Dicaeopolis

“ 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. ”

“ A brief interval, filled by a choral ode, allows time enough in dramatic imagination for Lamachus’s expedition and for Dicæopolis’s feast. A messenger from the army rushes in hot haste upon the stage, and knocks loudly at the door of the former. “Hot-water, lint, plaister, splints!” The general has been wounded. In leaping a ditch he has sprained his ankle and broken his head; and here he comes. As the discomfited warrior limps in on the one side, groaning and complaining, Dicæopolis, with a train of joyous revellers, enters on the other. ”

“ Within a space of time so brief as to be conceivable upon the stage only, Amphitheus has returned from Sparta, to the great joy of Dicæopolis. His mission has been successful. But he is quite out of breath; for the Acharnians, finding out what his business is, have hunted and pelted him up to the very walls of Athens. "Peace, indeed! a pretty fellow you are, to negotiate a peace with our enemies after all our vines and corn-fields have been destroyed!" ”

“ THE ACHARNIANS
Dicæopolis, whose name may be interpreted as conveying the idea of honest policy, is the principal character in the play. He is represented as a humorous, shrewd countryman (a sort of Athenian Sancho) , who (in consequence of the war, and the invasion of Attica by the Peloponnesian Army) had been driven from his house and property to take shelter in the city. Here his whole thoughts are occupied with regret for the comforts he has lost, and with wishes for a speedy peace. ”

“ As the man, intent on his vocation, is investigating the stranger's goods, and calling witnesses to this breach of the law, Dicæopolis gives the signal, and in a trice he is seized, tied up with ropes and straw like a large jar, and after a few hearty kicks—administered to him just to see whether he rings sound or not—this choice specimen of Athenian produce is hoisted on the shoulders of a slave, and carried off as a curiosity to Thebes. ”

“ He was an Athenian by all means—but an Acharnian first.
Such a man is Dicæopolis, the hero of this burlesque. He has been too long cooped up in Athens, while his patrimony is being ruined: and in the first scene he comes up to the Pnyx—the place where the public assembly was held—grumbling at things in general, and the war in particular. The members of the Committee on Public Affairs come, as usual, very late to business—every one, in this city life, is so lazy, as the Acharnian declares: but when business does begin, an incident occurs which interests him very much indeed. ”

“ It is snowing hard; but the orders of the commanders-in-chief are imperative, and Lamachus must go to the front. And at this moment comes another messenger to call Dicæopolis to the banquet, which stays only for him. A long antithetic dialogue follows, pleasant, it must be supposed, to Athenian ears, who delighted in such word-fencing, tiresome to English readers. Lamachus orders out his knapsack; Dicæopolis bids his slave bring his dinner-service. The general, cursing all commanders-in-chief, calls for his plume ”

“ Their single slave is to follow behind with other mystic emblems. But a spectacle is nothing, as Dicæopolis feels, without spectators; so he bids his wife go indoors, and mount upon the housetop to see the procession pass. Next to a caricature of their great men, an Athenian audience enjoyed a caricature of their religion. They had this much of excuse, that Paganism was full of tempting themes for burlesque, of which, their comic dramatists liberally availed themselves. But in truth there is a temptation to burlesque and parody presented by all religions, more or less, on their external side. ”

“ He is sending the Megarian home rejoicing, and wishing that he could make as good a bargain for his wife and his mother as well, when that curse of the Athenian commonwealth, an informer, comes upon the scene. He at once denounces the pigs as contraband; but Dicæopolis calls the constables to remove him—he will have no informers in his market. The next visitor is a Theban, a hearty, good-humoured yeoman, but who disgusts Dicæopolis by bringing with him two or three pipers, whom the master of the market bids hold their noise and be off ”

“ The general, finding the argument taking a rather personal and unpleasant turn, goes off, with loud threats of what he will do to the Spartans; and Dicæopolis, assuming his own acquittal by the Acharnians, proclaims, on the strength of his private treaty of peace, a free and open market on his farm for Megarians and Thebans, and all the Peloponnesian Greeks.
An interval between what we should call the acts of the play is filled up by a “Parabasis” as it was termed—a chant in which the Chorus pleads the author’s cause with the audience. ”

“ At v. 236 the chorus also is in Athens. In v. 237, the voice of Dicaeopolis is heard from within--his country house, it is said; and in v. 238 the chorus is as suddenly before this same house! Such rapid changes might easily take place on a modern stage, but are of a character to excite remark in an ancient theatre. If there was a change here, the second scene must have represented Cholleidae with the three houses of Dicaeopolis, Lamachus, and Euripides; and the three must be in the same deme; for the Bacchic procession of Dicaeopolis appears at v. 241, and is broken up by the chorus at v. ”

“ Dicæopolis tastes and discusses the qualities of the wines, and having fixed upon a sample οf thirty years' growth, goes away with a determination to avail himself of the change in his affairs, by keeping the Feast of Bacchus once more in his own village; while Amphitheus runs off to avoid the Acharnians whom he had outrun, but who are still in quest of him.
SCENE—The Pnyx
Dicæopolis. ”

“ In the Acharnians the working farmer Dicaeopolis is delighted at having made a separate peace on his own account. He holds it a fine thing [168] that he should now be able to perform religious rites and celebrate the festival of the rustic Dionysia with his slaves. He is back at home [169] in his own rural deme, and he calls his slave Xanthias to [45] carry the phallus in the procession. In the Clouds [170] old Strepsiades says that he lives in the heart of the country, and his preference for the easy and rather squalid life on a farm is plainly expressed. ”

“ Dicæopolis is left lamenting over the pillage of his provisions, but his spirits are soon revived by the appearance of Amphitheus, who has returned with samples of Treaties of Peace or Truces. These Treaties or Truces are typified by the wines employed in the libations by which they were ratified; a conceit, which in the language of the original appears less extravagant, the Greeks having only one and the same word by which they expressed the idea of a truce and that of the libation by which it was rendered valid. ”

“ In 397 it suffered a long siege from Dionysius of Syracuse, but at last was relieved by Himilco. In 307, however, the Greek arms had better success; Agathocles of Syracuse sold the inhabitants into slavery, after massacring 10,000 men, and changed the name of the city to Dicæopolis. ”

“ The impolitic representation in the latter of the Athenian allies as branded Babylonian slaves was the ground of Cleon's attack in the courts upon Aristophanes, or Callistratus in whose name the play was produced.
The extant plays are the following:--
'The Acharnians,' B.C. 425, shortly after the Athenian defeat at Delium. The worthy countryman, Dicæopolis, weary of being cooped up within the Long Walls, and disgusted with the shameless jobbery of the politicians, sends to Sparta for samples of peace (the Greek word means also libations) of different vintages. ”

“ He therefore makes a private and personal treaty of peace, goes back to Acharnæ and proceeds to celebrate the rural Dinoysia. The revel is on and the wife and mother warns the daughter, who is to officiate as basket-bearer, to take precautions,—
“Lest some one ere you know it nibble off your gold.” To-day the peasant girls of Menidi without fear display on their persons at the Easter dances their abundant dowries of gold and silver. As the Phallic procession moves off, Dicæopolis wisely sends his pretty wife to a place of safety:—
“You, wife, up with you to the roof and watch from there ”

“ Till at last Nicias falling down to Gylippus, "Let pity, O Gylippus," said he, "move you in your victory; not for me, who was destined, it seems, to bring the glory I once had to this end, but for the other Athenians; as you well know that the chances of war are common to all, and the Athenians used them moderately and mildly towards you in their prosperity." ”

“ On sailing into Prevesa the day before, we had passed over the very waters once enlivened by that combat, and over which Antony, forgetting for once to be a soldier, followed the wanton queen in flight and left the world to Augustus.
The ruins of Nikopolis, spread out over several square miles, look imposing in the distance; but, like most Roman ruins near at hand, vulgar in comparison with Greek. The theatre is massive, and the aqueduct inspires respect for the practical sense of the conquerors of the world. ”

“ And yet Nicias, the capitalist who worked this hideous trade, was the most pious and God-fearing man at Athens. So high was his reputation for integrity and religion, that the people insisted on appointing him again and again to commands for which he was wholly unfit; and when at last he ruined the great Athenian army before Syracuse, and lost his own life, by his extreme devoutness and his faith in the threats and warnings of the gods—even then the great sceptical historian, who cared for none of these things, condones all his blunders for the sake of his piety and his respectability. ”

“ If there is any truth at all in the legend, it amounts to this: In A.D. 250, some youths (three or seven) suffered martyrdom under the Emperor Decius, “fell asleep in the Lord,” and were buried in a cave of Mount Celion. In 479 (the reign of Theodosius) their bodies were discovered, and, being consecrated as holy relics, were removed to Marseilles.
(2) According to the Oriental Tales. Six Grecian youths were slaves in the palace of Dakiānos (Decianus, Decius) . This Dakianos had risen from low degrees to kingly honors, and gave himself out to be a god. ”

“ Besides the acropolis, the most conspicuous objects are two theatres (the larger with twenty-seven rows of seats) and an aqueduct which brought water to the town from a distance of 27 m.
Nicopolis was also the name of (1) a city in Cappadocia in the valley of the Lycus, founded by Pompey on the spot where he defeated Mithradates; (2) a city in Egypt, founded by Octavian 24 B.C. to commemorate his final victory over Antony; and (3) a city in Thrace (Nikup) at the junction of the Iatrus with the Danube, founded by Trajan in memory of his victory over the Dacians. ”

“ To a life thus rigidly decorous and ultra-religious—both eminently acceptable to the Athenians—Nikias added the judicious employment of a large fortune with a view to popularity. Those liturgies—or expensive public duties undertaken by rich men each in his turn, throughout other cities of Greece as well as in Athens—which fell to his lot were performed with such splendor, munificence, and good taste, as to procure for him universal encomiums ”

“ The life of Diocletian and Maximian was a life of action, and a considerable portion of it was spent in camps, or in their long and frequent marches; but, whenever the public business allowed them any relaxation, they seem to have retired with pleasure to their favourite residences of Nicomedia and Milan. Till Diocletian, in the twentieth year of his reign, celebrated his Roman triumph, it is extremely doubtful whether he ever visited the ancient capital of the empire. ”

“ Under the Roman empire Nicaea and Nicomedia disputed the title of metropolis of Bithynia. Strabo describes the ancient Nicaea as built regularly, in the form of a square, with a gate in the middle of each side. From a monument in the centre of the city all the four gates were visible at the extremities of great cross-streets. After Constantinople became the capital of the empire Nicaea grew in importance, and after the conquest of Constantinople by the Crusaders became the temporary seat of the Byzantine emperor ”

“ In the institutions of Sparta we see, carried to its furthest point, one side of the complex Greek nature—their capacity for discipline and law. Athens, the home of a different stock, gives us the other extreme—their capacity for rich and spontaneous individual development. To pass from Sparta to Athens, is to pass from a barracks to a playing-field. All the beauty, all the grace, all the joy of Greece ”

“ In my paper on "The Keepers of the Herd of Swine" I point out, at some length, that, "in accordance with the ancient Hellenic practice," each city of the Decapolis must have been "surrounded by a certain amount of territory amenable to its jurisdiction:" and, to enforce this conclusion, I quote what Josephus says about the "villages that belonged to Gadara and Hippos." As I understand the term pomerium or pomœrium, [166] it means the space which, according to Roman custom, was kept free from buildings, immediately within and without the walls of a city ”