Aristophanes' ECCLESIAZUSAE (Women In Council) Complete

A Literal Translation, with Notes.

Aristophanes Bilingual Anthology  Studies  Aristophanes in Print

65 pages - You are on Page 57

YOUNG MAN. Read it out then, and let's hear.

FIRST OLD WOMAN. Listen. "The women have decreed, that if a young man desires a young girl, he can only possess her after having satisfied an old woman; and if he refuses and goes to seek the maiden, the old women are authorized to seize him by his privates and so drag him in."

YOUNG MAN. Alas! I shall become a Procrustes.[723]

FIRST OLD WOMAN. Obey the law.

YOUNG MAN. But if a fellow-citizen, a friend, came to pay my ransom?

FIRST OLD WOMAN. No man may dispose of anything above a medimnus.[724]

YOUNG MAN. But may I not enter an excuse?

FIRST OLD WOMAN. There's no evasion.

YOUNG MAN. I shall declare myself a merchant and so escape service.[725]

[723] Nickname of the notorious brigand. The word means 'one who stretches and tortures,' from [Greek: prokrouein], and refers to his habit of fitting all his captives to the same bedstead--the 'bed of Procrustes'--stretching them if too short to the required length, lopping their limbs as required if they were too long. Here a further pun is involved, [Greek: prokrouein] meaning also 'to go with a woman first.'

[724] Athenian law declared it illegal for a woman to contract any debt exceeding the price of a medimnus of corn; this law is now supposed to affect the men.

[725] Merchants were exempt from military service; in this case, it is another kind of service that the old woman wants to exact from the young man.

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