Aristophanes' LYSISTRATA Complete

A Literal Translation, with Notes.

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CHORUS OF WOMEN. I'm watering you, to make you bloom afresh.

CHORUS OF OLD MEN. Alas! I am too dry! Ah, me! how I am trembling with cold!

MAGISTRATE. These women, have they made din enough, I wonder, with their tambourines? bewept Adonis enough upon their terraces?[419] I was listening to the speeches last assembly day,[420] and Demostratus,[421] whom heaven confound! was saying we must all go over to Sicily--and lo! his wife was dancing round repeating: Alas! alas! Adonis, woe is me for Adonis!

Demostratus was saying we must levy hoplites at Zacynthus[422]--and lo! his wife, more than half drunk, was screaming on the house-roof: "Weep, weep for Adonis!"--while that infamous Mad Ox[423] was bellowing away on his side.--Do ye not blush, ye women, for your wild and uproarious doings?

[419] Women only celebrated the festivals of Adonis. These rites were not performed in public, but on the terraces and flat roofs of the houses.

[420] The Assembly, or Ecclesia, was the General Parliament of the Athenian people, in which every adult citizen had a vote. It met on the Pnyx hill, where the assembled Ecclesiasts were addressed from the Bema, or speaking-block.

[421] An orator and statesman who had first proposed the disastrous Sicilian Expedition, of 415-413 B.C. This was on the first day of the festival of Adonis--ever afterwards regarded by the Athenians as a day of ill omen.

[422] An island in the Ionian Sea, on the west of Greece, near Cephalenia, and an ally of Athens during the Peloponnesian War.

[423] Cholozyges, a nickname for Demostratus.

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