Aristophanes
Aristophanes
Aristophanes, son of Philippus, of the deme Kydathenaion, was a comic playwright of ancient Athens. Eleven of his forty plays survive virtually complete. These, together with fragments of some of his other plays, provide the only real examples of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy, and are used to define it...
NationalityGreek
ProfessionPoet
men debt owing
If a man owes me money, I never seem to forget. But if I do the owing, I somehow never remember.
firsts may bluster
First listen, my friend, and then you may shriek and bluster.
sex children husband
Lysistrata: Oh, Calonicé, my heart is on fire; I blush for our sex. Men will have it we are tricky and sly...Calonicé: And they are quite right, upon my word!Lysistrata: Yet, look you, when the women are summoned to meet for a matter of the last importance, they lie abed instead of coming.Calonicé: Oh, they will come, my dear; but 'tis not easy you know, for a woman to leave the house. One is busy pottering about her husband; another is getting the servant up; a third is putting her child asleep or washing the brat or feeding it.
wind way fortune
Chorus of women: [...] Oh! my good, gallant Lysistrata, and all my friends, be ever like a bundle of nettles; never let you anger slacken; the wind of fortune blown our way.
home vegetables soup
I saw a cavalry captain buy vegetable soup on horseback. He carried the whole mess home in his helmet.
childhood age old-age
Old age is second childhood.
phrases idle truce
A truce to idle phrases!
kissing eggs shells
I would treat her like an egg, the shell of which we remove before eating it; I would take off her mask and then kiss her pretty face.
cat men tails
If I get clear of my debts, I care not though men call me bold, glib of tongue, audacious, impudent, shameless, a fabricator of falsehoods, inventor of words, practised in lawsuits, a pettifogger, a rattle, a fox, a sharper, a knave, a dissembler, a slippery fellow, an imposter, a rogue that deserves the cat-o-nine-tails, a blackguard, a twister, a licker-up of hashes; they call all this when they meet me, if they please, I care not.
yesterday today
Today things are better than yesterday.
foxes subtlety
A fox is subtlety itself.
knows
You can't have anything else to say: you've poured out every drop of what you know.
spring evil suffering
Evil events from evil causes spring, And what you suffer flows from what you've done.
men voice feminism
It should not prejudice my voice that I'm not born a man, if I say something advantageous to the present situation. For I'm taxed too, and as a toll provide men for the nation.