Now, it’s clear to anyone watching*
That women are better than men,
And putting them up for comparison
Will prove it again and again.
Charminus challenged Miss Sea-Fight*
And suffered a humbling defeat;
For the Spartans trounced him at Syme,*
Which cost him command of the fleet.
Miss Land-Battle’s* got you all beaten.
For years now you’ve raised up no Prince
Like the heroes that triumphed at Marathon,* —
You men haven’t troubled her since.
Cleophan’s* war-talk was pretty,
But he quailed before Sparta’s ships
And brought less joy to our City
Than Salabaccho* brought with her lips.
And what about last year’s Senators
Who gave up their seats in a rout?*
Do you honestly think that Miss Prudence*
Would have sold our democracy out?
Your pockets are heavy with money
Drained from the taxpayer’s purse,
Which you spend on luxury carriages;
Can’t you see your sex is the worse?
For we women take from our husbands
At most a handful of corn:
And we serve on your plates in the evening
Whatever we stole in the morn.
freely translated, in part by William Lucas Collins
* Collins did not translate any more of this chorus than was given in Part 1; what follows is an attempt to finish the song in the same spirit and metre.
* This is the first of a series of symbolic names, each in the feminine gender, for military success: in this case it is Ναυσιμάχη, literally ‘ship-fighter’. Aristophanes’s point was that the men commanding the Athenian forces in the Second Peloponnesian War against Sparta (431-404 BC) were doing a very poor job of it.
* Charminus was an Athenian general who in 411 BC (the year before the play was first produced) had been defeated in a key naval battle near the island of Syme in the Aegean Sea. Alcibiades would subsequently take charge of the Athenian fleet, based in Samos, and lead it to victory at the Battle of Cyzicus in 410, ultimately restoring Athenian democracy.
* Aristophanes actually uses two feminine names here, Ἀριστομάχη meaning ‘best-battler’ and Στρατονίκη meaning ‘conqueror of armies’.
* A reference to the famous victory at Marathon in 490 BC against the Achaemenid (Persian) Empire, an example from long before of a time when Greek generals won something. See The Battle of Marathon.
* Cleophon, who appeared in Aristophanes’s play The Frogs, was a general and demagogue who talked very grandly about war, but like the Duke of Plaza Toro in The Gondoliers:
In enterprise of martial kind
When there was any fighting,
He led his regiment from behind —
He found it less exciting.
Salabaccho was a famous Athenian courtesan. She is mentioned in The Knights along with Cynna as having done as much for Athens as Lysicles (?-428 BC), a leading figure in Athenian politics after the death of his friend Pericles. See also Pericles and the Fickle Public of Athens
* In June 411 BC, there was a coup in Athens, with a new oligarchy taking over from the democratic government of the day. If we accept that Aristophanes is referring to this event, and if we assume that Thesmophoriasuzae was first produced at the City Dionysia, it must have been in the following Spring, in 410 BC. It should be said that some modern scholars date the play to the previous year, 411 BC, in which case the yielding of office mentioned here must refer to some event in the run-up to the coup.
* Prudence here stands for a Greek name meaning ‘good counsel’.