Aristophanes: The Complete Plays

by Aristophanes

AESCHYLUS: My poetry hasn’t died with me—

  it’s still alive up there,

  whereas his is as moribund as he.

  Still, if that’s what you want, I don’t care.

  DIONYSUS: Will someone go and get the incense and the fire

  and I’ll begin this display of supererogation with a prayer

  that my decisions in this contest will be fair.

  Meanwhile will the Chorus invoke the Muses with a hymn.

  MEN AND WOMEN:

  Come, you holy maidens of Zeus,

  You Muses nine, who activate the decisions and the minds

  Of men along wonderfully clear and luminous lines

  When they are pitted against each other in tough and abstruse

  Debate, we invite you to come and admire the vigor and prowess

  Of this couple of speakers, each of which is a master

  Of handling enormous slabs of verb

  As well as piddling chips of syllable. Look and observe

  The mighty minds that are about to commence.

  DIONYSUS: Both of you now offer up a prayer before you say your piece.

  AESCHYLUS: Great Demeter, who sustains my faculties,

  let me be worthy of your Mysteries.

  DIONYSUS: You now, Euripides.

  Present your incense, make your prayer.

  EURIPIDES: Thanks, but I pray to a different set of deities.

  DIONYSUS: Your own personal ones? Brand-new, of course?

  EURIPIDES: Sure.

  DIONYSUS: Go on then. Have recourse to those personal gods of yours.

  EURIPIDES: Ether—you, my grazing pastures

  As well as Nous and Nosey Parker

  Arm me with the words for argument.

  STROPHE806

  MEN: Now we’re all agog to hear

  Two literary geniuses at work

  Who have decided to go to war

  In a duel of words.

  The tongues of both will go berserk.

  Their spirits are not short of valor

  Nor are their minds short of vigor.

  So we may safely assume that soon

  One will utter something smart,

  Whetted, and keen,

  The other score with a brilliant thrust

  And reasons torn up by the roots

  Scattering words in a cloud of dust.

  LEADER: Very well, begin your speechifying at once.

  Don’t fail to make it clever, but not pretentious

  or commonplace with silly riddles.

  EURIPIDES: Good, but before I tell you the kind of creative writer I am

  let me make clear what an impostor and sham my adversary is.

  What he did was set himself up to diddle

  the audiences he inherited from Phrynichus,807

  Who were already pretty far gone in imbecility.

  His Prologues always begin with some solitary soul,

  an Achilles, say, or a Niobe,

  all muffled up so you can’t see their faces

  and not uttering a syllable.

  Quite a travesty, I’d say, of dramatic tragedy.

  DIONYSUS: Yes, you’ve got it exactly.

  EURIPIDES: And while they sit there mute as dummies,

  the Chorus lets go in a litany

  of nonstop choral baloney.

  DIONYSUS: All the same, I quite enjoyed his silences.

  They weren’t as bad as today’s babbling histrionics.

  EURIPIDES: That’s because you’re easily taken in.

  DIONYSUS: Perhaps you’re right, but how else could he have written?

  EURIPIDES: Nevertheless, it’s sheer chicanery.

  He wants the audience to sit there interminably,

  all ears cocked for the moment Niobe

  utters a whimper. Meanwhile the play drags on.

  DIONYSUS: The rascal, he took me in! Aeschylus, I’ll thank you to stop fidgeting.

  EURIPIDES: It’s because I’m showing him up. . . .

  Then after he’s bumbled along like this till the play’s almost done,

  he lets fly with a volley of words

  as formidable as a beribboned bull

  flaunting crests and a shaggy scowl,

  which is followed by a whole string of scarecrow weirdies

  designed to make your flesh crawl.

  AESCHYLUS: How cruel!

  EURIPIDES: And never does he utter a word that makes sense.

  DIONYSUS: Aeschylus, do stop grinding your molars.

  EURIPIDES: It’s all river-Scamanders,

  fosses and bronze-bossed bucklers

  emblazoned with eagle-griffins

  and great rough-hewn declarations

  for which there are never explanations.

  DIONYSUS: Don’t I know it! “I’ve lain awake all through the long leviathan of the night,” trying to tell what is meant by a swooping hippocockerell.808

  AESCHYLUS: It’s the figurehead painted on our ships at Troy, you cretin.

  DIONYSUS: And I was imagining it to be Eryxis, son of Philoxenus.809

  EURIPIDES: But honestly

  do we really have to have cockerells in high tragedy?

  AESCHYLUS: All right, you god-detested,

  in what sort of themes have you invested?

  EURIPIDES: Well, for a start,

  no hippocockerells and not a single stag crossed with a goat,

  the kind of freak you might expect to see

  on a strip of Persian tapestry.

  None of that!

  When you passed on to me the tragic art

  the poor thing was loaded to the ground with bombast and fat.

  Immediately, I put her on a diet

  and got her weight down by a course of long walks

  and little mouthfuls of syllables in fricassee.

  I also fed her chopped repartee

  and a concoction of verbal juice pressed out of books.

  Then as a pick-me-up I dosed her with a tincture

  of monodies from Cephisophon.810

  I never shambled along like you

  with the first thing that entered my noggin,

  or plunged ahead leaving the audience in a stew.

  The first character to walk on

  explained the nature of the play and—

  AESCHYLUS: A better nature than yours, any day!

  EURIPIDES: [ignoring the interruption] . . . from the opening lines I got all the characters going: wife speaking, servant speaking, and of course the boss and young girl, not to mention the old crone.

  AESCHYLUS: Such vulgarity! It calls for the death penalty.

  EURIPIDES: Not so. It’s straightforward democracy.

  DIONYSUS: Be that as it may, pal,

  but that’s a topic I’d keep off if I were you.

  EURIPIDES: [gesturing to the audience] And I taught you people

  the art of conversation and—

  AESCHYLUS: I’ll say you did, and in my view

  you should have been sliced down the middle.

  EURIPIDES: . . . some of the nicer subtleties

  like how to make words tell;

  how to think and observe and decide;

  how to be quick off the mark and shrewd;

  how to expect the worst and face reality in the round—

  AESCHYLUS: I’ll say you did!

  EURIPIDES: . . . by re-creating the workaday world we know

  and things that are part of our living,

  things I couldn’t sham without being shown up as a fraud

  because they’re common knowledge. So

  I never tried to bamboozle them by fibbing

  or by bombast and persiflage.

  I never tried to frighten them with brutes like your Cycnus and

  your Memnon811

  careering about in chariots with bells clanging.

  And just look at the difference between his devotees and mine;

  he’s got Pussy-Beard Phormisius812 and Sidekick Megaenetus813

  ri
p-’em-uppers-treetrunk-twisters

  and bushy-bearded-bugle-blowing lancers

  whereas I’ve got Cleitophon814 and the clever Theramenes.815

  DIONYSUS: Theramenes? Yes, he’s supersmart,

  surmounts every crisis and on the brink of disaster

  always manages to land on his feet.

  Whatever the fix, he always throws a six.

  EURIPIDES: That’s exactly what I meant, Teaching people how to think, Putting logic into art And making it a rational thing Which enables them to grasp And manage almost everything Better than they’ve ever done, Especially matters in the home, Asking “Is everything all right?” “What happened to this?” “Oh, damn! Who the deuce went off with that?”

  DIONYSUS: Ye gods, you’re right!

  When an Athenian comes home now

  He starts to bawl the servants out:

  “What’s happened to that cooking pot?”

  “Who bit the head off that sprat?”

  “The basin I bought last year is shot.”

  “Where’s the garlic? Do you know?”

  “Who’s been getting at the olives?” . . .

  Whereas before Euripides

  They sat like gawking dummies half alive.

  ANTISTROPHE817

  WOMEN: “Renowned Achilles, do you behold this?”816 How will you respond to it?

  Will you lose that famous temper?

  Do take care.

  And not go running amok.

  His gibes certainly are no joke,

  So, good sir, do take care.

  Do not be consumed with bile,

  Furl the canvas, slacken sheets,

  Shorten sail.

  Slowly, slowly cruise along

  Till the breeze blows soft and strong

  And bears you steadily along.

  LEADER: [to AESCHYLUS] You, first of Greeks to raise pinnacles of

  praise to adorn all tragic waffle, open up your throttle.

  AESCHYLUS: I’m furious matters have come to this. My stomach

  turns

  that I have to demean myself by arguing with this man’s

  pretensions, but I must because otherwise

  he’ll say that I’m reduced to silence. . . . So tell me this:

  What are the attributes that make a poet famous?

  EURIPIDES: Skill and common sense, by which we are able to make

  ordinary people better members of the State.

  AESCHYLUS: And say you’ve done the opposite—made honest folk

  into libertines—what punishment would you merit?

  DIONYSUS: Don’t ask him—death.

  AESCHYLUS: Just give a thought to what they were like

  when they came from my hand:

  six-foot heroes all of them who never shirked,

  unlike your loafers and your useless jerks,

  these latter-day washouts we have now.

  Those others were men of spears, men of darts, the very breath

  of white-plumed helmets waving and ox-hide hearts.

  DIONYSUS: Heavens, it’s helmets now! He’ll wear me out.

  EURIPIDES: What method did you use to make them so elite?

  DIONYSUS: Come on, Aeschylus, lay off being aloof.

  AESCHYLUS: I did it by shoving Ares into everything.

  DIONYSUS: Exactly how?

  AESCHYLUS: In my Seven Against Thebes . . . I contrived

  to make every male who saw it hot for war.

  DIONYSUS: Not very nice to have connived

  in making Thebans braver in battle than us Athenians!818

  You ought to be chastised.

  AESCHYLUS: I think not. You Athenians could have had the same training but you didn’t think it worth it. . . . Then, when I produced my Persians, it sent them raving to annihilate the enemy. So you see, in the end I didn’t come off too badly.819

  DIONYSUS: I love the part when they heard that Darius was no more,

  and they couldn’t celebrate enough, clapping their hands and

  shouting,

  “Hurrah! Hurrah!”

  AESCHYLUS: This is the sort of thing that poets should celebrate,

  and this, you may remember, is what one finds

  among the best of poets from earliest times.

  Orpheus revealed to us the mysteries,

  and also taught us to abhor murder as a crime.

  Musaeus made us aware of things like clairvoyance

  and also how to cure diseases.

  Hesiod taught us how to work the land, when to plow,

  when to sow; and as to Homer, the divine,

  did he not earn his fame and undying renown

  by giving us lessons on how to esteem

  military training, armory, and the discipline of men?

  DIONYSUS: That may be so but all the same

  he did pretty dismally with that airhead Pantacles820

  who only yesterday made a fool of himself on parade

  trying to fix the plumes of his helmet while he had it on his head.

  AESCHYLUS: I know, but surely he did inspire other brave men,

  for instance, the indomitable Lamachus,821

  who was for me the role model in courage, like Patroclus822

  and the lion-hearted Teucer823—the role model for all of us,

  inspiring valor and giving us courage to emulate them whenever

  the bugle for battle blew. . . . I never did create

  strumpets like Phaedra or Stheneboea, like you.‡

  You’ll never find anywhere in anything I wrote

  a lascivious bitch.

  EURIPIDES: Don’t I know it! You left poor Aphrodite out.

  AESCHYLUS: I should think so, whereas you

  have let her squash you and your whole household flat.

  DIONYSUS: He’s got you there, Euripides, for you’ve been hit by the

  same fate you invented for other people’s wives.§

  EURIPIDES: [ignoring the insult] You tiresome man,

  what harm to the community was ever done

  by my Stheneboea?

  AESCHYLUS: You put decent women married to decent men

  in a situation like that of Bellerephon

  that drives them to suicide.

  EURIPIDES: All right, but I didn’t invent the plot of Phaedra.

  AESCHYLUS: Worse luck, no! But the poet shouldn’t side

  with what is evil and display it on the stage like a demonstration.

  Children may have teachers but adults have the poet

  and the poet ought to keep things on a higher plane.

  EURIPIDES: [sarcastically] As high as Mount Lycabettus, no doubt, or

  lofty

  Parnassus, and they’re to be our instructors in the good?

  My word! Can’t you do your teaching in the language of men?

  AESCHYLUS: Listen, you miserable heel, the lofty thought and the

  high ideal

  call for a language to match,

  and if the deities are clothed in rare attire

  their language, too, should be out of the ordinary.

  This is where I blazed a trail,

  which you’ve managed to undermine.

  EURIPIDES: How have I?

  AESCHYLUS: For a start, by the way you dress your royalty. They’re all in rags like any pitiful wretch.

  EURIPIDES: But whom do I hurt by that?

  AESCHYLUS: Well, to begin with,

  it tempts the rich to shirk their responsibility:

  a wealthy tycoon evades the funding of a warship

  by dressing up in rags and whimpering about his poverty.824

  DIONYSUS: Yes, underneath the rags, by Demeter,

  he’s in lovely fleecy underwear

  and you see him splashing out on fish in the market square.

  AESCHYLUS: What’s more, you’ve taught people to prattle and gab,

  emptying the wrestling schools and turning the young men’s

  bottoms into flab

  as t
hey prattle away—and you’ve encouraged the crew

  of the Paralus to answer their officers back.825

  But in the old days when I was alive all they knew

  was how to clamor for their grub

  and shout “Ship ahoy” and “Heave-to.”

  DIONYSUS: That’s exactly it, by Apollo. Now they fart in the bottom bencher’s face shit on their messmates and go off with people’s clothes when on shore. What’s more, they give lip to their commanders and refuse to row, so the ship goes drifting to and fro.

  AESCHYLUS: What bad behavior is he not responsible for? Showing us a woman acting as a pander,826 Or producing a baby in the very temple,827 And others even coupling with their brothers828

  And saying that “something living’s not alive,”829

  The consequences naturally are simple:

  A society swamped by lawyers’ clerks

  And buffoons lying their heads off to the people,

  And, because nobody takes any exercise,

  When it comes to running with a torch, no one tries.

  DIONYSUS: You couldn’t be righter. I almost doubled up

  At the Panathenaea laughing when

  A slow coach of a booby thumped along,

  Stooped, white as a sheet, fat.

  And when he got to the Gates by the potter’s field

  People whacked him on his belly and butt

  And ribs and sides and all his miserable hide.

  As he scurried along he began to fart

  With gas enough to keep his torch alight.

  STROPHE

  MEN: Great is the struggle, grand the tussle, The war’s now under way. One of them lands a hefty biff. The other ducks with a swing In counterattack. It’s hard to say Which of them will win. . . . Hey, you two, you’ve not fought enough, Many more buffetings are due And plenty of cerebral stuff. Whatever it is you’re fighting about Go at it hard and argue it out. Flense the old and strip for the new. Get down to the nitty-gritty And something erudite.

  ANTISTROPHE

  WOMEN: And if you’re afraid that people won’t know What it is all about And have no inkling, are unable to follow The twists of an argument, Don’t give it a thought; as a matter of fact Things are different today. Everyone’s an expert now And knows his book of rules by heart And every nicety Is fully briefed and clever as well, And sharply honed, as we all know, So that’s not something to worry about. Don’t be afraid—enjoy it all. People are primed to the hilt.

  EURIPIDES: Very well then, we’ll look at his Prologues first

  and see how this famous poet begins his tragedies,

  because their plots are far from clear.