No More Learning

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FINIS OF "LYSISTRATA"

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Footnotes:

[390] At Athens more than anywhere the festivals of Bacchus (Dionysus)
were celebrated with the utmost pomp--and also with the utmost licence,
not to say licentiousness.

Pan---the rustic god and king of the Satyrs; his feast was similarly an
occasion of much coarse self-indulgence.

Aphrodite Colias--under this name the goddess was invoked by courtesans
as patroness of sensual, physical love. She had a temple on the
promontory of Colias, on the Attic coast--whence the surname.

The Genetyllides were minor deities, presiding over the act of
generation, as the name indicates. Dogs were offered in sacrifice to
them--presumably because of the lubricity of that animal.

At the festivals of Dionysus, Pan and Aphrodite women used to perform
lascivious dances to the accompaniment of the beating of tambourines.
Lysistrata implies that the women she had summoned to council cared
really for nothing but wanton pleasures.

[391] An obscene _double entendre_; Calonice understands, or pretends to
understand, Lysistrata as meaning a long and thick "membrum virile"!

[392] The eels from Lake Copa? s in Boeotia were esteemed highly by
epicures.

[393] This is the reproach Demosthenes constantly levelled against his
Athenian fellow-countrymen--their failure to seize opportunity.

[394] An island of the Saronic Gulf, lying between Magara and Attica. It
was separated by a narrow strait--scene of the naval battle of Salamis,
in which the Athenians defeated Xerxes--only from the Attic coast, and
was subject to Athens.

[395] A deme, or township, of Attica, lying five or six miles north of
Athens.
The Acharnians were throughout the most extreme partisans of the
warlike party during the Peloponnesian struggle. See 'The Acharnians. '

[396] The precise reference is uncertain, and where the joke exactly
comes in. The Scholiast says Theagenes was a rich, miserly and
superstitious citizen, who never undertook any enterprise without first
consulting an image of Hecate, the distributor of honour and wealth
according to popular belief; and his wife would naturally follow her
husband's example.

[397] A deme of Attica, a small and insignificant community--a 'Little
Pedlington' in fact.

[398] In allusion to the gymnastic training which was _de rigueur_ at
Sparta for the women no less than the men, and in particular to the dance
of the Lacedaemonian girls, in which the performer was expected to kick
the fundament with the heels--always a standing joke among the Athenians
against their rivals and enemies the Spartans.

[399] The allusion, of course, is to the 'garden of love,' the female
parts, which it was the custom with the Greek women, as it is with the
ladies of the harem in Turkey to this day, to depilate scrupulously, with
the idea of making themselves more attractive to men.

[400] Corinth was notorious in the Ancient world for its prostitutes and
general dissoluteness.

[401] An Athenian general strongly suspected of treachery; Aristophanes
pretends his own soldiers have to see that he does not desert to the
enemy.

[402] A town and fortress on the west coast of Messenia, south-east part
of Peloponnese, at the northern extremity of the bay of Sphacteria--the
scene by the by of the modern naval battle of Navarino--in Lacedaemonian
territory; it had been seized by the Athenian fleet, and was still in
their possession at the date, 412 B. C. , of the representation of the
'Lysistrata,' though two years later, in the twenty-second year of the
War, it was recovered by Sparta.

[403] The Athenian women, rightly or wrongly, had the reputation of being
over fond of wine. Aristophanes, here and elsewhere, makes many jests on
this weakness of theirs.

[404] The lofty range of hills overlooking Sparta from the west.

[405] In the original "we are nothing but Poseidon and a boat"; the
allusion is to a play of Sophocles, now lost, but familiar to
Aristophanes' audience, entitled 'Tyro,' in which the heroine, Tyro,
appears with Poseidon, the sea-god, at the beginning of the tragedy, and
at the close with the two boys she had had by him, whom she exposes in an
open boat.