Sexual life in ancient Greece : with thirty-two full-page plates

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION

tragedians, especially Euripides, hundreds of attacks on the female sex could be got together, which can all more or less be included under the motto: “To bury a woman is better than to marry her.”

Not to weary the reader, we will content ourselves with a small selection from comedy. It is certainly more than a remarkable coincidence that the very first fragment of all, which is preserved to us among the remains of the old Attic comedy, contains an attack on women.

With comic pathos Susarion of Megara, who in the first half of the sixth century had transplanted comedy to the deme of Icaria in Attica, appears before the public, to which he exclaims that it is misery with women, but an evil hardly to be avoided, so that he comes to the startling result : “To marry and not to marry are both equally bad ” (CAF, p.3, Kock). We may quote from Aristophanes (Lysistr., 368, 1014, 1018) :—

“'There’s no poet wiser than Euripides; for there’s no creature so shameless as women .. . There is no wild beast more unconquerable than a woman, nor fire nor any panther so shameless . Why, are you aware of this, and then make war upon me, when it is in your power, you wretch, to have me as a firm friend ... For I will never cease to hate woman.”

Aristophanes often makes the women themselves announce their baseness very amusingly. We quote a specially characteristic passage from the Thesmophoriazusae (383 ff.): “ O ladies, it is not love of ostentation that has made me get up to speak, but it is because I have indeed been a vexed, unhappy woman now for a long time, seeing you treated with contumely by Euripides, the son of the herbwoman, and abused with much abuse of every kind. For what abuse does he not smear upon us, and where has he not calumniated us? I don’t believe there is a single theatre or stage where he has not

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