This is the reproach Demosthenes constantly levelled against his Athenian fellow-countrymen
1
At Athens more than anywhere the festivals of Bacchus (Dionysus) were celebrated with the utmost pomp – and also with the utmost licence, not to say licentiousness.
3
An obscene double entendre; Calonicé understands, or pretends to understand, Lysistrata as meaning a long and thick "membrum virile"!
5
The eels from Lake Copaïs in Boeotia were esteemed highly by epicures.
6
Leipzig: "De Athenis autem nil tale ominabor: aliud te suspicari velim.
7
This is the reproach Demosthenes constantly levelled against his Athenian fellow-countrymen – their failure to seize opportunity.
8
An island of the Saronic Gulf, lying between Magara and Attica. It was separated by a narrow strait – scene of the naval battle of Salamis, in which the Athenians defeated Xerxes – only from the Attic coast, and was subject to Athens.
9
A deme, or township, of Attica, lying five or six miles north of Athens. The Acharnians were throughout the most extreme partisans of the warlike party during the Peloponnesian struggle. See 'The Acharnians.'
10
The precise reference is uncertain, and where the joke exactly comes in. The Scholiast says Theagenes was a rich, miserly and superstitious citizen, who never undertook any enterprise without first consulting an image of Hecaté, the distributor of honour and wealth according to popular belief; and his wife would naturally follow her husband's example.
11
A deme of Attica, a small and insignificant community – a 'Little Pedlington' in fact.
12
In allusion to the gymnastic training which was de rigueur at Sparta for the women no less than the men, and in particular to the dance of the Lacedaemonian girls, in which the performer was expected to kick the fundament with the heels – always a standing joke among the Athenians against their rivals and enemies the Spartans.
13
Missing in Leipzig-ed.
14
Missing in Leipzig-ed.
15
The allusion, of course, is to the 'garden of love,' the female parts, which it was the custom with the Greek women, as it is with the ladies of the harem in Turkey to this day, to depilate scrupulously, with the idea of making themselves more attractive to men.
16
Corinth was notorious in the Ancient world for its prostitutes and general dissoluteness.
17
An Athenian general strongly suspected of treachery; Aristophanes pretends his own soldiers have to see that he does not desert to the enemy.
18
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 Lacedaemonian 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.
19
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.
20
The lofty range of hills overlooking Sparta from the west.
21
In the original "we are nothing but Poseidon and a boat"; the allusion is to a play of Sophocles, now lost, but familiar to Aristophanes' audience, entitled 'Tyro,' in which the heroine, Tyro, appears with Poseidon, the sea-god, at the beginning of the tragedy, and at the close with the two boys she had had by him, whom she exposes in an open boat.
22
Typo in Oxford: "perpitam". Leipzig has "perditam".
23
"By the two goddesses," – a woman's oath, which recurs constantly in this play; the two goddesses are always Demeter and Proserpine.
24
One of the Cyclades, between Naxos and Cos, celebrated, like the latter, for its manufacture of fine, almost transparent silks, worn in Greece, and later at Rome, by women of loose character.
25
The proverb, quoted by Pherecrates, is properly spoken of those who go out of their way to do a thing already done – "to kill a dead horse," but here apparently is twisted by Aristophanes into an allusion to the leathern 'godemiche' mentioned a little above; if the worst comes to the worst, we must use artificial means. Pherecrates was a comic playwright, a contemporary of Aristophanes.
26
Literally "our Scythian woman." At Athens, policemen and ushers in the courts were generally Scythians; so the revolting women must have their Scythian "Usheress" too.
