Aristophanes: The Complete Plays

by Aristophanes

  431 Born circa 490 B.C., a prolific writer of poetry, drama, and prose, and for many years a frequent visitor to Athens. (Loeb)

  432 A sanctuary in east Attica where an initiation festival for maidens was held every four years. (Loeb)

  433 The Isthmian Games took place every two years at Elis on the isthmus of Corinth. Isthmus, the spot connecting two legs of land, is here used as a metaphor for sex.

  434 Unknown.

  435 The only thing we know about him is Aristophanes’ dislike.

  436 Images of Hermes, god of business and success, stood in the street outside houses.

  437 Another of Aristophanes’ pet hates.

  438 i.e., ingenious. The Ionians (from a province of Asia Minor) were noted for their cleverness.

  439 A piper and lyre player frequently ridiculed in comedy for ineptitude. (Loeb)

  440 Unknown.

  441 Possibly the father of the prominent politician Pisander. (Loeb)

  442 A minor politician. (Loeb)

  443 A tragic poet with a malevolent disposition.

  444 Apparently not Euripides’ Medea, but possibly by Melanthius.

  445 Stilbides was the famous seer who accompanied the Athenian general Nicias to Syracuse for the disastrous campaign of 415 B.C. Aristophanes is saying: “Will Stilbides come through with a prophetic warning?”

  446 A Boeotian seer whose prophecies during the Persian wars were taken seriously and much quoted.

  447 There were sibyls in various parts of the ancient world. They were female seers and were seriously consulted.

  448 A shrine in Euboea near Oreus.

  449 Typical names of domestic servants.

  450 Thrushes were considered a delicacy. Even today the Latins shoot all their birds

  and will make a sandwich out of a sparrow.

  451 Probably the orator and rival of Demosthenes.

  452 Not the plant that is called myrtle in the United States, a small-leaved evergreen ground plant. The European myrtle is a tall evergreen bush with aromatic leaves and an edible purple berry. To this day in Italy during Holy Week branches of myrtle are strewn on the floors of churches to make the air fragrant. ‡ Unknown.

  453 Ancient King of Athens and tribal hero.

  454 Cottabus was a drinking game.

  455 The following sequence is a parody of Homer. I vary the dactylic hexameter with pentameter, which more nearly reflects the pace of the Greek.

  456 Aristophanes can never resist having a dig at Cleonymus, whom he makes the proverbial coward.

  457 From Saiia, a town in Thrace. The reference is obscure.

  458 Hymen was the son of Dionysus and Aphrodite: the god of marriage and the wedding feast.

  459 Execestides came from Caria in Asia Minor and tried to pass himself off as Athenian. The point of Euelpides’ remark is that, if Execestides couldn’t get himself to Athens, nobody could. †It’s not known which Philocrates is being referred to. ‡Tereus, King of Thrace, married Procne and raped her sister, Philomela, then cut out Philomela’s tongue and shut her away so that she couldn’t tell. But Philomela depicted what had happened on a piece of embroidery and sent it to Procne. The sisters planned revenge. They killed and cooked Itys, the son of Tereus, and served him up to his father. During the meal Philomela threw the head of Itys onto the table. The gods changed Tereus into a hoopoe, Procne into a nightingale, Philomela into a swallow, and Itys into a sandpiper. The nightingale’s song in its classic sadness came to represent the passion and pain of eternal love. Ironically, the story also illustrates how little the Greeks knew about birds: it is only the cock nightingale that sings; the female is mute.

  460 The only thing known about Tharrileides is that he was small and noisy, like a jackdaw.

  461 A double meaning here: in Greek “go to the crows” is our “go to hell;” and literally here: “to go to the land of the birds.”

  462 Sacas was the nickname of the tragic playwright Acestor who, it seems, had trouble proving his citizenship.

  463 Implements used ceremoniously in founding a settlement. (Loeb)

  464 The servant is naturally dressed as a bird.

  465 That is, they bungled his creation.

  466 One of the many lost plays of Sophocles.

  467 Aristocrates was a politician and general.

  468 Salaminia (the Salamis) was one of two state galleys that the Athenians used for official missions. The other was Paralus (the Seaworthy). The Salamis was sent to arrest Alcibiades in Sicily. He was one of the joint commanders. Aristophanes is saying: How absurd.

  469 A tragic poet, said to be leprous.

  470 Opuntius was said to be a fool and blind in one eye.

  471 Both the name and the point are obscure.

  472 In 416 B.C., when the island of Melos (which boasted of its seven-hundred-year independence) refused to join the Athenian hegemony, the Athenians laid siege to it, eventually captured it, killed all the young males, and sold the women and children into slavery.

  473 Pronounced Bee-o-shans.

  474 In the following lyrical sequences, Aristophanes, at the termination of each set, manages to give a remarkable impression of the rhythm and tone of the nightingale’s song.

  475 The godwit (Limosa fedoa) belongs to the wading family of birds.

  476 A mythical bird, though here the stormy petrel is meant. Alcyone, the wife of Ceyx, King of Thessaly, was changed into a kingfisher after death. Kingfishers do not fly over the sea!

  477 Pheasants are supposed to have come from the region of the river Phasis in Persia, which was also the country of seers and prophets, hence PEISETAIRUS’ remark about a “mantic crooner.”

  478 Members of a wealthy and distinguished family through several generations, alternating names in this confusing way.

  479 Aristophanes can never resist having a dig at Cleonymus, a politician often made fun of because he was fat, effeminate, greedy, and cowardly. In battle he supposedly threw away his shield and ran.

  480 A country in Asia Minor whose boundaries are uncertain.

  481 Sporgilus was a barber.

  482 The owl was Pallas Athena’s favorite bird. “To take an owl to Athens” was equivalent to our “coals to Newcastle,” or indeed, “ice cubes to Siberia.” However, Aristophanes seems to have forgotten that his setting for Birds is far from Greece.

  483 A large predatory bird from mountainous regions, also called a bearded vulture.

  484 Commander in chief of the Athenian forces in Sicily. He’d scored a success at Syracuse the previous autumn. No one at Athens was prepared for the disaster that was soon to follow.

  485 I have borrowed Jeffrey Henderson’s rendering of this line from the Loeb Classics.

  486 Generic term for a servant.

  487 Aesop is reputed to have been the slave of a man called Iadmon and lived on the island of Samos in the sixth century B.C. He seems to have been a peripatetic raconteur who spread his stories by the living voice.

  488 The deme Cephale (“Head”) was the site of a large cemetery. (Loeb)

  489 A deme not far from Athens.

  490 There were probably no pockets in the loose-fitting chlamys (cloak) and certainly none in the chiton (shirt); besides, in the summer, a young man would spend a good deal of his time exercising naked in the gymnasium. So the only place to put an obol would be in his mouth.

  491 Pronounced as four syllables, thus: Me-ne-la-us.

  492 The last King of Troy.

  493 Unknown but almost certainly some politician that Aristophanes despised.

  494 They rebelled against the Olympians and were eliminated.

  495 Alcmene: mother of Heracles by Zeus. Alope: mother of Hippothoon by Poseidon. Semele: mother of Dionysus by Zeus.

  496 Auspices were taken and omens interpreted from the flight and behavior of birds, a procedure that the Romans (the most superstitious of races) reduced almost to a pseudoscience: “auspice”=avis-spicere, “to scrutinize birds.”

  497 Quoted
from a fragment of Hesiod, one of the earliest of Greek poets—about 900 B.C. His long poem, Works and Days, is about agriculture and also full of moral reflections.

  498 A ram-headed Egyptian god, identified by the Greeks with Zeus, who had an oracular shrine at the Siwa Oasis in Egypt. (Loeb) ‡ Arbutus: a small woodland tree with ball-like pretty pinkish fruit, edible but tasteless.

  499 Loeb Classics gives these verses to the CHORUS, but to my mind they obviously belong to TEREUS (Hoopoe, king of birds), who has been silent long enough.

  500 The Fox and the Eagle went into a partnership that the Eagle betrayed. When food was short, the Eagle pounced on the Fox’s cubs and fed them to her young, knowing that the Fox could not fly. The Fox, however, snatched a burning cinder from an altar where a goat was being sacrificed and set the Eagle’s tree alight. As the eaglets fell to the ground, she fed them to her remaining babies.

  501 Perhaps it should be said again that it is only the cock bird that sings.

  502 Prodicus of Chios, a contemporary of Socrates with broad scientific and philosophical interests, traced the origin of gods to primitive nature and hero worship. (Loeb)

  503 Not the Orestes who was the son of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, but a local character Aristophanes didn’t think much of.

  504 Dodona, in northwestern Greece, rivaled Delphi in importance as an oracle, and it was much older. Ammon, in the deserts of Egypt, was the site of a famous temple to Zeus. Aristophanes would have been surprised to know that Alexander the Great was to visit the oracle there within living memory before setting forth on his conquest of the East.

  505 Apollo was the god of prophecy.

  506 Wife of Cronus and mother of Zeus; also called Cybele, the mountain mother.

  507 Tragic poet and contemporary of Aeschylus. His songs were still well remembered by an older generation.

  508 It’s not certain who this Spintharus was but anybody from Phrygia, in Asia Minor, would be looked down on in Athens.

  509 Philemon: unknown. ‡ Caria was a province of Asia Minor, with its capital, Halicarnassus. See footnote on page 338. § It is not known who Peiseias was or why he was called a partridge. ¶ The partridge was considered a clever bird because it camouflaged itself.

  510 He was nicknamed “the Shitter,” according to the Scholiast. (Loeb)

  511 He actually came from quite a distinguished family and became a general.

  512 A tough, wiry grass (Stipa tenacissima) used for making rope. It grows all over the Mediterranean regions.

  513 Aeschines was a famous orator and rival of Demosthenes. Aristophanes ridicules him as a boaster in Wasps, and Theogenes elsewhere as loaded with imaginary millions.

  514 In Macedonia, where the Giants attacked the gods and were defeated by Heracles.

  515 Aristophanes makes fun of Cleisthenes also in Knights, Clouds, and Women at Thesmophoria Festival. Apparently he was a professional informer.

  516 Antistrophe does not come till page 379.

  517 A lyre player and piper often ridiculed in comedy for poor technique. (Loeb)

  518 A small island in the Aegean among the Cyclades, the legendary birthplace of Artemis and Apollo, where there was an oracle of Apollo.

  519 A foreign deity whom the Athenians identified with Dionysus.

  520 The goddess Rhea, the Titan earth goddess.

  521 It’s not certain who this is.

  522 From the island of Chios, between Lesbos and Samos off the coast of Asia Minor. A powerful and independent ally of Athens. Its wine rivaled that of Samos.

  523 Answering the strophe on page 377.

  524 Simonides was one of the greatest lyric poets. He ended his days at the court of Hieron, King of Syracuse, in 468 B.C.

  525 Now the town of Taormina. The verse is adapted from a poem of Pindar written for Hieron, ruler of Syracuse and founder of Aetna.

  526 A legendary soothsayer of Boeotia.

  527 The hooded crow, whose back and wings are streaked with gray. ‡ Athens and Corinth were traditional enemies. Sicyon was in the Peloponnese, once powerful and criticized for its luxurious living.

  528 The “Eve” of mythology. According to Hesiod, the first mortal woman. Not the Pandora who let out evils from a box.

  529 Lampon was a soothsayer; Diopithes, a genius unraveler of oracles and a prosecutor of atheists.

  530 A district of downtown Athens where Meton had set up a sundial. (Loeb)

  531 One of the earliest Greek scientists and philosophers, who is said to have predicted a solar eclipse.

  532 Exemplifying the traveling inspectors sent by Assembly decree to enforce Athenian policies in the cities of the empire. (Loeb)

  533 The last king of Assyria, famous for his pomp and luxury.

  534 Teleas was a minor official in the Athenian Assembly.

  535 A Persian ambassador.

  536 Olophyxus was a small town in Macedonia on the peninsula of Mount Athos. It was an ally of Athens.

  537 That is, from the island of Melos between Crete and the Peloponnese. It was originally colonized by Sparta and was therefore anti-Athenian. Diagoras became violently antireligious and wrote a treatise to debunk the Eleusinian Mysteries.

  538 It is not clear whether Philocrates the politician is being referred to; in any case, the description of the ruthless bird hawker is all too familiar. The Romans inherited this habit from the Greeks and “improved” on it. Even today, in the Latinized countries—France, Spain, Italy—it is rife. La chasse in France may mean the slaughter of a robin. In Spain, until recently, song thrushes were netted by the thousand when they arrived exhausted from Africa. Some years ago I wrote to the King of Spain in protest and am glad to say that this atrocity has now stopped. However, one still hears, from my house in Majorca, the guns going off in the mountains of a morning, and one trembles to think what live thing is being assassinated. But at least one no longer sees baskets of dead thrushes in the local shops. In my youth, when I was a student in Rome, I had to pass every morning, on my way to the university, by a shop where you could buy a nightingale sandwich.

  539 Mountain nymphs.

  540 Paris, the handsome son of Priam, King of Troy, when called upon to judge a beauty contest among Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, chose Aphrodite and she awarded him the beautiful Helen.

  541 Coins made from the silver mined at Laurium in Attica. They were stamped with the owl of Athena.

  542 Nothing is known about him except that he is also parodied in Wasps for being a braggart.

  543 A corrupt politician.

  544 The huge horse concealing three hundred Greek soldiers that the Trojans disastrously wheeled into the center of Troy.

  545 Erebus was the son of Chaos and Darkness. He married Night and produced Light and Day. Erebus also means “the underworld.”

  546 The two sacred galleys used by the Athenians for important missions.

  547 The Greek literally is potera ploion ē kuōn: “(are you) sail or dog?” Considering what follows, it is clear that the play on words is sexual: “sailing or bitch?” The English “cruising” is the exact colloquial equivalent of the Greek “sailing,” and a bitch in heat is exactly what is meant by “dog.”

  548 Son of Zeus and Antiope. He built the walls of Thebes and was thought to be the inventor of music.

  549 Unidentified.

  550 Unidentified.

  551 An Athenian admiral during the Peloponnesan war.

  552 Unidentified.

  553 A well-respected Athenian orator praised for his impartiality.

  554 A politician ridiculed for his “barking” oratory. (Loeb)

  555 A public official and avid bird fighter. (Loeb)

  556 Quoted from Sophocles’ lost play Oenomaus.

  557 The Athenians were besieging the city of Amphipolis on the river Strymon between Macedonia and Thrace. Eventually the Athenian commander Euetion brought his triremes into the Strymon and blockaded the city from the river. See Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, book 7
, chapter 9.

  558 A tall, thin composer of dithyrambs in the avant-garde style noted for as-trophic “preludes,” musical complexity, elaborate language, and high emotionalism. (Loeb)