Lysistrata.
Don’t you feel sad and sorry because the fathers of your children are far away from you with the army? For I’ll undertake, there is not one of you whose husband is not abroad at this moment.
Calonicé.
Mine has been the last five months in Thrace—looking after Eucrates.[1]
Lysistrata.
’Tis seven long months since mine left me for Pylos.[2]
Lampito.
As for mine, if he ever does return from service, he’s no sooner back than he takes down his shield again and flies back to the wars.
Lysistrata.
And not so much as the shadow of a lover! Since the day the Milesians betrayed us, I have never once seen an eight-inch-long godemiche even, to be a leathern consolation to us poor widows. . . . Now tell me, if I have discovered a means of ending the war, will you all second me?
Myrrhiné.
Yes verily, by all the goddesses, I swear I will, though I have to put my gown in pawn, and drink the money the same day.[3]
- ↑ An Athenian general strongly suspected of treachery; Aristophanes pretends his own soldiers have to see that he does not desert to the enemy.
- ↑ A town and fortress on the west coast of Messenia, south-east part of Peloponnese, at the northern extremity of the bay of Sphacteria —the scene by the by of the modern naval battle of Navarino—in Lacedæmonian territory; it had been seized by the Athenian fleet, and was still in their possession at the date, 412 B.C., of the representation of the ‘Lysistrata,’ though two years later, in the twenty-second year of the War, it was recovered by Sparta.
- ↑ The Athenian women, rightly or wrongly, had the reputation of being over fond of wine. Aristophanes, here and elsewhere, makes many jests on this weakness of theirs.
