Chorus of Women.
Was it hot?
Chorus of Old Men.
Hot, great gods! Enough, enough!
Chorus of Women.
I’m watering you, to make you bloom afresh.
Chorus of Old Men.
Alas! I am too dry! Ah, me! how I am trembling with cold!
Magistrate.
These women, have they made din enough, I wonder, with their tambourines? bewept Adonis enough upon their terraces?[1] I was listening to the speeches last assembly day,[2] and Demostratus,[3] whom heaven confound! was saying we must all go over to Sicily—and lo! his wife was dancing round repeating: Alas! alas! Adonis, woe is me for Adonis!
Demostratus was saying we must levy hoplites at Zacynthus[4]—and lo! his wife, more than half drunk, was screaming on the house-roof: “Weep, weep for Adonis!”—while that infamous Mad Ox[5] was bellowing away on his side.—Do ye not blush, ye women, for your wild and uproarious doings?
- ↑ Women only celebrated the festivals of Adonis. These rites were not performed in public, but on the terraces and flat roofs of the houses.
- ↑ The Assembly, or Ecclesia, was the General Parliament of the Athenian people, in which every adult citizen had a vote. It met on the Pnyx hill, where the assembled Ecclesiasts were addressed from the Bema, or speaking-block.
- ↑ An orator and statesman who had first proposed the disastrous Sicilian Expedition, of 415–413 B.C. This was on the first day of the festival of Adonis—ever afterwards regarded by the Athenians as a day of ill omen.
- ↑ An island in the Ionian Sea, on the west of Greece, near Cephalenia, and an ally of Athens during the Peloponnesian War.
- ↑ Cholozyges, a nickname for Demostratus.
