by Aristophanes
188 The grasshopper brooch was a symbol of genuine Attic ancestry. The Athenians thought themselves the most ancient natives of Greece and called themselves autochthones, “from the same earth” as they inhabited, and also “sons of the earth.” Grasshoppers were supposed to have sprung from the earth, so to wear a golden grasshopper in your hair was to proclaim your honorable heritage and status as a citizen.
189 As usual, Aristophanes can’t resist having another dig at “poor old Cleonymus,” who threw away his shield in battle and ran.
190 Cleisthenes was a professional informer ridiculed by Aristophanes in Birds, Clouds, and Women at Thesmophoria Festival. It’s not known who Strato was. ‡ Phaeax was a diplomat and general who later was to lead an important expedition to Sicily.
191 Two girls appear dressed as truces.
192 The names that Aristophanes has invented for his characters have some significance. STREPSIADES could be translated as “Twister” or “Twistable”; PHIDIPPIDES as “Shyhorse,” a horse that shies easily; XANTHIAS as “Blondy,” xanthos being Greek for “yellow.”
193 For fear they would desert to the enemy.
194 Megacles: Mr. Big.
195 Coisyra: an aristocratic and extravagant woman.
196 Weaving (using up yarn) is a metaphor for extravagance.
197 In Greek: Xanthippus (“Goldentrot”), Chaerippus (“Hackjoy”), Callipides (“Beautybronc”). ‡ In Greek: Phidonides. § In Greek: Phidippides (“Shyhorse”).
198 An early and fanatical follower of Socrates laughed at for his thin, pallid appearance. He was the one—according to Plato—who asked the Delphic oracle if there was anybody wiser than Socrates.
199 The wealthy and aristocratic father of the orator Andocides.
200 One must suppose STREPSIADES to be between fifty and his early sixties—an age that was, at the time, biologically older than it would be now.
201 One thinks of a Harpo Marx-like charade. SOCRATES begins as if he is going to carry out a scientific experiment and needs a compass. A bent skewer won’t do, so he uses the homosexual he happens to have around. They are good at opening their legs, he implies.
202 Thales was one of the seven wise men of Greece (circa 640-546 B.C.), scientist-astronomer-philosopher, the first to predict with accuracy a solar eclipse that occurred on May 25, 565 B.C.
203 A theatrical machine that disclosed the interior of a house to the spectators.
204 Three hundred Spartan soldiers, a force that had attacked the promontory of Pylos, were marooned and captured on the island of Sphacteria and brought to Athens. No doubt a bedraggled lot.
205 A passion for law courts and juries was almost an Athenian disease.
206 In 446 B.C., Pericles invaded Euboea to suppress a rebellion.
207 In a lost play by Sophocles, Athamas sits waiting to be sacrificed for having wronged Nephele (Cloud), his wife. It goes without saying that this whole passage is a parody of some of the mystery cults then in vogue.
208 The meters are from Aristophanes, as close as I could manage.
209 Cecrops was the son of Gaea (Earth). He was man in his upper half and serpent in his lower. He became the first king of Athens, for which both he and Pallas Athena are synonyms.
210 The Eleusinian Mysteries.
211 Aristophanes makes one word of it: sphragidonuxargokometas.
212 It is sad to think that the Greeks and then the Romans were given to eating the exquisite and now heading for extinction song thrush.
213 A currier and something of a philosophical anthologist, but we have no evidence as to his being an embezzler and, later, a perjurer.
214 A well-known homosexual. ‡Prodicus was something of a prodigy: a polymath delving into science, semantics, and ethics—the Albert Einstein of his day.
215 In Greek: “you seedling of Cronus,” father of Zeus, i.e., “you dotard!”
216 Besides, the oak was sacred to Zeus.
217 A festival of Zeus and a time for feasting.
218 Haggis, known now as a Scottish speciality, has an ancient lineage and is typical of a thrifty, frugal, and usually highland people. It consists of the minced heart, lungs, and liver of sheep mixed with suet, onions, and oatmeal, all crammed into a small ball of sheep’s stomach lining and boiled.
219 The Athenian parliament.
220 Trophonius was a famous architect. His oracular underground shrine in Boeotia contained sacred snakes, which pilgrims kept happy by supplying them with honey cakes.
221 This was Aristophanes’ first play, Banqueters, produced in 427 B.C. and winner of second prize.
222 Taken up, that is, by another producer.
223 The scene is described in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers.
224 In comedy, especially in the satyr plays, the Chorus came on wearing long leather phalli. One must remember, too, that female parts were played by men—minus phalli.
225 A lewd dance performed in comedies.
226 He succeeded Cleon as the leading politician in Athens, circa 416 B.C.
227 Playwright and rival of Aristophanes. His Maricas was presented at the Lenaea in 421 B.C.
228 Phrynichus made his debut in 429 B.C. and was still competing in 405 B.C.
229 Hermippus attacked Hyperbolus in his play Breadsellers, produced circa 420 B.C.
230 In Knights, Aristophanes says that Cleon is like a man fishing for eels and inevitably stirring up the mud. Poseidon, god of the sea and god of earthquakes.
231 Apollo.
232 In 424 and 423 B.C. there was a lunar eclipse on October 29, and a solar eclipse
on March 21. This was a little before Cleon’s grab for power.
233 Apollo and his sister Artemis (Diana), both born on the island of Delos, one of
the Cyclades, where Apollo had a shrine. Cynthus was a high mountain there.
234 The gods were interested in sacrifices because they got the best cuts.
235 Memnon, son of Dawn, and Sarpedon, son of Zeus, were killed at Troy.
‡The Loeb Classics has an interesting note: “Holders of this office represented
Athens at the Amphictyonic Council at Delphi: perhaps the wind had blown off
Hyperbolus’ chaplet during the official ceremony.”
236 It becomes clear that Aristophanes makes a distinction between rhythm and meter, meter being rhythm made regular.
237 In Greek dactylos means both “finger” and the “metrical foot,” which like the finger is a long and two shorts: -˘ ˘.
238 Because it is a receptacle, a receiver, its action is passive. In this case the barleycorn is put into it to be pounded.
239 Cleonymus was a proverbial homosexual. A few lines further on, Aristophanes suggests that he masturbated.
240 Sostratus was a legendary homosexual with a crush on Heracles.
241 Cleonymus was a citizen of Athens who became a byword for timidity and lack of courage.
242 Not only a dig at Corinth, an old rival of Athens, but a play on words in the Greek: koris is the word for “bug.”
243 Remember that the writing would have been inscribed into the wax tablet with the point of a stylus. As to the burning glass, this was perfected by Archimedes, the greatest scientist and mathematician of antiquity. When the Roman fleet lay siege to Syracuse in 212 B.C., Archimedes directed burning glasses on the ships and set them on fire. The “glasses” were probably made of highly polished metal.
244 Megacles.
245 The word used in Greek is dinos, which means “whirl,” “gyration.” It also means “mug” or “cup.” There was a mug placed outside the Thinkpot as a symbol that not Zeus but Spin ruled the universe.
246 “Strepsiades confuses Socrates with Diagoras of Melos, author of a sophistic proof of the nonexistence of the gods, who was outlawed by the Athenian Assembly around the time Aristophanes was revising Clouds.” (Loeb)
247 Pericles, faced with the fact that he’d spent a large sum of money in a bribe to get the Spartans out of
Attica during the Euboean campaign of 445 B.C., entered the sum as “miscellaneous expenses.”
248 A festival of Zeus and an occasion for family banqueting.
249 It is possible that Aristophanes intended to cover this interval with a song from the CHORUS.
250 Telephus of Mysia in Asia Minor was a character in mythology who, because of the list of his misfortunes, became a synonym for the belabored soul. In Aristophanes’ Acharnians, Dicaeopolis disguises himself as Telephus the beggar in order to plead his case. Euripides also wrote a play, Telephus, on the same theme.
251 Phrynis was a celebrated lyre player and musical innovator.
252 I.e., at the gymnasium (a word that comes from gumnos, “naked”), where boys and young men exercised in the nude. (Hence the embarrassment of the hellenized young Jews recorded in the New Testament when perforce their circumcision was revealed while they exercised among their Greek fellows.)
253 This was an obsolete festival called the Dipoleia, at which an ox was sacrificed to Zeus. Apparently the festival had long been neglected because it failed to include athletic contests and competitions in music and the arts. Grasshopper (or cicada) brooches were centuries out-of-date.
254 Golden brooches of the grasshopper or cicada were in early times worn in the hair by the Athenians to show that they were genuinely indigenous. Why the grasshopper? Possibly because that was the most common insect in the dry plains of Attica, as the cicada was in the trees. §In 490 B.C., the Athenians defeated a large Persian force on the plain of Marathon, twenty-two miles northeast of Athens. This was the occasion when the runner Phidippides, sent to solicit aid from Sparta, covered the distance from Athens to Sparta (150 miles) in two days.
255 This was a dance where naked young men held a shield high above their heads and flourished it.
256 Hippocrates was a nephew of Pericles. His three sons, Demophon, Pericles, and Telesippus, became bywords in comedy for their lack of breeding and boorishness.
257 In the Greek Aristophanes has glischrantilogexepitriptou.
258 A public park with sporting facilities, and later the site of Plato’s school. (Loeb) ‡MR. GOOD REASON’s speech is an example of Aristophanes’ sense of nonsense. §It’s always been a mystery to me why Greek statuary of the male form seems to favor a penis disproportionately small to a hulking torso. Was this a convention or the reality?
259 Nothing is known of this Antimachus or whether he was a contemporary of Socrates. In any case the name became a byword for a lascivious character.
260 Hot springs were called Baths of Heracles.
261 MR. BAD REASON is cheating here. “Plaza” in Homer’s time didn’t mean the Agora but “meeting place.” Agoretes, Plazagoer, meant a good speaker.
262 Peleus, Achilles’ father, had been falsely accused of trying to rape the wife of Acastus. So Acastus arranged for him to be left unarmed in the wild. But the god Hephaestus gave him a dagger with which to defend himself against the beasts.
263 Hyperbolus: unknown.
264 Cuckolded husbands had the right to pour hot ash over the culprit.
265 Solon, circa 640-558 B.C., was a famous Athenian statesman, poet, and lawgiver.
266 Carcinus was a tragedian. Three of his four sons were dancers and one, Xenocles, a playwright, whom Aristophanes refers to more than once and always derogatively.
267 A parody of Alcmena’s speech in a play by Xenocles called Lysimnius, in which Thempolamus kills her half brother.
268 Thempolamus, in a play by Xenocles (a son of Carcinus), killed her half brother.
269 An established convention at drinking parties when the singer or reciter did not accompany himself on the lyre.
270 A snippet from the Aeolus of Euripides. Aristophanes attacks Euripides again in Frogs for his representation of incest. Apparently it was less reprehensible if the sister were by a different mother.
271 Lines echoing, reversing, and parodying a sentence in Euripides’ play Alcestis, in which Admetus, trying to find someone to die instead of him, approaches his father, who replies scathingly: “You enjoy the light of day. Do you think your father doesn’t?”
272 He means the earthenware mug outside the Thinkpot, the Greek word for which is dinos, which also means “spin.” So the humble mug (instead of a god) becomes the symbol of creation.
273 Hermes was the patron of ruses and trickery.
274 A demagogue who made himself powerful in Athens during the Peloponnesian war. A domineering character and a tanner by trade.
275 The fourth section of an Aristophanic comedy (following the Prologue, Parados or entry of the Chorus, and the Debate). In it, the poet speaks directly to the audience.
276 A Phrygian deity, patron of slaves.
277 Cleonymus was a proverbial coward. ‡The Pnyx was a hill not far from the Acropolis in Athens where a large amphitheater had been hewn out of the side of the hill to accommodate assemblies of the people.
278 The curing of ox hides indicates that the person being lampooned is Cleon, who was once a tanner.
279 Impossibly condensed in the Greek, the one word dēmos means both “the people” and “fat.” ‡Theorus was a crony of Cleon’s. §Alcibiades was the golden boy of Athens, elegant, self-willed, unreliable, and beautiful. He was one of the young men who tended to hang around Socrates.
280 Euripides was too modern for the Athenians of his time and seldom won a prize. He retired to the court of King Archelaus of Macedon, where he was well received and wrote two or three of his most enduring tragedies, including his masterpiece Bacchae.
281 Aristophanes had already “chewed up” Cleon in Knights.
282 We don’t know who Dercylus was, nor Amynias.
283 A successful general.
284 Philoxenus was a dithyrambic poet.
285 Speeches were timed in the courtroom by a water clock.
286 Verdicts would be recorded on a wax tablet with a stylus but Lovecleon fanatically used his nails.
287 The god of healing.
288 One must imagine a double scene: the first in the house and the other out.
289 Both Homer and Euripides (in Cyclops) tell the story of how Odysseus and his men escape from the cave of the one-eyed giant Polyphemus by clinging to the underside of the sheep as they are let out to pasture.
290 A proverb for something of no importance.
291 To pun with Woolsack: the Lord Chancellorship. ‡Scione was a town in Thrace that had rebelled against Athens during the Peloponnesian War. I’ve lifted almost every word of this short passage from Jeffrey Henderson’s translation in the Loeb Classics. I could see no way of making it different—and certainly not as good.
292 Aristophanes makes it one word: archaiomelioidōnophrunixērata. Phrynicus was a tragic playwright who flourished in early fifth century B.C. Only fragments of his work remain.
293 A successful general whom Cleon attacked for his handling of the first Sicilian expedition (427-25 B.C.). He is also the name character of Plato’s dialogue Laches, which deals with the quality of courage.
294 Perhaps to light the lamp with. ‡The woodcock, like the snipe, is a woodland bird that likes to wade about in muddy water probing for grubs with its long beak.
295 The Samian revolt of 440 B.C. The informant’s name was Carystion but we don’t know why the CHORUS should think his doings might annoy LOVECLEON.
296 It is not clear what this refers to. Perhaps the man implied is Laches again.
297 Ridiculed by Aristophanes in Birds, he is otherwise unknown. Son of Sellus is either Aeschines or Amynias.
298 Aristophanes has “I can’t turn myself into whey,” which seems rather odd!
299 The goddesses: Demeter (Roman Ceres), goddess of agriculture and central to the Eleusinian Mysteries, and Cora, or Persephone (Roman Proserpine), her daughter, Queen of Hades.
300 Diopeithes was a fanatical baiter of atheists.
301 Lycus was a mythological hero whose shrine was near the lawcourt.
/> 302 During the autumn Pyanopsia festival, harvest wreaths made of olive or laurel branches were carried around by singing boys and then hung on house doors for the rest of the year.
303 Theorus was an Athenian statesman in the time of Pericles who established a fund to pay two obols to poorer citizens for the entrance fee to the theater at the Dionysiac festivals.
304 Gorgias was an orator said to have lived to be 108.
