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Technically, Dareia is in the andron – a part of the house reserved for males. Usually the master of the house entertains guests here. But it is clear that this room has no such purpose. The dim light of a single oil lamp shows little more than a writing desk, but in the shadows the usual couches have been pushed against the wall, and scrolls, clothing and a half-eaten roll of bread with olives occupy the seats.
Furthermore, the only other occupant of this man’s domain is also female. Their hair spilling off their necks, the two study the contents of the desk. Suddenly, Dareia’s companion speaks in dramatic tones.
‘Ah, Lampito. You dear Spartan girl with your delightful face, scrubbed in the rosy spring! You stride so easily, sleek and slender, yet look as if you could strangle a bull.’
In reply, Dareia makes a spirited attempt at reproducing the broad vowels of the Spartan accent, but is uncomfortably aware that it sounds more as though she has a throat cold. The Spartans are a reclusive people, and the few from Laconia who turn up in Athens are remarkably, well, laconic, so it’s not as if she has heard a lot of material to imitate.
She studies the scroll before her. How, she wonders, do you scrub your face in a rosy spring? Yet ‘rosy’ is what the playwright has written. He actually crossed it out and then put it back again.
Her companion Chryseis sighs impatiently and resumes her part in the play. ‘“What lovely breasts you own!”’
Dareia rears back from the groping hands of Chryseis, who remarks defensively, ‘It’s what the script says – look, you’re meant to reply, “Ooh, your fingers assess them with such tickles and tender chucks. It makes me feel like a victim at the altar.”’
Is this, Dareia wonders, meant to be funny? Then she remembers that on an Athenian stage the lines and actions will be delivered by male actors (women are played by men in Athenian theatre). So yes, the sight of two men in drag affectionately fondling a set of fake breasts on stage is exactly the sort of bawdy humour for which the playwright – her owner Aristophanes – is notorious.
Dareia knows that she and Chryseis are unusual slave girls because both can read. That’s an achievement of which many a freeborn Athenian girl cannot boast, but not perhaps altogether surprising in servants of the leading comic playwright in Athens. The playwright, Aristophanes, has just retired to bed, leaving an ink-spotted draft of his latest comedy for an early enactment by the enterprising pair.
Chryseis studies her character’s name. ‘Lysistrata. That’s uncommon. Not many people call their daughters “Stand down the army”. What’s wrong with Neaira – “Newly arisen”? Or Eudokia – “Good-looking”?’
‘Well, you’re giving hostages to fortune with names like that. There’s Ekaterina – “Purity” – that girl from the Eudoxus household, the one who has a dozen boyfriends. Look at me. My name means “rich in possessions” and I don’t even own this tunic on my back. And you’re Chryseis …’ Dareia stops, embarrassed.
Chryseis’ name is a sore point. One can come to be a slave in Athens in many different ways. Chryseis has told Dareia that her journey started twenty-five years ago when Lycian pirates captured a boat near Halicarnassus. On the boat was Chryseis’ mother, the daughter of a minor aristocrat. That aristocratic father declined to pay the pirates’ ransom, so his daughter was sold into slavery. (The father had two other daughters, each expecting an expensive dowry, which might have affected his decision.) So Chryseis was born while her mother was a concubine to a minor Persian administrator in Anatolia.
‘Golden’ her name might mean, but Chryseis is as swarthy as her Persian father. Captured in a Greek raid on the coastal town where she lived, Chryseis at age eighteen was sold in Athens as part of the booty of that raid. She had been taught to read and write by her mother. This attracted the playwright Aristophanes, who needed a slave secretary, cleaner and general factotum. Chryseis has been in the playwright’s household ever since.
At least Chryseis knows who her father was. Dareia doesn’t. She got her name from her ambitious mother. That mother was a slave prostitute in one of the better-class brothels in the Kydathenaion (the largest of the five administrative areas within the city of Athens itself). Not wanting her daughter to follow the family profession, Dareia’s mother had one way or another managed not only to ensure her child was literate, but also that she was familiar with basic accountancy. Then Dareia was sold to one of the brothel’s regular patrons – Aristophanes. Once Dareia had joined the household, Chryseis, partly out of boredom, had completed the girl’s education.
It is not a bad existence. Both girls have been slaves all their lives, and regard themselves as well above some of the freeborn poor whom they regularly see begging in the gutter. At least they are fed and clothed and have a warm bed to sleep in at night.
Furthermore, slavery is seen by most Greeks as a form of severe social disadvantage rather than as an inherent genetic trait. (Among fellow Greeks, that is. Everyone knows that barbarians are born to be slaves.) Well-educated Greek slaves regard their condition as temporary, as do their owners. Certainly neither Dareia nor Chryseis intends to die in servitude. Chryseis is being courted by one of the retainers of a Phoenician merchant, a boy who finds her copper skin and dark curls highly attractive. If Aristophanes sells her, Chryseis will marry him and demand her freedom as her dowry. After that, anything is possible.
THALIA, THE MUSE OF COMEDY, HOLDING A COMIC MASK
Dareia is aiming for Aristophanes himself. Well, why not? Many a concubine has seamlessly made the transition to wife. Aristophanes is in his early thirties, which is just the right age to marry. Athenian men tend to take wives ten to fifteen years younger than themselves, so he and seventeen-year-old Dareia are well-matched. Why should he wed some gawky aristocratic girl he barely knows?
Aristophanes has no need to marry into money, and he cares little for the political elite of Athens whom he regularly skewers in his plays. A few years back the populist politician Kleon was so outraged by how he was portrayed in one of Aristophanes’ comedies that he dragged the playwright into court. (Despite this – or perhaps because of it – the play won first prize at the Lenaia festival that year. Athenians certainly do not venerate their leaders.)
Kleon’s outrage may have been because Aristophanes subtly hinted that the politician was dishonest. Dareia remembers reading the exact words:
This villain, this bare-faced thief, this villain, this villain – I can’t say the word often enough, because he acts the villain a thousand times a day. Strike him, throw him down and crush him to pieces, hate him …
You shake out the treasury like a ripe fig tree … you know how to extort those guileless citizens, meek as lambs, yet wealthy and scared of lawsuits.2
Although Kleon was not Aristophanes’ greatest fan, oddly enough, Socrates and Aristophanes get along amiably. This says a lot about Socrates, because few relationships could survive the treatment that Aristophanes gave Socrates in The Clouds. It is not often that a philosopher has an entire comic play dedicated to him alone, and that play was a merciless send-up of Socrates, his character and his ideas (ideas Aristophanes portrayed as manufactured in a sort of workshop called the ‘Thinkery’). This was one of Aristophanes’ less successful plays.
As the Athenian gossip machine later revealed to Dareia, Socrates himself was responsible for that. Instead of wincing or getting outraged at the well-aimed barbs, the philosopher showed every sign of genuinely enjoying the proceedings. The theatrical festival of the Dionysia attracts hordes of foreigners to the city, and when some of these puzzled spectators at the play asked, ‘Who is this Socrates fellow?’ the fellow in question stood up and cheerfully waved to the audience by way of introduction.
Instead of applauding the deflation of a self-important egomaniac, the audience decided that Aristophanes was victimizing an obviously well-grounded and good-natured individual who also happened to be known as something of a war hero. (When taking a break from debating ethics or the nature of the soul, Socrates in battle fights like a rabid wolf.) Aristophanes’ play came third – in a field of three.
Dareia definitely approves of The Clouds. One of the leading characters, Strepsiades, is struggling with debt because his spoiled aristocratic wife allows their equally spoiled son to spend the fortune that Strepsiades has not got. Dareia is in total agreement that aristocratic wives are a bad idea; women who over-indulge in horses, silks and fast living. Aristophanes needs someone good looking, with experience in household affairs and who is sensible yet stylish. To find this someone, Aristophanes need not look further than the pillow beside his on the bed. Dareia doggedly perseveres with her matrimonial project, though for someone who has made a career out of working with words, Aristophanes seems amazingly blind to even the most unsubtle hints.
Aristophanes is considered the greatest writer in the school of ‘Old Comedy’ in Athens, although he had the considerable advantage that he was the only playwright of the school whose plays survive (we have eleven of his forty or so productions).
Aristophanes was never a struggling playwright starving in a garret. He was from a wealthy family (they seem to have owned property on the island of Aegina) and enjoyed an extremely good education. He was something of a scholar of Homer’s works and was well capable of holding his own while among the leading philosophers of his day.
Aristophanes was a relentless opponent of war, and Lysistrata is but one of the plays in which he bitterly castigates the futility of war and the stupidity of those who drag his city into it.
We do not know whom Aristophanes eventually married, but marry he did, for one of his three sons seems to have finished and staged two of the plays that were incomplete when Aristophanes died some time around 386 BC.
After a brief and rather tense silence, the slaves resume reading the script of Lysistrata. Through unspoken agreement they’ve stopped playing the different parts for the moment. Eventually Chryseis remarks, ‘Oh, it seems that we are giving up sex.’
Dareia pauses, being much further up the scroll from Chryseis. ‘Why? On religious grounds?’
‘In a way. All the women of Greece swear an oath not to do it. Here, at these lines, “Not on my back staring at the ceiling, nor on my hands and knees doing the Lion on the cheesegrater.” It’s total abstinence.’
‘That leaves other alternatives,’ remarks Dareia with professional interest, ‘For instance …’
She pauses, suddenly struck by the implications of the text. One does not write an anti-war play for no reason. So the rumours at the market are true. The peace is breaking.
While Dareia likes the idea of Lysistrata calling a meeting to get the women of Greece to keep their knees together until the men stop fighting, she’s sure there would be fighting anyway. There is always fighting. Recently the Athenians were fighting in Egypt – that went badly, yet even so Athens had to launch into another war in Asia Minor, which is how Chryseis ended up in Athens. Then the Spartans, and now everyone is talking about how easily Athens can conquer Sicily. Homer was right; men tire of wine and dancing before they tire of war.
Dareia hates the idea of renewed war and the uncertainty it brings. Ari will be away again. He might get killed. Indeed, if the war goes very badly, Dareia and Chryseis might not live through it either.
This play was eventually staged in 411 BC, five years after we have here imagined the first draft being written. By then, the Spartans were back at war with Athens, setting the scene for the attempted coup of Lysistrata. The story of Lysistrata is as described here – the women of Hellas go on a sex strike until their men agree to stop killing each other.
The play is considered to be Aristophanes’ masterwork, and it has been frequently translated and anthologized. The problem with many modern versions of the work is that they reinterpret the author’s meaning by being overtly feminist. Though Aristophanes was much more sympathetic to women than many of his peers, he used the idea of female dominance for comic effect.
The ancient Greek text is loaded with breathtakingly obscene jokes, which sensitive translators tend to gloss over. Imagine Shakespeare writing pornography with a political twist to get an idea of the original.
‘War’s a man’s affair,’ Chryseis says, her back to Dareia in the lamplight.
‘So we sit quietly at home, lonely and forgotten,’ Chryseis says, ‘expected to endure their tantrums and childish antics. Though we bite our tongues, we can easily work out how the war is going. Even at home he talks of nothing but. Unless he comes from the Assembly with some fresh tale of a decision even more stupid than the last, and one that’s going to rush us to destruction all the faster. Yet if we should ask what’s going to be inscribed on the treaty-stone, all we get is an irritable glare and the warning to keep to our shuttle and loom – or our buttocks will be sore and hot for hours afterwards.’
Dareia is surprised by her companion’s rant. She didn’t know Chryseis could be so eloquent. Then she realizes that, while she was reading her scroll, Chryseis had picked up the playwright’s rough notes and was quoting from them. Looking over Chryseis’ shoulder at the well-blotted script, Dareia sees that Aristophanes has scribbled ‘Goes in iambs for tetrameter’. Whatever that means.
Dareia giggles. She has realized why she didn’t recognize her master’s words. He’s not put a dirty joke in there yet. That’s what Aristophanes does best; he expresses something filthy in such elegant verse that the audience don’t know whether to be admiring or outraged.
She assesses her master’s work with a critical eye. She’s no expert critic, but life at home will be so much better if Aristophanes’ new play is received well. A lot depends on the chorus. The chorus can make or break a play, depending on how well they are coached. And here’s the lines of the chorus – but wait. Startled, Dareia roots through the pile on the desk. Here’s another one. She realizes that Aristophanes is going for one chorus of men, and another of women. That’s twice the number of choruses, so twice the possibility of something going wrong. But it’s innovative, and Dareia thinks theatre-goers will give Aristophanes credit for that.
Dareia wants Aristophanes to win the Dionysia again. It’s so much better than the Lenaia. At the Dionysia the leading playwrights of Athens present their work. The Lenaia is a lesser festival that happens in the month of Gamelion (roughly January), two months before the Dionysia. Often a playwright will test his personal popularity at the Lenaia before going all out at the Dionysia.
She considers her master’s options and his character. He might go with this at the Lenaia. Whether this play is popular or not, it seems to be something he wants to get off his chest. But it’s risky, too. If peace is maintained, this whole play won’t even be worth entering. Aristophanes will have wasted his time. She says as much to Chryseis, who disagrees.
‘No, you know him. He will fiddle with it for years until there’s a bad war. There’s always a war, even if we win Sicily without a serious fight.’
Dareia gives a mock cheer. ‘Tha’ Spartaaans will get to et, yawl see!’
‘Oh, in the name of Hermes Psychopompus! That accent is abominable. Still, we’ve got a while yet. When he’s been working this late, he’s never up early. Want to try being Lampito again?’
