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    The Thesmophoriazusae (Or The Women's Festival)
    The Thesmophoriazusae (Or The Women's Festival)
    The Thesmophoriazusae (Or The Women's Festival)
    Ebook59 pages1 hour

    The Thesmophoriazusae (Or The Women's Festival)

    By Aristophanes

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    About this ebook

    Like the 'Lysistrata,' the 'Thesmophoriazusae, or Women's Festival,' and the next following play, the 'Ecclesiazusae, or Women in Council' are comedies in which the fair sex play a great part. In ‘The Thesmophoriazusae’ Euripides is summoned as a notorious woman-hater and detractor of the female sex to appear for trial and judgment before the women of Athens assembled to celebrate the Thesmophoria, a festival held in honour of the goddesses Demeter and Persephone, from which men were rigidly excluded.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDigireads.com Publishing
    Release dateJan 1, 2014
    ISBN9781420900392
    The Thesmophoriazusae (Or The Women's Festival)
    Author

    Aristophanes

    Aristophanes, son of Philippus, of the deme Kydathenaion, was a comic playwright of ancient Athens and a poet of Old Attic Comedy. Eleven of his forty plays survive virtually complete.

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      Book preview

      The Thesmophoriazusae (Or The Women's Festival) - Aristophanes

      THE THESMOPHORIAZUSAE

      (OR THE WOMEN'S FESTIVAL)

      BY ARISTOPHANES

      A Digireads.com Book

      Digireads.com Publishing

      Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-2761-0

      Ebook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-0039-2

      This edition copyright © 2011

      Please visit www.digireads.com

      CONTENTS

      INTRODUCTION

      DRAMATIS PERSONAE

      THE THESMOPHORIAZUSAE

      INTRODUCTION

      Like the 'Lysistrata,' the 'Thesmophoriazusae, or Women's Festival,' and the next following play, the 'Ecclesiazusae, or Women in Council' are comedies in which the fair sex play a great part, and also resemble that extremely scabreux production in the plentiful crop of doubtful 'double entendres' and highly suggestive situations they contain.

      The play has more of a proper intrigue and formal dénouement than is general with our Author's pieces, which, like modern extravaganzas and musical comedies, are often strung on a very slender thread of plot. The idea of the 'Thesmophoriazusae' is as follows.

      Euripides is summoned as a notorious woman-hater and detractor of the female sex to appear for trial and judgment before the women of Athens assembled to celebrate the Thesmophoria, a festival held in honour of the goddesses Demeter and Persephone, from which men were rigidly excluded. The poet is terror-stricken, and endeavours to persuade his confrère, the tragedian Agathon, to attend the meeting in the guise of a woman to plead his cause, Agathon's notorious effeminacy of costume and way of life lending itself to the deception; but the latter refuses point-blank. He then prevails on his father-in-law, Mnesilochus, to do him this favour, and shaves, depilates, and dresses him up accordingly. But so far from throwing oil on the troubled waters, Mnesilochus indulges in a long harangue full of violent abuse of the whole sex, and relates some scandalous stories of the naughty ways of peccant wives. The assembly suspects at once there is a man amongst them, and on examination of the old fellow's person, this is proved to be the case. He flies for sanctuary to the altar, snatching a child from the arms of one of the women as a hostage, vowing to kill it if they molest him further. On investigation, however, the infant turns out to be a wine-skin dressed in baby's clothes.

      In despair Mnesilochus sends urgent messages to Euripides to come and rescue him from his perilous predicament. The latter then appears, and in successive characters selected from his different Tragedies—now Menelaus meeting Helen again in Egypt, now Echo sympathising with the chained Andromeda, presently Perseus about to release the heroine from her rock—pleads for his unhappy father-in-law. At length he succeeds in getting him away in the temporary absence of the guard, a Scythian archer, whom he entices from his post by the charms of a dancing-girl.

      As may be supposed, the appearance of Mnesilochus among the women dressed in women's clothes, the examination of his person to discover his true sex and his final detection, afford fine opportunities for a display of the broadest Aristophanic humour. The latter part of the play also, where various pieces of Euripides are burlesqued, is extremely funny; and must have been still more so when represented before an audience familiar with every piece and almost every line parodied, and played by actors trained and got up to imitate every trick and mannerism of appearance and delivery of the tragic actors who originally took the parts.

      The 'Thesmophoriazusae' was produced in the year 412 B.C., six years before the death of Euripides, who is held up to ridicule in it, as he is in 'The Wasps' and several other of our Author's comedies.

      DRAMATIS PERSONAE

      EURIPIDES.

      MNESILOCHUS, Father-in-law of Euripides.

      AGATHON.

      SERVANT OF AGATHON.

      CHORUS attending AGATHON.

      HERALD.

      WOMEN.

      CLISTHENES.

      A PRYTANIS or Member of the Council.

      A SCYTHIAN or Police Officer.

      CHORUS OF THESMOPHORIAZUSAE—women keeping the Feast of Demeter.

      SCENE: In front of Agathon's house; afterwards in the precincts of the Temple of Demeter.

      THE THESMOPHORIAZUSAE

      (Or The Women's Festival)

      MNESILOCHUS. Great Zeus! will the swallow never appear to end the winter of my discontent? Why the fellow has kept me on the run ever since early this morning; he wants to kill me, that's certain. Before I lose my spleen entirely, Euripides, can you at least tell me whither you are leading me?

      EURIPIDES. What need for you to hear what you are going to see?

      MNESILOCHUS.

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