The Athenian Women

by Alessandro Barbero

  “By Pandrosos, if your hand touches her, we’ll beat you till you shit yourself!”

  The magistrate was shocked: since when do women talk like that in the presence of men?

  “I’d like to see who’s going to shit themselves!” he barked. “Where are you, policemen? Handcuff this one first, since she talks so much!”

  The policemen, though, were no longer in sight: they had all descended from the stage and gone to hide behind the steps. The old men despaired, the old women were dancing in joy, Lysistrata and Kleonike strode forward boldly. Where are the policemen? the magistrate raved and cursed. Are we going to take a beating from the women? Come on, Scythians, into the fray! Stung in their honor, the Scythians reappeared, only to be put to flight by other women who’d emerged from the Acropolis. They had plundered the armory: one had put a helmet on her head, another one was wielding a sword; of course the policemen preferred to take to their heels. The magistrate gave in: an impressive show the police had made, indeed!

  “What were you expecting?” Lysistrata mocked him. “Did you think you were going to find so many slave girls? Didn’t you expect women with guts?”

  In a servile manner, the Old Man hastened to console the defeated man.

  “They’re all wasted words, magistrate! Why are you bothering to talk to these animals? You know how they wet us before, fully dressed, and without soap!”

  The magistrate could stand no more of that refrain; he lifted his cane to hit Lysistrata, but the knob rolled down off the stage once again. Quick as a flash, the Old Woman bent over and grabbed it.

  “My good man, you should never have laid rash hands on us,” the Old Woman suggested sweetly to the magistrate. “If you start afresh, I’ll give you a black eye. All I want is to be a good girl, without hurting anybody or moving any more than a milestone; but beware the wasps, if you go stirring up the wasps’ nest!”

  The chorus of old men withdrew once and for all into a corner, muttering about those wild beasts who had chased them out of the Acropolis. As he left, the Old Man turned again, hopefully, to the magistrate: investigate, try to find out what they have in mind, we can’t think of letting such a thing pass unopposed!

  The magistrate coughed, he walked the length and breadth of the stage, leaning on his cane, he dried off a couple of drops, and finally he planted himself squarely in front of Lysistrata, raising his voice loudly: “Indeed, by the gods, I would ask you first why you have barred the gates to our Acropolis?”

  “To seize the treasury; no more money, no more war,” replied Lysistrata.

  The theater was frozen silent, no one dared breathe a word. There ensued a rapid back-and-forth, in which Lysistrata proved to the magistrate that it would be much better for the women to guard the money, rather than allowing the government to waste it.

  “From now on, we’ll manage the treasury ourselves.”

  “You’ll administer the treasury?” the magistrate stammered in astonishment.

  “What is there in that to surprise you? Do we not administer the budget of household expenses?”

  “But that isn’t the same thing!”

  “Why isn’t it the same thing?”

  “We need this money to wage war!”

  “There, in fact: first and foremost, we shouldn’t wage war at all.”

  The magistrate gaped in amazement.

  “What! and the safety of the city!?”

  “We will provide for that.”

  “You?”

  “Yes, we!”

  “Then we’re ruined!”

  “Yes, we’re going to save you, whether you like it or not.”

  “Why, this is an awful thing!”

  “I know that it bothers you,” said Lysistrata cheerfully. “But it has to be done, nevertheless.”

  “But, by Demeter, it’s not right,” the unhappy man tried to retort.

  “We’ll save you, sweetheart,” Lysistrata sang liltingly.

  “Even if I don’t need saving?”

  “Then all the more, for that very reason.”

  “But since when do you concern yourselves with questions of peace and war?” the magistrate finally managed to object. The theater heaved a sigh: at last someone had said something sensible! If nothing else, at least this took the argument onto a more theoretical plane. Women don’t take lessons from the Sophists, they never learn the fine points of dialectics, maybe this is our chance to beat them.

  “Good response!” called someone approvingly. But he was hushed. The great majority of the audience waited in religious silence: will Sophocles manage to outwit the madwoman?

  “Since when? Let me explain now,” Lysistrata began, hesitantly. The magistrate sensed that he had regained the advantage.

  “Out with it then; quick, or you’ll be sorry,” he boasted, raising his cane. He realized that it still lacked the knob, and looked around. The Old Woman showed it to him from afar.

  “Listen, then, and try to keep your hands to yourself,” Lysistrata warned him.

  “I can’t help it: it’s hard to keep them still, so great is my anger!”

  “Look out, or you’ll pay,” butted in the Old Woman, tossing the knob of the cane up and down. The magistrate prudently took a step back.

  “Stop your croaking, you old crow! Now you, say what you have to say,” he said warningly to Lysistrata.

  “I certainly will. For quite some time now, we have put up with everything that you men did, because we are so remarkably patient. And anyway, you never even gave us the option of protesting. Even so we didn’t like it one bit, the things that were going on. We knew you very well, and often even though we stayed home, we’d learn of some idiotic thing you’d done at the assembly. Then we’d conceal the pity we felt deep down, pretend to laugh, all the while wondering to ourselves: ‘What you have decided about the truce, are you finally going to announce it?’ ‘What does it matter to you?’ my husband would ask. ‘Will you just shut your trap?’ And I’d say nothing.”

  The audience listened transfixed. Could the same thing be true of mine? each man thought. Could it be that they knew everything? And when they came to purr and be kittenish and, between one caress and the next, ask just what we had voted on, it wasn’t just because they weren’t capable of keeping their mouths shut, it wasn’t because they felt compelled to say everything that came into their pretty little heads? Could it have been because they actually cared? And most important of all, could it be that the time we voted for the expedition to Sicily, and the other time we rejected the truce, after which she pouted and, at night, turned her back to me, they already knew that we’d fucked up? But after all, then why did the gods give us our péos? After which, men being what they are, half of those present immediately regretted not having hit his wife often enough; and told himself he’d give her what for, next time. That’ll teach them to pry into things that are none of their business!

  In the meantime, Myrrhine too had come out of the Acropolis, had heard the last few exchanges, and was greatly tempted to weigh in.

  “I would not have held my tongue though, not I!”

  “You would have been reduced to silence by blows then,” retorted the magistrate, without realizing that he was shooting himself in the foot. Forget about dialectics: the only argument that we have to offer is our knuckles! In the front row, Sophocles started tugging on his beard and muttering to himself. It was no accident that he was a man of the theater: he understood very clearly how it was going to end, even though most of the spectators were still sitting there openmouthed, hoping that the false Sophocles would give those wretched women what for.

  “And in fact, at home I would say no more,” confirmed Lysistrata. “Would we learn of some fresh decision more fatally foolish than ever? Then I’d ask: ‘Oh, husband, how could you do anything so stupid?’ But he’d just glare at me: ‘Stick to your weaving,’ he
’d say, ‘if you don’t want to get a headache: war is men’s business.’”

  “Bravo! well said indeed, by the gods!” the magistrate tried to retort.

  “What do you mean, well said, you wretch!” Lysistrata buried him. “If we couldn’t advise you even when you were making absurd decisions! And yet we’d hear you saying it in the open street, loud and clear: ‘Is there never a man left in Athens?’ ‘No, not one, not one,’ says another. At this point it seemed wise to us to save Greece ourselves, all the women put together. What else were we supposed to wait for? If you are willing to listen to us, we know what we’re talking about. Now it’s your turn to shut up, and we’ll get you back on the road.”

  “You . . . to us?” the magistrate gaped like a fish. “You are just talking nonsense, and I mean to put up with it no longer!”

  “Sit down and shut up!” Lysistrata ordered him. The magistrate, in his surprise, lost his balance and wound up seated, legs spread. The real Sophocles groaned and put both hands over his eyes.

  “In your presence, cursed one, I need to shut up? In the presence of a woman with a veil over her head? Not as long as you live!” blathered the other Sophocles on the stage. Then he fell silent, in fright, because the women had gathered around him, encircling him menacingly.

  “If you have some problem with it, by all means take my veil,” Lysistrata treacherously offered him. “Wrap it around your head, that way you may be able to shut your mouth.”

  “If you’d care to take this work basket, too . . . ” Myrrhine suggested.

  “Then you can sit down, card wool, and tuck up your skirts, munching fava beans . . . ” Lysistrata went on.

  “The war shall be women’s business!” Myrrhine concluded triumphantly.

  12

  What did he do to you?” Glycera whispered. Locked up in the storage room, they were speaking softly, as if their tormenters were right there listening to them.

  Charis hesitated, embarrassed; then she told her everything, all at once. Glycera hugged her close.

  “That swine! And to think that I liked him!” she added, gaining renewed courage.

  “So I’d noticed,” whispered Charis.

  In the darkness of the storage room, the young women had their arms wrapped around each other, trying to warm themselves up under the horse blanket that was scratching their shoulders.

  “You don’t think there are mice in here, do you?” Charis whispered.

  “Mice? I’m more afraid of those two rats out there,” Glycera retorted.

  They both fell silent, while that unexpected image penetrated their overheated brains: those aren’t two young men outside this room, those are two animals, two greedy, sharp-toothed rats . . .

  They both shuddered and tried to clutch each other closer. But the rammed earth floor was too damp and chilly: after a while their teeth started chattering. Their bodies were slowly freezing.

  “Wait, this isn’t working,” Glycera decided.

  They cautiously got to their feet: they’d already hit their heads several times on the low-slung rafters; the ceiling was so low they could barely stand. They spread the blanket out on the floor, lay down on it, and tried to wrap themselves in the ends that remained. That wasn’t much better, the blanket was too small.

  “I’m freezing,” whispered Charis. Glycera tried to warm her up by rubbing her, but her hands were chilly too.

  “Does it hurt?” asked Charis.

  “No,” Glycera lied. The truth was her swollen lip was hurting her, and then some, and she knew exactly where Cimon’s blows had connected: he’d kneed her and kicked her in the belly, and he’d kicked her in the buttocks. Only Argyrus had kicked her so half-heartedly that she no longer remembered it.

  A sound from without alarmed them. They both lay silent, straining to hear, but the noise wasn’t repeated. For all they knew, their captors might just have left, abandoning them in that room.

  “What are they going to do now?” Charis asked.

  “They’re going to let us go, what else do you think they’re going to do?” Glycera reassured her. She didn’t believe a word of it, but she felt responsible, it was she who’d talked Charis into following her into that trap. What are they going to do: it’s all too obvious, they mean to fuck us. But I’d rather let them kill me than let those bastards win.

  “They aren’t going to let us go,” Charis contradicted her.

  Glycera heard the note of panic in her voice, and tried to think of something to say that might calm her.

  “Of course they will. If we do what they want, then they’ll let us go.”

  “But we already were doing what they wanted!” Charis said in despair. “So why did they lock us up in here again?”

  We already were doing what they wanted, Glycera realized. How fast it happens! Without wanting to, she thought back on Cimon and what Charis had told her, and for the first time realized that it was all quite strange.

  “Listen, you did exactly what he wanted you to, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it again.”

  “Sorry. I was just trying to figure out what’s happening. If you ask me, there’s something strange about him. Think about it: nothing actually happened, did it?”

  Charis, unwillingly, replayed in her memory what she’d been forced to do just a short while ago. She’d certainly done exactly what he wanted her to do: she was too frightened to put up any resistance, and after all, he wasn’t trying to deflower her.

  “Do you remember the stallion?” asked Glycera. Charis understood. What had happened to the stallion when it was able to get close to the mares ought to have happened to him, too. Charis had never been with a naked man, but she knew that his péos, from being with her, ought to have become like the phallus on the god by the door, like the ones that men wore in processions at festivals: these were things that even children knew. She and Glycera had wondered many times what it would be like to see and touch one, and what they could do with it. The péos of Cimon, however, remained just as tiny as the ones on the statues of heroes, about which they had occasionally heard women joke, when there were no men around to hear—men were very touchy on the subject, and it didn’t take much for them to get violent.

  “But why didn’t anything happen to him?”

  Glycera thought it over.

  “You know what I think? That that guy isn’t a man at all.”

  Charis didn’t understand.

  “He already has a beard!”

  “Exactly,” Glycera said triumphantly. “But what’s supposed to happen to men isn’t happening to him. It just stays soft. He couldn’t do anything, even if he wanted to.”

  For a while they mulled over that discovery. Was this a good thing? Certainly, their virginity no longer seemed quite so endangered. But they both could sense that, for that very reason, the danger was even greater. Glycera tried to imagine what the two young men might do, but her imagination was limited. What if they beat us again? And what if they beat Charis? When we get home we’ll be covered with bruises, and my father will kill me!

  Glycera suddenly felt her blood curdle, and not from the cold. Sooner or later their fathers would return from the theater, and they wouldn’t find their daughters at home. This last danger, which hadn’t occurred to her before, struck her as the most terrifying of all. What time could it be? In here it’s impossible to say. But we need to get out of here, and soon, she thought. She disentangled herself from Charis’s embrace and sat down again. Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness, a bit of light was filtering under the door and through the roof tiles, and now you could see a few things: sacks of fava beans and millet, sealed wine jars, baskets of charcoal.

  “Wait!”

  Glycera got to her feet and felt the roof tiles. They were solidly nested, one lying atop the other, they wouldn’t move. She pushed at the gaps where the ligh
t filtered through: there were a few places where it was clear that the roof tiles weren’t quite as tight as elsewhere, and if she pushed she could even lift them an inch or so. But that was as far as they would go, Glycera wasn’t strong enough.

  “Help me,” she said in little more than a whisper. Charis emerged from under the blanket, her teeth still chattering, and Glycera guided her hands to the right spot.

  “Push!”

  They pushed together, but the tile wouldn’t budge. Glycera looked around for anything she could use as a lever. Next to the door, right by the bags of charcoal, stood a pile of dry firewood. She rummaged through the stack until she found a log small enough to grasp. She climbed back to the gap in the roof, wedged the large stick under the tile, and tried to pry it up, yanking and then hanging on it, with all her weight. No good, the damned tile wouldn’t budge.

  “Let’s try over there,” suggested Charis. Sure enough, a little farther along they could see a tile that looked less securely fastened than the others, under which a slightly broader shaft of light filtered through. To get to it, though, they’d have to move the sacks. Panting, they started dragging them out into the only free space, right in front of the door.

  Glycera had an idea.

  “Say, what if we used them to bar the door?”

  Charis laughed.

  “Can you imagine the look on their faces?”

  They’d barely dragged two, with considerable effort, when Glycera realized that the door opened outward. “Sly dogs that we are! They can just open it anyway.”

  Disappointed, they went back to work. After moving six or seven sacks, they managed to get under the opening. But there, however, the ceiling was higher, and Glycera couldn’t reach.

  “Hold on, let’s pull a jar over here, and I can stand on it.”

  “Be careful!”

  They brought the jar over and Glycera climbed on top of it. She wedged the cane into the gap and started prying it up. The roof tile moved.