“Hold on, I’ll pull it inside.”
Charis set the roof tile down on the floor. Now there was a hole in the roof, big enough to slip one’s hand through. Glycera started working on the next roof tile.
“Here it is!”
Once she’d removed three or four roof tiles, she managed to stick her head out. The storage room had been an addition to the house on the side facing away from the city, and from there you emerged directly into the olive groves. She tried to figure out what time it was, but the sky was so dark that she couldn’t say; still, the light was starting to dim, sunset couldn’t be far off.
“Can you get through?”
“Not yet, but we should be able to soon!”
She removed another roof tile. She craned her neck a little further and saw that the drop was nothing much to worry about. The road to their homes couldn’t be far, behind the nearest olive trees. It was just a matter of jumping down and taking off at a run. Wait, it suddenly dawned on her: naked, and without their house keys . . .
She pulled her head back in.
“Say!”
“What is it?” Charis asked, taking fright.
“No, I mean: are we sure of this? We’re both naked, and we don’t have our keys! Maybe we should forget about trying to escape and just try to talk them into letting us go.”
Charis’s eyes widened and she shook her head.
“No, no, no! I don’t ever want to see them again. I’d rather just tell my father all about it.”
Glycera hesitated. All right then, maybe she’s right, you can’t put your trust in a couple of rats. If they can, the rats will just kill you and eat you. She pulled herself back up, and started to push the last roof tile out of the way.
Then everything happened far too quickly. One foot slipped beneath her, she lost her balance and fell, shouting out more in surprise than in pain, while the jar went rolling noisily. She hastily fell silent and clapped both hands over her mouth, but it was too late: outside, the key was turning in the lock.
13
At the foot of the stage, the chorus of old women danced in time to the tambourine, mocking the magistrate who looked on aghast. Shaking their tits and asses as wildly as they could, they deafened him with a ditty honoring Lysistrata and her comrades. Women so lovely, so courageous, so wise, so patriotic, in a word, so womanly, had never been seen before!
On the stage, Lysistrata was dancing too, the way women dance when they’ve had a bit too much to drink, in those festivals they have for themselves and from which all men steer clear. Then, as soon as the old women fell quiet, she too started singing, accompanied by the flute, to the rhythm of the sacred hymns, and the magistrate prepared to listen, hopeful: could the gods be about to help him to bring this demented one back to the fold of obedience?
“May gentle Eros and beloved Aphrodite . . . ” Lysistrata sang in a well-turned voice. The magistrate listened raptly.
“ . . . shower seductive desire on our breasts and between our thighs . . . ”
The magistrate began to show a few signs of agitation.
“ . . . and may we stir so amorous a feeling among the men that they stand as firm as sticks . . . ”
In his rage, the magistrate threw his cane to the ground, and Kleonike stealthily stole it away. The magistrate, with his poor eyesight, hadn’t noticed. He leaned over to pick it up anyway: it was nowhere to be found.
“ . . . then we’ll be done once and for all with your wars!” Lysistrata concluded triumphantly.
“What is it you’ll be done with?” the magistrate asked distractedly, as he searched for his cane.
“To begin with,” Lysistrata began, “we shall no longer see you running like madmen to the market holding lance in fist!”
“Right you are, by Aphrodite!” Myrrhine approved.
“Now we see them, wandering among the saucepans and kitchen untensils, armed to the teeth, looking like lunatics escaped from the asylum!”
“Why, of course; that’s what real men ought to do!” said the magistrate, with dignity. In response, Kleonike let fly with a sharp blow between the magistrate’s shoulder blades with his own cane. The audience fell silent in horror: it was unmistakable now, the men were getting the worst of things.
“Not at all, it’s simply ridiculous: a man going to buy fried fish with his shield slung over his shoulder!” Lysistrata upbraided him.
“I saw one,” Kleonike broke in triumphantly. “A fine captain with flowing locks, on horseback. He’d purchased some semolina from an old woman and didn’t know where to put it: he took off his helmet and poured it in there! There was a Thracian warrior too, brandishing his lance like a tragic actor; he had scared a good woman selling figs into a perfect panic, and was gobbling up all her ripest fruit!”
The magistrate tried to put his thoughts into order.
“And how, pray, would you propose to restore peace and order throughout the land, and be done with it?”
“It’s the easiest thing in the world!” Lysistrata tossed out. This time the magistrate was annoyed.
“Come tell us how? Prove it to me!”
But before he could finish speaking, he received a second blow between the shoulder blades. He whipped around furiously, but Kleonike had handed the cane to one of the old women in the chorus, arrayed at the foot of the stage. The magistrate, stamping his feet, inspected all twelve of them, one after the other. His cane was stealthily passed from one to the other at the same rate; the last old woman displayed it to the delighted audience, and as soon as the magistrate turned his back, she gave him another blow to the calves.
Lysistrata, in the meantime, had begun explaining, pulling out the various implements from the work chest that Myrrhine had handed to the magistrate.
“Just as when we are winding thread, and it is tangled, we pass the spool across and through the skein, now this way, now that way; even so, to be done with this war, we shall send female envoys hither and thither and everywhere, to disentangle matters!”
The magistrate remembered that he was the representative of the people, and he flatly stated what all the men in the theater were thinking.
“And is it with your yarn, and your skeins, and your spools, that you think to appease so many bitter enmities? You really are silly, brainless women!”
The mood of the audience, which for a while had swung in favor of the women, was now starting to shift in the other direction. Just look at them, the usual fools: they’re voicing their opinion about things they have no business meddling in, now I’d like to see how they get out of this situation!
“So you see that I was right?” whispered Thrasyllus. “Remember that we’ve bet an obol.”
“Of course I remember,” Polemon replied. “In fact, you know what I say? Double or nothing: two obols.”
“Two obols?”
“Are you in?”
“I’m in! You’ll see how sorry you are.”
“If only some of you had a pinch of common sense, you would always do in politics just as we do with our yarn,” Lysistrata declared.
“How exactly? Explain it to me!” the magistrate burst out in amazement.
“First we should do as when we wash the yarn to get out the grease and filth: stretch it out and beat it thoroughly, the city, to drive out the rogues, and pick out all the thorns; and all these claques, these gangs of cronies who divvy up the offices and jobs, card them thoroughly, smooth them out and clean them! And pile up in a single basket all those who care about the commonweal, mixing them together, even the immigrant, if there are any who are your friends.”
“I knew they’d get to the immigrants,” Thrasyllus muttered. “I told you that I don’t trust this Aristophanes of yours. If you listen to him, the next thing you know, they’ll come vote in our assembly. But I’d send them all back to where they came from!”
“What are you talking about, send them back where they came from, don’t tell me you too are spouting this nonsense? Send away the immigrants and soon there’ll be no one here to do the work!” Polemon retorted heatedly.
“Maybe,” Thrasyllus grumbled, unconvinced.
Meanwhile, Lysistrata was continuing to heap invective on the magistrate.
“And all those poor wretches who cannot afford to pay their debts to the taxman, we’ll toss them in as well. And by the gods, the cities, all the colonies that this country has founded, aren’t they like so many scattered hanks of wool, each to its own? And instead, find the ends of the separate threads, draw them to a center here, wind them into one, make one great hank of the lot, out of which the people can weave itself a good, stout cloak.”
Aristophanes, from the house, watched the audience’s reactions. The tirade about immigrants had aroused a certain amount of uproar, and that was exactly what he’d expected; it was no accident that immediately after that he’d brought up the allies, which is what the people cared most about. Then he’d finished by mentioning the people: all it took was that one word, and the audience settled down again right away. Aristophanes knew his chickens.
As far as the magistrate-Sophocles was concerned, though, that whole tirade had not made the slightest impression.
“Is it not a sin and a shame to see them carding and winding the state, these women who have neither art nor part in the burdens of the war?” he objected, turning to the audience.
“Right! Send her home!” someone shouted. Many in the theater laughed and stamped their feet in a sign of approval. But Lysistrata had foreseen that.
“What! wretched man! why, it’s a far heavier burden to us than to you. In the first place, we bear sons who go off to fight as soldiers.”
“Hush, you, what sort of things you’re dredging up!” retorted the magistrate, now on the defensive.
“Then secondly, instead of enjoying the pleasures of love and making the best of our youth and beauty, we are left to languish far from our husbands, who are all with the army. But say no more of ourselves; what afflicts me is to see our girls growing old at home in lonely grief.”
Thrasyllus sighed and said nothing. Polemon looked at him.
“Eh!” he said, and sighed himself.
“Don’t the men grow old too?” objected the magistrate. Lysistrata walked over to him, looked him right in the eye, then bent over and grabbed his flaccid and pendulous phallus. She showed it to the audience and nodded her head ostentatiously.
“That’s not the same thing, though,” she went on, as the audience laughed. “When the soldier returns from the wars, even though he has white hair, he very soon finds a young wife. But a woman has only one summer; if she does not make hay while the sun shines, no one will afterwards wish to marry her, and she spends her days waiting for good fortune to strike . . . ”
The magistrate was no longer listening to her. He’d focused on the idea of the young girl, and the white-haired man who marries her. Contemplating his own wrinkled, soft péos, and lifting it the way a butcher does with a sausage, he commented sadly: “Yes, if a man is still capable of getting it up . . . ”
Lysistrata pitilessly turned to the audience and pointed at him.
“But you, why don’t you get done with it and die? It’s time to make room! Go buy yourself a bier, and I will knead you a honey-cake for the funeral banquet. Here, take this garland!”
Out of nowhere, she pulled out a funeral wreath of ivy leaves and put it on the magistrate’s head. Terrorized, the old man made all kinds of gestures to ward off bad luck, but Myrrhine hurried up with another wreath and plopped it onto his head, atop the first one.
“Take this one too, from me!”
“And take this one as well,” Kleonike squeaked; and she popped a third wreath on his head. Sophocles, in the front row but unobserved, also made signs to ward off evil.
“What more do you lack? What else do you want?” pressed Lysistrata. “Step aboard the boat; Charon is waiting for you, you’re keeping him from pushing off!”
“To treat me so scurvily! What an insult!” the old man complained. “By the god, I will go show myself to my fellow-magistrates just as I am, so they can see what’s been done to me!”
The false Sophocles came out, tottering and vigorously palpating his phallus to ward off the evil eye; perhaps a little too vigorously, because when he reached the door it tore loose and fell on the floor. The magistrate walked through the door, then turned, put his hands in his hair, gathered what little pride remained to him, and vanished amidst gales of laughter.
“You aren’t blaming us for not having given you a proper wake, are you? Give us time, and we’ll stage a proper funeral for you, with all the trimmings!” Lysistrata shouted after him, out of control now.
The magistrate’s exit was greeted by a festive burst of music; and in time to the music the women returned to the Acropolis, pulling the door shut behind them, while the chorus of old men marched to a military beat, arraying themselves before the spectators. It was time to counterattack, the situation was desperate. The Old Man stepped forward and enunciated, again in time to the music:
We’re not sleeping on this matter, come on, you’re all free men!
We can solve the problem, if we roll up our sleeves!
I smell a whiff of trouble deep, come on, let’s at it, men!
The chorus was quick on the uptake, and as they took off their cloaks in a coordinated dance step the twelve old men expressed all their anxiety. There was a smell of big doings in there, yes, in fact, to state it flat out, a whiff of tyranny! Could it be that the Spartans had arrived and were inciting our women against us? And in the meantime, those same women have laid their hands on the treasury! And now what about the stipend? I used to live on that!
When they were all in their shirtsleeves, the Old Man summarized the situation for the audience’s benefit.
No, you must admit, this is a thing passing all belief.
To us, to the citizenry, they dare to give orders!
These are women, they know nothing, but see how they chatter:
They’re even ready to talk with the Spartans.
They might as well chat with wolves, but instead they take them at their words!
People, out of this state of affairs tyranny can arise.
But I won’t let anyone place their feet on my neck,
I’ll smash their faces in, those damned old women!
The audience, won back, warmly approved. But here was a strange thing, damn that Aristophanes: the chorus is the City, it speaks with the voice of one and all, it’s hard to disagree with it, but here there are two choruses, in sharp disagreement. They’d all forgotten that fact, but once the Old Man had proclaimed his threat, the music once again went wild and the chorus of old women in turn marched in to the beat of the drum and lined up face-to-face with the audience. The Old Woman stepped forward contemptuously and menaced her rival: you’ll see how I fix you, when you go home your mama won’t know you! Then, brashly, she ordered the other women to doff their cloaks in preparation for the fight: ready for combat!
The chorus of old women danced with joy at the idea and threw their cloaks to the ground. But instead of the bellicose music that everyone expected, from the corner beneath the statue of the god rose the faint and melancholy melody of an unaccompanied flute. Instead of attacking the old men, the chorus of women began a slow and solemn chant, listing the religious ceremonies a young Athenian girl could take part in during the few years available to her: all things that the audience knew very well, but who among them had ever stopped to think about how important those things might be for women? At the age of seven, the old women sang, I assisted the priestess on the Acropolis, then I ground grain for the goddess, and at the age of ten, nude, I played the bear in the festival of Artemis, and once I had grown to a pretty
young woman, I carried the basket in the procession, with a garland of figs around my neck. And if I’ve had such a lovely life, I owe that to this city of mine, which brought me up this way, in contact with the gods.
In the audience, there were some who were deeply moved, and others who muttered under their breath: there’s no point telling us about it, they always choose the daughters of the nobility to assist the priestess or play the bear for Artemis, my daughters were never chosen! But there were others still who moved about uneasily: are they trying to convince us that if the gods love our city, in the end, it’s all due to them, the women?
When the music died down, the Old Woman shamelessly resumed her harangue. You aren’t hoping to shut me up just because I was born a woman? Try telling me that I’m useless: where do men come from in the first place, in your opinion? As for you, in comparison, I’d like to know what it is you bring to the table! At least our ancestors actually made some conquests, back in the time of the Persians: but all you know how to do is spend money!
Attacked like that, the chorus of old men reacted. What kind of arrogance is this? Here, any man with a pair of balls must lend a hand. Off with our shirts, too, because a man should smell like a man! Let’s get at it, barefoot, like the time we expelled the tyrants! But here, as the old men took off their tunics and kicked away their shoes, the tune betrayed them. The bellicose music that had encouraged them until just a moment before suddenly faded away, dwindling into a ridiculous lament, and it was to that mewing whimper that the old men who had just recalled their long-ago victory over the tyrants looked each other shamefully in the face and added: yes, when we were still there . . .
An instant of silence chilled the theater. More than one wanted to leap to their feet and shout: but we’re still here! But no one had the nerve to be the first on their feet. They exchanged glances, crestfallen. But enough is enough: Aristophanes wanted to make his audience think, not wilt. The music resumed, as bold and brash as before, and the old men rediscovered their enthusiasm: come on, this is the time to rejuvenate, let’s puff up our feathers and shake our old age off! In that climate of enthusiasm, the Old Man took the floor again.
The Athenian Women Page 14