No More Learning

CHORUS. This is even more animated and more trenchant than the first
speech; all she has just said is full of good sense and to the point; it
is clever, clear and well calculated to convince. Yes! we must have
striking vengeance on the insults of Euripides.

MNESILOCHUS. Oh, women! I am not astonished at these outbursts of fiery
rage; how could your bile not get inflamed against Euripides, who has
spoken so ill of you? As for myself, I hate the man, I swear it by my
children; 'twould be madness not to hate him! Yet, let us reflect a
little; we are alone and our words will not be repeated outside. Why be
so bent on his ruin? Because he has known and shown up two or three of
our faults, when we have a thousand? As for myself, not to speak of other
women, I have more than one great sin upon my conscience, but this is the
blackest of them. I had been married three days and my husband was asleep
by my side; I had a lover, who had seduced me when I was seven years old;
impelled by his passion, he came scratching at the door; I understood at
once he was there and was going down noiselessly. "Where are you going? "
asked my husband.
"I am suffering terribly with colic," I told him, "and
am going to the closet. " "Go," he replied, and started pounding together
juniper berries, aniseed, and sage. [587] As for myself, I moistened the
door-hinge[588] and went to find my lover, who embraced me,
half-reclining upon Apollo's altar[589] and holding on to the sacred
laurel with one hand. Well now! Consider! that is a thing of which
Euripides has never spoken. And when we bestow our favours on slaves and
muleteers for want of better, does he mention this? And when we eat
garlic early in the morning after a night of wantonness, so that our
husband, who has been keeping guard upon the city wall, may be reassured
by the smell and suspect nothing,[590] has Euripides ever breathed a word
of this? Tell me. Neither has he spoken of the woman who spreads open a
large cloak before her husband's eyes to make him admire it in full
daylight to conceal her lover by so doing and afford him the means of
making his escape. I know another, who for ten whole days pretended to be
suffering the pains of labour until she had secured a child; the husband
hurried in all directions to buy drugs to hasten her deliverance, and
meanwhile an old woman brought the infant in a stew-pot; to prevent its
crying she had stopped up its mouth with honey. With a sign she told the
wife that she was bringing a child for her, who at once began exclaiming,
"Go away, friend, go away, I think I am going to be delivered; I can feel
him kicking his heels in the belly . . . of the stew-pot. "[591] The husband
goes off full of joy, and the old wretch quickly picks the honey out of
the child's mouth, which sets a-crying; then she seizes the babe, runs to
the father and tells him with a smile on her face, "'Tis a lion, a lion,
that is born to you; 'tis your very image.