Women at Thesmophoria Festival by Aristophanes

Also known as Thesmophoriazusae, this play was first performed in 411 BC, the same year as Lysistrata, another play about the battle of the sexes. 

I read the translation by Paul Roche. 

1/ Euripides is one of the main characters in the play: 

“EURIPIDES The women plan to do away with me today 

at the Thesmophoria. 

I speak ill of them, they say.

AGATHON How can we help you, then?

EURIPIDES In every possible way. 

If only you’d infiltrate among the women as a woman 

and speak up for me, you’d save my life 

because only you can represent me well.” 

That’s the premise. The play later has a scene in which the women complain about Euripides’s depiction of women in his plays—do they not notice the way he depicts men?—so the female-only festival of Thesmophoria is where they decide what to do with him.

We no longer have Agathon’s plays but it doesn’t matter, as Agathon refuses to help, so Euripides gets his relative Mnesilochus to dress up as a woman and infiltrate the women’s meeting. The poor man however is exposed, so Euripides rescues him by reenacting scenes from his own plays Helen and Andromeda—Andromeda and some other plays Aristophanes parodies don’t survive but Helen does—it’s a great pleasure to catch the references to not only Helen but also Hippolytus, Ion, and Alcestis. 

2/ Aristophanes is crude:  

“SERVANT For Agathon, our peerless poet, prepareth to—

MNESILOCHUS Get himself buggered.

SERVANT —to lay the keel of a vessel for drama. 

He bendeth the beams, and planeth the planks, 

Riveteth verse with phrase and symbol…” 

Imagine these lines in the tragedies of Aeschylus! Or Euripides! Reading other playwrights, especially the Greeks, makes me fully appreciate how unusual it is that Shakespeare mixes the tragic and the comic, the high and the low. 

Aristophanes also makes me realise how “clean” the plays of Molière are—this is not a complaint—Aristophanes is very funny and Women at Thesmophoria Festival is a light-hearted farce. 

3/ Like the Elizabethans, the ancient Greeks only had male actors playing all the roles, so Mnesilochus pretending to be a woman or even reenacting Helen reuniting with Menelaus is, when we think about it, not that different from what the Greeks were doing with the female roles in the tragedies. 

There is also another layer of comedy: when Cleisthenes appears and says there’s a spy at the meeting, the women all look at each other and try to find out which one is the man, but to Aristophanes’s audience, they were all men. 

4/ This makes me curious: 

“WREATH SELLER […] My husband died in Cyprus, leaving me with five small children whom I struggled to maintain by weaving wreaths of myrtle for the market and have kept them all alive—at least half and half. But now this fellow in his tragedies has made people believe that the gods don’t exist and my sales in consequence have halved…” 

Euripides tends to depict the gods as capricious and cruel; in some cases, such as Electra, he removes the gods except as deus ex machina at the end, Electra and Orestes themselves choose to kill Clytemnestra without an order or oracle from Apollo; so I’m quite curious about the Greeks’ reception of that. 

Another thing is that in The Bacchae, Dionysus persuades Pentheus to dress up as a woman to spy on the women, only for him to be brutally killed and torn limb from limb by the women in frenzy, including his own mother. I can’t help thinking if Euripides simply borrows the idea because “all this female frippery reveals/ to passersby the depths of your depravity”, or there is some deeper meaning that I have missed, considering that Women at Thesmophoria Festival has an appearance of Euripides as a character and Dionysus in his play is the god of drama.