[142] These temples were inviolable places of refuge,
where even slaves were secure.
[143] A rocky cleft at the back of the Acropolis into
which criminals were hurled.
[144] Young and effeminate orators of licentious habits.
[145] By adroit special pleading he had contrived
to get his acquittal, when charged with a capital
offence.
[146] They were personified on the stage as pretty
little filles de joie.
This is the first of the series of three Comedies—’The
Acharnians,’ ‘Peace’ and ’Lysistrata’—produced
at intervals of years, the sixth, tenth and twenty-first
of the Peloponnesian War, and impressing on the Athenian
people the miseries and disasters due to it and to
the scoundrels who by their selfish and reckless policy
had provoked it, the consequent ruin of industry and,
above all, agriculture, and the urgency of asking
Peace. In date it is the earliest play brought
out by the author in his own name and his first work
of serious importance. It was acted at the Lenaean
Festival, in January, 426 B.C., and gained the first
prize, Cratinus being second.
Its diatribes against the War and fierce criticism
of the general policy of the War party so enraged
Cleon that, as already mentioned, he endeavoured to
ruin the author, who in ‘The Knights’ retorted
by a direct and savage personal attack on the leader
of the democracy. The plot is of the simplest.
Dicaeopolis, an Athenian citizen, but a native of Acharnae,
one of the agricultural demes and one which
had especially suffered in the Lacedaemonian invasions,
sick and tired of the ill-success and miseries of
the War, makes up his mind, if he fails to induce the
people to adopt his policy of “peace at any
price,” to conclude a private and particular
peace of his own to cover himself, his family, and
his estate. The Athenians, momentarily elated
by victory and over-persuaded by the demagogues of
the day—Cleon and his henchmen, refuse to
hear of such a thing as coming to terms. Accordingly
Dicaeopolis dispatches an envoy to Sparta on his own
account, who comes back presently with a selection
of specimen treaties in his pocket. The old man
tastes and tries, special terms are arranged, and
the play concludes with a riotous and uproarious rustic
feast in honour of the blessings of Peace and Plenty.
Incidentally excellent fun is poked at Euripides and
his dramatic methods, which supply matter for so much
witty badinage in several others of our author’s
pieces.
Other specially comic incidents are: the scene
where the two young daughters of the famished Megarian
are sold in the market at Athens as sucking-pigs—a
scene in which the convenient similarity of the Greek
words signifying a pig and the ‘pudendum muliebre’
respectively is utilized in a whole string of ingenious
and suggestive ‘double entendres’ and
ludicrous jokes; another where the Informer, or Market-Spy,
is packed up in a crate as crockery and carried off
home by the Boeotian buyer.
