good, sir, but please attend my witnesses.

  Cheese grater, step up and give the facts.

  You were quartermaster, were you not?

  Tell us clearly, please,

  if you grated the full allowance of the soldiers’ cheese?

  Yes, he says.

  LOVECLEON: Of course he does, the liar!

  HATECLEON: My dear sir,

  have some compassion for poor Labes here.

  Bones and offal are his only fare,

  and he’s always on the go,

  whereas this other cur, why he’s nothing more

  than a house dog, and so

  stays glued to the spot

  and exacts his share

  of whatever is brought in—or he’s ready to bite.

  LOVECLEON: Good Lord! Am I going soft? Something’s coming over me, switching my mind.

  HATECLEON: Now, Papa, I beg you. Have a heart, be kind,

  and don’t destroy him. . . . Where are his puppies?

  [LABES’ PUPS come running in.]

  Step up here, you little squeakies:

  whine, whimper, crawl.

  LOVECLEON: Down, down, down, down with you all!

  HATECLEON: Step down I will,

  though stepping down should not fool anyone,

  but I’ll step down.

  LOVECLEON: Down, too, with that sipping of hot soup:

  it’s nearly made me lose my grip.

  HATECLEON: Then he’s not being acquitted?

  LOVECLEON: It’s hard to decide.

  HATECLEON: Come on, Daddykins, make a U-turn:

  Take this voting pebble, shut your eyes,

  and dash over to the number two urn.

  Do, Dad, and acquit him.

  LOVECLEON: And my reply’s

  a flat no. . . . I can’t play the lyre either—along with him.

  HATECLEON: Come, I’ll take you by the shortest route.

  LOVECLEON: So this is urn number one?

  HATECLEON: Correct.

  LOVECLEON: [dropping in his pebble] There, it’s in.

  HATECLEON: Ha ha, he’s fooled withal.

  He’s voted to acquit.

  We’ll count the pebbles.

  LOVECLEON: So what do we make of it?

  HATECLEON: We’ll soon see. . . . Oh, Labes, you’re acquitted.

  [LABES trots off, the court is cleared, but LOVECLEON lies stretched on the floor.]

  Papa, Papa, what’s the matter?

  Quick, someone, water . . .

  Can you sit up?

  LOVECLEON: [raising himself] Tell me at once. Was he acquitted?

  HATECLEON: He was indeed.

  LOVECLEON: Then I’m dead.

  HATECLEON: Dear Dad, don’t give it a thought. . . . Stand up.

  LOVECLEON: How can I live with this? How can I ever admit it?

  I let a defendant go scot-free—heaven forgive me.

  I’m not myself. Unwittingly I did it.

  HATECLEON: Don’t let it get you down, dear Pop,

  I’ll take good care of you.

  You’ll come with me everywhere:

  dinners, parties, shows, a new

  way of life full of pleasure and fun;

  Not any longer will anyone

  fool you and undermine you.

  Now let’s go in.

  LOVECLEON: Very well, if you think so.

  [They both go into the house.]

  CHORUS: Go on your way, wherever that be.

  Meanwhile, you thousands, much more than a few,

  Make sure that the rest of this my address

  Doesn’t fall by the wayside, which happens I guess

  With stupid spectators, but never with you.

  LEADER: [speaking in the name of Aristophanes]

  Now please, you crowd, listen to what I have to say.

  Our poet wants to castigate his audience today.

  He asserts that they have wronged him without the slightest

  cause,

  Though he more than indulged them in every possible way.

  Secretly at first and then in the glare of day

  They favored other poets; so then like Eurydes334

  He slipped into the voice box of others to amuse

  With a flood of jokes, and then he risked the ruse

  Of simply being himself and holding the reins

  Not of someone else’s team of muses but those

  Of his own. And after accolades and sellout runs

  He never rested on his laurels or got a swollen head;

  He never cruised the gyms to snatch a boy. And

  If an angry lover asked him to ridicule his friend,

  He never did on principle, or ever would descend

  To turning the muses into panders, or ever mocked

  (From his very first play)335 the simple, but attacked,

  Like Heracles, the fiercest monsters, and from the first

  Went for old Crooked Teeth himself,336 who nearly burst

  With anger flashing like bitchy Cynna’s eyes,‡ and then

  Let himself be licked from head to arse by toadying men.

  He had a voice like sewers in full flood, and the stench

  Of a sick seal or the unwashed balls of that wench

  Lamia,337 the epicene witch, or of a camel’s rump.

  Seeing this nightmare vision he didn’t crash with a crump

  Or let himself be bribed to undermine your trust,

  But fought for you as he fights for you still, as he knows he

  must.

  But dealing with this freak was not the only horror

  He grappled with last year but with that thing that had a

  Sudden hold by night with shivering and fever,338

  Suffocating fathers, choking many a grandpa,

  And crawling into the beds of honest citizens.

  Then there followed affidavits and citations,

  Summonses and briefs and a swarm of trepidations

  That made people leap and race for a defendant,

  And though in me you’d found the land a disinfectant,

  Last year339 you let him down, even though he’d sowed

  The seed of many a new idea, which you mowed

  Through your limited intelligence, and yet

  Over and over again, by Bacchus, you can bet,

  There wasn’t at any time a comedy in verse

  Heard by any one of you so funny and so terse.

  You ought to be ashamed—yes, all of you—for not

  Applauding it at once, though it doesn’t matter a jot

  In the eyes of the perspicacious that he never got a

  Reward for new ideas but came instead a cropper.

  But, dear audience, henceforth you

  Must nurse and cherish poets who

  Search for things to say that are new.

  Savor their thinking like a potpourri

  Inside your closet, letting free

  Fragrance for the entire year

  In your attire

  Together with the scent of wit you wear.

  CHORUS: Long ago we showed our prowess in the choral dance

  And in action our prowess, too, to threaten

  But most of all our power to lance

  With this our phallic weapon.340

  But that was long ago, and now

  My hair is whiter far than the snow- />
  White of a swan

  But even so

  From this wreckage we

  Must rouse a stripling’s energy,

  And I have opined

  That my hoary self is more than a match

  For the young men of today with their curled thatch,

  Their mincing way,

  And their tight behind.

  LEADER: If any of you, dear audience, has taken note of our shapes

  And observed our waspified waists and wonders about our

  pricks,

  Let me set him wise at once, whatever the glaring gaps

  In his education. These points are the Athenian fix

  Of our autochthonous virile strain and helped our town

  Enormously in war when the Persian hordes came down

  Belching smoke and setting fire to all the city341

  Intent on reducing our hives to nothing, without pity.

  At once we hurled ourselves against them with shield and

  lance,

  Every man of us taut with fear, the pawn of chance,

  Standing each to each, biting his lip and tense,342

  The flying arrows hiding the sky, they were that dense.343

  Nevertheless with the help of heaven we forced them back

  (An owl had flown over our troops before the attack).344

  We chased them and harpooned them in their baggy slacks,

  And they never stopped running. We stung them on eyes and

  face and backs.

  That is why barbarians everywhere insist:

  The manly sting of the Attic wasp is something to be missed.

  CHORUS: I was formidable then and struck the foe with awe.

  I turned them upside down

  When my triremes bore

  Against them. Those were the days

  We never gave a thought

  Of preparing a peroration

  To undermine antagonists at court.

  To excel at the oar

  Was the first thing in our minds.

  And so we captured many a Persian town,

  And we are the reason that the tribute finds

  Its way to Athens where

  Our juniors wolf it down.

  LEADER: All in all you’ll find our characters and our life,

  Whatever way you look at it, extremely waspylike,

  And that more than any other creature we are

  Quick tempered, easily annoyed, and also more

  Recalcitrant. On top of that, we all behave

  Like wasps in everything. We gather in a swarm

  And make our nests crammed tight as in a hive:

  Some in the Odeon,345 some in the magistrate’s court, and

  some

  In the Chambers of the Eleven, where we take the form

  Of grubs in their cells, jammed against the walls

  Like this, crunched down; on top of that,

  We’re all devastatingly proficient at

  Earning our daily bread by stinging all and sundry. . . .

  But among us are some drones without a sting

  And they feast upon our revenue, always hungry,

  And never do a ruddy thing.

  The way they dodge the draft sends me to a fury.

  They live on the dole without having even once

  Pulled an oar, raised a welt, or hauled a lance

  To defend this land, which makes me say that forever hence

  No citizen without a sting should be able to cadge

  Three obols a day for doing nothing, as a wage.

  [Enter HATECLEON, and LOVECLEON in a moth-eaten old cape, and XANTHIAS carrying a brand-new cape and a pair of boots.]

  LOVECLEON: [hugging his cape around him]

  Never while I live will I part from this.

  It was the one thing that saved me on campaigns

  when we battled with the great North Wind.346

  HATECLEON: You don’t ever seem to want something nice.

  LOVECLEON: Not for the world!

  Niceness never did me any good.

  I once gorged on some nice sardines

  and it cost me three obols to get rid of the stains.

  HATECLEON: [indicating the cape in the hands of XANTHIAS] Well at least try this on. Remember, you promised to put yourself in my hands to be spoiled.

  LOVECLEON: So what d’you expect me to do?

  HATECLEON: Discard that old thing and put on this smart new

  cape.

  LOVECLEON: What’s the point of bearing

  and bringing up children

  when one of them wants to smother me?

  HATECLEON: Come on, take it and stop blabbering.

  LOVECLEON: For God’s sake,

  what the hell is this?

  HATECLEON: Some call it Persian lamb and some astrakhan.

  LOVECLEON: More like a carpet from Morocco it seems to me.347

  HATECLEON: It would . . . but if you’d ever been to Sardis‡

  you’d have known what it was. You don’t.

  LOVECLEON: It looks to me

  more like a blanket belonging to Morychus.§

  HATECLEON: Nonsense! This stuff’s woven in Ecbatana.¶

  LOVECLEON: So Ecbatana’s where they weave tripe?

  HATECLEON: What a suggestion! . . . No, this cape

  is woven by the natives out of the most costly lana.

  This one gobbled up at least a talent’s worth of wool.

  LOVECLEON: So instead of “Astrakhan” why not call it “Woolsack”?

  HATECLEON: Take it, old fellow. Change into it and stand still.

  LOVECLEON: My word, what a whiff of warm fart!

  HATECLEON: Come on, throw it over you!

  LOVECLEON: That I shall not.

  HATECLEON: Be a good man and—

  LOVECLEON: Be compelled to dress up in an oven.

  HATECLEON: At least let me put it on you.

  [He turns to XANTHIAS.]

  You may go.

  [XANTHIAS puts the boots on the ground and leaves.]

  LOVECLEON: We need a meat hook, too.

  HATECLEON: The reason?

  LOVECLEON: So you can pull me out in one piece—

  when I’m cooked.

  HATECLEON: [after LOVECLEON has finally donned the astrakhan] Now take off those defunct booties and put on these Spartan brogues.

  LOVECLEON: What? Me truck with leather from Spartan rogues?

  HATECLEON: Put a foot into these Spartans, my dear sir,

  and stop making a fuss.

  LOVECLEON: It’s a crime to make me set a foot on enemy sole.348

  HATECLEON: Now the other.

  LOVECLEON: Not this foot, please!

  Very anti-Laconic is one of the toes.349

  HATECLEON: There’s no other course.

  LOVECLEON: Well I’m blessed!

  In my dotage I’m not going to be left a single corn.

  HATECLEON: All right! Got the brogues on?

  Now stride forth with a swagger the way the rich do,

  like this.

  LOVECLEON: Very well, watch me strut. . . . Who among the

  wealthy

  promenades thus?

  HATECLEON: Who? Someone who’s just had a garlic poultice.

  LOVECLEON: I’m doing my best to waggle my behind.

  HATECLEON: Yes, but can you converse seriously

  with educated and intelligent men?

  LOVECLEON: Of course I can.

  HATECLEON: What do you have in mind?

  LOVECLEON: Many a story.

  For instance, how Lamia when caught blew a snort

  from her behind.

  Also what Cardopin did to his mother and—350

  HATECLEON: Give me no myths, just people

  in everyday domestic affairs about the house.

  LOVECLEON: I know a very domestic story

  which begins: “Once upon a time a cat and a mouse . . .”

  HATECLEON: You oafish numbskull,

&nbs
p; as Theogenes351 the shitmonger said in repartee,

  do you honestly mean to spout about cats and mice

  before these distinguished people?

  LOVECLEON: Then what should I spout about?

  HATECLEON: Important things. You could recite

  the story of your going on a diplomatic mission

  with Androcles and Cleisthenes.352

  LOVECLEON: Diplomatic mission? I never went on one,

  except to Paros for two obols a day.

  HATECLEON: Well at least you can describe

  Euphudion’s duel with Ascondas in the pankration353

  when he was white-haired and old

  but had that barrel chest,

  those hands and flanks, and that superb breastplate of ribs.

  LOVECLEON: Hold!

  How can you fight the pankration in armor?

  HATECLEON: Ha, very clever!

  So tell me something else.

  If you were having a drink with people you didn’t know very

  well,

  what exploit of your youth would you tell

  that showed your prowess at its best?

  LOVECLEON: Of course! Of course! My manliest act:

  when I pinched the sticks that prop up Ergasion’s vines.354

  HATECLEON: You’re killing me! Prop sticks indeed!

  Tell me how you chased a boar or a hare

  or ran in a torch race—one of your most boyish scenes.

  LOVECLEON: My most boyish scene? Yes . . . Once

  when I was still a young bull I beat Phayllus in a race,355

  then beat him by two votes in a suit for slander.

  HATECLEON: Enough! . . . Come over here

  and recline as for dinner,356

  convivially and most concordially.

  LOVECLEON: Recline? How exactly, tell me.

  HATECLEON: Delicately.

  LOVECLEON: You mean like this?

  HATECLEON: Not in the least.

  LOVECLEON: Then how?

  HATECLEON: Stretch out your legs and flow

  over the covers like a reclining athlete.

  Then praise a bronze or two,

  stare at the ceiling, admire the drapery. . . .

  Next come finger bowls, dinner trays, dinner,

  clearing away, wine time.

  LOVECLEON: My word, the food was the stuff of dreams!

  HATECLEON: The piper girl is piping, and with you to carouse are

  Theorus, Aeschines, Phanus, Cleon,

  and another foreigner next to you, Acestor’s son.357

  Among such quality be sure to keep in tune.