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ACHARNAI (Ancient demos) ACHARNES
This is the first of the series of three Comedies--The Acharnians, Peace and Lysistrata--produced
at intervals of years, the sixth, tenth and twenty-first of the Peloponnesian
War, and impressing on the Athenian people the miseries and disasters due to it
and to the scoundrels who by their selfish and reckless policy had provoked it,
the consequent ruin of industry and, above all, agriculture, and the urgency of
asking Peace. In date it is the earliest play brought out by the author in his
own name and his first work of serious importance. It was acted at the Lenaean
Festival, in January, 426 B.C., and gained the first prize, Cratinus being second.
Its diatribes against the War and fierce criticism of the general
policy of the War party so enraged Cleon that, as already mentioned, he endeavoured
to ruin the author, who in The Knights retorted by a direct and savage personal
attack on the leader of the democracy.
The plot is of the simplest. Dicaeopolis, an Athenian citizen, but
a native of Acharnae, one of the agricultural demes and one which had especially
suffered in the Lacedaemonian invasions, sick and tired of the ill-success and
miseries of the War, makes up his mind, if he fails to induce the people to adopt
his policy of peace at any price, to conclude a private and particular peace of
his own to cover himself, his family, and his estate. The Athenians, momentarily
elated by victory and over-persuaded by the demagogues of the day--Cleon and his
henchmen, refuse to hear of such a thing as coming to terms. Accordingly Dicaeopolis
dispatches an envoy to Sparta on his own account, who comes back presently with
a selection of specimen treaties in his pocket. The old man tastes and tries,
special terms are arranged, and the play concludes with a riotous and uproarious
rustic feast in honour of the blessings of Peace and Plenty.
Incidentally excellent fun is poked at Euripides and his dramatic
methods, which supply matter for so much witty badinage in several others of our
author's pieces.
Other specially comic incidents are: the scene where the two young
daughters of the famished Megarian are sold in the market at Athens as suck[l]ing-pigs--a
scene in which the convenient similarity of the Greek words signifying a pig and
the `pudendum muliebre' respectively is utilized in a whole string of ingenious
and suggestive `double entendres' and ludicrous jokes; another where the Informer,
or Market-Spy, is packed up in a crate as crockery and carried off home by the
Boeotian buyer.
The drama takes its title from the Chorus, composed of old men of
Acharnae.
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