Aristophanes' ECCLESIAZUSAE (Women In Council) Complete

A Literal Translation, with Notes.

Aristophanes Bilingual Anthology  Studies  Aristophanes in Print

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CHREMES. No, certainly not, nor even had you gone at the second cock-crow.

BLEPYRUS. Oh! what a misfortune! Oh, Antilochus![689] no triobolus! Even death would be better! I am undone! But what can have attracted such a crowd at that early hour?

CHREMES. The Prytanes started the discussion of measures nearly concerning the safety of the State; immediately, that blear-eyed fellow, the son of Neoclides,[690] was the first to mount the platform. Then the folk shouted with their loudest voice, "What! he dares to speak, and that, too, when the safety of the State is concerned, and he a man who has not known how to save even his own eyebrows!" He, however, shouted louder than they all, and looking at them asked, "Why, what ought I to have done?"

BLEPYRUS. Pound together garlic and laserpitium juice, add to this mixture some Laconian spurge, and rub it well into the eyelids at night. That's what I should have answered, had I been there.

CHREMES. After him that clever rascal Evaeon[691] began to speak; he was naked, so far as we all could see, but he declared he had a cloak; he propounded the most popular, the most democratic, doctrines. "You see," he said, "I have the greatest need of sixteen drachmae, the cost of a new cloak, my health demands it; nevertheless I wish first to care for that of my fellow-citizens and of my country. If the fullers were to supply tunics to the indigent at the approach of winter, none would be exposed to pleurisy. Let him who has neither beds nor coverlets go to sleep at the tanners' after taking a bath; and if they shut the door in winter, let them be condemned to give him three goat-skins."

[689] A parody on a verse in 'The Myrmidons' of Aeschylus.--Antilochus was the son of Nestor; he was killed by Memnon, when defending his father.

[690] See above.

[691] He was very poor, and his cloak was such a mass of holes that one might doubt his having one at all. This surname, Evaeon ([Greek: eu aion], delicious life) had doubtless been given him on the 'lucus a non' principle because of his wretchedness.

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